This brittle light exhibition catalogue

CURATED BY MELISSA KEYS

This brittle light: Light Source commissions 2020–21 Buxton Contemporary University of Melbourne 12 March – 20 June 2021 Exhibition curated by Melissa Keys Artists Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser Taloi Havini Laresa Kosloff Nicholas Mangan Stuart Ringholt Grant Stevens Hossein Valamanesh & Nassiem Valamanesh Director Ryan Johnston Senior Curator Melissa Keys Senior Collection and Exhibition Manager Katarina Paseta Audience and Visitor Services Officer Ashlee Baldwin Curatorial Interns Anna Bellotti Coral Guan Gallery Supervisors Olga Bennett Anthea Kemp Gallery Attendants Lucas Andreatta Genevieve Elliot Marcela Gómez Escudero Rosie Leverton Clara Murphy Ashley Perry Gail Smith

Title This brittle light: Light Source commissions 2020–21 Authors Melissa Keys Tessa Laird Tara McDowell Kyla McFarlane Djon Mundine & Natalie King Alice Procter Lisa Radford Selena Tan ISBN 978-0-6482584-7-6 Editor Melissa Keys Copyediting and proofreading Clare Williamson Installation photography Christian Capurro Design Studio Round, Melbourne Publication design Tristan Main Printing Print Graphics Stocks: Sovereign Silk 350 gsm, Knight Digital Smooth 140 gsm Edition: 600

Contributors — Melissa Keys is Senior Curator, Art Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne — Tessa Laird is an artist, writer and Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne — Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne — Dr Kyla McFarlane is a curator and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand based in Naarm/ Melbourne and Senior Academic Programs Curator, Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne — Djon Mundine OAM FAHA, Bandjalung peoples of northern New South Wales, is a curator, writer, artist, activist and foundational figure in the criticism and exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art — Professor Natalie King OAM is a curator, writer, editor and Enterprise Professor at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and Curator of Yuki Kihara for Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale — Alice Procter is an art historian and author of The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in our Museums and Why We Need to Talk about It — Lisa Radford is an artist who lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne — Selena Tan is a filmmaker and writer

Cover image Grant Stevens, Fawn in the Forest 2020 (detail)

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Director’s foreword — Ryan Johnston

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be directed to the publisher.

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This brittle light — Melissa Keys

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The Dugong: rehearsing writing as a means for responding to a pamphlet and a stand-in painting observed without clothes on, as instructed — Lisa Radford

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Every single starling, every single song: Laresa Kosloff’s Radical Acts — Tessa Laird

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Take the Money and Run: Nicholas Mangan’s Limits to Growth — Tara McDowell

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Fawn in the Forest: Grant Stevens — Kyla McFarlane

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Useful Arts: Taloi Havini — Alice Procter

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What Goes Around: Hossein Valamanesh and Nassiem Valamanesh — Selena Tan

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Abi see da classroom: Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser — Djon Mundine & Natalie King

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List of works

© Copyright 2021 Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, the artists and authors The views expressed in this publication are those of the contributing authors and not necessarily those of the publisher.

Buxton Contemporary respectfully acknowledges the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, on whose land this book was produced. We acknowledge their ancestors and Elders, who are part of the longest continuing culture in the world.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this publication may contain images of people who have died.

Buxton Contemporary Corner Southbank Boulevard and Dodds Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia www.buxtoncontemporary.com

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Buxton Contemporary launched This brittle light: Light Source commissions 2020–21 precisely one year to the day after the World Health Organisation officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. While unintentional, this timing was nonetheless apt as this exhibition originated in the early days of the Australian pandemic response that entailed (among many other measures) a closure of all museums and galleries. These events suddenly threw the practices and livelihoods of countless artists into an immediate and indeterminate period of uncertainty. This brittle light was initially conceived as a series of seven commissions (the Light Source commissions) designed to support the artistic community in the absence of exhibition-making, engage our audiences remotely while the museum and collection remained physically inaccessible and, as indicated in its titular reference to illumination, recognise and celebrate the unique capacity of artists to cast light (both directly and obliquely) on the complexities of the present and, in so doing, produce important cultural artefacts for the future.

The Light Source commissions were launched individually throughout 2020 and 2021 and engaged a variety of forms, subjects and media, including (among others) home-delivered paintings to be enjoyed naked during lockdown; a deceptively benevolent, hermetically sealed screen world generated in real time via artificial intelligence and broadcast on the museum’s website; and a series of photographs of unidentified ethnographic museums digitally over-painted and over-drawn with tribal patterns, motifs and untitled maps that disorient and confound the vectors of colonialism. Together, the suite of commissions presented a multiplicity of perspectives on the present that are variously (and sometimes simultaneously) insightful, wry, penetrating, poetic, unrelenting, humorous and, perhaps surprisingly, deeply complementary.

As this complementarity in difference revealed itself over the course of the project, and the social restrictions that inspired the commissions gradually eased, it became clear that the works warranted a second, museum-based iteration wherein they could be experienced collectively in the immediate aftermath of the circumstances of their creation.

Buxton Contemporary Committee, chaired by Michael Buxton and Su Baker, for their ongoing support, and also mark our gratitude to the late Kate Daw for her much valued contribution to this committee and her enthusiastic support of the museum in its formative years. I also thank the guest authors for their insightful and fine-grained contributions to this catalogue: Tessa Laird, Tara McDowell, Kyla McFarlane, Djon Mundine and Natalie King, Alice Procter, Lisa Radford and Selena Tan. The assistance of Andrew Moran and Roslyn Oxley from Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, as well as Brigid Moriarty and Irene Sutton from Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, was also very much appreciated.

Both the commissions and the exhibition were impeccably curated by Melissa Keys. I congratulate her on such an original and multifaceted project, noting also that it was delivered to a substantial degree while under strict lockdown restrictions. The project’s cultural legacy will exceed the temporal duration of the exhibition by a very long chalk.

Finally I thank, and express our considerable gratitude to, all of the artists for their participation in this project: Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Taloi Havini, Laresa Kosloff, Nicholas Mangan, Stuart Ringholt, Grant Stevens, and Hossein Valamanesh and Nassiem Valamanesh. Despite working under considerable constraints (and in some cases without studio access), all have demonstrated great generosity, ingenuity and dedication in their work on both the commissions and this exhibition. The opportunity to experience their work in This brittle light: Light Source commissions 2020–21 will undoubtedly help guide us all as we navigate the complex conditions in which we now find ourselves in 2021 and beyond.

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Director’s foreword — Ryan Johnston

It is important to note that the seventh Light Source commission, by Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, was not completed due to Virginia Fraser’s untimely passing in early 2021. As a way of recognising the importance of their involvement and acknowledging the extraordinary legacy of Virginia Fraser as an artist, writer, activist and generous colleague to so many, the long-time collaborators’ earlier work Abi see da classroom (2006) has been included in the exhibition.

Unsurprisingly, this earlier work resonates powerfully with both the more recent commissions and our current moment.

It requires many contributors to successfully realise a project of the complexity and scope of This brittle light: Light Source commissions 2020–21. Firstly, I extend my appreciation to the Buxton Contemporary team – Melissa Keys, Katarina Paseta, Ashlee Baldwin and, until recently, Maddie Cowell – for their remarkable and inspired work, as well as for their collegiality during what were (in the now common yet understated parlance) challenging times. I thank the

Director’s foreword

Ryan Johnston

This brittle light — Melissa Keys

work in the museum space. The project neatly reconfigures Ringholt’s well-known naturist museum tours, this time for the age of stay-at-home social isolation.

First experienced remotely, the projects featured in This brittle light now welcome audiences and communities back to the museum as a social space and a shared and contested environment for engagement with art, ideas, politics and expression.

Comprising a flat-packed, two-sided work saturated with fields of colour and an instructional guide, the work requires participants to assemble the artwork and attach it to a wall in their home. Participants are then encouraged to remove their clothes and to sit on a chair or on the floor in order to experience the colours that constitute the painting. The naturist viewing can be experienced solo or shared with members of one’s household or any others. As the artist has stated,

Emerging during this confronting, too often tragic and continuing moment in history, each of these projects can be seen as an extension of the participants’ ongoing artistic pursuits and interests as well as an outcome of the time in which these works were conceived, a period underscored by human fragility, resilience and imagination.

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Now taking a range of new forms, these ambitious projects were initially presented digitally and have been given a further life arrayed together as a series of discrete projects across the museum spaces at Buxton Contemporary.

The exhibition comprises six commissions and one pre-existing work, with projects spanning perform-at-home mail art, AI-powered digital media, single and multi-channel video and installation. Mirroring the ubiquity of technology and the shifting and accelerated virtual role of museums, the featured projects explore and engage with micro and macro, local and global themes and issues, including humour, ritual and the role of art in society; how lived experience is mediated through the conventions of representation; corporate duplicity, neoliberalism and the climate crisis; humanity’s fraught relationship with nature; the opportunity to learn from diverse cultures, systems of knowledge and the continuing impacts of colonialism; and the complex and evolving dynamics of the global political economy.

A seventh commission, by Destiny Deacon (KuKu Nation, Far North Queensland & Erub/Mer Peoples, Torres Strait) and her long-time collaborator Virginia Fraser, was planned but was not possible due to the untimely passing of Virginia Fraser.

A pre-existing work by Deacon and Fraser has been included in the exhibition to mark their participation in this project and to recognise and honour their longstanding collaboration and enduring contribution to art, culture and social change.

Artist Stuart Ringholt produced the inaugural Light Source commission, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home (2020), which was first made available as a mail-order do-it-yourself artwork through the Buxton Contemporary website.1 Because the piece was originally conceived for audience participation and activation in the home, Ringholt presents an archival copy of the

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the viewing of the painting can best be described as playing ‘Twister for the thinking nude’ . . . typically, the museum visitor’s job is to look at the nude in its environs . . . but this self-assembled painting functions in reverse. No longer does one look at a nude; instead, you are the nude.2 Ringholt’s ongoing, critically engaged and absurdist artistic project encourages unconventional readings of and engagements with art, expanding the possibilities for where art might be found, situated and experienced.

Laresa Kosloff’s film project Radical Acts (2020) is assembled and edited entirely from stock footage sourced from the internet. It is a darkly humorous and critical short film that mimics corporate PR. The video tells a fantastical story about frustrated climate scientists who come up with a plan to ensure they are no longer ignored. The scientists conspire to create a new pathogen and clandestinely distribute it to offices by secreting the agent in indoor plants. The pathogen makes corporate workers less productive and more open to possibilities beyond the drive for relentless growth and the profit motive.

The narrative also involves corrupt politicians and a faked mission to the planet Mars and explores themes of doublespeak, corporate domination of society and climate change inaction.

An incisive humour is woven throughout Kosloff’s work, whether it be in questioning the act of looking and representation within the public realm or drawing out the tensions between received cultural values and political, economic and social issues.

Known for unpacking the complex histories of contested sites, value exchange, transformation and the unstable relations between economics, nature and culture, Nicholas Mangan’s practice addresses some of the most galvanising issues of our time: the imbalance between humanity and the natural world, the pervasive impact of colonialism and the complex dynamics of globalisation.

Limits to Growth (Part 3) (2020) transhistorically references a diverse array of phenomena, from bitcoin cryptocurrency mining and biodiversity credits to historic Micronesian Rai stone currency. It expands upon and ‘unmakes’ Mangan’s critically celebrated and ongoing project Limits to Growth, initiated in 2016. Taking the form of a narrated documentary, this new component of Mangan’s continuing project traces the exchange and transformation of value, energy and investment in objects and currencies through processes of destruction, disassembly, reproduction and re-formation.

Melissa Keys

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The assembled works by leading artists Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Taloi Havini, Laresa Kosloff, Nicholas Mangan, Stuart Ringholt, Grant Stevens, and Hossein Valamanesh and Nassiem Valamanesh were commissioned by Buxton Contemporary during the pandemic disruption that resulted in the closure of museums around the globe. The project was titled Light Source commissions, referencing art as a source of illumination, and the initiative was conceived to support the creation of new work or the further development of an existing landmark body of work.

Assembled and composed as layered sequences of imagery throughout Limits to Growth, each material or immaterial transformation – by natural or human act – reveals how we extract value and create debt, waste or environmental impacts through value chains of investment of labour, material, faith and trust.4

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In Grant Stevens’ Fawn in the Forest (2020), a beautiful animated juvenile deer wanders through an enchantingly picturesque computer-generated redwood forest. Programmed as if alive and powered with artificial intelligence, the fawn moves placidly around the environment, walking, eating and resting undisturbed, living by algorithm. A camera tracks its movements, gliding through the forest to create a single continuous point-of-view shot, rendering and live streaming in real time. Paradoxically the fawn is isolated, confined and alone, but also protected and buffered from the chaotic world beyond.

Working predominantly with computer graphics, moving image and photography, Grant Stevens’ practice considers the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds and social realities. In the contemporary world pervaded by film, television and the internet, Stevens invites us to explore how we understand and relate to each other and ourselves, and how we construct and communicate our experiences – lived, imagined, social and psychological.

inextricable politics of location and identity, exploring contested sites and histories connected within Oceania and employing photography, sculpture, immersive video and mixed-media installations.

Her two-part project takes its name, Useful Arts, from a chapter in an historical anthropological text, Both Sides of Buka Passage: An Ethnographic Study of Social, Sexual, and Economic Questions in the North-western Solomon Islands, published in 1935 and authored by British anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood.

Highlighting the privilege of Western frameworks of knowledge, science and institutions, Havini’s Useful Arts project theatrically reconstructs a backof-house collection storeroom, presented in Buxton Contemporary’s public exhibition spaces. The work is at once rigorously critical and alive with personal and community stories. Throughout this installation, in acts of cultural agency, the artist presents a selection of Kastom (traditional culture) objects from her private collection arranged alongside cane structures from two artworks created with members of her matrilineal clan. Havini’s practice raises critical questions around notions of ownership, repatriation, the politics of display, the history of classification and the moral imperative for colonial redress.

Hossein Valamanesh and Nassiem Valamanesh’s What Goes Around (2021) comprises a video installation that evolved from a sculpture that Hossein Valamanesh crafted from items he serendipitously found in his studio during the early stages of the 2020 lockdown in South Australia. Upon re-finding materials that he hadn’t worked with for some time, Hossein decided to use them to make a series of new forms that engage with ideas around chance and coincidence.

One of the artworks created was a memorial, formed from an upside-down chair holding a nest-like bundle of sticks, with each of the upwards-facing legs lit by a small oil burner. This poignant piece titled For Honey (2020) was made in memory of the Valamaneshes’ much-loved family dog, who at the time of making had recently passed.

Taloi Havini’s Useful Arts (2021) encompasses two distinct and interrelated elements. Online, Havini presented a series of composite digital images comprising redrawn and recoloured photographs, taken by her, of objects and often unseen museum storerooms and repositories of ethnographic collections around the world. These images re-position and reconstruct these objects and collections through these acts of self-determination.

Following this nest-like structure, the artist crafted a spherically shaped arrangement of sticks and branches and suspended it in a configuration topically suggestive of biological molecular structures, but also of clouds or astronomical phenomena such as nebulae or, perhaps, planets. He then worked with his son who is a filmmaker, Nassiem Valamanesh, to capture and record the piece slowly rotating.

Havini views her extensive archive of images of museums as a deeply personal collection with direct links to her cultural heritage and ancestry. Through photography and processes of overwriting images with tribal designs and patterns from shields, high-key colours, untitled maps and the artist’s own image, Havini reclaims and reanimates static museological arrangements and object displays to suggest the dynamic cultural contexts and people to which the collected, tagged and stored artefacts belong.

The accompanying sound is mysterious, somehow simultaneously musical, industrial and sci-fi, yet it is actually a recording by Nassiem of Hossein at work in his studio.

Taloi Havini is a descendant of the Nakas clan of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Her work is often a personal response to the

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This new work links back to some of the more kinetic seminal earlier works by Hossein Valamanesh, such as The lover circles his own heart (1993), which alludes to the ecstatic dance of the Mevlevi dervishes and reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in spirituality, interconnectedness, endless circulation and the passage of time. What Goes Around is the fourth collaborative artwork that father and son, Hossein and Nassiem Valamanesh, have produced together since 2011.

Melissa Keys

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Partially shot at an industrial facility in Melbourne built to crush and shred credit cards and old financial infrastructure such as EFTPOS and ATM terminals, the video shows the destruction of bitcoin mining machines deployed by the artist at an earlier stage of his project and the shredding of 149 copies of a single photograph of Rai stones, printed as an indication of the value of the mined bitcoin. In processes described by the artist as being akin to those of ‘a mint press in reverse’,3 the machines are then further transformed at a foundry into raw aluminum ingots and the photographic prints are reconstituted by hand into a papier mâché sculpture resembling this monumental form of ancient currency, which forms part of this presentation.

To mark Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser’s participation in the Light Source commissions project, Abi see da classroom (2006) has been included in the exhibition.

Whether experienced physically or digitally, museums are sites of contest and possibility. Each of the commissioned projects in This brittle light explores personal, local and global themes and issues. Inescapably, the COVID-19 pandemic is a lens and a reference; however, many of the ideas, concerns and subjects are perennial. Each commission is resonant with complexity, ruptures and continuities that transcend the restrictive conditions in which it was produced, registering individual and shared experiences, profound injustice, dizzying uncertainty and, perhaps, glimpses of an unextinguished optimism.

Melissa Keys April 2021

Notes (1) Stuart Ringholt’s Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020, edition of 500 copies, was made available on the Buxton Contemporary website in June 2020.

(2) Stuart Ringholt, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020, instructional guide, Buxton Contemporary, 2020, p. 2.

(3) Nicholas Mangan, from the artist’s monologue in the film Limits to Growth – Part 3 (Letter to Rai), 2020.

(4) The Limits to Growth project functions like the visionary artist Joseph Beuys’s influential investigation in 1984 titled What is Money: A Discussion. With participants including a former banker, a political economist and other financial scientists, Beuys examined the fundamental social, economic and political foundations of money.

In this current work, Mangan expands the discussion to reflect aspects of the 21st century, including the everaccelerating transformations of technology, the digital economy and the unfolding uncertainties of modern monetary theory, which foresees and abstracts possibilities for endless unconstrained growth.

Images pp. 6–7 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, museum foyer with wallpaper detail of Grant Stevens, Fawn in the Forest 2020 p. 13 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Stuart Ringholt, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020 (detail) pp. 14–15 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Stuart Ringholt, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020 (detail)

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The work consists of two parallel, simultaneously unfolding montages.

Each channel was assembled using content sourced from the ABC’s television archives. In one, characterisations of the Black Other play out, performed through the degrading practices of blackface musical theatre, mimicry and cultural appropriation. In the other, we vividly observe the oppressive roles that Western education and Christian conversion have played in colonisation via historical footage of a classroom of First Nations children being subjected to a severe regime of English language and religious instruction. Through the lens of the national broadcaster, this installation traces some of the key historic and ongoing political, institutional, social and cultural systems and structures of white Australia, including the role that television, the media, popular culture and entertainment have played in the systemic dehumanisation, marginalisation and oppression of First Nations communities and people of colour.

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Sitting at the table with coffee, I am speaking to the computer in lieu of you, in my apartment on the top floor of a building named Tunbridge Manor. The autumn light is soft and even. I’m looking east. Beer-town, the old CUB factory, is on the horizon, framed by the hills of Yarra Bend. I can count nine palm trees plus the turret of a town hall. If anyone is next door in the hotel apartments – which were mostly empty during 2020, except for that one emitting light from the ground floor – I wonder, can they see me sitting and speaking to the world via digital appendage, tapping keys to trace thought to screen? Planes are flying.

There is subsidised travel to destinations deemed by some as more worthy of visiting than others, for others. We can move again, so I know they are there behind the pink-patterned, half-drawn curtains. As if in a Monty Python film, I imagine the large hand of Parrhasius drawing back one of those curtains upon request from Zeuxis only to discover, not a painting, but glass – yet another flat screen. I can’t see them during the day; the light bounces back an image of the walls supporting the room I am in.

They moved in during August. We looked at each other for weeks, curtains wide during the day, slightly ajar at night – everyone on and between screens. With thresholds less dim, we can see in. I remember them dancing during Diwali while I was at the window trying to replace the loss inside my body with cigarette smoke. Gesturing through the hotel windows that don’t open, we exchanged numbers to share beer. Looking out to where they once were, I count 28 air conditioning units and their 28 fans. The dancers have gone, and perhaps too is this illusion of privacy. For now, my windows are open. As I type, the cool air wafts over my right arm, face, neck and chest – fresh and soft, it hits my right nipple, avoiding my middle and skipping to the tops of my thighs.

The problem of language and its subsequent arrangements and juxtapositions.

I have thought about this before. As we write, we image, and we also run a risk.

The practicality of engaging with what is lived and then thought, when scripted, becomes something else. Private-then-public, it is not unlike the window to my home. Dangerous and exciting, exhilarating, banal – words can make you feel as if you are traversing a precipice. Letters fall to either side – left then right, in front then behind. This precipice, our bodies.

Light refracts.

When I write nipple, I can’t help but think of those who are censored on the platforms that we share. The New York Times asks if THEY will ever free the nipple. That’s how I read it, capitalised, underlined and italicised – this is the tone. Noted, Amanda Charchian’s images look like bad Baldessaris.1 I recall my colleague, the illustrator, who when working for US publishers would have to erase the lines that made cleavage for breasts and those that traced teats for cows. Solicitous Christians coveting the imagery of felt-tipped lines: prototension, pan-erotica. Is there a book titled Taboo and Tipper Gore: On Parental Warnings and Paternalistic Pop? It is hard to imagine Kenneth Clark sans suit, but he walks into the room with slightly weathered skin to ask was it ‘not an

The Dugong

advocate of paganism who wrote, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth”’? 2 Click, scroll, hover; touch, stroke, linger.

In direct swap, from tech to trace, the lubricious potential of language is evident in the translations of the encounter. Encounter, not experience. It is a meeting, unfamiliar. One body, mine, with that of another, your work. As I move, so does this work – left to right, forward and back. Position and place. Reading Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Robert Leonard, without clothes on and beside me.

I make tea, wondering if they will care to share the snowballs from the IGA. Exposed – as we are in writing – addressing a muse and re-dressing prose.

I can see the veins beneath my skin – some of it brown, some pink, some yellow, the swim-lines of summer fading and the scar always-already on my knee. My stomach rolls. They are the soft version of Alina Szapocznikow’s gypsum cast of the stomach of Arianne Raoul-Auval. I read that ‘In 1968, the artist produced a hundred Belly Cushions with the intention to have them enter private homes or preschools’.3 I love her boob and lip lamp – Illuminated Breast, 1966 – pretending to be an object of the everyday, a stem blooming a body. I wonder, should I plug in the coloured polyester to see what shadows it may cast?

I just sent a text message that reads: ‘I am writing about Stuart Ringholt in the nude whilst reading Kenneth Clark’. My skin is sticking to the leather chair which has wheels, and as I try to re-position the self, carefully pulling thigh from seat, I slightly slip on the floorboards, feeling crumbs beneath my feet. Your pamphlet enters the home, mail art via digital delivery and offset print.4 I have taken the title as a directive. The pamphlet is a proxy. I have printed you out and sat you beside Maged Zaher. Public figures in the privacy of my home. I might vent frustrations to the telly in a somewhat similar scenario, but the exchange with you and Zaher is of an entirely different manner. Zaher, with short beard, sits slightly hunched, his legs somewhat spread; the smooth skin on his arm directs the hand pointing to your pamphlet. He says: The PDF format is romantic. We use it to talk about the revolution and to say that we own our breakfast.5 Your pamphlet is a PDF, a document in portable format, formatted. Like a pamphlet, it is a small unbound treatise, in this case without a case and of five pages. This isn’t a school project, and maybe it is a revolution. I have eaten breakfast. Amidst the language of instruction and context pedagogue, you interrupt the bureaucracy with an antagonism and argument that throws me off – just a little. It’s like a punctum in the prose: What does it mean for your head to be thinking about wealth as you move through the world with cowardice? 6 A casual instruction sheet, or guide for looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home. Sentences that rupture safety, its casual instruction is substitute teacher – slightly aloof, perhaps ironic but definitely well-dressed – able to interrupt the normality of a flat-packed, state-based curriculum.

Lisa Radford

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The Dugong: rehearsing writing as a means for responding to a pamphlet and a stand-in painting observed without clothes on, as instructed — Lisa Radford

Who’s wealth? What cowardice? Mine? Is it mine?

Just as it is in the exchange with the relief teacher where the role of whom, in instructing another, and about what, is blurred. The relief is in the de-situating of a formal exchange – less form, no norm, and context with content. Who’s speaking to the emperor about his brand new clothes, at the boundary to the fourth wall, standing on the stage, imagining the audience without clothes on but definitely with us? They’re naked too, right?

I am reading dictionaries of etymology. From panfletus, we produce Pamphilus, seu de Amore and pamphilos comes to follow – Greek for loved by all. Carolyn gently interrupts us, her glasses reflecting red on her nose as the curls of her hair bounce about her bare shoulders. She is excited. Robert is listening, his spindly legs supporting that squared torso. One of Carolyn’s knees touches Zaher’s, they share a glimpsed exchange; looking at Robert she re-positions his prose perpendicular to yours.

As PDF is to glance, a monochrome might be to touch; ‘Ringholt’, she says, ‘moves away from the technology of enchantment towards a re-enchantment of techne’.7

Notes

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(1) Julia Jacobs, ‘Will Instagram ever “Free the Nipple”?’, The New York Times, 22 November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/arts/design/instagram-free-the-nipple.html.

(2) The full quote is ‘Before the Crucifixion of Michelangelo we remember that the nude is, after all, the most serious of all subjects in art; and that it was not an advocate of paganism who wrote, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth”’, and it is found in Kenneth Clark, The Nude, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, UK, 1960, p. 25.

(3) ‘Collection: Alina Szapocznikow, Belly’, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, https://artmuseum.pl/en/kolekcja/ praca/szapocznikow-alina-ventre.

(4) Stuart Ringholt, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020, Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020, https://buxtoncontemporary.com/ exhibitions/stuart-ringholt-looking-at-a-painting-without-clothes-in-the-safety-of-your-own-home-2020/.

(5) Maged Zaher, Love Breathes Hard, Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2014, p. 26.

(6) Ringholt, Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home, p. 3.

(7) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ‘On Anger, Fear, Laughter and the Art of Healing’, in Stuart Ringholt: Kraft, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2014, p. 22.

Images p. 19 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Laresa Kosloff, Radical Acts 2020 (detail) pp. 20–21 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Laresa Kosloff, Radical Acts 2020 (detail)

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Synthesised violins keen over a desolate landscape. Climate scientists in hazmat suits look forlornly over the wasteland. A British matriarch narrates, her voice authoritative but empathetic, betraying her emotional entanglement as she talks in the past tense about a dystopian future that is really our present.

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This is a speculative fiction in which every scene has been filmed in advance of the artist’s storyboard. Laresa Kosloff spent her COVID lockdown patchworking – not fabric but stock footage designed for corporate videos. That she was able to construct a seamless, if bizarre, narrative, says much about the insidious nature of the neoliberal world we inhabit, where everything is based on pre-emptive assumptions of market desires. Out there in the ether exists stock footage you didn’t even know you needed.

Kosloff’s climate scientists have given up warning Earth of imminent demise, because no one is listening. Instead, they go back to the lab, where they experiment with potted house plants, developing a ‘synthetic pathogen’ that affects human behaviour. This brings to mind the experiments of the pseudoscience classic The Secret Life of Plants (1973), where pot plants were demonstrated to be so in tune with their human owners that a begonia could be wired up to either open the garage door or be a homicide witness. But so too Kosloff’s narrative emanates a whiff, subtle as airborne pollen, of M. Night Shyamalan’s dystopian film The Happening (2008), where trees are sick and tired of humans and synthesise their own pathogen – one which makes people suicidal.1 That plants might change human behaviour is hardly science fiction – psychoactive compounds are literally lurking underfoot all around us. Hysteria around plants’ abilities to take over human cognition reaches its apogee in pulp science fiction and B-grade movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which saw alien spores turn into ‘pod people’. But the 2007 reboot, Invasion, introduced a new twist. People became more peaceful, thanks to the alien invaders that had taken over their brains; wars and pollution were things of the past.2 Kosloff’s plants create scenes that recall the 1960s paranoia that hippies would ‘slip LSD into the water supply’. Good corporate workers are rendered incapable at their desks. They grin, they goof off. Team-building exercises don’t boost productivity, they eclipse it, turning into actual purposeless play. As if on ecstasy, workers dance around the office, or sit meditating in the lotus position.

‘Months of idleness’ ensue, with ‘huge profit losses …’ And yet, climate scientists couldn’t be happier, as carbon emissions have lowered, ‘buying them precious time’. This echoes the reports of clear skies in formerly smog-choked cities that emerged early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, not to mention sightings of dolphins frolicking in Venice canals. Paul B. Preciado likened the global pause to a ‘giant technological-shamanic ritual for “stopping the world”’, providing us with a ‘micro-political opening’ that could be our only chance for true change.

As with Kosloff’s imagined future, this would certainly bring about an economic crisis, but so too would it produce a necessary ‘aesthetic crisis, a rupture within neoliberal subjectivity’.3

Every single starling, every single song

Certainly, Kosloff’s narrator can barely mask her disdain when she says the word ‘politicians’, as a grumpy old white man in a chauffeured car gesticulates into his mobile phone. These politicians’ grand scheme is to distract the public by announcing a successful mission to Mars, a ruse no less preposterous than anything else we have witnessed in recent years. Perhaps this is Kosloff’s subtle dig at Elon Musk, who, in spite of backing renewable energy, is leading the eternal quest for a ‘Planet B’. These are the kinds of ‘technofixes’ that Donna Haraway rails against in Staying with the Trouble, where she urges us to stick with earthly realities rather than imagine transcending them with a rocket ship.4 In Radical Acts, however, the rockets are artificial constructs, just like the stock footage itself. Male and female astronauts pose in their spacesuits, exercise in their cabins and look out on vistas of the Red Planet. But when we see the director having a hissy fit, we realise the whole thing is a set-up. News of the deception leaks out, and with that revelation comes a realisation of the biggest cover-up of all – of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Meanwhile, politicians fan themselves with banknotes, men point at an array of graphs and screens and a deliriously happy woman totes numerous shopping bags.

‘So what did we do?’ the narrator asks, as the music builds to a crescendo.

‘We used our privilege to lie down in radical acts of horizontality.’ Lying down becomes an act of refusal to participate in the ‘fantasy of eternal economic growth’. We might equate these horizontal protests with what Michael Taussig calls ‘the mastery of non-mastery’. Certainly, Taussig has been working on radical horizontality for many years, having erected a hammock in his office at Columbia University. You could trace this rejection of extractive productivity from Paul Lafargue’s 1880 tract The Right to Be Lazy right up to The Nap Ministry of today, who claim that ‘Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy’.5 Likewise, Kosloff’s abstainers lie down, ‘acknowledging colonisation and ecocide as the root cause of the crisis’. They get arrested, they get jailed, but they keep lying down, until something changes. The orchestral crescendo finally cuts out. We are left instead with a song sung gently by a woman as we watch, not a tornado, but a whirling murmuration of birds.

In Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, Taussig says that Georges Bataille should have chosen the murmuration of birds to illustrate his concept of dépense, or ‘spending for the hell of it’.6 This is an anti-capitalist understanding of expenditure that has more in common with ancient traditions of potlatch and sacrifice and is about the ineffable beauty of giving things away. Similarly, Brian Massumi’s 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value imagines a post-capitalist future, one in which we will have to radically change our current value systems.

Key to this is resisting the quantification of qualitative experience. Yet, Massumi reminds us, quality and quantity are not polar opposites. He gives the example of a murmuration of starlings; what was one day merely ten birds flying in formation becomes the next day ten thousand. This is not just a shift in quantity but a qualitative shift too, creating an intensity, an event.

As Kosloff’s flock of birds twirls, the gentle song continues to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’: ‘We are peaceful and united, / We are here for your children too, / We want to be non-violent, / Oh, how about you?’ Kosloff tells me this is the song members of Extinction Rebellion sing when one of their number is arrested.

Police have been known to break down and cry on hearing it.7

Tessa Laird

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Every single starling, every single song: Laresa Kosloff’s Radical Acts — Tessa Laird

As Preciado says, evoking both a protest movement and the murmuration of starlings, ‘even if we can’t locate the exact moment when a process of collective emancipation begins, we can feel the vibration it produces in the bodies through which it passes. No single narrative can contain such a process.’8 Taussig writes that the word ‘murmuration’ itself ‘activates the tongue, lingual ripples moving through bodies—mine, yours, and the body of the world . . .’9 while Preciado believes that we are on the verge of nothing less than ‘a planetary paradigm shift’.10 The crisis we are in is a call ‘not to arms, but rather to dreams’, and these dreams are where we flock, dive and wheel together in order ‘to constitute a vast new countercultural force’.11 We will need this intensity—every single starling, and every single song—in order to wrest control of the planet from those who would kill her.

Notes (1) It is hard, when watching Shyamalan’s film, not to be rooting for the trees, so to speak, especially when Mark Wahlberg is the hero. Give me a river red gum any day of the week.

(2) Of course, this is a travesty of human ‘freedom’ and our heroes must continue to fight to reinstate the disharmony that is our human birthright. See more on sci-fi hysteria about plants in Tessa Laird, ‘Spores from Space: Become the Alien’, in Prue Gibson and Baylee Britts (eds), Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, Punctum Books, Santa Barbara, CA, 2018.

(3) Paul B. Preciado, ‘On the Verge’, Artforum, vol. 58, no. 10, July/August 2020, https://www.artforum.com/ print/202006/paul-b-preciado-on-revolution-83286.

(4) Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2016.

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(5) The Nap Ministry, https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/.

(6) Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2020, p. 11.

(7) It is important to note that Kosloff is herself an activist associated with Extinction Rebellion. These ideas are not abstract but part of her daily commitment to visible change. Likewise, Taussig’s dedication in Mastery of Non-Mastery is ‘For a Green New Deal’.

(8) Preciado.

(9) Taussig, p. 95.

(10) Preciado.

(11) Ibid.

Images p. 25 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail) pp. 26–27 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail)

Every single starling, every single song

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Nicholas Mangan’s Limits to Growth project has been ongoing since 2016, with Buxton Contemporary’s Light Source commission simply the latest permutation, or perhaps transaction, in the work’s evolution – or, perhaps, devolution. If the first law of thermodynamics states that the quantity of energy in the universe remains the same, the second law cautions that with each transformation, energy is wasted, and the system tends towards disorder, or entropy. Limits to Growth flirts with this very possibility of oblivion, seeking its own limit even as it simply follows the options available at any given time to a participant-observer of global capitalism and its flows – material and immaterial, extractive and wasteful.

The project began as an investigation into the relationship between two infamous currencies: the cryptocurrency bitcoin and Rai, the massive, often unmoveable stone money of the Micronesian island of Yap, both of which rely on trust of a shared financial ledger to ensure their ongoing value. As an opening salvo, Mangan installed an internet-sourced, already obsolescent bitcoin mining rig in the basement of the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Though a fascinating misnomer, bitcoin mining is more accurately minting, through complex number-crunching, which consumes exorbitant amounts of energy for a ‘virtual’ currency. The funds produced by the basement mining rig paid for the printing of photographs of the Rai currency, first displayed at MUMA and then at Kunstwerke in Berlin (parts 1 and 2). For this third iteration of the project, Limits to Growth – Part 3 (Letter to Rai), Mangan had the entire roll of photographs (the ‘roll’ is at once his artwork, the product of his labour, and his non-liquid asset) shredded. Moreover, dismayed by the carbon debt and impending e-waste of the mining machines, Mangan extracted the aluminium heat sinks for reuse and arranged for a local foundry to make them into ingots.

Mangan photographs the material stuff at each point in the process: the shredded paper piled onto a pallet, the stack of aluminium ingots. This material stuff (also briefly known as sculpture) is photographed against an affectless, empty, digital-grey blank space. An aesthetic purgatory, it is as if they are in a holding zone, forensically documented for posterity even as they await an imminent transformation. To wit, with the shredded paper, Mangan has sculpted a papier mâché version of a stone Rai, a fiction in the vein of a Hollywood prop, on display at Buxton Contemporary, and the ingots may in future be made into a holder for the Rai. Letter to Rai opens with the consistent whirr and repetitive thump of a machine at work. The image comes into view moments later: a close view of a pile of shredded paper – not the paper itself, but an image of it – materialises before our eyes as a printer head sweeps across the screen, adding to the image’s visual information, a centimetre at a time. The footage is as soothing as it is satisfying: we watch an image take form, become fully itself. But even that visibility is occluded by the printer head, a vague black form that passes by at regular intervals, and the inscrutable image itself – shredded paper connoting waste, secrets, or both.

Such swerves from visibility to invisibility recur throughout this project’s twists and turns: the photograph of the shredded pile of paper was given to the owner of the shredding facility in exchange for his labour (his suggestion).

Take the Money and Run

Thirty seconds in, we see a hand holding an ingot and hear the sound of the same object dropping, followed by a brief shot of a chainsaw slicing a roll of paper in half (the photographic roll, we later realise, chopped to fit into the shredder). ‘Dear Rai’, the artist says, ‘the other day we were all messaging on WhatsApp. You asked me, what was the most recent thing I’d made. Given the context of COVID-19 and the lockdown, I hadn’t made much. But just before we went into Stage 4 lockdown, I had just begun to unmake a work.’ The video that follows ostensibly documents that unmaking – whose most visceral moment is that shot of the chainsaw, which is repeated throughout the video like a cinematic analepsis or rupture or punctum. The video is also a product of the pandemic and of an artist in lockdown. That it is framed as a letter to a friend (who shares the same name as the stone Rai) indicates this on a structural level, as do its reliance on local Naarm (Melbourne) facilities and its initial online release. In a reverse of usual exhibition and documentation protocols, the work first appeared online and only later, from March 2021, was it physically manifest in the galleries of Buxton Contemporary.

We might say that at every stage of the process, Mangan is simply selecting the most compelling exchange available: mining rig to photo roll, to shredded paper, to papier mâché sculpture. How long this transactional process can go on is uncertain, and that uncertainty (and thermodynamic degradation) is part of the point. Surely the title Limits to Growth has a built-in awareness of this very conundrum. In the process, the work moves from material to virtual and back again, from visible to invisible and back again, from liquid to non-liquid capital and back again, from parasitic (on the museum, for one) to potlatch (gifting the photograph to the shredder) and back again. Mangan’s journey down the destructive rabbit hole of late capitalism trades in different kinds of value, from the utopianism and wastefulness of cryptocurrency to that of art, as well as the benevolent leeching from various art institutions that support him, financially and infrastructurally, in the process.

Latent here is a much bigger cautionary tale of greed, growth and waste. In 1972, MIT researchers commissioned by the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which predicted that economic growth, unless significantly curtailed, would lead to social and environmental collapse by the middle of the twenty-first century. Under industrial capitalism, growth (which transformed into ‘development’ and then ‘globalisation’) became almost a new religion, seemingly natural and unassailable. Despite such ideological entrenchment, and in the face of accelerated climate breakdown, a burgeoning degrowth movement in political science has emerged in the past decade, especially in response to an increasing causality between capitalist growth and environmental degradation. But as Mangan notes in Letter to Rai, it’s probably too late to dismantle capitalism and redirect its ideology of growth. All that may be left is to instrumentalise it.

I’d like to conclude with some thoughts on form. Sometime around 2005, I attended a lecture by the artist Sean Snyder in the auditorium of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Listening to Snyder’s lecture and watching the images he showed on the screen, I was struck by a subtle shift in the genre of the artist’s talk. Rather than describe his finished works, Snyder spoke about his process and showed materials that were part of this process, or what we would now easily categorise as artistic research. It was a sleight of hand with

Tara McDowell

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Take the Money and Run: Nicholas Mangan’s Limits to Growth — Tara McDowell

which I felt wholly sympathetic: Snyder (who, incidentally, appears in Letter to Rai ) could sidestep the expectation to explain his artworks to us by narrating the research that had inspired him instead – his investigations of the replica of the 1980s TV show Dallas’s Southfork ranch built in Romania, for one, or the media’s schadenfreude over Saddam Hussein’s candy-wrapper-trashed mancave-bunker.

Watching Mangan’s Letter to Rai, I had a similar sensation of witnessing a shift in form. Letter to Rai is not exactly an artist’s video, and it’s not exactly an artist’s talk (though, with Mangan’s own voice narrating, it recalls that form). It’s more like a documentary about an art project that also is an artwork in its own right. It’s as if Chris Marker made an essay film about La Jetée, if La Jetée spanned five years and multiple manifestations. Or Robert Smithson made a documentary about all of the Nonsites that was also a work of video art. It is an extraordinary work, Letter to Rai, cinematically and materially sophisticated, deeply generous, conceptually and ethically urgent, and quite possibly a shift in how artistic research takes form.

Letter to Rai ends with the pulpy smearing of papier mâché to make the stone Rai, but the project does not. Mangan is investigating converting the sculpture into biodiversity credits, a scheme by which developers can offset harm to biodiverse habitats by investing in ecological sites elsewhere. Such abstracting and parcelling out of ‘nature’ not only ignores the profound relationality of the Earth’s systems but also ignores – for a bit longer – the exhaustion and increasing untenability of a growth-oriented capitalism itself. Take the money and run, straight into the ground.

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Images p. 31 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail) pp. 32–33 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with (left to right) Grant Stevens, Fawn in the Forest 2020 (detail); Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail)

Take the Money and Run

Fawn in the Forest: Grant Stevens — Kyla McFarlane

———

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The ‘agency’ of this fawn to move, explore and rest within this forest idyll was driven by procedurally generated graphics and AI algorithms built in the gaming software Unreal Engine. The artist made decisions about the activities that the fawn would undertake, and a virtual camera was programmed with artificial intelligence to follow this little protagonist as it undertook its purposeful yet aimless actions. The fawn and its forest surroundings were purchased as part of different ‘assets packs’ available online. In this sense, Fawn in the Forest can be seen as an assisted readymade, its existing components brought together by Stevens who then set up the scenario under which they would operate and interact.

Stevens’ choice of assets to create Fawn in the Forest also foregrounds the pervasiveness of certain environmental and situational visual tropes in both cinematic and gaming worlds. A browse through available environments on the Unreal Engine Marketplace online reveals wooden log cabins, a birch forest and an ‘Assetsville’ virtual town reminiscent of a North American semi-rural community. Stevens points out that these assets are developed globally, yet they have a similar tenor to the outdoor studio sets in California and other locations in the United States that provide the backdrop for television series and movies set in any number of global locations. More specifically, redwood is native to the west coast of the United States and signals a northern hemisphere environment to antipodean viewers.

Furthermore, Stevens’ choice of the lone fawn protagonist to inhabit the forest brings with it strong emotional and cinematic associations. Perhaps one of the strongest cinematic touchstones is Bambi, the animated Disney film from the early 1940s. In the film, Bambi, a young deer, is accompanied by forest friends including a rabbit and a skunk and is completely devoted to his mother, who is famously shot and killed by a hunter – a trauma strongly felt by generations of children who have watched the movie. Consequently, a lone fawn in a redwood forest brings with it connotations of impending doom that, while never realised in the work, remains a resonant subtext that is potentially increased the longer the viewer stays with the work. As Stevens has also noted, many of the default settings in Unreal Engine revolve around a ‘first person shooter’ scenario, a common gaming format in which the point of view engages a combat situation.

Fawn in the Forest

Like all of the Light Source commissions, Stevens’ work was launched online when the world was in a febrile state and artists were highly limited in their ability to exhibit in public indoor gallery spaces. Fawn in the Forest went live in November when, in Melbourne, the 112-day lockdown to prevent further spread of COVID-19 had just lifted. As Melburnians re-emerged, several nations entered, or re-entered, their own equally lengthy lockdowns. Relaxed restrictions into a ‘COVID-normal’ life allowed Fawn in the Forest to be reimagined in the exhibition space of Buxton Contemporary for a communal, on-the-ground audience.

While it exists because of it, Fawn in the Forest is not about the current global pandemic. However, the containment of the vulnerable fawn within its pleasant yet fixed boundaries certainly resonates with the experience of the hard-edged cocoon of lockdown, where ‘home’ becomes a site of safety designed to isolate us from one another in order to protect against the unseen enemy of airborne disease. Lockdown is also a strange form of privilege not able to be accessed by essential workers or the homeless, but one which also results in loss of jobs and other devastating societal effects and collateral damage.

Viewing the work from my laptop screen in Melbourne in November, these associations inflected my relationship to the work, which also gave rise to generalised feelings of threat and existential ennui. Purposely innocuous and clichéd, Fawn in the Forest nevertheless pulled at emotional levers that for me began with the pandemic and ended at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anxiety around environmental and species threat due to living in the age of the Anthropocene. Whether the fawn became a site of individual projection or a symbol of the lived natural world, its little animated body very easily absorbed and encouraged the presence of perceived threats. But the work also exuded something of the easy calm of mindfulness videos of pleasing environments, designed to push down such thoughts and let us get to sleep. And, to complicate things further, the mise en scène was also accompanied by a soundtrack that had the slightly generic feel of a great deal of video art, pulling the work into another kind of non-space of emotional affect.

——— The notion of ‘endless duration’ is a curious one in gallery-based video installation, where works of fixed duration run all day long in gallery hours, made possible via the ability to loop a work so that it repeats until closing time. Visitors encounter the work at any stage of its duration – often entering the space to find a work is halfway through. Do you sit down and absorb the whole work? Or might you remain standing, moving on after a few seconds or a minute or two? Does the work have a linear narrative to be followed, or is it performing outside this structure? It’s an experience counter to the cinematic presentation of allocated session times shared by a seated audience there for the duration.

Stevens had begun his investigation into the idea of endless duration some years prior to Fawn in the Forest. He started with Sky (2016), in which ‘a virtual camera floats across a panorama of endlessly generating digital clouds’, giving the impression of ever-changing, yet narrative-less progression, while still being

Kyla McFarlane

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In mid-November 2020, Grant Stevens’ Fawn in the Forest was launched online.1 With a single click, viewers from any location could open up a live stream window and fill their screen (laptop, desktop, phone or tablet . . .) with an animated mise en scène, in which a young deer inhabited a redwood forest.

Inside this live stream the fawn would move about, heading towards a certain point, then sitting, stopping, or resting. While it appeared to be content – there was no sense of panic – it remained endlessly alone, without parents, family or predators. The time of day appeared constant; there was no drift towards night. A dappled sunlight filtered through the redwoods to the forest floor.

The fawn would continue on its little stop-start journey of exploration and rest in this pleasant and innocuous forest glade until the viewer decided to close the internet window and shut it down. This could be after seconds, hours, even days, as the stream was of endless duration, with no beginning or end.

of fixed duration.2 Next, Unreal Engine supported three of Stevens’ works, this time of endless duration and also situated in natural environments without protagonists – aside from the eye of the virtual camera, of course. In The Forest (2020), ‘an artificially intelligent camera roams endlessly through an idealised computer-generated forest’,3 a related counterpoint to the camera in Fawn in the Forest, which stays in the boundaries of the forest glade with its juvenile protagonist, responding by moving towards and away from it.

In the This brittle light exhibition at Buxton Contemporary, the endless live stream of Fawn in the Forest is experienced in the company of other visitors, who move about the space, and adjacent to two other commissioned works. This shared space of the video-friendly darkened room and the added environmental aspects of the installation – such as the slightly unnatural shade of green given to the walls and the bench seat, and the directional speakers overhead – bring the work into a space of collective consciousness. Limited in its actions, the fawn conveys a certain feeling of repetition which is actually undone by the absence of the loop. Here, the undercurrent of vague, undefined threat is somewhat dissipated. In Melbourne, as we gratefully return to this shared cultural space, now part of a ‘COVID-normal’ age, there is something reassuring about sitting with others, for as long as we like, watching a young fawn inhabiting its pleasant, slightly anodyne virtual world.

Notes (1) The author thanks Grant Stevens for his generous conversation about the work, which has infused this essay.

(2) Artist’s statement, https://www.grantstevens.net/#/sky/, accessed 12 April 2021.

(3) Artist’s statement, https://www.grantstevens.net/#/the-forest/, accessed 12 April 2021.

Images pp. 36–37 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with (left to right) Grant Stevens, Fawn in the Forest 2020 (detail); Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail) pp. 38–39 Grant Stevens, Fawn in the Forest 2020 (detail) pp. 40–41 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with (left to right) Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 (detail); Laresa Kosloff, Radical Acts 2020 (detail)

Kayla McFarlane

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The file boxes have been dredged up from a storeroom somewhere. The files are part of the vernacular of the museum or the university – nothing remarkable, purely functional. Their plain card construction and peeling stickers represent the most mundane apparatuses of collecting and keeping, so bland that they are almost invisible. The boxes sit on pale green shelves, the kind of easily cleaned sickly pastel of hospitals, prisons, libraries: the colour of institutionalisation.

Archival storage boxes, tied closed, are labelled with handwritten tags bearing a collection number, a geographical designation, sometimes the details of a donor. Objects peek out of their tissue paper beds in trays or are laid out on tables to be examined. Everything here is ordered and arranged.

This is and isn’t a museum. Useful Arts is a piece of theatre, an elaborate set that is simultaneously constructed and real. The objects here are from Taloi Havini’s own collection – it’s her name on the labels, her family credited as donors.

There are works created for previous exhibitions, inherited pieces, gifts, things commissioned by the artist. This installation is a space of tension. Everything here is treasured; everything is worthy of display – but imitating the storeroom pushes us to think about how and why these objects are held. It hints at the fundamental incompleteness of museum collections, these stores supposedly curated to present a complete vision. A gallery’s task is to tell an enclosed and neat story, but that means most visitors only see a fraction of what is really there. We rarely, if ever, get to go into these storerooms, to face the vast quantity of stuff that museums hold, to experience the work that goes into maintaining these collections, to understand the sheer scale of what they’ve taken.

Havini is working with the museum as her medium, playing with the material and form of the storeroom to draw our attention to its essential falseness. The attention to detail is meticulous. The acid-free paper, the tags, the washed-out greys and unnatural greens: these elements are familiar to anyone who has spent time in a collection store. The labelling conventions, from the collection numbers to the classifications, are imitations of the Australian Museum’s system. The objects, too, are of the kind usually kept off display: shell money, model boats, fishing spears, woven baskets – all the materials beloved by anthropologists and accumulated en masse during the ethnography boom of the twentieth century, over-represented in university collections but often not considered thrilling enough for exhibition.

The installation’s title, Useful Arts, comes from a chapter in an anthropologist’s book on Buka and Bougainville; in her eighteen months of fieldwork, the author acquired more than four hundred objects, now overwhelmingly in British museums and mostly kept in storage.1 Such anthropologists created collections to tell stories, to illustrate the worlds they thought they could comprehend in just a few months of fieldwork. The museums that these collections ended up in are made in their image, reflections not of the societies and communities they studied but of the authors themselves, mirroring what they considered most significant or valuable, most demonstrative of their theories.

Any collection is a portrait of its creator. When we accumulate we are creating mirrors of our idiosyncrasies, the things we want to see ourselves reflected

Useful Arts

in. This is as true for an artist as it is for an anthropologist, an academic or an amateur. Understanding museums means learning to read collections not as objective truths but as tangled biographies, the knotted lives of maker, collector, keeper. Sometimes, it means being willing to cut those knots, to be critical of the hagiography we have been given and to attempt to find the places where the collector’s biography has overshadowed the truth of the object. This collection is intimate, more intimate than those of most museums, because it is honest about the presence of its maker; but it’s possible to find that intimacy in any museum, if we learn to look for it.

Havini’s commitment to detail and her deep understanding of how these institutions function make Useful Arts compelling, but it’s the willingness to play that makes it so effective. This museum is reverent and ironic at the same time, speaking back to the structures it imitates. The objects museums hold had lives before they were collected, have their own biographies and stories, but they have been detached from their context and given a new one. Havini does the same with the museum’s apparatuses of display and control. The fiction of the museum is laid out: its lack of transparency, the impossibility of viewing the whole. These spaces are threaded through with narrative and theatre; they choose who is modern and who is ancient, performing feats of geographical imagination. Havini plays with that strangeness, turning gridded hanging walls commonly found in museum storage areas into a cage for objects, encouraging us to look through the display, to understand we are being kept from the whole.

A snaking coil of shell money spills out of a crate; there is more here that we cannot see.

These collections are trapped, inaccessible. The first form of Useful Arts, the images that became the installation, perform a small but radical act of digital restitution; Havini uses her archive of photographs, reference images and personal reminders from visits to anthropology museums in Australia, America and Europe as the basis for digital drawings and collages. These kinds of research images taken under strict supervision are sometimes the only way that objects in storage are ever seen, and they tangle with other forms of control imposed by the institution: the ownership of images and the copyright restrictions placed on the use of such photographs. With playfulness, and reflecting an intimate understanding of how these institutions function to control, the collages subvert the usual blandness of catalogue photographs.

Against the backdrop of museum stores, the figures and forms of these objects float and become free, haunting the corridors and refusing to be contained.

Museums collapse time. They enable us to walk through a convenient chronology that highlights moments of significance or transformation. They bring past and present together, most often through the juxtaposition of objects: the modern and ancient crafts of a culture presented side by side. In this way, they create artificial narratives of progress, idolising the developments of new technologies by showing us their lineages. At the same time, they have the power to push living people into the past, juxtaposing the stories of progress with stories of continuity and the inheritance of tradition and custom. In doing so, they neglect the truth that so-called progress has often come at the expense of that inheritance, forcing displacement and environmental destruction. It’s no accident that museums in the West tend to separate out their own histories by century or

Alice Procter

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Useful Arts: Taloi Havini — Alice Procter

style while other cultures are kept in non-chronological galleries. But Useful Arts plays a game with time, too, reminding us that these institutions are modern as well as historical; the decisions that shape them are constantly being reaffirmed instead of challenged. The histories they hold are still alive, no matter how stifled their collections might be. There’s a barely concealed violence to museums, simmering beneath the surface; it’s built on the colonial systems of control and exclusion, and it’s revealed in Havini’s mirror world. Those systems are turned into theatre; the hidden is made into the installation, made spectacular.

Note (1) Beatrice Blackwood, Both Sides of Buka Passage: An Ethnographic Study of Social, Sexual, and Economic Questions in the North-western Solomon Islands, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1935.

Images p. 45 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021 (detail) pp. 46–47 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021 (detail) pp. 48–49 Installation views, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021 (details) pp. 50–51 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021 (detail)

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pp. 52–53 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with (left to right) Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021 (detail); Hossein Valamanesh & Nassiem Valamanesh, What Goes Around 2021 (detail)

Useful Arts

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A fallen branch from a gum tree in Hossein Valamanesh’s neighbourhood in Adelaide was the starting point for the object in What Goes Around. It formed the building blocks of what Hossein has described as a ‘crazy nest’ he started making, akin to how birds begin to build nests from what they find.

Nassiem Valamanesh begins his filmmaking process with elements such as a character that he can build a story upon, a strong visual that can be turned into something compelling, or a space or location that lends itself to narrative development. With What Goes Around, the constantly spinning spherical object in the middle of a dark room was the visual inception of an idea for a moving image work.

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We begin in a blur, with only ambient sound as a clue, although that itself is an abstraction that gives no answer. There is a focus pull, and we see details of branches which come clearer into view as the camera tracks out to reveal a network of them, intertwined and hovering in mid-air. The soundscape grows increasingly menacing, then shadows emerge, before the object disappears.

But the title of the piece and the constant revolution we see on screen signal to the viewer that it will return. What Goes Around is exquisite in its simplicity and accessible in its literalness. Yet it is in this universal form that complexity lies.

The source of this form was humble and almost accidental. When Hossein started assembling branches one after the other, a spherical object began to take shape, prompting the idea that it could be interesting to see what the structure would look like if it spun. After adding a motor to it and suspending the piece, he decided to document the work by filming it spinning. When Buxton Contemporary invited Hossein and Nassiem Valamanesh to create video work for the Light Source commissions, Hossein approached Nassiem with the question of whether filming the object in a manner beyond pure documentation could make for an engaging piece of video art. That was the genesis of their collaboration on the commission, which evolved into an exploration of movement, space, sound and light, and resulted in a video that lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Hossein and Nassiem have collaborated on moving image work for more than a decade, starting with From the Heart in 2004. Hossein had collected the 35mm film footage from his own angiogram, which the hospital was discarding.

Nassiem edited, coloured and added effects to it, recording and laying an audio track of Hossein reading a poem in Farsi. The resulting 30-second video was an early experiment in working together. Hossein and Nassiem’s collaborative practice formally began ten years ago in Passing Time (2011). The video piece was installed in a black box with a circular frame at the top, and when the viewer looked down from the top of the box, they saw Hossein’s fingers floating against a black background, continuously forming and re-forming the infinity sign, a childhood game that Hossein used to play to while away the time. Nassiem filmed the action in a single shot, and there were no edits made. From the Heart, Passing Time and What Goes Around form an interesting trilogy of circles. From the circular X-ray in From the Heart to viewing Passing Time as if looking down

What Goes Around

from the top of a well to the revolving sphere at the centre of What Goes Around, we see circles suspended in voids. In all three pieces, there is a focus on looping, infinity and the cyclical nature of time.

Nassiem’s filmmaking brings this sense of time to Hossein’s concepts. In 2014, the pair made Passing, which was filmed with two cameras simultaneously recording from the front and back of a trolley car travelling down a singletrack railway line in the Yarra Valley in Victoria. The work is a two-channel video installation that situates the viewer in an in-between space of arriving and departing, simulating the experience of being in a train carriage, with the sensation of movement and a sense of temporality. Char Soo (2015) explored similar ideas of space and time. For that work, Nassiem and Hossein set up a platform with four cameras in the middle of a four-sided bazaar in the city of Arak in Iran. Footage was captured by the four cameras in the span of a day, with additional cutaways shot with a single camera over another half a day. Nassiem edited the footage into a 27-minute video, which was exhibited as a large-scale, four-screen video projection that placed the audience in the centre of the bazaar.

The work takes the viewer through a day in the marketplace, from shops opening up in the morning to closing in the evening. In Passing and Char Soo, filmic language transforms concepts and ideas into cinematic explorations of time.

Hossein works with the language of objects and textures, and Nassiem engages with the language of the moving image – camera placement, lighting, shot construction, sound – all of which are elements that contribute to the complexity of What Goes Around. Hossein has described the spherical object in What Goes Around as a ‘happy accident’, something that found its form casually, based on intuition, emotion and aesthetics. For Nassiem, the happy accident came from the sounds he recorded of Hossein doing various things in his studio, such as grinding stones, sawing wood, sanding, using a mortar and pestle, and playing a stringed instrument. He distorted the recordings and designed a soundscape from them. The sound design adds a spatially rich dimension to the work, and there is poetic resonance in the fact that the sounds are of Hossein carrying out routine tasks at home but that the distortions give these sounds the feel of something ominous and unhomely. This counterpoint can also be seen in the gold painted on the ends of the spinning branches, which makes them sparkle when light is cast on them. Where the gold turns something ordinary, such as branches, into something precious, the sound distortions imbue the everyday with a sense of the unfamiliar.

In their approach to their collaborative pieces, Hossein and Nassiem work together without conversing too much about meaning. Instead, they focus on aesthetics, as well as on questions surrounding the technicalities: How should we light something to give an illusion of depth? How do we move the camera to involve the viewer in the action? Where do we cut, add a fade or dissolve to construct time, set the tone or give a sense of pace? How many channels are required to best represent the visuals? What should the duration be to keep the viewer engaged? The role of the spectator is integral to the work that Hossein and Nassiem Valamanesh make. They rely on the imagination of the viewer to add to their ideas. Our lived experiences contribute to how we respond to what we see, the stories we tell of them and the connections we make to our own worlds. We are all collaborators in the process.

Selena Tan

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What Goes Around : Hossein Valamanesh and Nassiem Valamanesh — Selena Tan

Don’t you wish that you can be a little Aborigine?

The boomerang he learns to throw and that is all he needs to know.

From Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Schoolroom, 2007 The Boomerang is that unique Aboriginal object that returns to the thrower. The Yolngu Aboriginal term buku-bakarama refers to a reciprocity not in numbers or modern currencies but in time and performative emotional values. Historically, all Indigenous art was, though initially personal, fully expressed collaboratively as well as site- and event-orientated. It formed from related people coming together across age and genders in a spirit of reciprocity to bring into being art across all forms.

This intertwinement and syncopation are like the collaboration and partnership between Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, as an Indigenous and non-Indigenous duo. As reflected by Fraser, ‘Her Blakness and my not-Blakness aren’t solid objects’.1

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Together, Deacon and Fraser collated, dissected, rearranged, slowed down and stitched together an assortment of footage derived from unfettered access to the ABC’s archives for the broadcaster’s 50th anniversary. Twenty Australian artists were invited to trawl through five decades of footage and reimagine histories for the exhibition Yours, Mine & Ours: 50 Years of ABC TV, which was presented at Penrith Regional Gallery and Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2006–07.

The ‘perils of participation’2 and the ‘crime of collaboration’ are two tropes or concepts discussed by several writers who develop ideas into physical projects and societal practice (including artworks and exhibition proposals). There is a peril in presenting an idea to another(s) and it being critiqued into reality.

One may lose control in the move and a totally unknown outcome might appear, for better or worse. To participate with others is to expose one’s somewhat unguarded self, in trust, to another, sometimes revealing vulnerabilities, commonalities and profound differences or even discord. Conversely, it’s also posited within this concept that in teaching-explaining proposals, recipients will learn-understand more quickly and are happier if several angles or paths are presented as possibilities to choose from.

To paraphrase German philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke: living in a relationship, one must work at it every day. And, further, although the merging of two people is impossible, one must realise and in fact admire difference, and recognise that an ‘infinite distance’ exists, even between the closest people. The term ‘collaborator’ has often carried a negative ‘tinge’, of collaborating with an occupier power in assisting their colonising process. However, in the colonial environment of collaborating across lines of age, race, religion, class and power, coloniser and colonised can re-examine history to up-end the master–slave relationship and create a form of creolisation: a vibrant richness. In this case, two forceful personalities and intellects, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working-class and middle-class, with a set of divergent spiritual beliefs, have created together.

Abi see da classroom

Australia’s history has a dark shadow. It’s written in black and white. All photographic image-making (whether chemical or digital) is a meeting of black and white, light and shadow. All historical memory is of light and shadow. And this project, at its core, was a re-imaging of this history, strengthened and made true through the fact of the collaborative, insightful, dual seeing across the race line of these two partner researchers – partners and collaborators in work and life.

Both Deacon and Fraser have hinted at confronting childhood moments and could be seen to have recognised that in each other. At least in making art, they have been able to effect some control over their destiny (sic): to make one feel better, to be oneself, despite everything, to nurture special visions of the world – a world otherwise filled with prejudice. The relationship (and attendant issues) has been, to some degree, beyond questions of Indigenous identity alone.

For Abi see da classroom, Deacon and Fraser conducted a search for any footage tagged with keywords starting with ‘Aborigin-’ and dating from the beginning of the ABC until the referendum year of 1967. The work is presented across two screens or monitors and was later transformed into the installation Schoolroom, with a variation of the work shown at the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009. In recent correspondence, Deacon reflected on the commission: We requested news and variety show footage from the late 1950s to early 1960s, which was sent down to us on loan. Two videos on two separate screens. Spooky stills from them as photos on the wall. Plus a classroom installation, e.g. dolls on little wooden chairs, etc.3 There are many levels of experiencing, reading and living Blak. They ambiguously exist as separate paths of familiarity and understanding. One sequence in Abi see da classroom shows black-and-white footage of Aboriginal children attending a missionary-type school and a close-up of a bell ringing repeatedly, defining the rigidity of colonial and Christian education in remote communities. The small children perform in starched frocks and ironed shirts, collectively repeating in unison the spelling of the words ‘baby’ and ‘Mary’ while a nun in a white habit instructs them with a long stick.

In another sequence on this screen, Tommy plays a button accordion while a polite, white lady with pearl earrings and a chignon sings ‘Walking on the green grass / Walking side by side . . .’. Side by side seems preposterous and meaningless yet strangely potent as the young children are instructed in white, irrelevant ways. An Aboriginal woman teaching a Sunday school class on a mission sings the Christian assimilation song / children’s jingle ‘Hear the Pennies Dropping’.

Deacon and Fraser’s mash-up is unsettling and discordant yet revealing.

By contrast, the second screen presents clips of white people taking on the guise of Blakness. The first sequence is an excerpt featuring Julitha Walsh: a woman with blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin who sings a traditional women’s song in language with clapsticks. Walsh performed in one of the first broadcasts on Australian television, on 5 November 1956, and had spent much of her childhood in the outback. This is followed by footage of dancing minstrels slowed down to an eerie, inelegant groan. Three ‘mammie’ caricatures perform in blackface

Djon Mundine & Natalie King

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Abi see da classroom: Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser — Djon Mundine & Natalie King

while the audience snoozes and yawns. Deacon and Fraser cleverly subvert the stereotype of the devoted, dark-skinned caregiver and domestic servant by interspersing this imagery with footage of a white audience clapping jubilantly and menacingly. Deacon and Fraser heighten the preposterous frisson by suturing discordant footage.

When preparing for an exhibition shortly after making Abi see da classroom, Fraser remarked: Among the recent events that were going through my mind while ‘Whacked’ was being made was the Federal Government’s intervention in the NT, the material in the ABC archives we used for the ‘Schoolroom’ installation, the previous Federal Government’s citizenship test, and the increasing use of the Australian flag for all sorts of quasi and pseudo patriotic purposes.

In making this work, the artists have asked: What have been the images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on our television screens during this time? What story has been told and from whose perspective?

Notes (1) Rose Vickers, ‘On Collaboration: Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser’, Artist Profile, issue 51, May 2020, p. 88.

(2) Cybil Scott, ‘The Perils of Participation: How We Pay for Online Existence with our Privacy’, Tech Culture, 25 April 2019, https://www.iperity.com/tech-culture/the-perils-of-participation/.

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(3) Destiny Deacon, email correspondence with the authors, April 2021.

Images pp. 56–57 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Hossein Valamanesh & Nassiem Valamanesh, What Goes Around 2021 (detail) p. 61 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, Abi see da classroom 2006 (detail) pp. 62–63 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, with Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, Abi see da classroom 2006 (detail) p. 64 Installation view, This brittle light: Light Source commissions, exhibition reading room

Abi see da classroom

List of works Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser Abi see da classroom 2006 dual-channel video, black and white, sound, 10 mins Courtesy of the artists and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Taloi Havini Useful Arts 2021 artist’s collection of Kastom objects installation dimensions variable Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2021 Courtesy of the artist Laresa Kosloff Radical Acts 2020 4K video (stock footage), colour, sound, 7:29 mins Voice actress: Jenny Seedsman Singer: Violet CoCo from Extinction Rebellion Sound design: Final Sound Music: Secession Studios Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Nicholas Mangan Limits to Growth (Part 3) 2020 single-channel video, black and white with colour, sound, 18:43 mins (continuous loop), readymade server rack, reconstituted aluminium from Bitcoin miner machines, archival pigment print with aluminium frame, shredded photographs of O’Keefe stones aboard SV Mnuw junk ship, Colonia, Yap, Micronesia, 2016 installation dimensions variable Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Stuart Ringholt Looking at a painting without clothes on in the safety of your own home 2020 offset print mailer double-sided, 137 × 137 cm edition of 500 Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and MADA, Monash University, Melbourne

Grant Stevens Fawn in the Forest 2020 live-streamed procedurally generated computer graphics with sound Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney Hossein Valamanesh & Nassiem Valamanesh What Goes Around 2021 single-channel video, colour, sound, 5:20 mins Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2021 Courtesy of the artists and GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide