Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture BROADSHEET | 44.3

BROADSHEET Contemporary Visual Art + Culture

ART | CRITICISM | THEORY

44.3

Summer 2015

AGWA’s annual program highlighting the work of WA artists

Art Gallery of Western Australia

Helen Smith

Proximity Festival

Graham Miller

Until 18 Oct 2015 | Free

28 Oct – 8 Nov 2015 | Ticketed

21 Nov 2015 – 28 Feb 2016 | Free

Helen’s practice spans painting, photography and site specific installation that incorporates a minimalist approach to geometric forms.

Proximity takes over AGWA galleries and hidden spaces, engaging audiences with talks, workshops, parties and experimental one-on-one performances.

Graham is known for his richly atmospheric images that combine cinematic vision with the eye for subtle detail of a short story writer.

Helen Smith May 2014, Alighiero e Boetti from Wikipedia, United Nations 2014 (detail). Oil on canvas, 150 x 210 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through the Sir Claude Hotchin Art Foundation, Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Art Collective WA. © Helen Smith, 2014.

Proximity Festival – Art Gallery of WA, rooftop view, 2015 (detail).

Image: Matt Sav.

Graham Miller Josephine 2010 (detail). © Graham Miller.

ANNUAL SPONSORS Wesfarmers Arts - Principal Partner, 303LOWE, Singapore Airlines, Audi, Alex Hotel, Gage Roads Brewing Co.

#WAFocus @ArtGalleryWA

artgallery.wa.gov.au

TarraWarra InTernaTIonal 2015

29 AUGUST – 22 NOvEMbER 2015 | Curators: Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn

OPENING HOURS Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00am – 5:00pm and public holidays (ex. Christmas Day)

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This project is supported through a Curator in Residence grant. The Curator in Residence Grant Program is supported by the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund, and is managed by Museums & Galleries of NSW.

ADMISSION $7.50 adults; $5.00 seniors; children, students and pensioners free entry

Telephone (03) 5957 3100 Email museum@twma.com.au 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Rd, Healesville, Victoria

MAJOR PARTNERS

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe A Journey that wasn’t, Double Negative, October 19, 2005 Event, Wollman Ice Rink, Central Park, New York, USA Courtesy of the artist

www.twma.com.au MAJOR SPONSOR

With the support of the Institut Français in Paris and the Embassy of France in Australia

Contributors Jude Adams is a former lecturer in Art & Design History/Theory at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. She taught a range of undergraduate courses, which from time to time included specialist courses on gender and art. She was a member of the Women's Art Movements (Sydney and Adelaide) and is now a member of the recently formed, Adelaidebased FRAN (Feminist Renewal Art Network) and is currently working as an archival artist/curator.

Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), for which she won the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather award for art criticism. She writes on contemporary art and performance, and is a regular contributor to Artforum. Her latest book, Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? was published in 2013 by Koenig Books.

Kelly Fliedner is a writer, curator, and co-founder and co-editor of the West Space Journal (with Rowan McNaught), an online platform for criticism and commissions. Kelly is currently part of the Biennale of Sydney and Artspace’s 2015-16 project, the Bureau of Writing, and has worked with organisations such as West Space, Monash University Museum of Art, MPavilion, Next Wave, un Magazine, and Melbourne Fringe.

Rayleen Forester is an Adelaide-based independent curator and writer; co founder of Adelaide’s longest running ARI, FELT space, and founder of new arts writing initiative, fine print. Rayleen has curated and contributed towards exhibitions and biennials in Australia, Belgium and Japan. She recently curated FX Harsono: Beyond Identity as part of the OzAsia Festival 2015.

Dr Adam Geczy is an artist and writer, who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts. Editor of the journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (Penn State Press), he is the author of numerous books, the latest being (with Vicki Karaminas) Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (Bloomsbury) to be released in December 2015. He is currently working on two exhibitions and connected symposia with Blak Douglas for 2016.

Chari Larsson has recently completed her PhD examining the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. Her research areas include theories of images and the relationship between cinema and art history. She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Queensland.

Ian McLean is Research Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong; his books include White Aborigines, Identity Politics in Australian Art, The Art of Gordon Bennett and How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art. A contributor to a number of journals including Broadsheet, Art Monthly, Artlink and Third Text; he writes on contemporary and Indigenous art.

Dr Maia Nuku was born in London of English and Maori (Ngai Tai) descent, Maia Nuku’s doctoral research focused on early missionary collections of Polynesian gods and their extraordinary materiality which sparked an interest in drawing out the often eclipsed cosmological aspects of Oceanic art. She followed up her involvement on the major exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia 1760–1860 <http://www.sru.uea. ac.uk/polynesia/exhibition.htm> at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts <http://scva.ac.uk/> (2006) with postdoctoral research at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, as part of a collaborative research team exploring Oceanic collections in major European institutions – Artefacts of Encounter: 1765–1840 and Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art in European Museums. She now lives in New York, where she is Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aaron Seeto is the Curatorial Manager of Asian and Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. He was previously Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.

Franklin Sirmans has been recently appointed the Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Previous positions are Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010-2015); Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection in Houston and curatorial adviser at New York’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Ian Were is an independent arts writer and editor based in Brisbane. He has been to every APT since 1993. From 2002 to 2009 he was Senior Editor at the Queensland Art Gallery.

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Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. Print post approved PP53 1629/00022 Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: Broadsheet 14 Porter Street, Parkside, South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Email: admin@cacsa.org.au www.cacsa.org.au Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA.

Front cover image: Angelica Mesiti, Nakh Removed, installation view (still), 2015.

Commissioned by Carriageworks for 24 Frames Per Second. Image: Zan Wimberley.

Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Broadsheet magazine is assisted by the Government of South Australia through Arts SA and the Australian Government through the Australia Council and supported by the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory governments.

John Neylon is an Adelaide-based author, art reviewer and curator. He writes for The Adelaide Review.

2 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015

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44.3 Summer 2015 Contents Enduring civilisation, entangled histories:

Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum Ian McLean Standing on the edge of the abyss: Shigeyuki Kihara, catalyst for change Maia Nuku

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10

This is not an orchestra: Super Critical Mass making the invisible visible Chari Larsson

15

Dance in the Museum: Trends, Problems and Possibilities Claire Bishop

18

The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: Interview with curator Aaron Seeto Ian Were

26

30

Fashionable, Fleeting and Influential: Feminist Art Revisited Judith Adams

35

Tony Albert Franklin Sirmans

40

Pierre Huyghe at Tarrawarra International 2015 Kelly Fliedner

43

Good Art Adam Geczy

45

TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Rayleen Forester

47

Condensation: CACSA Contemporary 2015 John Neylon

Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 3

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4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is an initiative of the Asian Australian Artists Association Inc. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; the NSW Government through Arts NSW and the City of Sydney. Champions: Kerr & Judith Neilson. Principal Patrons: Susan Acret & James Roth; The Sky Foundation; Ah Xian and Ma Li. Patrons: Geoff Ainsworth AM; Daniel & Lyndell Droga; Richard Funston & Kiong Lee; Johnson Pilton Walker; The Keir Foundation; John Lam-Po-Tang; Vicki Olsson; Adrian Williams. Benefactors: Brooke & Stephen Aitken; AMP Foundation; Andrew Cameron; Edmund Capon OBE, AM; Julia Champtaloup and Andrew Rothery; CHROFI; Rhonda McIver; Lisa Paulsen; Penelope Seidler, AM; Lucy Hughes Turnbull AO; Dr Dick Quan; Dr John Yu AC. Friends: Michael Alvisse; Professor Ien Ang; Simon Chan Art Atrium; Michael Hobbs; Mabel Lee; Susan Nathan; Dr Gene R. Sherman AM; Becky Sparks & James Roland; Maisy Stapleton; Ursula Sullivan + Joanna Strumpf; Victoria Taylor; Rosie Wagstaff; Anna Waldmann; and Sean Woon.

BROOK ANDREW ¦ MEGAN COPE ¦ CHURCHILL CANN ¦ R ACHAEL DEASE ¦ KEG DE SOUZA MIK AL A DW YER ¦ TIM GREGORY ¦ BRENT HARRIS ¦ GLENN LIGON ¦ LEO MAGUIRE A N G E L I C A M E S I T I ¦ M O N G I M T H O M B E N I ¦ S T E V E M C Q U E E N ¦ L E N A N YA D B I ¦ R O N N Y I S Z T O R F I O N A PA R D I N G T O N ¦ L I S A R E I H A N A ¦ S T U A R T R I N G H O LT ¦ K Y N A N TA N ¦ C U R T I S TAY L O R

P I CA .O R G . AU

14 N OV EM B ER – 27 D EC EM B ER

Image: Leo Maguire, Untitled, 2014 (detail, from the series Strangers). Image courtesy and © the artist.

C U R AT E D B Y L E I G H R O B B

Enduring civilisation, entangled histories Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum IAN McLEAN With about 6200 artefacts, as well as photos and archival materials in its Australian collection, the British Museum (BM) is a rich mine for stories about Australia. However, while most of this collection can these days be seen online, it has featured little in the Museum’s headline stories of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilisations or been able to compete with its African galleries. Thus the appointment in 2013 of Gaye Sculthorpe as the curator of its Oceanic collections was a very welcome move. Sculthorpe – a descendant of Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905) – was a former curator of the Indigenous section at Museum Victoria (1987–2003), a member of the National Native Title Tribunal (2004–2003) and a Board member of Museum Victoria (2006–2013). No wonder she sourced stories for these objects in the communities from which they came. Now accepted ‘best practice’ in the museum fraternity, it is rapidly transforming Indigenous people from being colonial objects of the museum gaze to its postcolonial subjects. They are the new curators and clients of museum collections, and rarely to the extent that occurred in Sculthorpe’s debut exhibition at the BM, The BP exhibition, Indigenous Australia: Enduring civilisation.

The exhibition was much anticipated by those who hoped that it would counter the bucketing Indigenous art had received in London two years earlier. Then seasoned British art critics such as Brian Sewell and Waldemar Januszczak savaged the Western Desert painting in the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy: ‘the stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage… corrupted by a commercial art market’;1 ‘tourist tat’ and ‘spotty meanderings … dull canvas approximations, knocked out in reduced dimensions, by a host of repetitive Aborigine artists making a buck.’ The Indigenous, not to mention larger Australian, artworld was duly enraged, but for all its trying said Januszczak, it had only ‘managed to create what amounts to a market in decorative rugs’.2 Another British critic, wondering what the Australian artworld saw in Indigenous art, thought there must be ‘an element of penance in the way that Australia has elevated Aboriginal art in the last twenty years.’3 However, it seems there is no penance for Australia’s original sin. Zoe Pilger, writing for the Independent, damned Enduring civilisation before it even opened with a raft of caustic accusations: Indeed, this exhibition is half in denial. It both acknowledges the violation of the indigenous people and censures that violation. It uses terrible metaphors: the histories of the indigenous people and the colonisers are “entangled”, “interlinked”, born of “encounters” and “misunderstandings.”4 These words are ways of repressing the fact that white Australia is founded on murder. The drama and dignity of the story of indigenous colonisation and resistance is thereby muted. This also has the effect of draining the exhibition of vitality – it is quite dull, which indigenous art emphatically is not.

At least Pilger admired the art. While she had trouble enduring the ethnographic objects – most of which were collected in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – which comprised most of the exhibition, the smattering of recent large Western Desert canvases by the Spinifex people elicited her delight. Critics writing for the Telegraph and Guardian, Alastair Smart and Jonathan Jones respectively, also singled

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out these colourful acrylic paintings as the highlight of the exhibition, while ignoring the other contemporary art that, I can only presume, seemed to them too contaminated with Western ways. Despite being made with modern industrial materials for the Western fine art market, these Western Desert painters have successfully branded their products as authentic Indigenous art. Pilger saw something ‘striking’ and ‘joyous’.

Smart and Jones called them ‘welcome bursts of colour’ ‘upbeat’, ‘captivating’ and ‘fascinating’. The irony is that the ‘stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage’ in the Royal Academy exhibition, drawn from masterpieces in Australian state galleries, were of higher quality and much better displayed as aesthetic objects than those in Enduring civilisation. Sadly, as someone whose aesthetic sensibility has been spoilt by the generous space of the white cube, I find the darker lighting, cluttered displays, multi-coloured walls and tight maze-like spaces of museum design – very evident in this exhibition – challenging to endure.

However, the explanation for these very different reactions to contemporary Western Desert painting is not display design; it is the dissimilar curatorial contexts of the two exhibitions. Conceived by two senior white curators – one with a specialist interest in British colonial art in the Australian colonies – Australia was an overview of the history of Australian art since its colonisation. Thus critics judged its Western Desert paintings in aestheticised and art historical contexts.

As if remembering the curation of Indigenous art in Australia, Jones congratulated the BM for not ‘treating Aboriginal art as an aesthetic fetish.’ Sculthorpe placed the Western Desert painting within a set of multiple Indigenous perspectives on the conflicted and complex meetings of cultural differences in the crucible of British colonialism. If Australia defined culture in the transcendental terms of ‘fine art’ – the civilising of a country – Enduring civilisation defined it in more sociological terms, in which material culture, be it designated fine art or not, is an artefact of ongoing social and political relations. Nevertheless, while the exhibition embedded the Spinifex paintings in their own stories – the legacy of British atom bomb testing and native title claims – the critics understood these large colourful paintings as transcendental symbols of contemporary Indigenous confidence and hope.

Interestingly, while both exhibitions addressed the 200-year histories of British occupation of the Australian continent, each handled the colonial-era material best. This made some sense given that both institutions are monuments to British imperialism in this former centre of Empire. It also suggests that the institutional narratives of Australia have failed to escape the shadow of the Enlightenment and its colonial legacy. This was reflected in the titles of both exhibitions – ‘Australia’ (south land) is a Eurocentric name coined in 1800, and ‘civilisation’ is a classic concept/conceit of the Enlightenment that legitimised European colonialism.

However, Enduring civilisation had much more to say than Australia – both in the actual exhibition and the excellent catalogue. If Australia maintained a strict temporal and racial categorisation in its display, Enduring civilisation mixed up these conventional differences of Western discourse. Consequently it produced a much more engaged exhibition,

in which history was an ongoing conversation between present and past. This in part explains the ironic note of its title: had Aborigines endured civilisation, or were they the architects of the most enduring civilisation, 60,000 years in the making? Were they victims of a greedy more powerful civilisation, or agents of their own destiny? The refusal to decide between these positions – or the desire to have it both ways – was the strength of the exhibition and signalled the maturity of Sculthorpe’s approach.

Pilger and Smart were too overwhelmed by the Native victim narrative to see the ironic doublings of Enduring civilisation, and thus were unable to imagine the idea of Indigenous agency. Smart welcomed the contemporary Western Desert paintings as one bright spot in the ‘unrelenting’ and ‘all-too familiar account of dispossession, malfeasance and massacres by the British.’ He wanted more focus on pre-colonial Aboriginal culture. ‘By undervaluing millennia of achievement’, he believed that ‘this show feels like yet another injustice meted out against indigenous Australians’ – as if there had been no Indigenous achievement in the modern era.

Pilger took an opposite tack. One might have expected her to complain that the ‘joyous’ Western Desert paintings took our eye off the ‘grisly history’ of colonialism. However, she is too partisan to admit this. The focus of her review was the demand of repatriation, which has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s. This current cause célèbre threatened to overwhelm the exhibition. No critic, indeed not even the exhibition, could resist its siren. It strikes a raw nerve in all museums but especially the BM, as its collections have benefited so much from Britain’s imperialism. At its core it is an archive of imperialism’s loot: it should really be named the British Empire Museum.

Jones channelled the obvious: with much of the Museum’s holdings pillaged by colonists under the pretext of terra nullius, the ownership of the art on display – which ‘includes some of the oldest portable Aboriginal artefacts, owned by the BM since the 18th century’ – is ‘inherently problematic.’ Pilger is much more combatant. This ‘rape’ and ‘plunder’ ‘is not simply a political issue, but an existential one. It undermines the very nature of Indigenous being.’ Her logic recalls old-fashioned nationalism cast though it is in the glow of New Ageist sensibility: ‘Like the people, the objects are inseparable from the country. To separate the people from the country is to separate them from themselves.’ Today 90 per cent of Australian Aborigines live away from their ancestral lands. Some, like Sculthorpe, even live in London.

Pilger, who had done her homework, knew exactly at which objects to shake her spear: ‘a rare bark etching [of a kangaroo hunt] ... and a bark figure of an emu … made around 1854 … acquired (according to the catalogue, there is no record of how) from the Dja Dja Wurrung people of Victoria by a Scottish settler, John Hunter Kerr.’ Kerr managed the station of Fernyhurst near Boort in Victoria’s Riverina where the objects were made and collected.

Looking at the objects in question one might wonder what the fuss is about, but the same could be said about certain saints’ relics in Europe’s churches. Pilger singled out these two bark pieces, because they had been subject to a repatriation claim in a court case in 2004. According to the claimants, the Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group, ‘like all First Nations Peoples’, they ‘have a cultural and spiritual duty and obligation to repatriate all our Human Remains and Artefacts spiritually and physically connected to our Country and our Esteemed Ancestors.’5 This legal action marked the moment when issues of Indigenous repatriation shifted from human remains to also include artefacts.

Before 2004 only a few specialists knew of the BM’s bark etching and emu. They, along with a similar bark etching that had recently been discovered in the back rooms of the Royal Botanic Gardens, first came to the notice of the Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group after being lent to Museum Victoria (Melbourne) for an exhibition in 2004 – Etched on Bark 1854: Kulin barks from Northern Victoria, curated by Elizabeth Willis.

From the anthropological literature one could infer that the bark etchings were from shelters and the emu bark object was used in ceremonies.

This was hardly enough to mount a case for repatriation. They were not the Elgin Marbles of the Riverina. The Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group’s claim failed, Willis argued, because it made exaggerated claims for these objects that had no ‘correlation with what nineteenth century European observers recorded as the nature and use of these and similar objects.’6 However, arguments about historical veracity miss the objects’ contemporary value – a value clearly demonstrated in the curatorial strategy of Enduring civilisation. Unlike the Elgin Marbles, during its 150 years of caring for the bark etching and ceremonial object, the BM had not included them in the stories it tells. On the other hand, Willis did have a story to tell and it was a good story that greatly stirred local Aborigines. However, her employer, Museum Victoria, ‘which of course had contractual relationships with the lending bodies’,7 did not press any claims and the objects were duly returned to Britain. Perhaps Museum Victoria believed it had sufficient objects to tell its stories anyway: of the three Kulin bark etchings that survive from this time, it has the most magnificent, the so-called Lake Tyrell bark which was made nearby about fifteen years after the BM barks.

The BM catalogue might indeed be, as Pilger noted, silent on how the bark etching and object were acquired – there is a lack of original documents – but Willis points out that few such objects ‘are as well-provenanced’ as these items.8 Further, the exhibition catalogue (which references Willis’s research) does not shy away from the issue of repatriation or the controversy surrounding these objects. Willis details how the three items, along with others now lost, were especially commissioned for the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, from which the Royal Botanic Gardens acquired them, before two were transferred to the Museum of Mankind. Further, argues Willis, the bark etchings – which are too short to be from shelters – were probably made to illustrate how the other objects on exhibit were used, as if the whole ensemble was especially designed as a scaled-down version or model of

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that neatly fits with the usual activist scenario, be it Pilger’s journalism or frequently heard Indigenous complaints. Willis reported one of her Indigenous colleagues skepticism towards her argument: He asserted that, because colonial power relationships between White and Black were so uneven [unequal], the Indigenous people of Boort, ipso facto, must have been forced to give up their objects for display – they could not have possibly resisted the demands of the squatter and could not have possibly given up their objects happily and in a cooperative manner.

To which Willis replied: This view, coming out of the universalized strong story of powerlessness and dispossession, goes completely against the historical evidence we have about the situation at Fernyhurst in the 1850s, and totally discounts historical instances of Aboriginal agency and ability to negotiate and to make autonomous decisions.10

Dja Dja Wurrung bark engraving, Fernyhurst, Victoria.

Collected by JH Kerr before 1855. Acquired by the British Museum in 1866. Oc.1827. ©Trustees of the British Museum.

Indigenous material culture for the Paris exposition. Further, she argues, it is very likely that all the items were acquired ‘in exchange for some kind of mutually-acceptable payment, and with the active involvement of the Indigenous men, women and children’9 who made them. Willis convincingly describes it as a collective project jointly planned between the collector and the artists, all of whom were well known to the other.

In other words, Fernyhurst is a prototype of the modern Indigenous art centre, in which were made the large Spinifex acrylic paintings that Pilger admired.

Willis’s scholarship establishes that these objects were most likely made for display in a Western museum, unlike the shield that the Museum believes was likely collected by Captain James Cook or one of his men in Botany Bay in April 1770 and the centrepiece of one of the most interesting displays and stories in the exhibition. Cook shot its owner, driving him, his wives and children from their camp, after which he pillaged their artefacts leaving a few trinkets in recompense.

For Willis, the cross-cultural transactions and their aftermath were the most interesting stories associated with these objects. However, this story of adaptation, transculturation, modernisation and initiative is not one

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There is truth in both scenarios. This ambivalent discourse, caught as it is between black and white, agency and victimhood, Indigeneity and modernity, is what gives postcolonial stories traction in today’s globalised politics. Enduring civilisation was the better for taking this path.

Far from ‘draining the exhibition of vitality’, the ‘entangled’ histories of these particular Kulin objects make the case for their repatriation more pressing, as they speak to more than pre-colonial Kulin practices (as the Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group argued in court); they also speak to the entangled histories of contemporary Indigenous lives, modern Australia and indeed the world. Equally, it makes a case for telling these stories throughout the world, and especially in London, the former centre of Empire.

The great blindness in Pilger’s accusation, quoted earlier, is that entanglement is a colonialist paradigm. If only it had been: then the devastating logic of terra nullius would have had no oxygen. Pilger doesn’t explain how the metaphor of entanglement represses ‘the fact that white Australia is founded on murder.’ Murder is invariably an act committed within entangled peoples – usually family – and its result is to further entangle the parties. The very atrocities of British colonialism on which Pilger wants our eyes glued are a prime site of the entanglements that Enduring civilisation, to its credit, addresses. Australia is not alone in being founded on murder. What nation and what law are not? Indigenous culture is not some New Age wonderland. It too has its Macbeths and Lears, and Shakespeares too. In 1841 British squatters shot Munangabum, the renowned Dja Dja Wurrung leader, but in 1846 a rival clan murdered him.11 Colonialism is a complex story, and it is by acknowledging these complexities that the best case for, and also against, repatriation can be made.

The BM may well have obtained the bark painting and emu sculpture with due civility – even if the terms of trade were heavily weighted towards the colonists (though whoever acquired the Lake Tyrell bark got a better bargain) – but this does not give them the automatic right of custodianship. Custodianship is not simply a matter of having a secure vault: it also comes with the responsibility to keep the stories alive. This was the point of the Dja Dja Wurrung Native Title Group’s call for repatriation. The BM’s best counter was to appoint Sculthorpe and throw its weight behind Enduring civilisation. What will be the next chess move in this increasingly entangled story?

The exhibition Encounters at the National Museum of Australia from 27 November 2015 — 28 March 2016 is a collaborative project between the National Museum of Australia, the British Museum, the Australian National University and a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia.

ENDNOTES 1. Brian Sewell, ‘Australia, Royal Academy - Exhibition Review’, London Evening Standard, 19 September 2013. http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/australia-royal-academy--exhibitionreview-8826000.html.

2. Waldemar Januszczak, ‘A Desert of New Ideas’, Sunday Times, 22 September 2013. http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/arts/Visual_Arts/article1315292.ece.

3. Adrian Hamilton, ‘Australia’s Day in the Sun, at the Royal Academy of Arts’, Independent, 22 September 2013.

4. Zoe Pilger, 'Indigenous Australia at the British Museum: It's time to give the Aboriginal art back', Independent, 21 April 2015.

5. Elizabeth Willis, ‘History, Strong Stories and New Traditions’, History Australia, vol 4, Monash University EPress, 2007: 13.1-13.11 at 13.4.

6. ibid:13.7.

7. ibid:13.5.

8. Elizabeth Willis, ‘Exhibiting Aboriginal Industry: A Story Behind a ‘Re-Discovered’ Bark Drawing from Victoria’, Aboriginal History, 27 (2003), 39-58 at 53.

9. Willis, ‘History, Strong Stories and New Traditions’, 2007:13.3.

10. ibid:13.8-9.

11. http://www.egold.net.au/biogs/EG00243b.htm.

NCCA 31 OCT - 28 NOV

Gallery 1 Claudine Marzik & Tijn Meulendijks, Seed to Seed Gallery 2 Chanyi Henry, George Town Screen Room Aaron Burton, 33 (from My Mother’s Village project) Box Set Merran Sierakowski, i-virii 3 Vimy Lane, Parap Darwin, NT www.nccart.com.au

Chanyi Henry, Penang Watercolour, (2015). Image couresy of artist.

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Standing on the edge of the abyss: Shigeyuki Kihara, catalyst for change MAIA NUKU ‘I stand at the edge of the abyss, yet I do not fall in.’ Gauguin wrote the words to a friend on the eve of his departure for Tahiti in 1891, no doubt cognisant of the threshold with his past that was about to be breached. The prophetic words of Gauguin could be a further codex to each of the works in Shigeyuki Kihara’s latest series of black and white photographs: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’

(2013), twenty works that find the artist in reflective mood bearing witness to the devastation caused by the tsunami and cyclone that ravaged Samoa between 2009-12. Kihara has revived her nineteenthcentury muse and alter ego Salome1 to explore this next chapter in an increasingly expansive art practice. Having spent many years mining the ethnographic archive, glimpsing history in the frames of colonial photographs and postcards, Kihara now returns to the sites of those histories to reflect on their material legacies. With the lens now directed away from her body (heretofore the site of much debate and discussion), Kihara shifts the emphasis onto the vitality of the landscape around her, planting her feet in the soil and sand in a bid to further penetrate the cultural and political history of Samoa, all the while raising issues pertinent to the broader Pacific region.

Silhouetted against a broad expanse of cloud-scudded sky or lost in a shadowy tangle of foliage, the atmosphere bears down on this solitary and immobile figure, heavy in the full-skirted, black dress of Victorianera mourning. Weighty moiré skirts appear to grind into the coarse sand of an empty beach (After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu), to billow on the springy lawns of the former Mau headquarters (Mau Headquarters, Vaimoso), or unobtrusively soak up the pool of rainwater that has seeped into a ruined church (Agelu i Tausi Catholic Church, Mulivai Safata). Insects, air, the noise and colour of life – all apparently sucked out by a vacuum of pressure after the storm. The mood is almost apocalyptic, the figure something of a spectral visitor sweeping between island locations to silently inhabit these significant landscapes – key sites of encounter, union, disaggregation, growth, abundance, violence. Each photograph is a single piece of a larger puzzle, which when pieced together, will tell the cultural and political history of this Pacific island nation.

In these startling monochrome images, Kihara pivots on the threshold of time and space understood conceptually in Polynesia as va, a ‘space between … not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together.’2 This dynamic liminality or ‘between-ness’3 is a conceptual model that lends itself particularly well to the navigation of multiple identities, postcolonial histories and inter-cultural encounters. Here Kihara deploys it to encompass multiple aspects of temporality within the space of the frame. In contrast to Fa’a fafine: In the Manner of a Woman (2004-05),4 in which the artist resolutely confronted the eyes of her beholder, here her back is turned away. Angling herself obliquely within the frame is a departure of sorts for this artist, who nevertheless understands the power there is to be had in occupying liminal space.

Anchored between land and sky, the artist is moved to ponder the same philosophical questions posed by Gauguin in his epic 1897-98 painting of the same name, D’ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous?

(Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going). In facing away from the viewer, Kihara does not completely turn her back, but instead invites us to support her in these reflections. More than this, she affords her audience a unique vantage point within a thoroughly Polynesian conceptual framework of space and time: viewers inhabit a privileged position alongside her, as she prepares to walk backwards into the uncertainty of the future. Standing on this multi-dimensional threshold, Kihara faces forward to confront the complexity of the known past, perfectly poised to enlist the support of her forbears, ancestors very much alive in the landscape who will inform and guide her. Though apparently empty, these photographs are far from silent or languid.

Each landscape gently reverberates, very much alive and populated with the histories of the past, voices and memory that Kihara is at pains to scrutinise.

It is intriguing, or perhaps rather inevitable that Kihara would choose to reference Paul Gauguin’s most ambitious painting and consciously enter into dialogue with the artist. Gauguin famously spoke of the painting’s shifts in register as ‘violent harmonies’,5 distinguished, notes Hal Foster, by something he identifies as ‘visionary flow’– a fusion of ‘different temporalities, past, present & future’,6 which are held suspended and in constant tension. This is the enigma, he suggests, that Gauguin worked hard to sustain rather than resolve and the element which ultimately keeps his art alive for us.7 Certainly the ‘ever-presence’ of ancestors was something the French painter absorbed early on during his period of residence in Tahiti, for it was a theme he revisited in many of his paintings. In Mana’o Tupapa’u (Watched by the Spirit of the Dead), (1892) and Merahi metua no Tehamana (Tehamana has many ancestors) (1893), the spirits of ancestors (or tupapa’u) are not so much the haunting or ‘evil’ presence, which has pervaded interpretation of Gauguin’s oeuvre to date, but more a formidable link in the genealogical stitching of ancestral time and space.

The suspension of time and origins is revisited in another fascinating image by Gauguin, l’Univers est crée (The Universe is Created) – one of a series of ten woodcuts that Gauguin worked on in Tahiti between December 1893 and March 1894.8 Intended to illustrate Noa Noa, his fictionalised yet personal account of life in the islands, these dark, raw images give us far deeper insights into the extent of immersion into Polynesian spiritual life, which Gauguin so desperately sought. Capturing a time when the universe was erupting into consciousness, primordial waters overflow releasing prehistoric fish, ancient rock and sprouting vegetation.

Sketched skeletal forms and amphibian teeth join the veiled presence of ancestral spirits, observing from shadowy recesses, as elemental light pierces through the barrier of night and vegetal human-life begins to (continued page 14)

10 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015

Shigeyuki Kihara, Agelu i Tausi Catholic Church After Cyclone Evan, Mulivai Safata 2013. c-print, edition of 5 + 2 AP, 795 x 1040 mm.

Courtesy of the artist and Milford Galleries Dunedin, New Zealand.

Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 11

OTHER CURRENTS NICHOLAS MANGAN 24 SEPTEMBER – 1 NOVEMBER

Featuring the new work, Ancient Lights, co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London.

Image: Video still from Ancient Lights, Nicholas Mangan, 2015, two-channel HD video with sound, off-grid solar power supply.

Courtesy of the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland; and LABOR, Mexico.

The development and presentation of Ancient Lights is supported by

Artspace

our Commissioning Partners the Keir Foundation and principal funders the Australia Council for the Arts.

Special thanks to our partners Australia Wide Solar, King & Wilson

43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road, Woolloomooloo, Sydney NSW 2011, Australia

Essential Art Services, Sutton Gallery, Monash University Museum of Art

Galleries Open Tues – Fri: 11am – 5pm Sat – Sun: 11am – 6pm

and Gertrude Contemporary’s 2013 International Visitors Program.

T. +61 2 9356 0555 E. artspace@artspace.org.au W. www.artspace.org.au @ArtspaceSydney

Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments; by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW; and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council,its arts funding and advisory body.

coalesce. Normal boundaries are apparently eclipsed in this generative landscape of tupu noa – spontaneous and free-flowing growth – so that the figure of a woman, newly emerged from a churning ocean literally teeming with burgeoning life, draws breath, whilst wringing out her hair on the beach.

Much of Shigeyuki Kihara’s work to date has been concerned with recovering early pre-Christian perspectives, motivated not in a denial of the complex history of Samoa, but in a bid to recover lost knowledge and redress some of the skewed imbalances of colonialised memory.

In this sense she asks similar questions of her islands as Gauguin first did of Tahiti. Arii Matamoe (The Royal End) (1892) was his own rather brutal homage to pre-Christian indigenous culture in its depiction of the head of the last Tahitian chief, Pomare V, lying in state and mourned by islanders. Persistent disillusionment drove Gauguin to peer ever more keenly into all-pervasive landscapes of ancestral immersion that he could easily glimpse throughout Polynesia, but in the end never quite penetrate. Seen through the lens of Gauguin’s complex and vivid images, Kihara has herself prompted in us subtle, perhaps unexpected re-readings of this latest suite of photographs. As an artist interested in continually extending her repertoire, we find Kihara here pushing at the boundaries of her art practice; as activist and provocateur these works set out to galvanise historical consciousness and champion a rewiring of Pacific history.

ENDNOTES 1. Inspired by a late nineteenth-century photograph by Thomas Andrew of an unnamed woman entitled Samoan Half Caste, Kihara was moved to create a history and identity for this woman, naming her Salome after the notorious dancing seductress of New Testament tradition, and appears as her in a number of works including Taualuga: the last dance (2006); Siva in Motion (2012) and Galu Afi (2012).

2. Albert Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’ in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, Lanham (eds.), MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999: 399-412, [402].

3. ibid.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented a solo exhibition of Kihara’s work entitled Living Photographs (Oct 7 2008–Feb 1 2009). Curated by Virginia Lee-Webb, the exhibition highlighted the range of Kihara’s inter-disciplinary practice presenting an exhibition of contemporary works alongside archival photographs and a live performance of Taualuga: the last dance. In addition to the works My Samoan Girl (2004-5) and Ulugali’i Samoa: Samoan Couple (2004-5), the museum acquired Fa’afafine: In the Manner of a Woman, Triptych I in 2009 and the remaining Triptychs II and III in 2014, which now complete the series.

5. Gauguin uses the term in a letter to André Fontainas, March 1899 in Henri Dorra (ed.), Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994: 209 6. Hal Foster, ‘The Primitivist’s Dilemma’, in Gauguin Metamorphoses, Starr Figura (ed.), New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014: 48-59, [54].

7. ibid: 57.

8. Three of these prints are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Prints and Drawings (accession nos. 21.38.3, woodcut on china paper; 36.6.6 and 36.6.7, woodcuts printed in colour on wove paper). Two recent exhibitions have explored the implications of Gauguin’s highly innovative printing techniques in his broader art practice: Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints at Princeton University Art Museum, September 25, 2010–January 2, 2011; Gauguin: Metamorphoses at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, March 8–June 8, 2014.

Paul Gauguin, l’Univers est créé (The Universe is Created), from Fragrance (Noa Noa), 1893–94, Woodcut on china paper, dimensions: 20.3 x 35.4 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1921 (21.38.8).

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1 4 |B R O A D S H E E T | S u m m e r 2 0 1 5

This is not an orchestra: Super Critical Mass making the invisible visible CHARI LARSSON Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).

Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing etc).

What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.

The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of – for lack of a better word – concerts.1 Written shortly before the formation of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969, English composer Cornelius Cardew officially announced ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution’ in the June edition of the Musical Times.

Perhaps one of the last great manifestos in the history of the twentieth century avant-garde, Cardew described his early vision for the Scratch Orchestra as a collective consisting of ‘enthusiasts… assembling for action.’ Working immediately in the wake of European Fluxus, and its oppositional impulse to tradition and professionalism in the arts, Cardew and his associates were deeply committed to breaking down the traditional hierarchies between musicians and non-musicians.

Membership was open to everyone, regardless of skill and ability. In an interview for the BBC first broadcast in 1972, Cardew discussed the philosophy of the Scratch Orchestra: These people may be visual artists, they may be people interested in theatre, they may be perfectly ordinary office workers or students or what have you. They’re not necessarily trained in playing any instrument at all. Some of them would perform activities of one kind or another, not necessarily producing sound, because scratch music was really a composite of people making their own activities, so that some of these activities would involve people playing conventional instruments like saxophones or flutes or this, that and the other.2 There is something of Cardew’s spirit of institutional critique and democratic collaboration that leaves a fertile legacy for contemporary composers and musicians, and provides an ideal entry point for a discussion of the Australian collective that is Super Critical Mass. It was the egalitarian potential of sound that initially brought the group together in 2007. Occupying the porous intersection of performance, sound and participatory art, Super Critical Mass is currently in the final stages of preparation for its latest initiative at Queensland Art Gallery’s flagship event, the Asia Pacific Triennial. Extending over the duration of the triennial in a series of workshops, video installations and performances, the project promises to be the most ambitious commission undertaken by the group to date.

Super Critical Mass co-directors Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste’s approach to participatory-based sound projects is influenced by their formal education as classical composers. Refuting the barriers to entry imposed by a traditional orchestra, Day declared the goal was ‘to construct a form of orchestra that sidestepped many of the

negative trappings of orchestras.’3 Orchestras tend to rigidly defined communities. Roles are clearly demarcated, and the hierarchical delineations between the conductor, performers and audience are firmly entrenched. The musicians perform to a set score and the audience sits in silence, passively listening; the architecture of the performance space serves to reinforce such hierarchies; the orchestra performs on a stage, and is physically separated from the audience. Finally, the performance takes place in a ‘special’ space, deliberately severed from the everyday.

From its inception in 2007, the collective’s core premise has remained consistent: to create sonic works in a range of heterogeneous spaces, using multiples of the same type of instruments or sound sources.

The participants are issued with a single instruction or directive. What unfolds is an extremely pared down, minimalist experience. The goal is to create an immediate, direct engagement between spectators, performers and the physical environment.

The authorial role of the composer-as-God is destabilised as individual variables alternate and change with each new performance. Far from producing a predictable outcome, performances are subjected to a fluctuating array of factors; from the selection of the sound source, through to the number of participants involved, every update to the practice is unique. Once outside regular performance spaces, the acoustics become site specific and present a new set of contingencies.

Unlike the clearly defined spaces between audience and ensemble performances, the participants are free to move around. The space is understood not in terms of reinforcing hierarchies, but as a fluid response to the site’s architecture.

What ensues is a highly process-driven approach to the creative act that is both iterative and cumulative. The in situ research feeds back into the development of the project, as it unfolds through a series of workshops.

Often, the performance will take place after months of site visits, where the acoustics of the individual site are closely studied. Preliminary ideas are workshopped with volunteers in a process that Day describes as the ‘circular flow of information.’4 By directly involving the participants, the process of production becomes a two-way interactive exchange.

Super Critical Mass inhabits the other to the concert hall and the tightly controlled management of the acoustic experience: repurposed industrial sites such as Eveleigh’s Carriageworks, recreational and exhibition spaces, and ‘non-places’ or locations that are often overlooked or neglected.5 By moving out of the performance space of the concert hall, the practice is able to draw attention to the ambient sound of the architectural space. Looking ahead to the next iteration at the Asia Pacific Triennial, we are alerted to how sound loves space. This reflects co-director Luke Jaaniste’s long-term theoretical and practical interest in ambient sound. Exhibition spaces are highly invested in the visual.

The sound source, however, can interact and mingle with the ambient background noise of the gallery. Sound is able to shift, move and inhabit other spaces in unforeseen and unplanned ways. This is, of course, entirely the point. Sound can destabilise the hierarchy between the visual and aural that is privileged and reinforced by the architecture of

Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 15

Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, Super Critical Mass, Together We Breathe, 2013.

Courtesy of the artists, and Library of Birmingham, UK. Photograph: Gethin Thomas.

the gallery. This allows for a redrawing of visual spaces along invisible territories of sound.

With performances taking place in both Australia and internationally, Super Critical Mass is raising important questions pertaining to community-based collaborative projects. How might communities be understood as possible sites of resistance? Each new iteration of the practice is committed to a notion of equality that is active and handson. Again, this reminds us of the barriers to entry and the cultural capital that remains inscribed in conventional orchestral practice. Less concerned with musical instruments, the project is trending towards the use of common, everyday objects. From the simplicity of collectively scrunching pieces of paper, to the humility of the hum, no prior education or highly trained expertise is required as a pre-requisite for participation. It is here where Super Critical Mass moves closest to Cardew’s legacy and his ambition of musicians and non-musicians coming together to perform in the public sphere.

Rethinking the limits of what an orchestra can possibly be is an implicitly politicised gesture. This is not a matter of simplifying the practice to a non-orchestra, or even the negation of orchestra. Instead, the egalitarian impulse informing Super Critical Mass must be understood in political terms. French philosopher Jacques Rancière is helpful here. As part of his ongoing discussion of the nature of visual images and their political efficacy, Rancière offers us an opportunity to rethink participatorybased performance practices in respect to equality. As is well known, equality is a core operative principle in Rancière’s vocabulary, since he conceives of equality in terms of a process of disruption to the ‘natural’ 16 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015

hierarchy or order. By reminding us of the barriers to traditional ensemble performances, Super Critical Mass creates a mode of address that simultaneously speaks to these highly encoded cultural conventions, as well as destabilising them.

Working against institutional ‘top down’ theorisations of equality, Rancière moves in the opposite direction, from the ‘bottom up.’ Equality is entwined with the political, in what Rancière calls the ‘police’, or the systematic ordering, which establishes conformity and reinforces inequitable configurations of power. Politics occur when the police and the processes of equality intersect. Equality is therefore understood as making visible invisible power structures. Rancière is concerned with the individual’s ability to think beyond the homogeneity of the ‘police.’

He writes: ‘Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting… It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions.’8 This is more than the mixing of high and low. It is the act of making visible pre-existing hierarchies by those who are excluded by those very organisations of entrenched power. As Rancière argues in Dis-agreement: ‘Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.’9 The passive role accorded to the spectator in conventional orchestra has no place in Rancière’s schema. He observes: ‘To be a spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act.’10 Against this, and as Jaaniste and Day are careful to emphasise, participants are able

to determine their own individual responses to the initial directive.

Moreover, as spectators move throughout the gallery spaces, they are alerted to the promiscuous intermingling of the source sound and the ambient background sounds of the gallery. With the goal of heightening the phenomenological engagement with the acoustics of the individual site, this demands a shift from passive to active spectatorship.

The distinction between spectating and participation becomes unstable, bringing the practice directly into dialogue with Rancière’s unique formulation of equality. The notion of active spectatorship came to the fore in a 2014 performance at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.11 The brief was simple: an hour-long performance throughout the MCA’s gallery spaces. The selected sound source was voice. Visually indistinguishable from the regular gallery visiting public, the ensemble moved through the gallery spaces, emanating one of the simplest of sounds, the hum. The distance between spectators and performers collapsed, as members of the public adopted the sound source, mimicking the ensemble. Against the silence demanded from the audience by traditional ensemble, the ambient, background noise of the gallery became the subject of the spectator’s experience.

It is from this vantage point that Super Critical Mass redirects our gaze back to Cornelius Cardew’s ambitions for the Scratch Orchestra and prompts a reassessment of the legacy of the historical avant-garde.

Far from fading into impotence, Cardew demonstrated that sound is a medium, which contains political agency. Sound can temporally bring together diverse, heterogeneous communities that are otherwise precluded from direct engagement. This reminds us of Rancière’s insight that equality is active and interrupts the status quo. Equality happens at the fractious points of disruption.

ENDNOTES 1. Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution’, The Musical Times 110, no. 1516 (1969): 617.

2. Quoted in Timothy D. Taylor, ‘Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius Cardew’, Music & Letters 79, no. 4, 1998.

3. Interview with Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste, September 2015.

4. ibid.

5. The term is Marc Augé’s. See Marc Augé, Non-places, trans. John Howe, London and New York: Verso, 1995.

6. Luke Jaaniste, ‘The Ambience of Ambience’, M/C Journal 13, no. 2, 2010, http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/238.

7. On policing, see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999: 29.

8. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2009.

9. Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, 1999: 11.

10. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2009: 2.

11. Untitled (2014) was part of Sonic Social, curated by Performance Space.

Dance in the Museum: Trends, Problems and Possibilities CLAIRE BISHOP Every few years a burning topic appears to crop up in almost every single conversation with friends and colleagues invested in performance.

Currently, that topic is Dance in the Museum – by which I mean the specific problem of programming dance in the gallery space, rather than in a dedicated black-box theatre attached to an art gallery or museum (as found at multi-disciplinary arts centres, for example). In the last three or four years, discussions about dance in the museum have decisively taken over from those about re-enactment, which somehow climaxed and fizzled out with Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present (2010). It has also displaced all talk about performance as a component of parallel programming to exhibitions, which now seems to occur as regularly as talks and related screenings.

The art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I am going to refer to these as the first, second and third waves of dance in the museum.

MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate Modern have recently begun to show dance on a new scale and to new ends, and have reached out to incorporate dance into the museum in different ways. In what follows, I will sketch these institutional histories, drawing out the differences and highlighting some of the ongoing possibilities and problems of presenting dance in the museum. The aim is not to be comprehensive, but to offer a quick survey, prejudiced by my own experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Alfred Barr’s original scheme for MoMA, when he established the museum in 1929, was inspired by the Bauhaus, with departments not just of painting and sculpture, but film, photography, architecture and design. But MoMA’s first wave of dance in the museum didn’t begin until 1939, when it accepted the archive of writer and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who went on to found the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine in 1948.1 During this period, MoMA acquired and exhibited set design and works of art relating to the stage, but dance was never performed in the galleries. In-house and touring exhibitions about dance included Isadora Duncan and Modern American Dance.2 This interest was short-lived, however, and the Department of Theatre Arts had closed by the 1950s.

Although MoMA showed performances intermittently through the 1960s (most notably, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York in 1960, Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull in 1963, and Yayoi Kusama’s Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead in 1969, its second wave of dance didn’t really begin until the Summergarden series was initiated in 1971. The MultiGravitational Dance Company performed several times during the 1970s, as did Laura Forman, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti. But dance in the Summergarden was at best intermittent and seems to have been secondary to theatrical and music performances. It was basically event programming – a summer diversion rather than part of an historical narrative.

18 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015

Today, MoMA attempts to present dance within the museum’s galleries, organised by the Department of Media and Performance, created as an offshoot of the Film Department in 2009. Nowhere is the question of dance in the museum more fraught than at MoMA: the lure of the museum’s reputation and status seems irresistible to all artists, yet its architectural confines are arguably the least conducive to their practice, and acoustics are a perennial problem. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, MoMA’s atrium opened in 2006 as a pristine but sterile, vertical shaft, seemingly designed for corporate parties; its atmosphere of prestige capital has the unwelcome side effect of making experimental performance look under-rehearsed, rather than exploratory, intimate or nuanced. Under Klaus Biesenbach (now director of MoMA PS1), the department staged a number of high-profile performances in the atrium during 2010 – most memorably Abramović’s The Artist is Present, but also Allora and Calzadilla’s Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008) and Yoko Ono’s participatory Voice Piece for Soprano (1961). Of these, only Abramović’s performance – theatrically hushed and cinematically spectacular – really held the space. The others were visually and sonically adrift.

The dance program accompanying Connie Butler’s exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010–11) presented choreographers over the course of five weekends in early 2011, including Trisha Brown, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ralph Lemon, and Xavier Le Roy. Some of the performers made good use of the space: De Keersmaeker strewed the floor with sand for Violin Phase (the third movement of Fase, 1982): her feet left traces that accumulated like a mandala over the course of the performance, particularly stunning when viewed from the upper floors. Trisha Brown’s dancers, clad entirely in red, performed on balconies and in windows overlooking the atrium during Roof Piece Re-Layered (2011), punctuating the space with a spiral of points rising through four stories. Both choreographers turned the problems of showing work in a museum – dispersed attention, noise, lack of lighting – to good effect.

A further series of contemporary dance, Some Sweet Day, was organised by the choreographer Ralph Lemon in 2012, and revolved around intergenerational pairings of younger choreographers and seminal older figures (such as Lemon himself and Faustin Linyekula; Deborah Hay and Sarah Michelson). The juxtaposition of Steve Paxton and Jérôme Bel was perhaps most revealing, not just in terms of dance history (Bel owes a huge debt to Paxton), but in terms of how much dance can offer – and resist – a huge museum like MoMA. Paxton presented Satisfyin' Lover (1967) and State (1968), two classic works from the late 1960s that involve non-professionals, and which could be described as the degree zero of choreography: the elementary movements of walking and standing still. In its mute, sculptural refusal to entertain, State in particular induced an overwhelming pang at seeing the frailty and contigency of human life, especially poignant in the context of MoMA’s turbo-powered weekend tourist turnover.

Bel, meanwhile, presented an excerpt of The Show Must Go On (2001), a work that also uses professional and amateur performers. The fulllength version involves twenty dancers moving to twenty pop songs.

Crucially, the work is designed for full proscenium staging, for only then does the audacity (and criticality) of Bel’s assault on traditional ideas of choreographic skill and disciplinary accomplishment become apparent.

In the MoMA atrium, by contrast, the work was abbreviated to ten songs, and the performers were well-known local performers from the dance and theatre worlds. The contrast was striking. Shown in a theatre, The Show Must Go On tempers straightforward crowd-pleasing entertainment with refusal, bathos, the anonymity of distance, and entire songs where nothing happens. These qualities were completely lost in MoMA’s atrium, where it became a carnival of local stars performing the ‘best of ’ Bel’s work for their peers. Meanwhile, the loud pop music played into all the worst tendencies of museum-as-spectacle, exacerbated once again by poor acoustics. MoMA looked like a greatuncle trying to breakdance.

MoMA’s third dance series in the atrium was a collaboration with the French choreographer Boris Charmatz in October 2013, and brought other problems to light. Charmatz is director of the National Choreographic Center in Rennes, which he has renamed Musée de la Danse; the invitation to perform at MoMA was a great opportunity to put the two institutions in dialogue. He decided to show three works, the most interesting being Twenty Dancers for the XX Century (2012): twenty performers demonstrating their own (or others’) dances, occasionally pausing to converse with the audience. At MoMA, the work was dispersed through a range of galleries over five floors – including the garden, the atrium and the stairwells – over one weekend. At best, the piece brought a dynamic energy to the galleries, and created multiple lines of spectatorship: my personal highlight was watching a school group looking up at the steel slab of Richard Serra’s Delineator (1974–75), oblivious to Shelley Senter at their feet performing excerpts of Trisha Brown’s Accumulation (1971). Yet ultimately Twenty Dancers left me with the conclusion that the traffic between dance and the museum is oneway, and always on the museum’s terms: dance animates the galleries of the museum, but ultimately the museum flattens and homogenises our experience of dance. Call it the Tino Sehgal effect – gallery lighting enhances the objects, but not the performers inserting themselves in between these works. Unfortunately, every instance of dancing in the gallery now tends to look and feel like a Tino Sehgal.3 The most pressing issue is the question of MoMA’s controversial planned expansion into the former American Folk Art Museum, directly opposite its premises on 53rd Street. Performance plays a crucial role in this redesign: although the expansion will create only thirty-percent more gallery space, performance will be housed in a ‘grey box’ (that’s right, a combination of white cube and black box) and in a glass-fronted contemporary art and performance space on the ground floor facing 53rd Street. Whether performance will benefit from this context, or feel like a cheap enticement leading to the ticketed pleasures of Monet, Picasso et al, remains to be seen. Some critics have already complained

that the new plans privilege performance and event culture, rather than the presentation of art prior to 1980, which requires a more intimate architecture conducive to quiet concentration. But this line of thinking is erroneous, because spaces that pander to Instagram-friendly event culture don’t serve any art form well; dance and performance also require focus and concentration.4 Tate came somewhat late to the performance party: dance was almost completely absent from the museum, while MoMA experienced its first two waves.5 But it was first off the mark with the third wave when, in 2002, an internet bank called Egg funded a series of performance events across both Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Alex Poots was hired to orchestrate the more populist end of this program, while Catherine Wood was hired to produce edgier works by a younger generation.6 Unfortunately, the star-studded half of the program resembled an opportunistic response to a fundraising coup rather than a thoughtfully curated project: Poots paired up Turner Prize winners with international stars – such as Anish Kapoor with composer Arvo Pärt and director Peter Sellars, or artist Steve McQueen with soprano Jessye Norman and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. But Poots also commissioned the first dance works at Tate, inviting physical theatre company DV8 to rework The Cost of Living (2003) as an ambulatory work that split the audience into colour-coded groups and included circus, vaudeville, clowning, and a fight scene on the Turbine Hall bridge. Later that year, he also brought a series of Merce Cunningham Events to the Turbine Hall, performed beneath the acrid yellow glow of Olafur Eliasson’s installation The Weather Project (2003–4). As is well known, Cunningham tailored each Event to the venue in which his company was performing; faced with the hangar-like dimensions of the Turbine Hall, he split the space into three performing areas, around which the public was free to roam.

Catherine Wood’s program was initially more intermittent and lowkey, focusing on an emergent generation of visual artists interested in performance. Among the memorable early highlights in 2003 were Mark Leckey placing a sound system facing Jacob Epstein’s sculpture Jacob and the Angel (1940–41) in the Tate Britain rotunda; Lali (now Marvin Gaye) Chetwynd devising a performance around Richard Dadd’s painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855–64) in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery; and Carlos Amorales organising a Mexican wrestling performance on the Turbine Hall bridge. The Tate Triennial in 2006 included several visual artists interested in dance and/or social choreography, and Tate began acquiring score-based performances, beginning with Roman Ondák’s artificial queue Good Feelings in Good Times (2003) and Tino Sehgal’s This Is Propaganda (2002).

Inevitably, this direction of programming included a return to historic works of the Judson generation: in 2006, Trisha Brown restaged Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, first performed in New York in 1970.

At Tate Modern, the performer was strapped into a harness and rather falteringly descended the former power station’s vast façade to a crowd of onlookers. This version of Brown’s work seemed to lack the precision and austerity that we associate with her downtown performances

Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 19

opportunity for people to be aware of their own bodies, gravity, effort etc, it was hard to focus on such subtleties, when having to wait your turn to clamber aboard a plywood ramp, surrounded by noisy crowds of hyperactive children and frenzied families. The historical value of reconstruction was tempered, and perhaps ultimately dwarfed, by the Tate Modern machine – which has often been guilty of supersizing performance to match the museum’s size and popularity. For example, Alison Knowles’s modest instruction-based Make a Salad, first performed in 1962, was remade for hundreds of people at Tate Modern in 2008.

Tate Modern seems to handle the scale and atmosphere of the Turbine Hall best when it forges dance/installation crossovers, either setting works alongside pre-existing installations (Cunningham inside Eliasson) or turning the performance area into an installation space, as in 2009, when William Forsythe performed Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, a forest of 200 pendulums and nineteen dancers, watched by viewers from the Turbine Hall bridge and along the edges of the performance space.8 A further solution to the size/scale dilemma was arrived at in 2010, when Michael Clark became the first (and to date only) choreographer-in-residence at Tate Modern. Clark needed space to develop and rehearse a piece, which would work on the scale of the Turbine Hall. The conclusion brokered was that he would work on his commission during the museum’s opening hours, so that casual audiences could watch the rehearsals. Unused to doing this, Clark reportedly found the experience torturous. At the same time, he used this as an opportunity to push his work in the direction of participation, training 78 members of the public to perform a basic choreographic sequence to a David Bowie track. The Turbine Hall was equipped with a sprung floor painted in geometrical black-and-white patterns that echoed the vertical grid of the east window, so even when no one was rehearsing, the space looked visually occupied. The performance was presented free and unticketed over four nights in August 2010, the culminating piece in a program of recent works by Clark.8

A presentation by Michael Clark Company, with volunteer non-dancers, at the end of a research and development residency at Tate Modern, August 2010.

Photograph: Hugo Glendinning.

of the 1970s; in this respect, it was similar to the Tate’s hugely popular 2009 restaging of Robert Morris’s participatory installation Bodyspacemotionthings: a replica of the artist’s notorious exhibition at Tate Millbank in 1971 that was cancelled after four days due to overenthusiastic audience participation and injury. The show comprised plywood props, remade in 2009 with modifications to meet Health & Safety requirements. Bodyspacemotionthings was a runaway success – its four-day run was extended to two weeks – but this also highlights one of the central problems of Tate Modern’s approach to performance: it is a victim of its own success. While Morris regarded his work as an

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In summer 2012, Tate Modern opened the Tanks, three circular spaces dedicated to installation and performance, part of an ongoing expansion

by Herzog and de Meuron to double the museum’s exhibition and display space. Only one of the Tanks is equipped with a full lighting rig, and none has a sprung floor. In their shape and mood, the Tanks are quite different from the fully equipped ‘black box’ of alternative theatre, and permeated with an industrial grey austerity that is more rough, ready and focused than the Turbine Hall. The opening season included Boris Charmatz’s Flip Book/50 Years of Dance (2009), Nina Beier’s The Complete Works, and most impressively, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase (1982), which was adapted to the conditions of museum spectatorship following her presentation of Violin Phase in the round at MoMA. Rather than dancing the four movements in succession as a single piece, after museum hours, for a paying audience, De Keersmaeker performed each movement separately, at regular intervals over the course of a day, for three days. The original proscenium presentation was replaced by informal floor-cushioned seating, allowing the work to be seen from all four sides, whereby it achieved a more sculptural character and viewers see the piece in detail. Although this format disrupted the wholeness that derives from seeing all four movements in sequence, the payoff was accessibility: allowing the general public to come in and see a world-class choreographer performing her signature work, for free. Since opening, the Tanks have had an erratic program due to funding priorities and a delayed building schedule; the long-term plan is to use the spaces for a combination of permanent collection, live performance, film, and education.

www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery

University Collections curating and collaborating researching and documenting engaging the community presenting events enhancing university experience supporting university values

With its illustrious history, the University of Adelaide holds over 40 collections which form in effect a decentralised museum with many branches and facets.

We share our collections with the public through a dynamic program of cultural activities and invite you to register for electronic invitations and see what we are up to: unicollections@adelaide.edu.au www.adelaide.edu.au

Image: Sue Kneebone, Neat Drop, 2014 Photographer: James Field Collection Art Gallery of South Australia Upcoming SASA Gallery exhibition, Border Crossings

image Smith Elder & Co Physiological diagram The Organs of the Senses, Plate 1, 1876 photograph: Catherine Buddle

Of the three museums I’m looking at, the Whitney Museum has the longest, most intense relationship to the performing arts across all media (music, theatre, poetry, performance art, and dance). When the museum first opened in Greenwich Village in 1931, it supported avantgarde composers like Edgard Varèse, who was offered the Whitney Studio Club as the home for his International Composers’ Guild. Music concerts continued to be the museum’s primary mode of interest in performance, when it moved to its current location on 75th Street in 1966. In the early days this included chamber music and choral groups, contemporary music (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Steve Reich), jazz (Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman), and even Sun Ra. Most of these events were promoted under the remit of the longrunning series Composer’s Showcase, held on Tuesday nights. Events were free (or cheap), audiences sat on floor cushions, and performers were encouraged to play ‘in tune with the environment’; the gallery was often specially hung for the performance with works from the permanent collection.

It was as part of the Composer’s Showcase series that the Whitney’s most celebrated dance performances took place: Yvonne Rainer’s Continuous Project – Altered Daily (performed over three nights in spring, 1970) and Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall (1971). Deborah Hay was the first choreographer to appear under this rubric (in 1969), followed

by Meredith Monk, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay and Lucinda Childs. Hay obtained the third floor galleries by writing directly to museum director John Baur, arguing that the work of her contemporaries, including herself, ‘has found its greatest support from the art audience, patrons and artists.’ She also cited her previous pieces made in museums and art galleries: Seattle Art Pavilion, Vancouver Art Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo – a list that gives an idea of just how many museums were involved in this second wave of dance programming during the 1960s.

During the 1980s, dance at the Whitney took place in its other, corporate-funded branches too (in Fairfield, CT and at the so-called Philip Morris branch on Park Avenue). But it has been an intermittent occurrence, rather than part of a regular curated program – its appearance mirroring the art world’s fluctuating relationship to dance in general. Performance by visual artists has been equally sporadic, and generally tied to the Whitney Biennial. Dance was not made an integral part of the Biennial until 2012, when curators Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussmann dedicated the fourth floor of the museum to dance and performance. Sanders explicitly looked back to the Composer’s Showcase series for this decision, as it had also cleared an entire floor of the museum for performance.

Sanders’s use of the fourth-floor gallery was stunning: wall dividers were removed, bleachers were constructed along the length of the south wall, and the building’s trapezoidal window was exposed in all its graphic clarity. Two choreographers were invited to be ‘in residence’: New Yorkbased Sarah Michelson and London-based Michael Clark. Michelson’s performance made fantastic use of the space, with the walls bare apart from a glowing green neon logo of her head, and a sprung floor printed with an architectural floorplan of the museum. Four dancers performed a gruelling sequence of hypnotic and repetitive reverse circles; Devotion Study #1 deservedly won the Bucksbaum Award for best work in the Biennial.

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The 2012 Biennial was also notable for its creative solution to the need for a dressing room. Wu Tsang’s installation Green Room (2012) served as a private space with mirrors and wardrobe for the dancers, actors, and musicians participating in the Biennial; when not in use, it hosted a twochannel video installation about a gay bar in Los Angeles and the drag queens who perform there. As an actual dressing room, the installation acquired an authentic atmosphere over the course of the exhibition that made the video seem all the more immersive. Despite these ingenious solutions, the main problem with the Whitney’s performance program has been limited ticket availability and seating.9 In May this year, however, the Whitney moved to a new building by Renzo Piano in the Meatpacking District. This includes a 2,500-squarefoot dedicated performance space: not a grey box, nor a circular tank, but a flexible space with a sprung floor, acoustic panelling, full lighting grid, projection booth and retractable risers, enabling the space to be used both as an open loft or fixed proscenium seating. The far wall has large windows overlooking the Hudson, which can be covered by a diffusion curtain, a blackout curtain, or a cinema screen. The space has already shown itself to be hugely flexible, capable of hosting wildly different events (from classical music concerts to cabaret revues) in atmospherically appropriate settings.

The three museums discussed in this article each have a distinct history: MoMA is anchored in modernist and postmodern dance, and continues to validate contemporary dance above other forms of performance; its presentations make most sense when tied to exhibitions. But given its location and affluence, one might imagine MoMA undertaking collaborations with off-site organisations to co-produce works in contexts that provide a more conducive environment than the atrium.

Tate’s achievements lie primarily with its vital work of re-enactment and reconstruction, and with making these works freely accessible to the public within a festival format (notably the Long Weekend series); the downside to this approach is supersizing and mass audiences. The Whitney’s history is tied to the Judson generation (and to their peers in music), but more recently it has relied upon the Biennial as a way to frame this activity, rather than integrating dance and performance within its historical exhibitions.10 Surveying these three examples, the problems and possibilities of dance in the museum can perhaps be boiled down to four points. The first is historical. The current love affair between museums and dance is in part an acknowledgement of the longevity of visual art’s relationship to dance. The reinsertion of dance into the museum acknowledges this long history, and allows it to be made visible again. At the same time, dance is rarely included in a fashion that allows it to become an historically significant presence; live dance is never presented as part of the collection displays and seems to exist in a different time zone to that of history. Resolving the temporalities of these conflicting demands – i.e., finding a way to present dance as part of an historical dialogue with visual art, not just as spectacle – is one of the main challenges the museum now faces.

More worrying, the current fascination for the performing arts might be seen as signalling a retreat from performance art proper. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has recently suggested that the performing artist (choreographer, theatre director) knows how to collaborate with institutions, and is – in the majority of cases – a seasoned professional.

The performance artist, by contrast, has a more antagonistic relationship to the museum, and frequently seeks disruption and

intervention. Bruguera sees the turn to dance in the last decade as a conservative move, reducing risk and critique in favor of professional collaboration.11 The same could be said for the curatorial penchant for historical reconstruction: the known and tested is always a safer bet than the new and unpredictable.

The second possibility/problem of dance in the museum concerns audience and accessibility: the advantages of making one’s work available to a larger cross-section of the general public than a limited run at one of the city’s smaller venues.12 For dance and increasingly theatre, the museum promises exposure to new audiences – especially younger audiences, for whom tickets otherwise remain prohibitively expensive.

But the cost of accessing a wider audience is precisely its transience and lack of attention: spectatorship is dispersed and fragmented when visitors can walk away from the work at any moment. Choreographers and dancers must be careful not to pander to short attention spans, or to feel aggrieved when viewers lose interest and meander off. Creating new works for gallery situations might be the best option, be this ticketed (e.g., Michelson’s Devotion Study #1) or designed to structurally accommodate different levels of spectatorship in one multi-part work (e.g., Xavier Le Roy’s ‘Retrospective’, 2012).13 The third factor, related to the second, is the pressure that the museum context places upon the integrity of a work. Museums can offer incredible opportunities for rethinking the context of choreography – formally and historically, but also socially and politically. When a work is made specifically for a site, this relocation can be immensely stimulating, especially if the choreographer understands, and is responsive to, the mood and atmosphere of the building. The downside of this approach is that pieces originally conceived for the autonomy of a black-box theatre might need serious reconsideration before being moved into white-cube institutions, where context inevitably bleeds into the work.

Cutting and editing a composition for presentation in the round can violate its meaning, and artists need to weigh carefully what can be gained from this relocation and what is lost. Acoustics and lighting – some of the basic aesthetic ingredients of performance – are often considered disposable, but the more that dance takes place in museums, the more the construction of distinct atmospheres seems necessary.

The fourth consideration is financial. Unlike ticketed blockbuster exhibitions, performance is expensive, has no stable source of funding and does not recoup its costs. The Tate Tanks have the potential to be a regular partner on the European touring circuit, but the institution’s own funding for performance is so intermittent (and linked to corporate sponsorship) that this leap has yet to be made. MoMA’s director seems happy to pour funds into the Department of Performance and Media, but it can sometimes seem as if every Charmatz or Lemon needs its big-gun counterpart in the form of a pop star. The only downside of the Whitney’s new space is that it will be available only to US artists, and that it separates performance from the galleries, returning us to the arts centre model. All three institutions need to find a way to develop new funding models for dance – which may or may not complement international grant-funding cycles – in order to more fully support homegrown talent.

We are now at a point where all three of the museums discussed have a track record of presenting dance and performance within their exhibition spaces, but have also commissioned big-name starchitects to create expansions with dedicated spaces for this work. In the future, current debates about ‘dance in the museum’ will probably seem like

a brief blip that was finally resolved by the presentation of flexible, hybrid spaces both for visual art performances (where ideas of context and intervention remain key) and the performing arts (where acoustic and lighting conditions are finessed to maximise audience attention). The question that looms over the next decade is whether dance will continue to stand as an alternative economic model to the financial excesses of the art world, or whether it will be flattered into participating and competing with (and ultimately being colonised by) the hoarding impulse of museum logic.

Finally, I will end with two new curatorial models for bringing dance and the museum into dialogue with each other (and which, I think, move us beyond the Tino Sehgal model). The first is Ralph Lemon’s ‘Value Talks’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a year-long series of discussions and performances, and the second is Boris Charmatz’s Expo-Zéro, a two-day event in July as part of Berlin’s performance festival Foreign Affairs. (And full disclosure: I was partially involved in both projects, as one of a line-up of invited participants.)

Lemon’s ‘Value Talks’ were organised as part of his two-year Annenberg Residency at MoMA. Lemon proposed a series of seven events that dealt with the question of value, beginning with the incommensurate economies of visual art and dance, but also extending more widely into issues of race and culture. The first event was a public discussion between choreographers Boris Charmatz, Simone Forti and Ralph Lemon in October 2013, which reportedly got off to a bad start by asking how visual artists manage to sell a conversation for a million dollars, all of which seemed like a nasty case of Sehgal envy. Finance also dominated the second event a month later: an intimate gathering held in one of the exhibition spaces, where MoMA’S director recounted the difficulties of acquiring Robert Rauschenberg’s combine Canyon (1959), due its inclusion of a bald eagle (illegal to trade or own in the US). Later in the series, in March, art historian Kellie Jones spoke on the theme of absence and ancestry in the work of legendary AfricanAmerican artist David Hammons. For the first half of her talk, Jones lectured in absentia, her disembodied voice filling a small screening room with the poetry of her father, Amiri Baraka, who had died two months earlier.

Two weeks later, artist Kevin Beasley and poet-scholar Fred Moten put together an evening themed around improvisation (‘On Value, Poetry and the Turntable’): Beasley mixed records, while Moten simultaneously composed a rapid-fire response in poetry. In May, we gathered off-site to see choreographer Sarah Michelson ‘in rehearsal’ with two of her dancers; she spoke so sotto voce that this was easily the least language-driven event in the series, effectively presenting the rehearsal as pure image, and refusing the usual format of performanceand-talkback in favour of inaccessible opacity. Finally there was yours truly, leading a guided tour of the contemporary galleries at MoMA fifty years in the future, overwriting the Sigmar Polke retrospective then on display: a utopian hang of art prompted by a total change of social values following unprecedented environmental catastrophe in 2020.

Lemon has referred to the ‘Value Talks’ as ‘performance essays’, but I experienced them more like a pro-seminar or workshop: a chance to gather regularly with peers to hear one-off experiments in our respective mediums. The series also put me in dialogue with the African-American art and performance scene, which is still far from integrated into the city’s museums. Reflecting on the series as a

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whole, however, it seems discouraging that MoMA can only give space to this degree of experimentalism in the form of fleeting events like performance and education, rather than being able to admit such forms of creativity and criticality into its exhibitions and collection displays.

Boris Charmatz, meanwhile, has been developing a speculative and discursive approach to dance since 2009 under the auspices of Musée de la Danse. Expo-Zéro isn’t an exhibition so much, as a drifting series of encounters between the public and ten or so performers. I was invited to be part of the team for its Berlin iteration last summer, alongside performance artists Rabih Mroué and Tim Etchells, curator/writers David Riff and Hu Fang, dancers Shelley Senter and Pichet Klunchun, and choreographers Mette Ingvardsen and Meg Stuart. In July we gathered in Berlin for five days to workshop an event that then opened to the public for two days.

In its lack of structure, the experience was at once maddening, terrifying, and exhilarating. Charmatz’s only organising principle was for us to present our individual proposals for a museum of dance in the ten empty rooms of the Kunstsaele, a classic nineteenth-century bourgeois apartment turned art gallery. We were forbidden from using costumes, props, objects, scores, or scripts; there was no furniture and no music or video.

The result was that invisible histories of performance, questions of ownership and re-performance, improvisation versus scores, social dance and pedagogy were all put on the table (or rather, the floor). Riff was a walking repository of information about Karl Marx, especially his relationship to dance; Ingvardsen explained and enacted a collection of now iconic erotic performances by Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci and others. Etchells gave exhilarating streams of verbal improvisation, either in dialogue with Stuart’s choreography, or in tandem with Mroué as they spent hours amassing imaginary objects in a room.

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Charmatz himself veered indefatigably between turbo-powered dance improvisation and high-energy discussions with the audience.

To my amazement, it all kind of worked, and people settled in for a five-hour hybrid of exhibition/conference/performance, with viewers and performers continually flowing between rooms and words and movement. Discussions were not pre-prepared and repeated, but spontaneously erupted after a week of sitting in a room and listening to each other. The overall structure was raw and unpolished, in part because we weren’t being filmed for posterity, and in part because we were in a continual state of testing.14 That dance is now adopting a discursive register, seems to be an inevitable consequence of Tino Sehgal’s popularity, but both the ‘Value Talks’ and Expo-Zéro point to paths beyond Sehgal in harnessing performers, who were allowed to let their own knowledge flourish; lifetimes of research and expertise were not so much performed as made available to new contexts and collaborations. As an academic, I welcomed the ways in which ‘Value Talks’ and Expo-Zéro opened up alternatives to the conventional scholarly formats of the symposium or lecture; rather than taking these presentational devices as a given, these projects made possible the option of embodying and enacting ideas in other performative formats. And yet the joy, pleasure, and risk of each series was directly indexed to its intimacy and scale: the freedom of these experiments only seems to be possible with limited audiences and a lack of repetition. (In Berlin, tickets were restricted to one hundred people. In New York, the audience was invitation-only, although at some point Triple Canopy will publish a record of the series in a format yet to be determined.) Whether this exclusivity of address and resistance to popularisation is a creative necessity – or a crippling drawback – is one of the trickiest questions that experimental choreographers now have to confront. I just wish you all could have been there.

This paper was given at Artspace, Sydney on 13 December 2014 and has been slightly updated for the present publication. It is a hybrid of two essays: ‘The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: MoMA, Whitney and Tate’, Dance Research Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 62–76, and ‘The Year in Performance’, Artforum, December 2014: 149-50.

ENDNOTES 1. In fact, Kirstein tried to get MoMA to be the original host/sponsor for the School of American Ballet. Barr declined, and Kerstein ended up running it largely independent of any institution. In 1940, the Walker Art Center began presenting local dance, poetry and chamber music concerts.

2. Set design was shown in solo exhibitions by Joan Junyer (1945), Arch Lauterer (1946), and Robert Edmond Jones (World of Illusion: Elements of Stage Design, 1947-8).

3. I am sure the dance crowd will beg to differ here, but from a visual art perspective, the similarity of dance performances in gallery spaces is increasingly troublesome. This becomes especially clear when looking at photo and video documentation of these events. Sehgal is wise to forbid photography of his work, as it flattens our memory of the encounter. I should add that during Three Collective Gestures, Charmatz performed two other pieces in the atrium: Levée des conflits (2010) and Flip Book/50 Years of Dance (2009), for which a white sprung floor and special lighting were installed.

4. See for example, Jerry Saltz, ‘The New MoMA Expansion Is a Mess’, 2014, . http://www.vulture. com/2014/01/saltz-the-new-moma-expansion-is-a-mess.html; Jerry Saltz, ‘Jerry Saltz to MoMA’s Trustees: Please, Reject This Awful Expansion Plan’, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/jerrysaltzs-open-letter-to-the-moma-trustees.html.

5. Tate seems not to have had any performance during the 1960s or 1970s, and only intermittently during the 1980s. Notable exceptions are the performances included in Seven Exhibitions: Keith Arnatt, Michael Craig-Martin, Bob Law, Joseph Beuys, Hamish Fulton, Bruce McLean, David Tremlett (1972) and Tate’s

‘first season of Performance Art’ in 1981, as part of Performance, Installations, Video, Film. Dominated by installation and video screenings, the latter series included live performances in the galleries by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Charlie Hooker. In 1985, a small performance series accompanied the exhibition Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, featuring live works in the galleries by Rose English, Silvia Ziranek, Hannah O’Shea and Nan Hoover. In 1989, a Performance Sub-Committee was established to promote performance, understood as ‘any “live” activity […] performance art, dance, drama, readings and music,’ the latter building upon the museum’s successful series of classical music concerts in the Clore Galleries.

6. Poots would go on to bring high-end performers to the Manchester International Festival and the Park Avenue Armory.

7. This work has since become an interactive installation without dancers, Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No.2, described by the company as a ‘choreographic object’ with 400 pendulums. It was first shown at the Ruhrtrienniale in 2013.

8. Clark returned to Tate Modern in June 2011 to present the premiere of th, a work devised for the Turbine Hall space; this time the performances were ticketed.

9. In short: viewers have to collect pre-paid tickets at least an hour before the performance, and to stand in line for the rest of this hour before being allowed up in the elevator to the fourth floor. Once the doors open, it’s like The Hunger Games as everyone sprints and scrambles for a good seat.

10. The restrictions of being a museum dedicated only to American art become apparent here, as seen in the recent exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama— Manhattan, 1970-1980 (2013).

11. Tania Bruguera, in conversation with the author, April 2014.

12. The ability to reach wider audiences has also been one reason for documentary filmmakers turning to visual art since the 1990s. See Harun Farocki (2008).

13. ‘Retrospective’ by Xavier Le Roy was held at the Tapiès Foundation in Barcelona in 2012, and has since toured the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Musée de la Danse, Rennes; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and MoMA PS1, New York.

14. The same team, with a few substitutions, was deployed for a re-run of Expo-Zéro at Tate Modern last May, as part of the weekend-long project If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (15-16 May 2015).

Opposie page: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Performance 13: On Line, January 22-23, 2011.

The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor, MoMA, NY, (Violin Phase from Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich, 1982).

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - New York.

DIGITAL IMAGE © 2011, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

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Melanie Irwin, Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art), Distension (Assembly) 2013.

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The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: Interview with curator Aaron Seeto QAGOMA, 21 NOV 2015 — 10 APR 2016 IAN WERE Ian Were: Aaron, I have a couple of questions that might start the conversation. In what position do you think the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) series of exhibitions stand right now in the world of contemporary art?

Aaron Seeto: Let’s look at the legacy of the APT as a way to answer the question… I have only just joined the [Queensland Art] Gallery, so I have the benefit of viewing this from a slightly outside perspective – the APT has substantially driven the discourse around contemporary art from the region and I believe it is one of the most important periodic exhibitions which Australia produces… There is still room for these types of large-scale exhibitions, and the APT maintains a prime role.

The APT’s longevity and also the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection developed over the life of the APT project illustrates the gallery’s deep commitment to the art of the region. It also provides an informed base, from which the curators working on successive editions of the APT are able to speak. It is clear that this is a deep interest for the gallery, and through its activity – the APT assists in the development of a critical discussion, where the art of the region and our cultural connection to Asia and the Pacific opens up all kinds of dialogues.

IW: It’s interesting that you mention the bigness of the show, something I’d like to return to later. In the period since the first groundbreaking APT in 1993, has its relevance shifted, given the emergence of several other biennials and triennials in Asia and the Middle East?

AS: I don’t know if the relevance has shifted, because we are not talking about a static set of conversations. Artist and curatorial practices, which emerge from the local scenes in Asia and the Pacific are also shifting, as is the critical environment that is responding to new pressures including issues of global circulation, the market etc. Looking back through the archive, and seeing the energy and curiosity that surrounded the first edition in 1993 these intangible factors are still there. However, looking back to 1993, I doubt that you could develop any large-scale exhibition in the same way it was done then. The world has changed; the types of global conversations that are occurring now are very different to the 1990s. You can see the APT in the context of some other important projects like Fukuoka Asian Art Trienniale, for instance, and these models are very different to other biennial models that you might see elsewhere. The relevance of APT, and also Fukuoka, is that you can see the development of deep knowledge bases. What I think audiences appreciate, and this was the case for me, is the texture of the APT, which avoids a smooth globalism, because it is invested in the voice of the artist.

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IW: Do you think there’s a more sophisticated cultural discourse now between Australia and the Asian and Pacific regions?

AS: Definitely, yes, but it depends on who you’re talking to and where you’re talking from. If we were to look at the development of the APT as a barometer of the levels of acceptances and the social shifts that have happened within Australian culture, definitely; the landscape now is very different to 1993 but how you answer the question really depends on where you’re talking from.

IW: In 1993 it seemed that a number of visual arts organisations and curators around Australia were quite disinterested in contemporary art of the region, and in many ways it was APT1 and, maybe even more the 1996 event, that began to stir them and they gradually became interested in the region’s art.

AS: There has been a great broadening of the field of contemporary art, and also an awareness of the contemporary art of the region. I think it is true that the APT has played an important part alongside artists and other curators, critics, art historians and organisations working in this field.

IW: Each successive APT has to some degree attempted the application of conventional museological criteria. The first APT in 1993 ordered the show in geographical terms with the artists classified via regions (Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific); APT2 in 1996 followed in similar fashion — but with a line-up of performance and installation artists. APT4 in 2002 sought to historicise the art by emphasising certain major artists (including Yayoi Kusama, Lee-U-fan and Nam June Paik). APT5 in 2006 emphasised the art of China with artists such as Ai Weiwei and Yang Zhenzhong, as well as screen-based work. APT6 in 2009 included art from the Middle East (Iran and Turkey), and APT7 paid special attention to the art of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.

Looking back, some critics — including Rex Butler in a 2012 Broadsheet article — have suggested that the APT series of exhibitions in general, can be seen as survey shows with few other curatorial principles at play.

Is this reasonable?

AS: Of course there were other curatorial principles at play; these are necessary to structure all kinds of exhibitions. The way that you’ve articulated it might also illustrate the types of shifts that have happened within curatorial practice itself — how, for example, institutions try to order the conversations or distill the types of research they’ve been doing within a very large geography. It’s not as simple as saying that

Simane Wénéthem, Yumi Danis (We Dance) as part of Emyo Tinyo Dance and Music Festival, Ambrym, Vanuatu, 2014.

Photograph: Ruth McDougall.

Courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery.

one methodology has more or less curatorial ordering than another.

However, it is important to reflect on how our conversations have developed.

IW: Which brings us to the current event. Is there a particular curatorial focus that APT8 has?

AS: There is an interest in performance that looks at the relationship of the body to social and political discourses, things that shift from territory to territory. It is an idea of performance that unpacks the intersection of local cultures and global networks; that seeks to draw out nuance, respond to history, champion the vernacular and create critical spaces for art. This APT asks, what makes these bodies reflective of their histories and environments? What can be learnt, and how can individuality be reinserted? The preoccupation has really centred on artists and how they engage with these broader social, political and cultural transformations and, as we’ve looked at this we’ve uncovered a tendency to focus on the body.

IW: Does that performative aspect include video and moving images?

AS: Yes, of course. It’s such an important part of contemporary practice.

IW: And live performance?

AS: Yes, there’s a mixture of performance approaches. There are durational performances, work that’s been created for screen, there are works that will evolve over the whole period of the APT, and there are projects which have been incubated in the Pacific through workshops and forums. Performance seems front-of-mind at the moment, but we aren’t necessarily talking about the canonical representatives of institutional performance art. What sets this APT apart, is that we are talking about the body and a whole range of social spaces, we’re talking about processes that are both within the conventional museological modes, as well as perhaps, ritual, the customary and the vernacular.

This is one of the important legacies of the APT — when we look at artists’ practices, we cannot assume that these traditions are interchangeable or that they mean the same thing from one place to another. Over the years that I have experienced the APT, it often asks you to question your own prejudices around what you think a museum should be doing or what can be presented within a gallery – that’s what’s exciting.

IW: I agree. One of the interesting things for me was that the APT had the potential to change people’s ideas about what might be seen as contemporary art. The APT kept reminding me, for example, that in many countries in our region, particularly the Pacific, there’s no such word as craft in the way we use it, it’s all simply art.

AS: We can expand on that in the context of performance traditions in, for instance, South East Asia. We’re not talking about the types of stylised or mannered performances that we might find in Western traditions, and I’m oversimplifying this, of course, but there is, if you look at the history of performance art in certain places in China or in South East Asia, the relationship between ideas of democracy or human rights or other political contexts are so closely aligned. One thing that is very interesting about this project is that we can't assume that everything is as how we’ve been told to imagine particular kinds of practices. I am particularly looking forward to the projects that Ruth

McDougall has been developing with a number of Pacific artists, or the work that we have been doing with vernacular traditions in India.

IW: Are we likely to see work that’s from the collection, particularly in terms of video and moving image?

AS: Not really. Not in terms of performance documentation of those earlier APT projects, and Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man No. 13 (1999) from APT3 immediately comes to mind. However, we are re looking at certain areas of practice, which we’ve explored in the past, which follow one of the other thematic threads in this APT – that of the vernacular. In APT3, we included the work of Sonabai, a woman from Bihar, who created clay-filled domestic environments of figurines and latticed jali [Untitled, 1999]. There was a lot of debate at the time about the inclusion of this kind of work within a contemporary art exhibition. We are revisiting some of these vernacular traditions from India in this APT, with a major project called Kalpa Vriksha. It has been quite interesting to revisit the work that we’ve done in the past — so it’s circulatory, a nice revisiting.

IW: Several other commentators have noticed that recent APTs have not only become much larger but have tended to focus on the spectacular, just for the sake of it or perhaps following the lead of many international biennials and triennials, except for those with smaller budgets like say Istanbul Biennial and some others in Asia, probably, rather than the more thoughtful, maybe smaller, even gentler forms of contemporary art. Compare, for example, the first two in 1993 and ’96 with the last two in 2009 and 2012. Your thoughts?

AS: It’s definitely a large-scale exhibition. But if people only come to view the spectacle then they have perhaps misunderstood the depths that the APT is able to achieve. It’s not an unconsidered selection of work. We’ve thought very carefully about how the selection talks to the history, politics, societies and geography of Asia and the Pacific. It’s hard to respond to those types of criticisms because they’re criticisms that are levelled across more than twenty years of exhibition making. On the

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other hand, these kinds of criticisms can be helpful in illustrating the changes in attitude to exhibition making over the years.

IW: Is the spectacular better? Is the spectacular necessarily a bad thing?

AS: It always depends on the project itself. I’ve had this conversation with other curators: simply because you do a big project doesn’t necessarily mean that the work can't be about intimate conversations or that the spectacular is devoid of meaning. Some people also assume that you can’t do popular and meaningful at the same time. Well, yes, you can. The ability to talk across a range of different audiences is something which large-scale exhibitions like this can achieve and which often smaller-scale projects can't; that’s important.

IW: I preface the next question by noting that geographical ‘Asia’ is a cultural artefact of European conceptions of the world, as well as the fact that countries like Armenia, Georgia and Cypress, while nominally in ‘Western Asia’, are socio-politically European countries. Over the years the APTs have explored contemporary art in, what could be called, our region, the Asia and Pacific region. In the Asian region the APT has been gradually exploring further afield, to Australia’s far west, to countries such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Armenia and, this year, Georgia and Mongolia. Some commentators see this as a kind of curatorial colonisation, a cherry picking of artists from the countries of the Middle East, or those sometimes called West Asia simply perhaps for political or curatorial reasons. Your thoughts on these developments?

AS: I think you’re right in terms of the fluidity of definitions around Asia and its relationship to geopolitics – Asia, is of course, a geopolitical construction. Artists and regions are included in successive editions based on a range of factors – from the internal logic of the project, to the interest that arises from the artists being presented. This year we see work from Mongolia — it is a fascinating group of artists and bodies of work, which make connection to both thangka painting and other forms of Buddhist iconography, socialist realism but tied up with the current economic and societal transformations occurring in Mongolia. There is also work from the Kyrgyz Republic by Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev. This presents a shift in attitude to land and place in what is now an independent country, which arises 28 | BROADSHEET | Summer 2015

from a confrontation of Soviet history and contemporary free markets influenced by the reorganisation of economic influence emerging from China’s burgeoning. APT has a commitment to West Asia, that’s just a fact now; we are building a collection around West Asia.

IW: A number of commentators have noted there was substantial dialogue particularly in the first two or three APTs with quite intensive seminars, people came from all over it seemed, including Asia, and there were extended weekends of discussion, and then suddenly that changed.

There were seminars but they were different and much smaller. Will this change with APT8?

AS: Yes, we’re hosting a conference on, well, firstly, we’ve got the whole opening weekend of activities including public talks and performances.

And then there’s the APT Conference the following week, which will bring curators and artists together. This conference will look to artists and their practice to draw out some of the conversations, which we have been having around this APT. This will be followed by AAANZ [Art Association of Australia and New Zealand], who are holding their conference here.

IW: Has the APT changed the way Australian and international art viewers, curators, artists and commentators understand contemporary art?

AS: Definitely, yes. The APT has held a very important leadership position, not just in Australia, but also internationally. Its longevity over twenty years, has seen it participate in some of the key discussions. It’s because of the APT that the Gallery’s collection is one of the finest; one of the most important collections of contemporary Asian and Pacific art.

Lee Wen, Journey of a yellow man no. 13: Fragmented bodies/shifting ground (still) 1999 / Videotape: 10:30 minutes, colour, stereo / Purchased 2000.

Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Opposite page: Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu, Path to wealth, 2013, 149 x 99cm, Synthetic polymer paint on canvas.

Purchased 2015 with funds from Ashby Utting through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery.

Condensation CACSA Contemporary 2015 Project Curator: Logan Macdonald. Project Manager: Sarita Chadwick Various Adelaide venues, July–September 2015

JOHN NEYLON Over the last two plus decades Adelaide, through its various visual arts agencies, has presented an impressive number of survey or thematic exhibitions. The list includes the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (from 1990), and major projects within the Australian Experimental Art Foundation and the Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s programs. To this can be added thematic and survey exhibitions, as presented by the South Australian School of Art Gallery, Flinders University City Gallery and other agencies. The end result is that contemporary artists working out of Adelaide have had exposure to wider audiences and the experience of exhibiting alongside a diversity of aspirational artists. In addition, the experience of creating work within a curated process cannot be underestimated in terms of testing and extending practice. Within this, strategies of collaboration and of cross-site and off-site presentation have become routine to the point that occasionally Adelaide begins to resemble a portrait of how it might be if it pooled its creative talents and resources to maximum impact.

The Contemporary Art Centre’s most recent multi-site venture CACSA Contemporary 2015 is a case in point. Forty-four artists presented work at ten sites around Adelaide. All but one of the sites were regular art gallery spaces. The exception was a commercial space in Morphett Street (supported by Renewal SA). CACSA Contemporary 2015 didn’t fall out of the sky. Its origins can be found in a number of CACSA initiated or linked projects that can be traced back to the 1990s. Consider for example, the exhibition Jemmy, curated by Alan Cruickshank, installed in the post-industrial confines of the Ebenezer Studios basement during the 1994 Adelaide Festival. Reflecting, in the context of Contemporary 2015, on how this exhibition fed off its post-industrial environment of broken masonry, dim lighting and distressed timbers, it is possible to appreciate that Adelaide contemporary art has paid and continues to pay dues to a lingering avant-gardist, counter-culture dreaming – with conceptual, some minimalist and anti-form art inflections. With a twist of Arte Povera. A number of Adelaide artists, then and now, appear to be at home speaking a common language of a specific kind of materiality, which favours suspended states, palimpsests of usage, recycling and ritual arrangement. Possibly inspired by Adelaide Installations (Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 1994 Adelaide Festival of Arts), CACSA’s two multi /off-site projects, CACSA Contemporary 2010: THE NEW NEW and CACSA Contemporary 2012: New South Australian Art successfully exploited the grungy aesthetics of decommissioned retail/domestic spaces to showcase the mainly sculptural work of local artists. It is interesting to note that almost a third of the 2012 lineup of artists – Roy Ananda, Craige Andrae, Christine Collins, Johnnie Dady, Joe Felber, Nicholas Folland, Louise Haselton, Kab 101, Sue Kneebone, Christian Lock, Ian North, Angela Valamanesh and Hossein Valamanesh were included in Contemporary 2015. This fact emphasises the role that a series of CACSA initiated survey projects has played in the ongoing promotion of the work of significant emerging and established contemporary artists.

In addition to Contemporary exhibitions, already mentioned, CACSA presented an annual (2005-08) series of Mentor Mentored projects. These

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exhibitions demonstrated and explored relationships between midcareer/established artists and emerging artists and included many who would later be represented in Contemporary 2012 and 2015. Similar observations can be made of another CACSA project IBIDEM: Temporary Public Works (2012), which sponsored the installation of works by five artists (Anna Horne, George Popperwell, Craige Andrae, Johnnie Dady and Christine Collins) in prominent city sites. With these two projects, and again within the context of CACSA Contemporary, it is interesting to see a culture of coalescence and dialogue becoming the hallmark of an increasingly confident and professional contemporary art community in Adelaide. Integral to this has been the belief that the association of established and emerging artists, not only encourages emerging artists and sharpens practice, but also sends out a strong message to the wider community (and funding bodies!) that the ‘vibrant contemporary art scene’ (beloved of policy makers and marketing people) just doesn’t grow on trees. It is a continuum that embraces youthful aspiration morphing into mature assurance. Within this, artists will pursue and continue to seek support for individual careers. But CACSA Contemporary and other initiatives identified in this text make the point that collaboration, sharing ideas and skills, having regard for the needs of emerging artists and recognising the achievement of mid-career/senior artists are the key components of a robust contemporary art culture. Adelaide, by virtue of its traditions of cultural self-reliance and willingness to take risks, has adopted collective action, and the contemporary showcase model (as seen in CACSA Contemporary) is a key strategy in drawing attention to the depth and diversity of its contemporary art. Perhaps Adelaide does this more often and better than elsewhere in Australia? That’s a question policy makers and marketers as well as key art agencies should prioritise when considering what works and what really delivers for its artists and the wider community.

Contemporary 2015 had a very different look to its predecessors. That only one venue, the pre-commissioned office complex of 172 Morphett Street, was a non-art site and in a relatively raw state (bare walls and

CACSA Contemporary 2015, Nic Folland, 12/09/2015 – Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza – Tetrahedra (Festival) – Bert Flugelman (detail).

Image courtesy of the artist, and Tolarno Galleries.

concrete flooring) reinforced the sense that the entire project really was a showcase of individual artist’s work rather than a creative or challenge exercise in responding to site/s. It was also a reminder that many of CACSA Contemporary artists routinely take their theatrical obligations seriously whenever they mount exhibitions or install on sites. More compact dedicated gallery spaces such as Greenaway Art Gallery, FELTspace and the Contemporary Art Centre, as well as 172 Morphett Street, allowed options for more theatrical or staged presentations, which invited layered readings of groups of work and set up dialogue between adjoining works. At CACSA for example the brooding, Southern Ocean seascape images of Ian North (Southern Ocean off Snares Islands, 2012) faced a sea of another kind – Sam Howie’s wall of serialised, small panels, each encrusted with fused and peeling layers of paint. North’s imagery raised questions about the awesome power of nature on the prowl being relocated out of subliminal realms into the prosaic and jitter-inducing zone of cataclysmic disasters. Howie’s work, from one perspective, was about other things, such as the paint medium having a life of its own. But the format of Survey’s (2014-15) panels (22 x 19 cm) placed alongside each other to form a large, single work, seemed to respond to North’s proposition in its suggestion of boundless possibilities. Running with this idea, Angela Valamanesh’s installation, Eyes Open (2015) offered plant root tendrils sending out rhizomatic feelers into the world. Joe Felber’s wrap-around wall (CACSA Project Space) of Ginsberg-like howling in defiance of digital dysfunction and overload turned boundless possibilities into a closed loop of a re-layered past returning to interrogate the present. This ever-expanding Wonderwall principle was also evident at 172 Morphett Street, as several artists pumped up scale and cinemascope sweep to command a different kind of viewer response. KAB 101’s In honour of the King of Kowloon created a grand and visually poetic spectacle for viewers checking out the second floor. That this work honoured the legendary Tsang Tsou-choi, an outsider artist who spent most of his life creating graffiti works on the streets of Hong Kong, amplified this sense of art being stretched

beyond temporal and permissible boundaries. Cue in here Nic Folland’s tribute to Bert Flugelman – a memorial wreath placed next to that artist’s Tetrahedron (1974) on the Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza. Folland estimates it remained in place for around twenty-four hours and then may have ‘hopped’ onto a passing bus. Some may think Bert would have liked that. Downstairs, Paul Sloan’s Interior Motives series of overpainted printed canvases came on like a Rauschenberg loco looking for somewhere to crash. Across the room Antony Hamilton’s Yellow Dog, a ‘blank canvas’, suggested the immensity of an imagined inland incrementally engulfing the exhibition space, as it dandruffed the floor with its flaking ‘earth’ surface.

Empty deserts, plant tendrils and rolling seas – such finely calibrated juxtapositions have the capacity to create fresh perspectives. A similar dynamic was at work at Greenaway Art Gallery. In this compact, pareddown space, all works by the three artists, Mary-Jean Richardson, Julia McInerney and Anna Horne had things to say to each other. On first take the sculptural constructions of McInerney and Horne appeared to have most in common. There was a ‘just so’ economy of means keeping each body of work in states of precise balance. But there were very different agendas. McInerney tracked territory that existed somewhere between material form and utterance. Lung Lung (2015) for example, a set of venetian blind-like structures composed of horizontal glass tubes, used the ‘frozen smoke’ attributions of the substance Aerogel to conjure ideas of space shuttles having lungs – a poetic as much as a scientific construct. A sea anchor translated by heat into ‘ocean dust’ (the light, and the light – Virginia Wolf Piece 11) flagged metamorphosis as a persistent coda which, in various ways, ran across the entire Contemporary 2015 project. On this basis Richardson’s memento mori, visual ruminations on bones as the ‘all that remains’ bit of individual existence had far more to say than a passing infatuation with the Baroque. They also enticed the viewer into a twilight zone of imagining what it might be like to slip into non-existence. And in such company Horne’s castings of bags of

CACSA Contemporary 2015, KAB 101 (installation view) 172 Morphett Street Adelaide.

Photograph: Sam Roberts.

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CACSA Contemporary 2015, Johnnie Dady, Paul Sloan (background) (installation view) 172 Morphett Street Adelaide.

Photograph: Sam Roberts.

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We see things not as they are, but as we are

Lisa GarLand 10 Oct - 15 Nov 2015

Contemporary art tasmania 27 Tasma St, North Hobart 7000 www.contemporaryarttasmania.org

Image: Lisa Garland, Cactus, 2014, digital image.

Courtesy of the artist.

CACSA Contemporary 2015, Christian Lock (installation view) Light Square Gallery.

Photograph: Sam Roberts.

concrete being emphatically pressed to the floor by a metal frame began to look for all the world like lungs having the last of air squeezed from them.

At SASA Gallery, Matthew Bradley’s Gobi Formwork (2015) the wooden formwork leaning against the wall and the concrete cast infilled with various materials including sand, perlite and resin, looked as purposeful as a core sample analyser and as mysterious as an ancient planispheric astrolabe. ‘Sometimes’ the artist says, ‘a thing is not reducible to its material elements nor to any symbolic equation… we encounter a thing about which vast quanta of data can be collected, yet for all this, its purpose, function and meaning remains entirely mysterious and intellectually insoluble.’ The sentiment of this insight could have been applied to Louise Haselton’s strategic retrievals of ordinary things (Explanatory Gaps, 2014) at FELTspace and through considered combinations of different objects. ‘The (latent) potential of things’, the artist says, ‘can be animated through a simple act.’

Once these thematics of metamorphosis, transubstantiation and even alchemy were glimpsed as inflections running through Contemporary 2015, neat distinctions imposed by different sites fell away. At the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery Christopher Orchard’s commonplace items, a phonograph horn, a chair and bird feeder were transformed into ‘other’ objects by the application of a graphite skin. Ariel Hassan’s animation delivered a disturbing catalogue of constantly morphing portraits, daring the viewer to identify the ‘real one’. Ed Douglas’s photographic close-ups of sections of tree branches revisited a long-standing personal interest in psychology and myth, in which motifs from the natural world impose themselves on the imagination. Annette Bezor’s wall installation built around a demotic motif of radiant, cheesy beauty, also explored altered states territory within a context of a narcissistic society obsessed with beauty on industrial terms and scale. Christian Lock’s unframed canvases (Light Square Gallery), hanging by their own weight off the

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wall, displaced any reflexive reading of these works as ‘paintings’ and more as pelts stripped from the carcasses of previous purposes.

Suspended rather than altered states – perhaps this described the underlying dynamic of Contemporary 2015 works – the idea that the art object is a cypher for ideas at work, but also flexes its own independence through its forms and materiality. In this process, viewers may have found themselves in some Situationist dérive mode, trailing from one work to the next – and the next – in the belief that at some point realisations will appear like condensation on glass. That is the reality of such large-scale, multi-site projects. They provide a one-stop supermarket experience for culturati, who never get to all the shows but want to feel connected. No harm in that, particularly if advocacy for contemporary art funding is in the mix somewhere. Perhaps it is time however to revisit something along the lines of the IBIDEM mode – some fewer artists – commissioned to respond to (non-art) sites within the city. Site agencies/owners might be encouraged to seek out partnerships with individual artists. They may even like the idea of sponsoring them. Collaborations with other creative communities (designers, sound artists, lighting designers and so on) encouraged. The NEW NEW/ CACSA Contemporary model is a good platform on which to build. Adelaide you clearly have talent. Picking up on the urgency of Jim Moss’s catalogue injunction that the ‘nowness’ of contemporary art is about ‘what can be’, it’s time for some (new) risk taking.

ENDNOTES Passivity is never an option for the critical viewer. Throughout Contemporary 2015 there were many opportunities to create individual thematics or simply do some trend spotting. One example is sound.

Examples include: Sasha Grbich (Adelaide Central Gallery) capturing sounds of silence in Adelaide’s quieter zones and serving them up in the cozy familiarity of the lounge room. Christine Collins (FELTspace) subjecting the viewer/listener to a montage of disembodied (and image free) injunctions, commands or salutations sourced from Hollywood war movies to draw attention to voice and words.

Roy Ananda (SASA Gallery) ironically evoking the romance swashbuckling duel through the kiss and muted clang of two suspended rapiers.

Fashionable, Fleeting and Influential: Feminist Art Revisited JUDITH ADAMS For anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary art, it would be hard to ignore the resurgence of feminist art1 over the past decade. On the global stage there has been major women-only or feminist shows, notably WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), Global Feminisms (2007) and Elles@centrepompidou (2009). Closer to home we’ve had Contemporary Australia: Women (2012) at GOMA and also in 2012, LOOK. LOOK AGAIN at the University of Western Australia.

There has also been a plethora of feminist-inspired, locally-based exhibitions such as A Time Like This (2008) at the Victorian College of the Arts, The View from here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism (2010) at Melbourne’s West Space, Feminism Never Happened (2010) at Brisbane’s IMA, Curating Feminism (2014) at Sydney College of the Arts and Beyonce is a Feminist (2013) at Adelaide’s Fontanelle. Many of these have been accompanied by conferences, seminars or workshops capitalising on the current interest in contemporary art and feminism.

This enthusiasm has coincided with a renewed interest in feminist art and Women’s Art Movements (WAMs) of the late 1960s and 1970s, partly due to the impact of WACK! – the first international survey of second-wave feminist art – in addition to the re-engagement with performance art of the period. Feminism’s current preoccupation with re-enactment is an archival strategy that reclaims feminist art history by drawing on past practices and performances.2 Thus, in the spirit of feminist re-performance which brings the past into the present, this article attempts to do likewise; working against the erasure of feminist art history, acknowledging matrilineal links between specific projects and reconsidering the overlooked.

this, a performance New Wave/No Wave (2015)4 similarly referenced consciousness-raising via Marsh’s documentary photograph, although its prior iteration was unknown at the time. Also revisiting the past was performance group, Brown Council’s photographic re-enactment of a form of 1970s activism, the feminist demo!5 The adoption and adaptation of feminist art methodologies, also represents a ‘return’; a re-citing.6 Brown Council’s Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours (2012) was a performative four-day bake-off, cooking every recipe from the iconic Country Women’s Association (CWA) cake cookbook. Mass Action wasn’t the first time the CWA and feminists had joined forces in an art project, since in 2001 Vivonne Thwaites – in association with the South Australian CWA – curated a craftbased exhibition, which combined the work of artist-craft makers with craftwork by CWA members. Home is Where the Heart Is established a dialogue between the domestic and professional crafts, raising questions concerning the hierarchical ordering of craft practices.

While Mass Action and Home is Where the Heart Is had quite different outcomes – one a durational performance, the other a gallery-based exhibition – their processes and preoccupations had much in common.

Both depended on establishing a relationship and working with nonartists, in this case with the same well-known traditional women’s organisation. Mass Action and Home is Where the Heart Is celebrated and reinterpreted the domestic products associated with the organisation while drawing attention to the unpaid labour of women in the home.

Marina Abramović’s influential exhibition Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and the re-enactment of Alan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 parts (2007) are cited as the instigation for the current interest in re-performance, but in documenting this genre, credit must also go to earlier feminist reenactments, such as Carolee Schneemann’s re-performance of Meat Joy (1964) in 2002, and Yoko Ono’s 2003 restaging of her Cut Piece (1964). Origins aside, feminism’s enthusiastic uptake of re-performance both in advancing the genre and in bringing 1970s feminist work to critical, historical and curatorial attention is a strategy identifiable as ‘paradigmatic to feminist art production.’3

In the case of Mass Action, what is revisited or recalled is not a specific outcome (an exhibition or performance), but a mode of working and a preoccupation with feminist approaches, concerns and sources.

As part of a feminist art trajectory, Mass Action ‘returns’ to the iconic collaborative projects associated with second wave feminism, such as The D’Oyley Show: Women’s Domestic Fancywork (1979). The D’Oyley Show ‘was important as a celebration of female creativity, as an historical study and as the example of the adaptation of traditional skills to express contemporary issues.’7 Mass Action, Home is Where the Heart Is and The D’Oyley Show, highlighted the undervalued feminine skills associated with woman’s domestic role, and as relational projects created social situations, generating interactions between artist and non-artist alike.

Contemporary feminist artists have demonstrated not only an interest in re-performing earlier performances, but have extended the performative impulse to investigating other aspects of 1970s feminist art, such as activist and community-based practices. The recycling of a photograph signifying dialogical interaction is one example of this. Discourse (1979) was a little-known performance by Anne Marsh based on the feminist strategy of consciousness-raising. A photograph of the work was incorporated into publicity for a relational work, Alexis Martinis Roe’s The Practice of Doing (2012-13). Subsequent to

Key events in feminist art history have also been translated into contemporary feminist performance. The recent Feminist Futures: The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture (2015) by Brown Council’s Diana Smith and Kelly Doley was a narrative-based performance on the theme of Lippard’s visit to Australia as Power lecturer in 1975. Lippard, an American feminist art critic and writer, was influential in the development of early feminist art activities. Brown Council’s performance was based on the collation of first-hand accounts of women, who had attended her lectures and discussions on feminism and art. Thus the ‘Lucy Lecture’,

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eschewing a singular authoritative narrative, employed ‘re-enactment as a pedagogical tool to remember feminist histories and practices.’8 The interest in revisiting the themes, genres and actions of 1970s feminist art by a younger generation has been accompanied by a renewed call for gender equality in the visual arts. In 2008 the CoUNTess blog was launched presenting ‘data and reviews on gender representation in the Australian art world.’9 Undoubtedly, the situation for women artists has improved over the decades. ‘On the one hand, feminism has permeated all ways of making and analysing art… The days when women struggled to be taken seriously in the arts – or in any other field – are gone. It’s easy to think of successful female artists – from canonical figures… to contemporary icons.’10 But on the other hand, when female exhibition and gallery representation seems to have stalled at approximately 35 per cent11 – a levelling off that began in the mid-1980s – it’s hard not to conclude with Maura Reilly that ‘[l]ittle has changed for women in the art world despite decades of feminist activism.’13 Campaigns for gender equality in galleries and exhibitions began with the women’s art organisations of the 1970s when discrimination against women artists was rife. Another strategy adopted to counter women’s invisibility was the organisation of women’s shows, by women and on their own terms. The first major undertaking in this regard was The Women’s Show (1977) organised by the South Australian WAM. Arguably, the largest, national, unselected exhibition of women’s art from the period of second-wave feminism, it was organised by a collective of more than fifty women, showcasing the work of approximately 400 women.14 I make the claims of ‘first’ and ‘largest’ advisedly, for as has been pointed out elsewhere, the history of women’s exhibitions is littered with ‘firsts.’ ‘Exhibitions have been repeatedly forgotten and the first major exhibition of women’s work repeatedly re-held.’15 Such transitory appearances (and re-appearances) forestall real, institutional change with women’s art granted a period of attention, but rarely lasting recognition.

Although 70 years apart, the precedent to The Women’s Show, could well be the The First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work (1907). While not on a scale anywhere near as vast as the 1907 show (16,000 works) there are nevertheless similarities. The 1907 exhibition was all-inclusive: ‘Virtually every known craft and domestic art could be found in it, as well as all the fine arts.’16 The display was non-hierarchical and the show was crammed with everything from oil paintings to embroidered screens to indigenous dilly bags. Similarly, The Women’s Show’s show blurred high art/craft, amateur/professional boundaries, exhibiting a wide range of art forms and media from paintings, photography and threedimensional work to ceramics and textiles.17 The hallmarks of feminist art were evident with collaborative works, craft-based work and work dealing explicitly with the body, including taboo subject matter such as menstruation. A program of weekend arts events was scheduled for the duration of the show. Also included were a conference, workshops, discussion panels and talks covering topics such as ‘women and the media’, song writing, and children’s literature. As a platform for sharing knowledge, The Women’s Show anticipated the educational turn in art and gallery spaces by more than a decade.

It should be noted that my response to The Women’s Show is based on the publication/catalogue, not from the personal experience of ‘being there.’

Nevertheless, a perusal of the catalogue led to the discovery of works, which intersected with geographically distant projects and articulated concerns that find an echo in current thinking. Portrait of the Artist as a Nude (1977) by Melanie Howard was a performative, durational work that addressed the topic of ‘woman as the object of the gaze.’ The work was composed of ‘a set of approximately 200 colour slides taken by

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male and female, amateur and professional photographers, who were given licence to pose the artist as they chose. Howard’s quest was to see if ‘men and women perceived and recorded the nude differently.’18 With its emphasis on the passive female subject offering herself to the audience/others to be acted upon, Howard’s work recalls Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) (minus the edge of danger but still risking discomfort). Portrait of the Artist as a Nude also functions as a hinge-work between modernism and postmodernism, for it appears inescapably linked to photographic works that critique the voyeuristic gaze and art history traditions.

If titles, catalogue entries or grainy photographs are any indication, the domestic as artefact, content or reference also featured (often humorously) in many of the works. Ann Newmarch and Anna Havana were two artists who explored the terrain of domestic temporality. Newmarch’s series of eighteen silkscreen prints Three Months of Interrupted Work are kitchen still-lifes that exist between stillness and movement, reflecting the repetitive tasks associated with domesticity. The title of Newmarch’s work refers to the time after the birth of her second child, when she placed her baby’s cot in the kitchen and worked around it ‘stealing’ what time she could in order to produce the work.19 Women’s time is monumental time; cyclical and subjective governed by corporeal and familial experience.20 In Newmarch’s work, time is not experienced as progressive or linear, but as all encompassing, governed by the demands of a young baby.

The catalogue photograph of the installation view of Havana’s Table Series 1 shows a series of three rows of photographs pinned to the wall.

The accompanying statement, expressing the artist’s desire ‘to relegate domestic travail to a secondary position’,21 indicates themes of domestic ambivalence, the tension between linear and monumental time and the ‘double-edged expectations of personal development and social responsibility.’22 Serialism is affiliated with conceptualism, minimalism and the banal, but takes on different meanings within the context of feminist art. Both Newmarch’s and Havana’s series mirror the repetition and routine of domestic life reflecting ‘women’s time.’ Furthermore, seriality foregrounds process and labour, here linking domestic work with the work of art-making. Yet, the very existence of these works is also testament to the fact that domestic temporality can facilitate ‘moments of personal creativity and unique merging of play and work.’23 Repetition, therefore, can be enabling for ‘the very act of repetition puts forth the possibility of transformation’,24 another motivation perhaps, for the current preoccupation with re-performance.

While rediscovering and renewing feminist art and activism may be the front-runner in contemporary feminist art today, the backward glance is not the only preoccupation of the current generation of feminist artists.

In today’s mediated world contemporary feminism is embedded in popular and online culture and feminist art is no exception. The 2013 exhibition, Beyonce is a Feminist – curated by Brigid Noone at Adelaide’s Fontanelle – highlighted this cosy relationship between popular culture and contemporary feminism, combining it with feminist-identified strategies, such as collaboration and intergenerational dialogue. The works, in a variety of media, from performance to collage, textiles to digital prints, were conversational, expressive and personal ranging across diverse concerns from feminist icons to individual empowerment, and the anxiety that the ‘feminist’ label is still able to elicit.

The value of contemporary feminism’s generative encounter with second-wave feminist art is to remind us of the achievements of the latter, as well as providing fresh insights into past practices and present

Jude Adams and Brigid Noone. New Wave/No Wave, 2015.

Installation shot for performance (Adhocracy Program, Vital Statistix, 2015, Waterside Workers’ Hall, Port Adelaide).

Photograph: Brigid Noone.

experience. But if ‘re’ as in return, revisit, re-performance has currency in today’s culture, so too does ‘inter’ in regard to intergenerational projects, intersectional feminism and intersectional art practices.

Contemporary art intersects with feminism refracted through popular culture and social media, discrete practices are replaced by the interweaving of media and genres, and individual works intersect across time and place.

ENDNOTES 1. Within the parameters of this discussion the term ‘feminist art’ will function as an umbrella term referring to art practices that demonstrate an alignment with feminist issues, aesthetics or methodologies. Similarly, the term ‘feminist artists’ will include artists whose work or projects exhibit a familiarity with feminist concerns.

2. The historiographical turn in art is ‘returning to’ and recouping the past by way of remembrance, re-enactment, memorialising, archival retrieval etc. For feminist artists/historians/curators the ‘return’ is more than the latest trend; it is a reclaiming of a ‘lost’ past given that women’s art histories have so often been marginalised by, or omitted, from canonical art histories.

3. Victoria Horne, ‘Kate Davis: revisioning art history after modernism and postmodernism’, Feminist Review, 2015, 110: 34-51, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v110/n1/full/fr201512a. html Works such as VALIE EXPORT’s Genital Panic (1969) Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and Wilke’s So Help me Hannah (1979) have achieved iconic status, reinforced by the current enthusiasm for re-performing or re-enacting them. Feminist re-performance has also been set as student studio assignments – further evidence of its popularity.

4. New Wave/No Wave, a participatory performance by Jude Adams and Brigid Noone revisited The Women’s Show via research and ‘feminist experimentalism of the past’ (Anne Marsh, Performance, Ritual, Document, Melbourne: Macmillan, 2013: 240). As a cross-generational conversation the aim of New Wave/No Wave was to reclaim the women’s show in the present by way of memories, first person accounts and contemporary feminist issues.

5. The photograph wryly addresses the nostalgia for an imagined time of feminist collective-based activism.

6. Re-cite: ‘to summon, or call, to set in motion, and it is in this fluid sense that young women artists respond to, play with and extend the legacies of their feminist forebears.’ Victoria Horne, ’Kate Davis: re-visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism’, Feminist Review, 2015, 110, 34-54. Reciting seems a more apt term to apply to the re-engagement with methods and processes of secondwave feminist projects.

7. Sandy Kirby, Sight Lines: Women’s Art and Feminist Perspectives in Australia. Sydney: Craftsman House, 1992: 85.

8. Kelly Doley and Diana Smith, Ideas Platform/Feminist Futures: The Lucy R Lippard Lecture (2015) https://www.facebook.com/events/1466037987044606/.

9. CoUNTess http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/.

10. Helena Reckitt,’Who want to be a feminist artist?’ in ratsalad deluxe http://www.turtlenosedsnake. com/ratsaladsite/reckitt.htm.

11. CoUNTess http://countesses.blogspot.com.au//search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:0008:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=6.

Recent surveys support

CoUNTess’s findings of approximately 35% female representation. In a 2013 survey of London commercial galleries women represented 31% and in a 2015 US survey women represented 30% (Lilia Ziamou, ‘Curator’s Close-up: Maura Reilly’ in Huffington Post 27-08-15). The percentage of women represented in this year’s Venice Biennale falls just above the percentage of 33% with one critic noting that ‘the 2:1 ratio between male and female is somewhat disappointing but with more than 35% female artists I suspect this is probably still above average for biennials’ (Jens Hoffmann, ‘How to Judge a Book by its Cover’, Mousse Magazine, Issue 48, April-May 2015: 264).

12. Catriona Moore, ‘Back to the Future – Critically’ in Past Present: the National Women’s Art Anthology, Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (eds.), Sydney: Craftsman House, 1988: 11-19, 14. Statistical findings from an Art Workers Union study (1985) prompted Moore’s observation that the push for equality in the art world had levelled off at 25-33 per cent for large survey exhibitions.

13. Maura Reilly in ‘Curator’s Close-up: Maura Reilly’ by Lilia Ziamou in Huffington Post 27-08-15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lilia-ziamou/curators-closeup-maura-e_b_8034736. html?ir=Australia.

14. Julie Ewington, ‘Julie Ewington On Curating’ in conversation with Hannah Mathews, ABC Arts, 31 May 2013 http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3772171.htm. Over 350 works are listed in the catalogue/publication. There was also a student exhibition and satellite shows.

15. Heather Johnson, ‘A Matter of Time’ in Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (eds), Past Present: the National Women’s Art Anthology, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998: 40-47 [40]. See also Joan Kerr, ‘National Women’s Art Exhibitions: Three ‘Firsts’ in Past Present: 2-10.

16. Joan Kerr, ‘National Women’s Art Exhibitions: Three ‘Firsts’, Past Present: 3.

17. A diverse range of crafts was represented in The Women’s Show from stained glass to textile-based crafts such as woven wall-hangings, crocheted doyleys, embroideries, macramé, theatre costumes.

Two-dimensional work included prints, pastels, drawings and watercolours. There were sculpture, installations, assemblages, found-object works and video. Weekend arts events covered the full gamut of the arts (film, theatre, mime, dance, poetry, music). As well as a conference for women in the visual arts, satellite events covered topics such as poetry, women’s autobiographies, women’s journals, women composers, video, and electronic, jazz and rock music.

18. Melanie Howard, ‘Slide Presentation’, artist’s notes, The Women’s Show Adelaide 1977, WAM (SA), St Peters: Experimental Art Foundation, 1978: 17.

19. Ann Newmarch, email correspondence, 13 May 2013.

20. For ‘women’s time’ see Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’(1979) in Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.), Columbia: CUP, 1986: 188-213. Griselda Pollock, Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts, London: Routledge, 1996: 8. Catriona Moore, Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-1990, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994: 4-5.

21. Anna Havana, catalogue entry, The Women’s Show Adelaide 1977, WAM (SA), St Peters: Experimental Art Foundation, 1978: 97. The full text reads, This series of photographs is an attempt to record the nexus between physical and domestic space, biological rhythms and emotive states. As a woman and a visually orientated person, I am acutely sensitive to the arrangement of everyday objects in the space I occupy – these photographs are an attempt to work through this preoccupation – to relegate domestic travail to a secondary position, to record it and recognise it for what it is, to frame it, to exorcise it, to have done with it, to thereby create a space for other forms of expression to swell.

22. Moore, Dissonance: 5.

23. Elizabeth Nathanson, As Easy as Pie: Housework, Temporality and Postfeminist Popular Culture, dissertation, Northwestern University, Illinois, 2008: 93 http://www.worldcat.org/title/as-easy-as-piehousework-temporality-and-postfeminist-popular-culture/oclc/601901834.

24. op cit: 22.

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CACSA PROJECTS 2015

BITING THE AIR FIONA FOLEY

OVERSEER/OFFICER JASON WING

Image (left): Fiona Foley, Black Velvet, 2015. Inkjet Print. Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer and Niagara Galleries.

Image (right): Jason Wing, OVERSEER/OFFICER (detail), 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.

Presenting as part of

EXHIBITION DATES 9 OCTOBER - 22 NOVEMBER, 2015 Gallery opening hours: Tuesday-Friday: 11-5 , Saturday-Sunday: 1-5

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA 14 Porter Street, Parkside, Adelaide, 5063 T +61 [08] 8272 2682 E admin@cacsa.org.au W www.cacsa.org.au CACSA IS ASSISTED BY THE COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY, AND THE SA GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS SA; CACSA IS SUPPORTED BY THE VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFT STRATEGY, AN INITIATIVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN, STATE AND TERRITORY GOVERNMENTS

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Summer 2015 | BROADSHEET | 39

Tony Albert FRANKLIN SIRMANS The focal point of the discussion on the art of Aboriginal artists in Australia has, until recently, focused almost exclusively on the art of abstraction. Yet, artists like Tracey Moffatt and Gordon Bennett have been working with conceptualist practices in photography and video for quite some time. A generation younger than Moffatt and Bennett, Tony Albert has continuously sought to disrupt the perception of Aboriginal art with his conceptual and highly representational art and a spirit of collaboration that has been as potent to the discourse as his works of art.

Speaking in an interview with Maura Reilly about his foundation and beginnings as an artist, Albert says of Moffatt and Bennett: ‘They also expressed stories that were familiar to me – there was a shared history that I really related to.’1 Seeing Bennett’s 1999 exhibition – Albert’s first museum experience at the Queensland Art Gallery’s Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art – ‘changed my life forever. It completely changed the way I thought about art.’2 Albert has had the benefit of close ties to not only more experienced artists like Moffatt and Bennett, but in school at Queensland College of the Arts (from 2000 to 2004).

He also created important conversations with Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell and Fiona Foley with Bell becoming a mentor. Recognising the importance of guidance and his teachers, Albert was avid for dialogue with like-minded artists. In 2003, he became a part of the collective proppaNow, which further augmented his position as a vocal artist in the growing discussion of contemporary art in Brisbane. Being part of the collective led to opportunities that weren’t happening in any of their individual practices. In addition to giving a sense of community and mentorship, the collective supported artists in varied ways, most especially challenging an entire system of thought around contemporary Aboriginal art. ‘We were not getting accepted into shows and our work seemed to be ignored. Together, as a collective, we became a force to be reckoned with. We could fight as a team, as a united voice, and this gave us much more traction as artists. The older members of proppaNOW really helped my career as an artist by advocating for my work.’

Those ties to a relatively new but vital history (albeit recent) have given Albert a unique position, from which to both participate in an important conversation pertaining to Aboriginal art in Australia, but perhaps more importantly they have provided a foundation to becoming a confident international voice in contemporary art. One who speaks the language of contemporary art but also his own mother tongue. His knowledge of, and background in, the meeting point between traditional practices in Aboriginal art and a more internationally recognised conceptual practice are the perfect tools for the creation of significant contemporary art in the twenty-first century. That combined ability is rare and brings to mind Edward Behr’s memoir Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? I came to Behr through the curator Francesco Bonami who invoked the phrase in his end-of-the-millennium exhibition Unfinished History (1999). A cold calculated call for information, Behr heard the words yelled to European survivors of a siege in the Belgian Congo

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in 1960 by a British reporter. At the end of the last decade of the twentieth century, Bonami pointed towards the growing discourse of internationalism in the art world at that moment. While certainly productive in inviting more voices to the table throughout the 1990s, by 1999 the curator rightly pointed to a commodification of geopolitics that sought facile packages of culture, sometimes ahead of great works of art. He also pointedly directed us to the collision of representation as being the easily commodified brand and abstraction being the less easily commodifiable and thus less discussed. Regardless of the fact that one woman’s abstraction is another man’s representational figure, let us say that Aboriginal Australian artists – along with some Ndebele house painters in South Africa and some Navajo weavers in the southwest United States – have made some of the most ‘beautiful’ abstract paintings known to human eyes. So, while the hard-edged geometric lines or multiple meandering dots in these works may outline communicative symbols to those who know their language intimately as their own, they also play richly into narratives of abstraction that come from the western canon, from which I speak. As Jens Hoffmann posits in No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting: ‘Speaking in a visual language of abstraction that is familiar to Western audiences, these artists have succeeded in calling across these cultural lines even as their exact symbologies remain occluded.’3 Knowing of these histories in abstract and representative, or more conceptually based practices, Albert seized upon the image and the word early on in defining his practice. He gravitated particularly toward those images of bodies from the archive of collective memory that resonate in mass reproductions and has uncompromisingly skewered them with panache and intelligence since 2002, the year he began his History Trilogy, a series of three works that each includes several pieces of Aboriginalia – dehumanising caricatures of Aborigines made for the souvenir market between the 1940s and 1970s.

A Collected History (2002-2010) includes reworked objects, sculptures and paintings of Aboriginalia, original paintings and the work of three peers.

Like its list of items describing its media, it is an exhaustive and heavy work made up of approximately one hundred items. Crowded together, the work – hung salon style – is claustrophobic in its presentation and reflective of the subject matter at play. It is a visual encyclopedia of mediated images of Aborigines over the last seventy years. Invariably filled with negative stereotypes, the work begs for a reconsideration of how humans treat one another. Rearranging Our History (2002-2011) takes a singular form of Aboriginalia in velvet paintings. Common in the 1970s, these paintings were sold both as finished products for tourists and paint-by-numbers kits for consumers and enthusiasts. The paintings on velvet are countered by thickly painted texts in white paint by the artist.

The texts bring to bear some of the artist's concerns and worldviews, such as using language as a vehicle for deeper understanding. At times the words are appropriated from existing song lyrics or original commentary, which seeks to make connections between black peoples

around the world. ‘Fullblood/Half caste/quadroon/octaroon/coon’ for example, takes those terms from different places, but by putting them all together suggests a broader collective than only that of the Aboriginal Australian, as is made elsewhere in a painting with the words ‘blak like me.’ Elsewhere the suggestion of outer space conjures a universal afrofuturism as speculated by the likes of Sun Ra. Projecting Our Future (2002-2013) is similar in format to A Collected History, combining reworked objects along with original works by Albert and others.

While occupying its own clear voice and vantage point, Albert’s work is in conversation with a host of other internationally known artists in addition to Moffatt and Bennett. His use of the figurines recalls several black artists in the United States such as Fred Wilson, who has made a number of works using caricaturistic black figurines. Albert has also made several works regarding sport that aim to elevate that discourse, as has Gary Simmons. And, Albert’s text-based works are in discussion with works by Glenn Ligon, Bruce Nauman and Jenny Holzer, among others.

Anyone here been raped and speaks English? Perhaps the language of international contemporary art, like that of English has come to be a lingua franca spoken by those of certain education levels the world over, who fancy themselves part of the international art world? Like English, that language is disappearing, making those mother tongues all the more important.

Other recent bodies of work find the artist making paintings as in 108 (99 mixed media collages and 9 houses of cards) (2011-2013), Gangurru Camouflage (2012-2013) and Green Skins (2014). Along with the velvet paintings, comparisons abound to other painters working in a figurative or representational mode, especially those dealing with history such as Kerry James Marshall, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans.

Although it has linkages to the early velvet paintings and other elements of Albert’s work, Brothers (2013), the exhibition to be presented at Kluge-Ruhe at the University of Virginia, combines photography and overlay painting with the archive of collective memory determined by the bodies of young black men often projected in the news media. Like past pieces it is displayed salon style to suggest multiple elements. Presented in Virginia, the work eerily converses not only with the event that precipitated its making – the 2012 shooting of three young Aboriginal men by police in Sydney – but the entire last year of police shootings of black people in the United States of America. Albert was an artist in residence at Artspace at the time and attended the protests in the aftermath, where some of the friends and supporters of the boys took off their shirts to reveal targets on their chests. The target was already a symbol that turns up in Albert’s work. But, Brothers is a new way of dealing with the subject matter. Albert sees Brothers as ‘using a new medium to convey the message [in my work]. I really wanted to step away from the aboriginalia in my work which was more common or known to a broader art audience.’4 While those readings were already there, Brothers brings it home so to speak. Originally shown in Sydney in 2013, the work is comprised of twenty-one pictures of barechested torsos of Aboriginal boys and young men he met through the residency. In addition to cartoon characters, UFOs and some of the geometric patterns that the artist has used elsewhere, the defining motif is a red target at the centre of each chest. One reveals the words ‘we come in peace’, and another says ‘our future.’

‘If you show this work internationally they would very much just be considered brown people in the photos and not necessarily aboriginal people. But in the process of leading up to the show and seeing the Trayvon Martin case it really brought some of the issues to the forefront.

Looking at it in a much more broader social and political level.’5 Making explicit the ties that bind rather than separate, Albert is a fresh voice in the contemporary conversation. Having created an original and highly moving body of work early in his career, building on a foundation of knowledge and study, Albert’s work is a thorn in the side of easy art consumption. While deeply indebted to a personal and cultural history, Albert is obviously a child of the world and his work gives us a voice in the twenty-first century that was unheard of in the twentieth.

Recognising the historical war between abstraction and representation allows the artist to concentrate on the here and now.

This essay was commissioned by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia to coincide with the exhibition Tony Albert: Brothers, 29 May — 16 August 2015. Tony Albert is exhibiting in TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, 8 October 2015 — 17 January 2016.

ENDNOTES 1. Maura Reilly, ‘I Am Important: An Interview with Tony Albert’, in Tony Albert, ed. Art and Australia, Sydney: Dott Books, 2015.

2. ibid.

3. Jens Hoffmann, ‘Languages of Abstraction’, in No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian contemporary abstract painting from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Nevada Museum of Art, DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2014: 23.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt2zqeSP5VE. 5. ibid.

P. 39: Tony Albert, We Can be Heroes, 2014, pigment on paper, 124 x 115 x 2 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

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Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12, Alive entities and inanimate things, made and not made Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin.

Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan.

Pierre Huyghe TarraWarra International 2015 29 August-29 November 2015 Curated by Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn

KELLY FLIEDNER But the faint cries – ecstasy? horror?

Or did you think it the sound of distant bees, making only the thick honey of this good life?

Jane Hirshfield, Bees, 1997

Time is the anxious heart of contemporary art. Peter Osborne’s definition of contemporaneity as a ‘coming together of different but equally present temporalities’, or 'a disjunctive unity of present times’, is immediately evoked on seeing the work of Pierre Huyghe.1 Huyghe creates something of a shared fiction, something transcendental – a mix of disjunctive unities and concepts of parallel time. It represents an attempt to affect, through human, geological and non-contiguous scales, the properties of time through the creation of sprawling, spawning worlds. In the process, his actions create an often cinematically tangible experience of the theoretically-synchronous conjunction of times that Peter Osborne’s contemporaneity aspires to. Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn’s exhibition at Tarrawarra presents a series of worlds – from miniature, contained, controlled, private, distinct, to expanding, sprawling, wild, unknown, and other – as connected vignettes playing out Huyghe’s preoccupation with time and temporality.

The exhibition’s achievement is its capacity to aptly combine these competing scales and circulating forces – creating an environment and audience experience that generates the atmospheres presented in the film works of Huyghe. A Way in Untitled (2012) depicts an animal kingdom; swarming bees jockey with each other over evolving honeycomb, a mouse runs across a field, a lost and wandering dog with a brightlypainted pink leg wanders through damp, overgrown outer-suburban ruins in search of food. Visceral and bodily, these characters root and move themselves in and around their world. Surreal landscapes, in which objects and beings seem to liquefy and bleed into each other.

The closeness of this picture, honed into the minute world of its protagonists, is a world at once unknown and familiar. These animal/ characters have means and are meaningful – we anthropomorphise them and champion them within their environs. We celebrate their successes (finding food, staying alive) and mourn their losses (perishing, decomposing, becoming food for another). As we follow their beating rhythms, a slippage emerges between reality and fantasy.

Likewise, De-extinction (2014) is a language-less world where knowledge is instead created and transferred through minute shifts in sensation.

Deserted by words, the worlds and their temporal sequences and spatial orders of A Way in Untitled and De-extinction mutate. These movements are watched and observed from the outside. The audience

is rarely within, since they are obvious voyeurs rather than participants.

However, viewers are unable to watch these worlds and to perceive them from anywhere, aside from within their own bodies, bringing with them their own set of specific experiences. Although Huyghe does attempt to insert the audience inside these worlds – zooming in and reading those worlds through microscopic visions and sounds. Both A Way in Untitled and De-extinction purposefully take on clichéd conceits of what are natural versus artificial. Although both attempt to create a space for non-human time, a way for the audience to explore something of the other, it is through the mixed application of field recording and overly produced, post production soundscapes that we are constantly brought back to earth, back through the common language of cinema. With more than a touch of humour, Hollywood rears its head at opportune moments. While a skinny dog is the hero of A Way in Untitled, bringing to mind many a childhood tale, De-extinction rolls out Jurassic Park (1993) sci-fi-esque tropes of insects floating in amber wax, waiting to be seized and revived by crazed scientists, attempting to build unnatural and paradoxical bridges between the present and the past. The audience’s ability to read between these worlds, between past and present fails, because they read through the hands and eyes of a complex, tightlybudgeted, post-production film industry. They are simultaneously left outside the world, but are nevertheless implicated through the film’s narratives and the shape of their creation.

In l’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2: Untitled (Light Box) (2002), the classic tropes of theatre and cinema emerge with more exaggerated effect. Both a light and a music box, it is a hanging sculpture with an internal void, which lies dormant while A Journey That Wasn’t screens nearby. On the completion of the nearby film, this hanging void/object erupts into life.

Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies orchestrated by Claude Debussy, begins to play as a mini choreographed light show is set in motion across its internal stage, illuminating clouds of smoke within. It reveals its own artifice, and although grand in its attempt to mimic the great concert halls of turn of the century Europe, there is a playful silliness that undermines it in turn. And like the (probably) unintentional evocation of Jurassic Park in De-extinction, the inclusion of Gymnopédies conjures the Disney appropriation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky in classics such as Fantasia (1940) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). The distinction between backstage and front of house is revealed to the audience—what was before clearly ‘off ’ is now ‘on’ and as the music starts to play and the smoke begins to rise, a sense of something happening becomes tactile.

L’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2 is palpable and sensory, yet imaginary and un-contained, material, yet abstract. Perhaps more than any other work in the exhibition, here in the gathering vapour-like, abstract-landscape, we can project our own stories (Disney references included) upon this dream-like landscape, where imaginaries are connected to lived sensory moments.

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In a similar way to l’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2, RSI, un bout de réel (2006), a large roof mounted neon work of three interlocking circles, Crystal Cave (sleeping) (2009), a 3-D photograph of Huyghe sleeping in Naica Mine in Mexico, and Untitled #7 Pierre Huyghe (2008), a poster that outlines the official aims of l’Association des Temps Libérés (Freed Time Association), act as an important mediators between the projected worlds of the three official aims of l’Association des Temps Libérés (Freed Time Association), act as an important mediators between the projected worlds of the three films, with the present and physical experience of the audience within the space. While the films depict the circadian rhythms of the natural environment, these four works make explicit the body of the viewer literally being amid noise, light and space. With l’Expédition Scintillante, Act 2 and RSI, the viewer is bathed in noise and/or light, while for Crystal Cave and Untitled #7 they need the aid of 3D glasses and UV light (respectively) in order to ‘read’ them. As in Heidegger’s concept of 'Worlding', these works evoke an intimate compositional process of dwelling in spaces and being near/next to/with the art that carries and gestures toward being in the world.

In this exhibition we see the proliferation of artworks as little worlds of all kinds, which take form as a result of the conditions put forward by Huyghe and that continue to exist beyond the confines of the exhibition’s time and space: Umwelt (2011), a nebulous area of gallery wall inhabited by ants and spiders, which emerge from a single pierced hole and then presumably venture into unknown areas of the museum building; and Courrier de découverte de l’île (2006), an official document announcing the discovery and naming of Isla Ociosidad (Idleness Island) chanced upon

by Huyghe in Antarctic waters while producing A Journey That Wasn’t.

Besides Courrier de découverte de l’île and Untitled #7, the only other work where language or text is presented to either read or hear is within the narrated prologue of A Journey That Wasn’t: A show is being set up. A symphony orchestra is about to play the topography of an island in musical form. The experience of a journey prefigures a world already lost. The expedition began to postulate that there should exist somewhere a new uncharted island sheltering a single unique creature. We invent no-knowledge zones and the means to verify their existence. There was only one rule of the game: to resist the possibility of bringing it back. Here is a story of a tragic odyssey.3 These melodramatic words anchor the audience’s reading of the following world as constructed from dual locations: firstly, in Antarctica as a troupe of artists and scientists embark together to find a rare albino penguin and new islands emerging as a result of global warming; secondly, in Central Park in New York City, where Huyghe organised an opera and performance depicting the epic antipodal journey, which includes a hovering and glowing mountain-shaped structure depicting the far away Isla Ociocidad, made of a networked sequence of lights and sound.

night metaphors, with beacons of light acting as signposts within both the light and dark landscapes of Antarctica and New York. Amid the operatic and dramatic interpretations of good and evil in A Journey That Wasn’t, the language of the heroic and criminality, which invades all aspects of the exhibition (thieves, suspects, champions, martyrs) again runs riot.

Huyghe’s worlds are displayed in fragments, framed and externalised. As with most exhibition experiences, the audience is amputated from their regular environments and swept up in the fever of ‘understanding’ this new world, attuning into its order. Huyghe presents atmospheres that are already humming as the audience enters them; their attunement and intimacy with these worlds is every bit part of his imperative.

However one can never completely enter the worlds or experience those alternate temporalities. Listening to bleeding sounds through exhibition spaces (the three films are timed perfectly to announce themselves to each other through walls at silent moments), the audience lives in the perpetual present, patently aware of their location within the physical confines of the gallery. Narratives are recast in different tenses, following the age-old strategies of cinema – forward, from the beginning, through to the end, everything has a start and a finish. As with life and death, these stories cannot escape the rhythms of our bodies; bodies that emerge, grow, then recede into the environment. The lessons of our bodies cannot be discarded – we cannot help but project those lessons onto the worlds we watch.

Instead of being able to truly comprehend an alternative sense of time and space through these miniature/alternative worlds, we have a series of inserted clichés as charming and beautiful delays, deferrals, detours and digressions. Experiencing this exhibition is to experience the facets of Huyghe’s impossible, contemporary conjunction-object concerned with the production and experience of time – the distinctions, aspirations, struggles, myths, failures and artifices generated by the apparent movement of the hyperplane that divides the past, present and future.

ENDNOTES 1. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, New York: Verso: 2013.

2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, London: SCM Press: 1962 [1927].

3. Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, super 16mm and HD video transferred to HD, 21’41, 2005.

In what is a complex film about the collapse of multiple locations and points in time, everything is thrown at the audience: profound moments of darkness follow the realisation of impending environmental ruin; an inverted sense of masculine and colonial conquest with romantic notions of the sublime; the return of the absurd yet playful protagonist, as the penguin’s heroic silhouette rises within the projected Antarctic mountains of Central Park to such symphonic announcement that it can be nothing other than comical; the crisp, perfectly formed snowy mountain peaks almost exactly replicate the trademark of Paramount Motion Pictures signalling the films inescapable cinematic context; and an almost humorous application of Wagner-Schopenhauer-esque day/ Pierre Huyghe, A Journey that wasn’t, 2005, film, 21.41 mins.

Courtesy the artist.

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Good Art ADAM GECZY What constitutes good art has always been a vexed issue but vexed on differing grounds. In pre-secular art, the means of measure were much easier, as they were based on skill and the way a more or less prescribed message was conveyed. In modern art, with its message of freedom of expression and the enlightenment of the viewer, notions of goodness become more subjective and oblique, but also historical: the extent to which a work of art sustains itself over time. With the cataclysms of World Wars and the Holocaust, the innocence of beauty is brought into question.1 Now in the age of post-colonialism and globalisation, beauty and good art are relative, regulated according to differing and shifting contexts and rules. And in the age of mass-corporatisation and the spectacle, art on the public horizon at least is at the service of entertainment and pleasure. The Enlightenment standards of artistic edification reverberate only softly. But people continue to make art, and look at art, and to write about it, which means they continue to have some kind of faith in it, which also means that there is some belief that good art exists and is possible. These are all very, very big issues, which I can only begin to gloss here.

When writing philosophically about art, one inevitably means ‘good art’; when writing about bad art, the adjective (‘bad’) is added. Then there are qualified statements such as ‘most of contemporary art is populist rubbish’. But writing about the abstract qualities of art, as in aesthetic theory, assumed an ideal object in which both reader and writer have some faith. The general suggestion of what art must do and how it must be, is, simply that it be good, and that goodness is qualified in the process, as in Adorno’s distinction between ‘autonomous’ and ‘committed’ art.

This is a good place to start from, since it situates the modern artwork within and against other forms of socio-political duty and effectiveness.

According to Adorno, committed art is art driven by a political agenda at the expense of aesthetic qualities, thereby manipulating art into a state where the very qualities that make art ‘what it is’ are undermined.

In his criticism of Sartre’s plays and novels that reflect his engagement, Adorno argues that ‘the theses they illustrate, or where possible state, misuse the emotions which Sartre’s own drama aims to express, by making them examples,’2 By reducing characters to typologies, by schematising his plot and using art as a vehicle for what appears a more urgent goal – the political message – forces the work of art into the very kind of misleading cavil and ideological reductivism typical of, say, Nazism, which are precisely the kinds of forces that Sartre sought to combat: ‘The flaw in Sartre’s conception of commitment strikes at the very cause to which he commits himself.’3

If such art is bound to fail, then its opposite extreme, art-for-art’s sake, l’art pour l’art, is also imperilled. Such art ‘denies by its absolute claim that ineradicable connection with reality which is the polemical a priori of the attempt to make art autonomous from the real.’4 No art can be absolutely autonomous, although it wrestles with the possibility of being so.5 Art must, for Adorno, seek a place of exception, but not at the price of denying the existence of reality, or indeed the extent to which

reality exists to support the wishful notion of art-for-art’s sake in the first place. While art’s content (or the content in its lack of content) has an orientation in history and the world, the internal mechanisms within art precipitate a slippage, perhaps even a radical misconstrual, that is art’s ambiguity. In its inherent capacity to be misunderstood lies not only its intrigue, but also its truth. It is art’s capacity to enshrine and harmonise contradictions, which themselves can still not be quelled or resolved in the content of the aesthetic form that constitutes for Adorno artistic form its ‘utopian’ aspect.6

But if a work of art had neither of these qualities – autonomy nor commitment – then Adorno showed a blind spot. He famously derided jazz and rock’n’roll as symptomatic of the ‘barbarism and profiteering of the culture industry.’7 The same would apply to Pop Art, which at one level declares the bland obviousness of the life in an obvious way, and possibly just as bland. Some of the ramifications and subtleties of the readymade are not entered into as they precisely elide the inner tension proper to the illogical logic of the aesthetic. At least Adorno was writing at a time when it was easy to demarcate high and low; in the same breath as his derogatory reference to jazz and rock, he mentions Beethoven, an artistic paragon that they have abruptly and rudely usurped.

But today, since the widening of mass culture with the Internet, popular culture is everywhere, such that it can no longer be viewed as a separable quality, attribute or object, but rather as having seeped into every corner of life. Some things may be more Pop than others, but nothing is exempt from popular culture. So pervasive is popular culture that it would be mistaken to use an archaism such as ‘tainted’, since it would naively imply the existence of some better place or power, a safe haven of cultural calm purged of vulgarity and bathos. Commercial films and television series are made by great composers, artists and philosophers, and the work of great writers is made into films with mass-market appeal. These are just the beginning of innumerable examples.

This presents the contemporary artist with a number of problems that suggest solutions that he or she might or might not want to consider.

Firstly, if the world is driven by commercialism and the culture industry is all around us, then the most accurate approach to art is to set up a mirror to commercialism and make work that is about the saturation of popular culture and the pursuit of wealth (Koons, Hirst). Secondly, to combat the vulgarities of popular culture, the best thing is to deny the infiltration of popular culture by making work as if it didn’t exist.

Thirdly, if large artistic festivals and public exhibitions are driven by visitation numbers, then it is best to avoid such venues except when deemed necessary for the advancement of one’s artistic reputation, and to instead favour more intimate and specialist places and modes of display, which are frequented by more appreciative and critical audiences (such as artist-run initiatives). To summarise, you either become part of popular culture in the pretence of some critical model, or you presume that a benign alternative exists, a critical enclave freed of dross.

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The answer may appear to lie between these two poles. For the first, let us call it hyper-Pop condition, overestimates the placement and role of popular culture, making too much of it; the second not enough. For at the time Adorno was writing, popular culture was still tangible and locatable: one can easily point to Mozart’s ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’ being piped through shopping malls, or to the lubriciousness and rowdiness of rock’n’roll. But more subtle is the way in which commercialisation has crept into the tempo of our lives, from the advertisements that we are forced to watch on YouTube, to the very entity of YouTube itself, a portal that doesn’t discriminate between films of intellectuals to goofy home videos.

But a better way of illustrating the shift from old school high-versus-low pop and the ‘pop is everywhere’ schema is through fashion’s evolution from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Vivienne Westwood, together with Malcolm McLaren are generally credited with giving life to punk styling. While they certainly did not do this alone and from nowhere, their various shops on the King’s Road (Let it Rock, Sex, Seditionaries) were a centre of gravity for punk, and allowed punk to flourish into a recognisable style with certain attributes and now a relatively coherent history and evolution. Westwood, together with Rei Kawakubo, whose first catwalk collection debuted the same year (1981), created a new syntax for fashion in which the language of degradation – tears, distressed fabrics – was built into the garment. This inaugurated a major shift in the history of clothing. Before this time, tears and tarnishings were the signs of misadventure, wear and, by extension, abject poverty.

They were to be spurned. Now these qualities were part of the language of the garment. It is nothing to buy at great expense jeans that have tears in them – unthinkable forty years ago – which today means you can buy a garment with the signs of labour and wear, without having to go through the ordeal oneself. Before Westwood, there was a clear division between good and bad clothing. Now badness is a language to be used in an ensemble, which could end up, according different criteria be deemed good, bad or indifferent.

This shift in clothing is therefore analogous to the shift in popular values into the once coherent and sanctified ambit of high culture. Good art deploys and reintegrates popular culture – in a way that first presumes a fictive binary between high and low – in configurations that manipulate popular culture so that it can be seen in a different light, as more beautiful or more intriguing or more stimulating than it ‘actually’ is.

When Westwood returns to punk styling – the term applies to fashion using punk tropes like the safety pin or the functionless zip or belt – it is a measure that historicises punk in a way that artists of the 1980s would self-consciously appropriate from art history and elsewhere. (This has always been done in the history of Western art, but the practice at this

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time was more concentrated and widespread.) Such repositioning, and conceptual remodelling of a once revolutionary and insurrectionary form is open to criticism that it draws on the style’s raciness without partaking in the risks that it historically once faced. It is, the argument can go, another example of capitalism absorbing its opposition to its own benefit. The same is said of art from the 1980s onward. Relational aesthetics draws from the revolutionary well of performance and protest, without any threat whatsoever. Performativity is used as a kind of ingredient to give a frisson to work, in which deeper ethical tensions are counterfeit.

Yet the difference between the disingenuous ploys of Relational Aesthetics and Westwood’s self-quotation of punk is simple. The former persists in advancing the perception that it is high art, while the latter is free in its use of tropes within a domain that is in its history and its nature popular. Whereas Relational Aesthetics is a toothless form of Situationism, Westwood’s punk styling (which was also nourished on Situationism with the hand of McLaren) reveals itself, in retrospect, as having an historical agenda; namely that the heroic stage of punk was only punk in its infancy that then needed to develop to maturity. The convulsiveness of early punk could never sustain itself. It was bound to self-destruction. Punk is used as a reminder of subjective displacement, of environmental degradation, of social alienation.

There is much more to this, but the purpose here is to be provocatively succinct. Good (contemporary) art, then, may need to take a few lessons from some contemporary fashion. Rather than use the critical credentials of a visual language or style in work that ultimately only ventriloquises criticality, it is better for it to insert itself into the strata of popular culture and to find the places where it is replaying the best songs of the past according to the key of the present.

ENDNOTES 1. Summed up by Theodor W. Adorno’s gnomic line: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’

‘Culture Criticism and Society, in Prisms (1967), trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge MA: MIT Press (1981) 1990: 34.

2. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, trans. Ronald Taylor, London & New York: Verso, (1977) 1995: 182.

3. ibid.

4. ibid:178.

5. Reiterated in more depth in the Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970: 160-161: ‘Kein Kunstwerk hat ungeschmälerte Einheit…’

6. ibid: 161.

7. ibid: 473.

TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Art Gallery of South Australia, 8 October 2015-17 January 2016 RAYLEEN FORESTER TARNANTHI, the inaugural Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art joins the South Australian festival circuit in October 2015. TARNANTHI (pronounced tar-nan-dee) is a word from the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains meaning to appear or to come forth. Like morning’s first light or the sprouts of new seedlings, TARNANTHI is a word brimming with optimism and the hope of new beginnings. Led by artistic director Nici Cumpston and presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), the festival is supported by the state government and principal sponsor BHP Billiton.

Showcasing established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists from across the country, TARNANTHI’s aim is to challenge the perception of what Aboriginal art is, reminding us that it is a living culture with an artistic practice that has been heralded internationally.1 For Cumpston, the festival is an opportunity to highlight the innovative and dynamic art of contemporary Indigenous artists. Many of the stories inherent in the work come from a deep traditional knowledge, but they are also being interpreted in an individual, contemporary way.2 The ambitious program comprises a number of exhibitions and events across numerous public institutions in South Australia with components then travelling on to regional galleries throughout the country.

TARNANTHI presents the work of approximately 300 local and national artists with many from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands located in the remote north-west of South Australia, as well as artists and collectives from the Central Desert region and beyond.

Coinciding with the opening weekend of the Festival, in partnership with Tandanya, TARNANTHI hosted a major fair showcasing forty national art centres. Cumpston says of the fair ‘our aim is to present a specially curated space that highlights each collective’s work in an appropriate way. Each space will be designed to be different from one another focusing on the functionality of the works available for purchase.

It will be an immersive experience for audiences.’3 Following a similar model in Darwin, where each year the city centre hosts a major art fair, this event aims to build the commercial viability of Indigenous art in this State.

Some twenty-five artists and collectives – such as the Kulata Tjula Project, Reko Rennie, Brian Robinson, Spinifex Arts Project, Warwick Thornton and James Tylor – are part of a highly diverse program of exhibitions at the AGSA, which also includes South Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce’s site-specific, (bomb) cloud-like glass installation Thunder Raising Poison of 2000 suspended glass bush yams. Alluding to the Maralinga nuclear tests of 1953-63 carried out by the British Government (in agreement with the Australian government), the internally lit forms are alternately clear and dark green – the latter a

reference to the unnatural colouration of Maralinga’s (post-nuclear test) radioactive landscape. Tony Albert exhibits his award winning, photographic series We Can Be Heroes (2013-14), in addition to the collaborative work, Frontier Wars: Bone Fish Story Place (2014) with fellow Queensland artist, Alair Pambegan. Their works are a commentary on the conflicts of the colonial period and the original landowners’ defiant protection of their country.

Cumpston has worked closely with the artist Jonathan Jones and curators Hetti Perkins and Genevieve O'Callaghan to develop a comprehensive survey of esteemed artist Yvonne Koolmatrie, who has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for over thirty years. A Ngarrindjeri woman, Koolmatrie grew up in the Meningie/Coorong and Riverland region of South Australia, where she still resides today. Her distinctive works include meticulously detailed eel traps, mats, turtles and small planes made into woven forms using foraged river sedge hand-harvested from the banks of the Murray River. Having experienced firsthand the degradation of areas surrounding the Riverland through ongoing agricultural processes, she recognises that her practice plays a significant role within the arts and her community. Materiality is an important facet of Koolmatrie’s practice connecting her work to the historic and cultural traditions of the Ngarrindjeri people; weaving is a fading craft, which she today uses as a tool to educate younger generations.

The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art is showing two contemporary Indigenous artists, Daniel Boyd and Archie Moore.

Presented in association with the Adelaide Film Festival, Boyd’s immersive video installation A Darker Shade of Dark #1-4 (2012) delves into stories of lost histories throughout the colonisation period, communicated through a pointillist and impressionist aesthetic; Boyd’s process for rewriting this history employs the Papunya Tula ‘dot’ technique, altering imagery and narrative into cosmic fields of movement and energy.

Multimedia artist Archie Moore, who interrogates themes of Aboriginal politics, language, racism and identity through subtle, clever and humorous work, presents Les Eaux d’Amoore (2014) – a highly original approach to discussing themes of colonial history and displacement.

The outcome of working with a master perfumer, Moore’s installations of coolly lit, department store quality perfumes, conjure the fragrances of his Aboriginal childhood and his navigation through ‘white society’.

At the Contemporary Art Centre of SA (CACSA), installations by Fiona Foley and Jason Wing delve into incarceration, police brutality and the acts against Aboriginal men and women; Foley’s installation Black Velvet (2014-15) revisits the nineteenth-century expression used for the prostitution of black women for white men. Retelling ‘herstory’

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through beguilingly modest sculpture, photography and installation, Foley examines the Aborigines Protection Act of 1897, where women were forced into incarceration on Fraser Island to avoid transmission of disease to white settlers through contact with prostitutes.5 In his installation/soundwork Overseer/Officer (2015), Jason Wing repurposes corroded farming detritus into embellished and oppressive tools of brutality. These seemingly harmless, well-made objects recall Aboriginal deaths in custody with a haunting sound element that draws parallels between the stockman, the overseer and the police force. Both artists exemplify, in different ways, the challenging and experimental approaches adopted by Indigenous artists working today.

Their approach is conceptual, enriched by a deep awareness of their Indigenous history and connection to their land.

In biennial and survey exhibitions, including Magic Box, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA has pursued a policy of including craftbased works and Tarnanthi is no exception. In interviews, Mitzevich has stated that no distinction is drawn ‘between high art and low art or decorative arts or conceptual art’6 – an approach the director expanded on in his regular column for the online publication In Daily: While painting has dominated production in most of the art centres in recent times, the perceived ‘cooling off ’ of the art market has led to other art practices such as punu (wood working), textiles, ceramics, tjanpi (spinifex weaving) and printmaking sharing space with painting. Some of these mediums, previously relegated to the realm of ‘busy work’, have been reinvented via contemporary art as strong communicators of Anangu culture and ongoing connection to country.7 At the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Garden, five senior artists from Bula’bula Arts at Ramingining in North East Arnhem Land – Julie Djulibing Malibirr, Robyn Djunginy, Evonne Munuyngu, Mary Dhapalany and Frances Djulibing Daingangan – exhibit an installation of mats woven from the leaves of the Gunga (pandanus spirals) palm; a plant native to northern Australia. Bula’bula Arts is a not-for-profit organisation which works with Ramingining communities and their neighbours in order to inspire and educate younger generations of Yolngu arts and culture. These age old crafts

are an important facet of the festival; aligning the traditional with the contemporary, as a means of reinventing the way in which audiences perceive Indigenous art practices of today.

The TARNANTHI public program incorporates a number of projects: collaborating with existing events such as Our Mob at the Festival Centre (now in its tenth year) and many of their partnering galleries (both local and regional). The festival will host a series of artist-led workshops and public talks extending dialogue and establishing a platform for critical debate on important topics affecting practising artists and audiences today.

Cumpston considers the creation of new work one of the core aims of the festival; by supporting independent artists, it plays an intrinsic part in ‘sowing the seeds’ of Australia’s burgeoning new talent, as well as extending the reach of more established artists into the public realm.

One of the highlights is a series of five commissioned moving image portraits by award-winning director Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays), which will be positioned throughout AGSA during the Festival. (Hyde and cameraman Bryan Mason visited artists at Utopia and Tangentyere Artists in the Northern Territory.) The TARNANTHI curatorial process has been intuitive and collaborative, focusing on the artists’ intentions and ensuring that the work’s evolution might continue beyond its presentation during the festival. As part of this consultative process, the curatorial team also travelled to many remote regions of SA to observe first-hand the principles of each artist’s practice. The collaborative curatorial approach is also exemplified in the relationship with their presentation partners. In a celebration of the diversity of contemporary Indigenous art practice, an estimated twenty-two artist, institution and festival-led exhibitions and events make up the program.

ENDNOTES 1. ‘Tarnanthi – South Australia’s new world-class Aboriginal art festival’, media release, SA Government, July 2014.

2. Art Monthly Australia, issue 274, Oct 2014.

3. Interview with Nici Cumpston, May 2015.

4.http://www.unisa.edu.au/Business-community/Samstag-Museum/2015-Exhibitions/09102015Daniel-Boyd-A-Darker-Shade-of-Dark-1-4-/.

5. Fiona Foley, Biting the Air, digital artist catalogue, 2015.

6. Andrew Taylor, ‘Tarnanthi Festival: How a bomb blast inspired glass artist Yhonnie Scarce’, SMH, August 14, 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/tarnanthi-festival-how-a-bomb-blastinspired-glass-artist-yhonnie-scarce-20150825-gizjbp.html#ixzz3lz2B7dxa.

7. Nick Mitzevich, ‘In not so remote SA, art is the answer’, InDaily, April 13, 2015: http://indaily.com. au/opinion/2015/04/13/remote-communities-art-is-the-answer/, 2015.

Yhonnie Scarce, Blown glass yams, 2015.

Courtesy the artist.

Photograph: Anna Fenech Harris.

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MUMA

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS

TECHNOLOGISM 3 october - 12 DECEMBER 2015

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

Jan Dibbets TV as a Fireplace 1969 distributed by LIMA, Amsterdam photo: Christian Capurro