CVA+C Broadsheet 42.3

CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE

broadsheet CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

VOLUME 42.3 SEPTEMBER 2013

21 AUGUST — 29 SEPTEMBER 2013

The Financial Report Curated by Mark Feary Denis Beaubois Melanie Gilligan Matthew Griffin Christian Jankowski Andrew Liversidge Dane Mitchell Natalie Thomas

Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Artspace is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia).

43–51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia www.artspace.org.au

T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Office 10am–6pm, Mon–Fri Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Sun

Image: Christian Jankowski, Kunstmarkt TV, 2008, installation view, Artspace, Sydney, 2013 courtesy of the artist; Artspace, Sydney; Angabe: Meyer Kainer, Wien; Klosterfelde, Berlin.

Photo: silversalt photography

Contributors Laura Brown: Brisbane-based writer and curator; co-founder and director of online journal The Maximilian; curator of ongoing independent exhibition series Rinse & Repeat, covering ground on the intersections of feminism, sex, and the internet; recently participated in the Exist-ence 5 Symposium, Brisbane; took part in the Otherfilm Psycho Subtropics residency at Serial Space, Sydney; previously co-curated the 2012 Brisbane Emerging Art Festival; currently works at Milani Gallery, Brisbane Sheyma Buali: London-based independent writer and researcher. Her interests include popular relationships with social and political visual documents; urban studies of the Arab Gulf; and Arab cinemas. She is a Culture Correspondent for the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq AlAwsat and an Editorial Correspondent for online visual culture forum Ibraaz. Her work has appeared in publications including Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia, Little White Lies, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, AlArabiya and a number of artist and exhibition catalogues. Buali holds an MA in Critical Media and Culture Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Prior to this, she worked for 10 years in a range of roles in TV, film and documentary production in Boston, Los Angeles and her native Bahrain Rex Butler: Associate Professor in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. His most recent book is Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe: Art After Deconstruction (2011).

He is currently working on a history of “UnAustralian” art with A.D.S. Donaldson A.D.S. Donaldson: Sydney-based artist and Lecturer at the National Art School, Sydney. His most recent project was a co-curated exhibition, J.W. Power: Abstraction Création, Paris 1934 (with Ann Stephen).

He is currently working on a history of “UnAustralian” art with Rex Butler Shane Eastwood: Hobart-based artist; Postgraduate, Santiketan India, Newcastle and University of Tasmania; interests include a political sociology of aesthetics; writes for Artshub and RealTime Blair French: Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; until recently Executive Director, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney; curatorial convenor 6th (20102012) and curator 7th (2013) SCAPE Public Art Christchurch Biennials; recent curatorial projects at Artspace include Nothing Like Performance (2011) and Everything Falls Apart (2012, with Mark Feary); recent writings include contributions to the books Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (eds, A. Jones & A. Heathfield, 2012) and Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 (eds, G. Arnold & K. Henry, 2012) Alex Gawronski: Sydney-based artist and writer. Recent art projects include Camouflage Cultures, SCA galleries, Sydney; Easy Listening, West Space, Melbourne; Black Square–100 Years, AEAF, Adelaide; Look This Way, UTS Art Gallery, Sydney; Paris Atelier, University of Sydney Art Gallery (2013), Formal Intensity, Tsagaandarium Art Gallery and Museum, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, ICAN Occupies EIDIA, Plato’s Cave (EIDIA House) Brooklyn, NY, USA (2012), We are all Transistors, Aratoi/Wairapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton NZ (2011); Publishes widely, regular contributor to Broadsheet and Column (Artspace, Sydney); Co-founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN); currently teaches in the Painting Studio, Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer, and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts. His most recent exhibition is (in collaboration with Blak Douglas aka Adam Hill), BOMB at the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (AAMU), Utecht, Holland. Editor of the Australiasian Journal of Popular Culture, his latest book (with Vicki Karaminas) is Queer Style (Bloomsbury) Paul Gladston: Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham; he is also principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Ian McLean: Research Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Wollongong; books include White Aborigines, The Art of Gordon Bennett, and How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art; contributor to a number of journals including Broadsheet, Art Monthly, Artlink and Third Text; writes on contemporary and indigenous art Robin Peckham: independent curator and editor currently based in Hong Kong. His writing and translation is published in Artforum, Yishu, LEAP, and the Journal of Visual Art Practice, while recent publications include books on video art pioneer Zhang Peili and architectural interventionists MAP Office. Current research interests lie in post-internet object cultures, casualist abstraction, and accelerationism Ana Teixeira Pinto: Berlin-based writer from Lisbon; a PhD candidate and a lecturer at the department of Cultural Studies and Aesthetics, Humboldt University Berlin, and a regular contributor to the magazines Art-Agenda, Mousse, Von-Hundert, Frieze/de and Domus Basak Senova: Ankara-based curator and designer. She has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. Senova is the editor of art-ist 6, Kontrol Online Magazine, Lapses book series, UNCOVERED and Aftermath among other publications; and an editorial correspondent for Ibraaz. Senova was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and lectured as assistant professor at the Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University, Istanbul (2006-10). Currently, she co-curates UNCOVERED (2010-2013) project in Cyprus and the 2nd Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground (2013) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Recently, she has been appointed as the Art Gallery Chair, (ACM) “SIGGRAPH 2014”, Vancouver

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e t Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

volume 42.3 SEPTEMBER 2013

Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Matt Huppatz Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2013, Broadsheet, the authors and artists.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. print post approved PP53 1629/00022 The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments 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 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286 Email: editor@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

Editorial Advisory Board International:

RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London BORIS KREMER UK Curator, translator and writer, London ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Czech Republic Writer, Prague; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director SALT, Istanbul JULIE UPMEYER Turkey Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, Mumbai COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic, writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila SUE HAJDU Vietnam Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic EUGENE TAN Singapore Director Special Projects, Singapore Economic Development Board TONY GODFREY Singapore Gallery director, writer GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland

Australia:

ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist, lecturer and writer CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e t

volume 42.3 SEPTEMBER 2013

COVER: Vernon Ah Kee, Let’s be polite about Aboriginal art, 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

163

163

WHO OWNS DOTS? OR, SPIRITUALITY FOR THE HIGHEST BIDDER? OR, CAN YOU BUY AURA? Adam Geczy

167

Surviving ‘The Contemporary’: What indigenous artists want, and how to get it Ian McLean 167

174

<<Besiege Wei to rescue Zhao>>: A strategem towards a post-critical art Part 1 Paul Gladston

180

Public practice post disaster: SCAPE 7 Christchurch Biennial Blair French

186

Agrophobia: in the current climate, is it possible to imagine social change through open resistance demonstrated on the streets?

Ana Teixeira Pinto

190

Saturated intolerance: resistance in Turkey in different forms Basak Senova 174

193

TOUCHING REALITY Adam Geczy

196

Fragmented images: framing, performativity and netwORks of circulation Sheyma Buali

199

<<Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place>> Shane Eastwood

203

Total Hong Kong: artistic ecology and the typology of the survey Robin Peckham

206

186

Something in the air: internet art as archive and strategy beyond the gates of the museum Alex Gawronski

210

Ten rooms: the real spaces of Asian-Australian artistic interaction Rex Butler and A.D.S Donaldson

214

<<We’re quite schizophrenic. We can be seen as crazy, wacky girls, gender bending, twisted, costumes, pop-music, just wacky shit!>> Laura Brown

197

Realms of WondeR Jain, Hindu and Islamic art of India

19 October 2013 – 27 January 2014

Art GAllery of South AuStrAliA N o r t h t e r r A c e , A d e l A i d e artgallery.sa.gov.au PreSeNted By

fAMily ProGrAM PArtNerS

MediA PArtNerS

detail: Length of fabric with haṁsa geese, 15th–16th century, Gujarat, India, found in Indonesia, block-printed, batik and mordant dyes on cotton, 521.0 cm x 98.0 cm; Gift of Michael Abbott AO QC through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2008. detail: Kalpa Sūtra, dated VS 1524 / 1467 CE, Gujarat or Rajasthan, India, ink, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, 92 loose leaves, 11.0 x 25.5 cm (each leaf); Collection of Michael Abbott AO QC

Rabih Mroué THE PIXELATED REVOLUTION

Lara Baladi Alone Together, …In Media Res 13 September–20 October in conjunction with the 2013 Adelaide Film Festival

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au

the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa and health promotions sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

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CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE IS A CULTURAL FACILITY OF CAMPBELLTOWN CITY COUNCIL AND IS ASSISTED BY THE NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS NSW. PAN-O-VISION BY SAMUEL TUPOU, SILKSCREEN ON PVC, 40CM ROUND, 2012. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MICHAEL REID SYDNEY.

ONE ART GALLERY ROAD

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Presented by MOnAsH UnIVersIty MUseUM OF Art In AssOcIAtIOn wItH MelbOUrne FestIVAl

Reinventing the wheel: The Readymade Century 3 october - 14 december 2013

Publication sponsor

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

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle wheel 1913, reconstructed 1964 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1973 © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP/Paris, Licensed by Viscopy, 2013

Shotgun: 19 october/ 24 november 2013 New work, iNdustry access aNd critical eNgagemeNt coNtemporary art tasmaNia aNd detached cultural orgaNisatioN preseNt the 2013 editioN of shotguN

www.unisa.e

du.au/sasa-g

Image: Michael Geissler, Pencil Landscape 81, 2013 from the upcoming SASA Gallery exhibition, Manual: inscriptions of the everyday, 17 September - 18 October 2013

allery

www.castgallery.org 27 tasma street, North hobart, tasmaNia t +61 3 6233 2681 iNfo@castgallery.org

5 October to 1 December Ngaahina Hohaia Israel Tangaroa Birch Sam Tupou Brian Fuata Daniel Boyd Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 1 Powerhouse Road, Casula (Enter via Shepherd Street, Liverpool) p. 9824 1211 e. reception@casulapowerhouse.com w. casulapowerhouse.com FREE ENTRY 10am to 5pm daily

Sam Tupou, Viewpoint #4, silkscreen and digital print on PVC, 100cm x 200cm, 2013.

Collection of the artist.

VCA School of Art

Live your art Applications are now open for all visual art degrees at the VCA. The School of Art offers undergraduate, graduate coursework and research higher degrees in Drawing and Printmedia, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture and Spatial Practice.

As a student you will be guided by some of Australia’s most progressive art educators and respected artists within a creative learning environment.

Our programs include: Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (Visual Art) Graduate Certificate in Visual Art Master of Contemporary Art Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) by Research Fred Fowler, Master of Contemporary Art

Applications close Friday 27 September 2013 Visit vca.unimelb.edu.au/art for details

CRICOS: 00116K

ZO370050

Vist us at VCA Graduate Study Week, 16-20 September 2013

NATASCHA STELLMACH 14 September – 20 October

EXHIBIT B(ENDIGO) 24 October – 26 November

PETRUS SPRONK 14 August – 8 September

PAULINE MATHRICK

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre

11 September121–View 6 October Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

JUDY JONES

9 October – 3 November La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121LaView Street, Bendigo, VIC, 3550 T: 121 03View 5441Street 8724 VIC, 3550 E: Bendigo, vac@latrobe.edu.au 3 5441 8724 W:+61 latrobe.edu.au/vac latrobe.edu.au/vacentre Gallery hours: Tue – Fri 10am-5pm. Weekends 12-5pm

Image: Natascha Stellmach, Gone., 2008, mixed media, installation view detail, © the artist, Courtesy Wagner+Partner Berlin

kate murphy.

Probable Portraits

13 September to 24 November 2013

Kate Murphy Yia Yia’s song 2010 digital video still (detail) 8 channel HD video installation 9 channel sound 10 mins 18 sec Collaboration with Basil Hogios (composer) Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney © Kate Murphy 2010 Yia Yia’s song was originally commissioned by Performance Space in 2010 for the project Nightshifters curated by Bec Dean.

The project was supported by the Australian Government through the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and by the Keir Foundation.

This exhibition is proudly presented by Greater Shepparton City Council.

70 Welsford Street, Shepparton VIC 3630 p (03) 5832 9861 f (03) 5831 8480 e art.museum@shepparton.vic.gov.au w sheppartonartmuseum.com.au

IN CONFIDENCE

ARTISTS SIMRYN GILL

REORIENTATIONS IN RECENT ART

RODNEY GLICK LYNN LU HAYATI MOKHTAR & DAIN-ISKANDAR SAID TOM NICHOLSON

31 AUGUST – 13 OCTOBER

MAX PAM PUNKASILA CHRISTIAN THOMPSON LISA UHL HOSSEIN VALAMANESH — Curated by John Mateer

Tue–Sun 10am–5pm

pica.org.au

Image: Hayati Mokhtar & Dain-Iskandar Said, production shot taken during the filming of Near Intervisible Lines, 2006.

Image courtesy the artist. Photo: Tara Sosrowardoyo.

C E L E BRATING FIVE Y E ARS IN 2013

SEPTEMBER On Men Curated by Eleanor Scicchitano 5 - 21 September Opening 6pm Wed 4 Sepetember FELTspace at Sydney Contemporary 19 - 22 September OCTOBER To Things Themselves Curated by Ray Forester 2 - 19 October Opening 6pm Wed 2 October NOVEMBER Ustopia Olivia Kathigitis + Kate Power 7 - 23 November Opening 6pm Wed 6 November DE-VERSIONS FESTIVAL exhibitions - events - ďŹ lm 22 November - 14 December Launching 22 November with FELTnatural, public art on the Torrens Check the website for event updates

HAPPY 5th BIRTHDAY FELT!

FELT AUCTION

Auction Fundraising Event

6pm Thursday 24 October

Check website for artwork and invitation details

Open hours: Wed-Sat: 1-4pm 12 Compton Street Adelaide 5000 www.feltspace.org feltspace@gmail.com

THE HERBERT MAYER COLLECTION OF CARROLUP ARTWORK

arte mag r a; from the o p aq ue 16 artists presenting work at the AEAF and other CBD locations Curated by Domenico de Clario & Mary Knights 5 September to 5 October

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Akira Akira

Aleks Danko & Jude Walton

Annika Evans

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Jessie Lumb

Joan Grounds

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of the Stolen Generations from the Carrolup Native Settlement, 1945-1951.

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This exhibition celebrates the return to Australia of the recently rediscovered collection of more than 100 artworks by Aboriginal children

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grenfell street currie

rundle

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JOHN CURTIN GALLERY EXTENDED UNTIL 20 OCTOBER

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Barry Loo, On the Alert c1949. The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artwork, Curtin University Art Collection.

Yhonnie Scarce

william

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arte magra; from the opaque symposium

king

west hindley

Monte Masi

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Tony Yap & Janette Hoe

street

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Matthew Bradley

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Aurelia Carbone & Tanya Schultz

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David Cross

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Louise Haselton

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Bridget Currie

street angas

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v i s i t w w w. a e a f . o r g . a u o r p h o n e 0 8 8 2 1 1 7 5 0 5 for more information

In a spirit of international collaboration, The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artwork was recently transferred from Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, USA to the Curtin University Art Collection, Perth.

Open Monday - Friday 11am - 5pm, Saturday & Sunday 1pm - 5pm

lion arts centre north terrace adelaide south australia | www.aeaf.org.au | info@aeaf.org.au +61-(0)8 82117505 | open 11amâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;5pm tuesday to friday & 2â&#x20AC;&#x201D;5pm saturday

For more information phone +61 8 9266 4155, email gallery@curtin.edu.au or visit www.johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au

arte magra; from the opaque has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and the South Australian Government through Arts SA

CRICOS Provider Code 00301J BRAND CUJCG0041 Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology

BACKBURNING JULIA BOYD / JACQUELINE BRADLEY CHRIS CARMODY / KARENA KEYS / TRISH ROAN ADAM VEIKKANEN / FIONA VEIKKANEN CURATED BY ANNIKA HARDING

6pm FRI 4th OCTOBER to SAT 9th NOVEMBER

CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE GORMAN HOUSE, 55 AINSLIE AVE BRADDON Tues-Fri 11-5 Sat 10-4 www.ccas.com.au CCAS IS SUPPORTED BY THE ACT GOVERNMENT & THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNNENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY.

COUNCIL, ITS

IMAGE: Trish Roan, Even the Most Solid of Things (Constellation 3), 2012, acorns, mirrors, wood (Photograph: Rob Little)

Image: Liam Garstang,,The Bucket 2013. Pigment print.

LIAM GARSTANG TO KILL THE SAUDADE

13.9 - 20.10.2013 CACSA PROJECT SPACE

14 Porter Street, Parkside Adelaide, SA 5063 www.cacsa.org.au admin@cacsa.org.au Tues-Fri: 11AM-5 PM Sat- Sun: 1-5PM

chameleon from the ashes cacsa@70 2012

chameleon from the ashes: cacsa@70 2012, presents images and texts from all exhibition and associated projects in 2012 in celebration of the Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s 70th anniversary.

Included are international writers for CACSA’s participation in 2012 ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL: RESTLESS–Nataša Ilic (Zagreb/Berlin), Behrang samadzadeghan (Iran) and chris sharp (Paris); ARTISTS WEEK participant, Palestinian Museum Director (and ex-Artistic Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and Sharjah Biennial) Jack Persekian; OZASIA FESTIVAL curator Indian curator, author, critic and poet Ranjit Hoskote; with South Australian writers Michael Newall, alan cruickshank, John Neylon, Wendy Walker, Logan Macdonald, Polly Dance and andrew Dearman.

saLEs: cONTacT MaTT HUPPaTZ: aDMINIsTRaTOR—admin@cacsa.org.au ISBN 978-0-9750239-5-2 128 pages 240 x 170mm, colour reproductions PUBLIsHED 2013 BY

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au

the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

CACSA BOOK AD.indd 1

3/09/13 3:46 PM

Join the Art & Heritage Collections mailing list to keep your finger on the cultural pulse of the University of Adelaide

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To register for electronic invitations email art.heritage@adelaide.edu.au or call 8313 3086

print award 2013 supported by little creatures brewing sat 21 sept–sun 17 nov Australia’s premier

curating and collaborating

exhibition and award for printmaking and artists’ books

researching and documenting engaging the community stimulating events enhancing university experience supporting university values

Artistic license

as/1003 broadsheet 05/04

ADELAIDE FLOWER HOUSE

43 unley road parkside sa 5063 tel: 08 8373 4800 www.adelaideflowerhouse.com.au

Art Stretchers offers South Australian artists an unparalleled combination of range, service and experience.

A broad range of mediums is available including Art Spectrum oils (artists’ and student quality), watercolours, gouache, pastels, primers, mediums, papers, stretchers (and stretching service), linens and canvasses. We also stock sable, bristle and acrylic brushes and easels. Reliable technical advice is available.

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Parking is not a problem!

Art Stretchers Co P/L 161 Morphett Street, Cnr. Waymouth St., opposite Light Square.

Adelaide. 5000. SA. Open Mon - Fri, 8.30am - 5.00pm and Saturday 9.00am - 12.00pm.

Telephone: (08) 8212 2711 Fax: (08) 8231 7190.

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K A CR

16 3 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 2 . 3 2 013

Who owns dots? or, spirituality for the highest bidder, or, can you buy aura?1 ADAM GECZY I see every spot within each painting as being alone yet together with all the other spots.

Damien Hirst2 I have a friend, indigenous, who has a tattoo on his left shoulder. It is the map of Australia styled from boomerang shapes and the Aboriginal flag.

The same friend sent me an email with a photograph of a Canadian man with a tattoo of a maple leaf bearing the motto, “Made in Canada”.

The message was sent with contempt at the man’s nationalism. But why had he the right to do so if he too wore a similar branding? Was this hypocrisy?

No, the difference between the hapless Canadian man and his tattoo was that one was worn out of pigheadedness and the other was a sign of resilience and defiance. One instated tautological ownership (I am what I already am), while the other laid claim to something he didn’t have. One mistook claim for essence—the recent creation of a State, in this case Canada—while the other asserted the essential character of his claim. One was about possession, the other about loss. If we apply this same logic to the question of dots in Aboriginal art we might say that the emotive possessiveness of most Aboriginal people to the dot is not simply because it is a social identifier, but, like “country”, it is because their nominal ownership of it, since the invention of Aboriginal art in 1971, has always been imperfect and incomplete.

Their stakes in ownership are arrived at through dispossession. Nonindigenous people ‘inhabit’ the world of images, in which ownership is arbitrary and taken for granted. For an indigenous person the dot is talismanic, for someone who is not indigenous, it is anecdotal.

This schism between talisman and anecdote is hardly new or exclusive to Aboriginal peoples. The best example of the difference between ritual ownership on one hand and sampling (or appropriation) on the other comes with tattooing, because it is the act of violent inscription upon the body. It is not only painful and permanent, but is either additive or constitutive of identity. Additive applies to the acquisition of a tattoo by choice, constitutive when it is a marker of initiation. In the latter case the word “obtained” is too vapid, since the application of the tattoo is itself the conclusion of the ritual passage that both distinguishes a member of the group as well as ensuring membership to it. The tattoo is also the best exemplar for understanding the difference between sacred and ritually oriented societies (what anthropologists call “ritually integrated”).

This difference is best seen in Japanese Samurai and Maori tattoos.

These were traditionally done by hand, which meant the application was more painful, but to endure this pain was a key test of the warrior’s mettle.

Be it combat or ceremonial recognition, the warrior wore his tattoo as an aesthetic celebratory wound.

Opposite: apologies again to Roy Lichtenstein (Explosion, 1965-6) Above: Del Kathryn Barton, Hugo, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Now it is possible to buy, for a relatively small price, what for the warrior came at considerable personal effort and risk. We can buy the trophy of a rite of passage without having to undergo its rigours. One can literally choose one’s fealty to a tribe, totem or myth. The world is yours, just not its inner substance. That tattoos are worn on the body permanently exposes the difference between the two approaches, yet more—one is an outward sign of an inner, spiritual and pathological state, in which there is a homology between self and idea, the other is an outward sign of a subjective aspiration that draws vampirically from the first condition. In short, the wearer of the modern tattoo buys into a system and a culture, to which the sense of belonging is entirely self-indulgent and presumptuous.

This detailed analogy is apposite to the debate surrounding the appropriation, or misappropriation, of dots and other recognisably Aboriginal artistic styles, which has hit a high pitch in the last year or so.

It was noticeably sparked by Lucas Grogan and succeeded by the controversy amid some Aboriginal communities over Del Kathryn Barton’s Archibald Prize winning portrait of actor Hugo Weaving. The former case has already been canvassed earlier in these pages, while the latter has enjoyed a drubbing over social media, particularly on Richard Bell’s Facebook page. Barton’s portrait is in her now familiar laboured style, and the work assuages any doubts that the Archibald Prize’s love affair with caricature has dwindled.

it accordingly. In the case of Grogan, to appropriate as he did Aboriginal art to such an overt extent is doubly egregious. It may have had some weight if he had done so in dialogue with indigenous artists and had done so in the name of ‘the cause’, say in a work that deals with the continuing stereotypes of Aboriginal identity. But the obverse is the case; Grogan was adding to this very problem of exploitation and flagrant neglect: he was doing what he did because he could, and for his own personal profit.

Writing recently in Artlink, Maurice O’Riordan, comments that; Grogan himself was reputed to have had some sort of ‘breakdown’. This is unfortunate, if true, but so, indeed more so, is the flagrant disregard for Aboriginal copyright, particularly when enacted consciously, as with Grogan’s case, and with an apparent hunger (at least initially) for any publicity which his ‘transgressions’ could garner.4

The work depicts an uncomfortable, stolid and mildly constipated looking Weaving interlocked with an exotic looking cat whose startled look can possibly be attributed to the fact that its tail resembles a snake. Weaving has a garland of eucalypt leaves around him that, equally improbably, have turned the colours of deciduous trees. He sits against a sort of firmament of dotted diamonds or leaves, redolent of the classic Tjakamara Papunya Tula painting, except the colours are largely green and turquoise. The resemblance, however, is unmistakable. Barton has domesticated and ‘eucalyptified’ the sacred designs of the hot and remote region of the Western Desert by rendering them in cooler colours.

But let us scratch a little deeper. Barton has lent her hand to the likeness of an actor, who is not only non-indigenous, but who was born in England. Some may call him an Australian actor, and yet Wikipedia has him as an English actor. It is darkly ironic that a recognisably Aboriginal style of painting specific to the dreaming of a particular region has been adapted for the sake of promoting an actor coming from the very Empire that colonised these people and subjugated them for over two hundred and twenty years.

This is in no way to impugn Weaving himself—far from it; it has nothing to do with him, his character or his talents as an actor. But we must try to examine this issue in a broader and more objective light. After the win, Australian Vogue ran a short promotional story that describes how the artist wanted to depict “a sincere, deep, generous and creative soul”.3 I am unsure whether she succeeded, although she did manage to convey the registers of a gastric or some other disturbance. What is more disturbing is the word “generous”. Again, external to any derogatory reference to Weaving himself, what we have is the very obverse of generosity, in stealing from a people who continue to live in squalid and makeshift conditions, well below that of most non-indigenous people, so as to win a prize worth fifty thousand dollars. It is easy to assert that the dot pattern around Barton’s subject lent her painting an aura of spiritual grace, depth and authenticity. Much as a biker gang member may get a Samurai tattoo emblazoned across his back to show that he shares the same instincts as Japan’s venerable warrior priesthood, Barton availed herself of the Aboriginal dot designs to ensure her work exuded the appropriate share of legitimacy.

But from here could be mounted the objection that the dots in this picture were ‘just dots’ much as Freud famously stated that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. Of course, there is no precise delineation. It would be absurd, for example to accuse an artist known for the use of dots, such as Yayoi Kusama, on these grounds were she to exhibit again in Australia.

However, the manner in which Barton arranges the dots makes the analogy all but unequivocal. To mount an argument that it was unintentional still courts similar objections, for to inadvertently create a swastika design at an Israeli art festival is to be guilty of not seeing it as such and altering

While it would be naïve not to know that in our image-ready times, all is available, to have presumption over delicate content comes with consequences. Grogan is certainly oblivious to the fact that art was the single biggest driving factor in giving Aboriginal artists a firm place within white Australian culture: it not only gave them self-esteem that they were doing something of value, but it has given them visibility in places where they in the past (or even now) would not have been permitted entry, least of all into the residences of the wealthy and powerful.

While the incongruencies of this are deeply moot, it is this compromised situation that has made Aboriginal art the single biggest artistic export, with regular auctions dedicated only to it occurring abroad, notably in New York. Non-indigenous artists have accomplished no such feat, and it is unlikely in the near future either. Robert Hughes proclaimedAboriginal art the last great art movement of the twentieth century. Even if movements had ceased to have the same validity at the end of the twentieth century, and even if Aboriginal art is Aboriginal art and not a movement, however obtuse or sententious this statement can be taken to be, it is still worth citing for the reason that it could never plausibly apply to the art of white Australia.

The dot can be understood as the stylistic sine qua non of this achievement.

It is central to the Aboriginal ‘brand’, which is significant to Aboriginal livelihood and both the mainstay and evolution of its identity.

Before Aboriginal art’s so-called invention in Papunya in 1971, the original dots, which are germane to this region were much larger and originally not executed on board or canvas. Rather, they were much larger indexical signs executed in the sand as part of the process of sharing stories, or of invoking totemic animals in ritual. The resultant forms, or designs were only there as a component to the telling—which could also involve song and dance—and were removed once the ritual, or storytelling event ended. The design itself was also not art per se. Like many cultures (including the ancient Greek), especially those with a rich ritual awareness, Aboriginal cultures had no word for art and indeed no place for it, since the practices which the Western concept associates with art were part of a much larger complex of sacred activity. By extreme contrast, what became art was now permanent, as opposed to ephemeral marks in the sand.

This radical alteration in spiritual representation immediately caused a number of objections within certain Aboriginal communities themselves. The earliest debates amongst elders at this time concerned the exposure of sacred designs to non-initiated eyes, whether those of their clan, or complete outsiders. The dots, it is often observed, as they evolved in the ensuing decade, became finer, more gauze-like to act as a covering layer for the secret and sacred content beneath. In acting as a protective skin, the dot assumed greater significance, not only as something for itself, but also as an intermediary between iconography not to be disclosed and the outside world. Since then the dot has come to have talismanic significance for Aboriginal art and artists well beyond the boundaries of the Papunya region. In the words of indigenous artist and film-maker Janelle Evans; …when white Australians discover they have Aboriginal heritage, one of the first things they do is try to ‘learn’ how to be Aboriginal—this includes painting ‘Aboriginal Art’ using dots—“Ooga Booga Art” (coined by ProppaNow).5

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It is fair to argue that the dot in the Papunya sense assumed far more universal importance once Aboriginal art was ‘invented’ or conceived.

With the displacement from sand to canvas or board, certain motifs and styles became hypertrophied and appropriated by other indigenous people.

Its closest ally in this renegotiation of objects and styles once specific to language and region is the didgeridoo. Most people in Australia—and one could possibly assert also some of indigenous heritage—believe it to be the national instrument of indigenous people, which it has become, although it belongs to a relatively small region of the north-east cape of Arnhem Land belonging to the Yolngu people. Its proper name is the “yidaki”, didgeridoo being the onomatopoeic pidgin.

But on the other hand one cannot help feeling sympathy with the mockery that the collective ProppaNow level at such a practice, because it is very much the symptom not just of the Western oriented ‘invention’ of Aboriginal art, but also its marketing and proliferation. Dot paintings are among the most popular because they are not only associated with Aboriginal art’s ‘birth’, but because they appear decorative. Add to that they show the visible signs of manual labour, which is always a winning component to lay purchasers of art (with Barton being another beneficiary of this banal truth). The work of Tjakamara and of other artists like Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula is that their stunning diaphanousness that has a deeply seductive, hypnotic quality. But the undeniable aesthetic qualities of such work has also led to an ongoing concern about Aboriginal art and its sacred content that not only do most buyers have no knowledge of this content, nor have any right to it, their response according to the work’s sensuous, decorative qualities that are given a turbo boost of legitimacy for the gravitas of the promise of unspoiled, innocent spiritual profundity.6 The fact that the Papunya dot has now adorned a famous BMW, aeroplanes and the Qantas uniform makes it all close to an ubiquitous sign of Aboriginality. But usually, as with Michael Nelson’s famous M3 BMW or the Qantas uniform, the design exists as a safe remnant, with the people and their place remote from the motifs and practices that were once seamless with it.

These issues do not however dampen the importance of the founding Papunya painters, but it does however add complexity to the use of dot painting by young artists today. There is also a generation of eminent urban artists who have successfully used dots in their work, such as Gordon Bennett, Lin Onus and Harry Wedge. Their work has helped to shape and characterise how urban Aboriginal art is understood today, namely as using certain styles and motifs in a meta-textual manner. In other words, an image or style can have more than one meaning, which may bear reference to the ways in which Aboriginal culture is exploited or misconstrued. In this vein, the dots (or additionally in the case of Onus, the rarrk) come to assume an ironic, but conceivably also a tragic import; the use of a style not belonging to the people with whom the artists identify is a strategy to reach to more than one Aboriginal people, given that subjugation is something that they all share. Such artists are not profiteering from their appropriation of these motifs and styles as they typically have much at stake, for their own sake and for that of the collective. There are non-indigenous artists, Imants Tillers and Tim Johnson, for example, who have appropriated Aboriginal art, and they have done so in collaboration or with permission from certain indigenous groups. Permissions are not universal and some Aboriginal people feel conflicted about what they see as opportunism.

It is the issue of what is at stake, which lies at the core of the debate.

When a non-indigenous artist like Grogan appropriates a style so flagrantly, he is not speaking in the name of a people, nor does he have the burden of oppression behind him. For any Aboriginal artist of quality, traditional —although these designators have changed in the last couple of decades —and urban, with the style, method and content of the image come various degrees of responsibility and questioning. Given fact that our indigenous peoples are not in our national constitution, all Aboriginal art, whether or not it is sacred—is perforce also political. This leads me to the content at the beginning of this essay. The tattoo of flag in second place of a people yet to receive the respect they deserve is a statement of solidarity and struggle, while a tattoo of a flag, especially one from a post-colonial country, is

ignorant neocon kitsch. Maybe one day, in an Australia which has finally lost its tokenism and its lip service, that has changed its national day to something that is not reminder of occupancy, violence and enforced law, when education and recognition of the ‘true’ past is no longer uneven but normative and widespread, then things like dot patterns might be more freely circulated between white and black. But not yet.

PostScript: With no ulterior intention I began this text while preparing the exhibition BOMB with Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill) at the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht (AAMU), Holland. The centrepiece for the show is a 1989 3 Series BMW, of the same generation as the Michael Nelson car. We executed what we have called the “Dorian Gray’s face” of the historic vehicle, not as a criticism to the artist but rather to the decontextualisation of Aboriginal art in general. The BMW is of a piece with the air-conditioned, white-wall display halls for art produced in conditions of sun and dust. It is a vehicle that most indigenous would not afford, and it uses a fuel that plays a role in despoiling their land. Our BMW, the ‘Bomb’ was painted with a huge Union Jack in dots. Where this places me I am unsure, but the message was pretty clear.

Notes 1

I am grateful to my friends and colleagues Blak Douglas (Adam Hill) and Janelle Evans for lending insights while writing this essay

2

Damien Hirst, cit. Gordon Burn, ‘Is Mr Death In?’, Damien Hirst, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always forever now, New York: Monacelli Press, 1997: 9 3

Vogue Australia, 22 March 2013, http://www.vogue.com.au/culture/arts/del+kathryn+barton+w ins+archibald+prize,22835

4 Maurice O’Riordan, ‘The (White) Elephant in the Room: Criticising Aboriginal Art’, Artlink vol.

33, no. 2, June 2013: 35-40 5

Email correspondence, 30 June, 2013

6

See also Adam Geczy and Adam Hill, ‘Aboriginal Art Diagnostic’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet 40.2, 2011

Above left: Yayoi Kusama, Yellow Pumpkin, 1992 Photo courtesy the artist Above right: Georges Seurat, The Seine at La Grande Jatte, Spring (detail), 1887

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Surviving ‘The Contemporary’: What indigenous artists want, and how to get it IAN McLEAN Works of art do not lie; what they say is literally true.

Their reality however lies in the fact that they answer to questions brought before them from outside. The tension in art therefore has meaning only in relation to the tension outside.1 Theodore Adorno There is nothing mysterious about what indigenous artists want. They want the same thing as most people: a fair slice of the pie. How to get it, is a much more difficult question to answer. To even find a seat at the table, indigenous art has to first be accepted as contemporary art. This has been its defining struggle in the modern era. The problem, at least until recently, was that the Western tradition of modernism circumscribed the terms of contemporary art. This meant that indigenous artists had first to prove their modernity, a Catch-22 game that they could never win without disavowing their indigeneity.

Being a contemporary artist is never a matter of just being here in the present moment, but of how one’s being is here. Take the example of Richard Bell. In a former life he was in the indigenous tourist art game, making and selling clichéd dot and rarrk designs that signified a clichéd idea of indigenous identity. In the 1990s Bell saw and seized a new opportunity to move sideways into the contemporary art game. Now he can make dot paintings for any occasion. Fast forward to now: The Dinner Party (2013), the final film in his trilogy Imagining Victory (2008-13). With its whacky crass references to Judy Chicago’s magnum opus, The Dinner Party is a very contemporary queering of the contemporary artworld. In an early scene a successful indigenous artist (played by Bell) is talking about his ‘dot’ painting to a dinner gathering in a collector’s house. The ‘dot’ painting is the latest addition to the collector’s collection of B-grade ‘erotic’ art, which covers every wall and corner of his house. Much like Borat (whom Boris Groys says is a figure of the radical artist and activist2), the indigenous artist’s self-deprecating naivety dissembles the sophisticated arty assumptions of the collector and his guests, leaving them (and us) incredulous. The biggest joke, the dot painting—its title I am an ass man writ large across the canvas —is clearly the most contemporary B-grade art in the room.

Are you an activist or an artist, the collector asked the artist, as if these are different ways of being. Not long ago they were; but since the ascendancy of relational art in the 1990s, the being of activism has been a good way of becoming a contemporary artist. It certainly worked for Bell.

The possibilities of how an indigenous artist might be here have changed enormously since Bell was born sixty years ago, when modernism was the horizon of contemporary thought. In the emerging post-Western era, non-Western traditions are increasingly shaping the sense of what contemporary art is. This has not been at the expense of, or in opposition to, Western art, but conducted as a conversation between contemporaneous traditions across the world no matter how incommensurable they might appear. To make contemporary art now requires artists to engage with the simultaneous presentness of contemporaneous worlds.

In Australia this new game plan produced considerable local success for indigenous artists. While the success is only regional, when today contemporary art is assuredly global—i.e. it situates itself reflexively within a transnational space3—it is evidence that the nature of contemporary art (what is in and what is out) is being reconfigured in ways that give indigenous artists a fighting chance to be contemporary.

These new possibilities for being an indigenous artist suddenly appeared in the late 1980s. A truism of art criticism today is that a seismic shift occurred around then, as if a threshold was crossed and art began to speak a different language across the world. As this new master narrative came into play in Australia, a shadow lifted off indigenous art and it was seen in the bright lights of the contemporary.

What did it feel like in the Western artworld when this new sun first cut across the horizon? The then young French curator and critic, Nicolas Bourriaud, was the first to clearly intuit the deeper ramifications of this defining moment for contemporary art practice. What turned his head were the new sorts of relations that were suddenly opening in contemporary art. His coining of the term “relational art” in 1995 aptly describes his sense of what was happening then. Aesthetic judgment and “its assertion of a private symbolic space”, and the teleology of the new and its “preconceived idea of historical evolution” were, he believed, no longer the criteria of contemporary art practice. Rather, relational art unfolds in “the realm of human interactions” and “social context”.4

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In the late 1980s and early 1990s a series of groundbreaking exhibitions put art hitherto excluded from contemporary art discourse—especially indigenous, Black and other non-Western art—into relation with it. Finally, indigenous artists tasted what they had long wanted: to be included as agents of the contemporary. These exhibitions, such as Magiciens de la Terre (1989), and the 1993 Whitney Biennial (New York) also favoured postconceptual installations that were socially engaged in both their content and participatory format—a type of practice that Bourriard associated with relational art.

The best known and most globally orientated of these groundbreaking exhibitions, Magiciens de la Terre, had a high indigenous and non-Western content and particularly inspired Bourriaud. While widely condemned as an act of neocolonialism by many Western critics and even some of the Western artists participating in it, Bourriaud was one of the few at the time to recognise its groundbreaking nature. He was particularly struck by the exhibition’s challenge to accepted categories of art and criticism: “For the first time in a long while, a curator has forced us to rethink art in time and space, re-examine our values and our understanding of the word ‘art’”.5 If, said Bourriaud, “it is an exhibition whose ‘directions for use’ are still to be found”, he saw in it an outline of things to come.

Bourriaud was most intrigued by the exhibition’s intercultural openings: “One couldn’t help noticing a number of tentative dialogues that were cut short, especially at La Villette: between Merz and Nera Jambruk (Papua) or between Richard Long and the Australian Aborigines.”6 Amongst the “discoveries” he listed “the installation of Yong Ping Huang… and Bodys Kingelez, a postmodern from Zaire”. Huang’s installation included mounds of pulp made from newsprint and books “run through a washing machine”, including two pulped books ceremoniously placed in a wooden box, titled The history of Chinese art and the History of Western art put into a washing machine for two minutes.7 Bourriaud would become increasingly interested in such “planetary negotiations” and “discussions between agents from different cultures”, and art that “can only be polyglot”.8 However, despite his interest in the expanded ground of contemporary art, he never developed an interest in the relational agency of indigenous art. This was the first lesson of contemporary art. Indigenous artists cannot rely on either an epochal change that seemingly brings them into the fold, or perceptive Western critics to get them what they want. They have to go out and get it themselves.

NARRATING THE MASTER NARRATIVE OF THE CONTEMPORARY: There is no point having a seat at the table if you can’t speak the language, narrate the narrative, or dance the dance. As critics have been telling us for some time, there is a new way of doing things and it’s called “the contemporary”. The contemporary rules. It is the grand narrative of our time by force of its sheer presence in artworld discourse. This means that the term “contemporary art” is no longer just a descriptive term that signifies the totality of works being produced today, but as Terry Smith was the first to argue, a fundamentally new condition.9 In the latest book attempting to get hold of the meaning of “the contemporary” in contemporary art, the English philosopher Peter Osborne argues that the contemporary has become a critical term, and more than this, a mindset, ideal or what he calls a “fiction”. This fiction is the ideology of our time.

Osborne’s underlying point is that the concept of the ‘contemporary’ has acquired the ‘historical-ontological’ significance that the ‘modern’ had for most of the twentieth century, thus usurping its former paradigmatic function. The notion of contemporaneity is shaping our sense of being in the twenty-first century, just as the concept of the modern did in the twentieth century. It is not just a new fashion or yet another avantgarde “ism”, but a whole new set of rules that, according to Osborne, have profound consequences for the ways in which we experience the world.

This is because they fundamentally alter our a priori intuitions of space and time. What are these rules?

Modern temporality, says Osborne, is “inherently self-surpassing”, eternally transient and futurist, whereas contemporary temporality is eternally present, meaning that, as in Aboriginal Dreaming, there is a “fictive co-presentness of a multiplicity of times”. Osborne aptly calls it a “disjunctive unity”, which, he says, “considerably complicates the question of periodisation”, imposing “a constantly shifting periodising dynamic”.

“When the present begins… has very different answers depending upon where [and I would add what] you are thinking from, geopolitically”.10 This disjunctive unity of contemporary temporality is also a characteristic of its spatiality. What was formerly incommensurable in the modern—the old and new, Western and non-Western, centre and periphery (and one could add other oppositions such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual) —enter new productive relations in the contemporary as we slip more easily between these categories.

Thus to be contemporary is to inhabit a temporality and spatiality that is foreign to that of the modern. Modern epistemology fashions difference in a series of oppositions—the new and the old, the West and the rest—which it resolves dialectically and in such a way that modernisation is always associated with Westernisation. On the other hand, the ‘disjunctive’ logic of the contemporary sets in play relational systems that are dialogical rather than binary or dialectical. Osborne aptly called it a “de-bordering”.11 Difference has not been annulled but its borders have been opened, so that we can now travel, like Bell did in The Dinner Party, as if through a wormhole to other worlds, and do it without leaving our own. In this apparently quantum state of contemporaneity, we can simultaneously be in not just multiple places, but also multiple time zones. Today even the long dead, even those condemned as living fossils of the Stone Age, can be contemporary.

However, this new, very ecumenical condition of the contemporary does not guarantee everyone, let alone indigenous artists, a seat at the table. While Smith is sympathetic to indigenous art, like most critics of contemporary art Osborne isn’t. He only admits them on very strict terms. While he recognises the inherent intercultural transnational space of contemporary art, he interprets it in Western-centric terms. Using Charles Merewether’s 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact as his example, Osborne claims, with some justification, that “the more successful an artist, the less likely they are to live and work in their country of origin, or indeed in any single place”, and that their movement is “overwhelmingly ‘inwards’, from the periphery to Europe… and New York”. While he thus acknowledges a striking feature of contemporary art—the role of nonWestern artists in its formation—he describes a space in which the old provincialism model of Western hegemony prevails, even if in a more (neo-) liberal guise. Indigenous artists will recognise in Osborne’s analysis a familiar scene—one reminiscent of the dinner conversation in Bell’s The Dinner Party: [I]t is precisely displaced postcolonial subjects who can most successfully represent themselves as “native”. The native itself, on the other hand, (in so far as the term retains a meaningful referent in such an interconnected world) can acquire its status as ‘informant’ only by being represented as such, by others, within international cultural spaces.12 This is the entirety of what Osborne has to say about the contemporary indigenous artist. If this doesn’t seem of much use to indigenous artists, it does map a discourse that they need to contest. Otherwise, indigenous art will be just as effectively excluded from the contemporary as it was from the modern.

In the current state of play there is no guarantee that indigenous artists will get what they want. Indigenous contemporary art might, like so many phenomenally popular art movements of the past, be a passing fad with no future. In privileging intercultural relations, the contemporary is a platform for the global trajectories of the most local traditions. However, this platform is a contested space that indigenous artists need to seize in order to get what they want.

THE CONTESTED CONTEMPORARY: If the contemporary provides openings to non-Western artists, including indigenous ones, the latter have had only limited success within its regime.

This is not the case with Asian, African and South American artists, who enjoy an increasing presence in European and American contemporary art museums. For example, in 2002 the Tate began establishing special committees to collect art outside Europe and the USA. Beginning with Latin America, it has since turned its attention to the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, and Africa. Elvira Dyangani Ose, appointed to the position of Curator International Art at Tate Modern to lead its interest in African art, said: “It is important for African art to be part of a major international narrative… we need to tell the whole story of modernity.”13 However, indigenous art has only come into view for the Tate tangentially through its interest in African contemporary art.

Tate Modern has shown no curiosity in indigenous contemporary art more generally, which in London remains the province of the British Museum.

Given the new internationalism, why has indigenous art, especially Australian indigenous art, which enjoys a reasonably high profile, had difficulty being accepted as contemporary art?

One obvious reason is the relatively unique indigenous experiences of decolonisation and its specific forms of postcolonial modernities. Osborne cites the importance of post-war anti-colonial struggles in the emerging geopolitical space of globalisation that is a defining feature of “the contemporary”. However, while indigenous artists did participate in the anti-colonial struggles of the post-war period, unlike other colonised groups they never achieved independence through the accepted political institutions of modernity associated with the nation-State.

They effectively remain a colonised people burdened by struggles for land, power and identity—struggles that seem, in Osborne’s terms, more modern than contemporary. How does one fight for land in an age of deterritorialisation, for the right to be a nation in a post-national world, and the

right for an autonomous identity at a time when identity politics has been discredited by the new regime of the contemporary? Condemned to being primitives in a modern world, now they seem condemned to being moderns in a contemporary world. Indeed, the artworld success of indigenous art in Australia would appear to rest more on the tropes of the modern than the contemporary. How did this happen to an art movement that for a brief moment in the 1980s fascinated artists, critics and curators searching for a way out of the endgames of modernism, and which in many ways presaged the relational art of the 1990s in its collectivist production, political content and installation format?

Postconceptual paradigms were first applied to Aboriginal art when three collaborative Papunya Tula paintings were included in the inaugural Australian Perspecta 1981: A Biennial Survey of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.14 The Papunya Tula art collective formed in 1972 as an expression of rising indigenous activism across the country (i.e. as part of the global anti-colonial struggle).

Early art criticism of Papunya Tula art focused on its political engagement and conceptualism rather than its formalist credentials. This focus in the reception of indigenous Australian art continued throughout the 1980s, most evident in the acclaim given to the Aboriginal Memorial (1988), which honoured Aborigines killed during the first two hundred years of colonisation.

First exhibited at the 1988 Biennale of Sydney, The Aboriginal Memorial met all the criteria of relational and contemporary art more generally: social-political content, disjunctive temporality, the re-fashioning of local traditions to global contexts (in this case the history of colonisation in Australia), installation format, collectivist and intercultural production and postconceptual form. Interestingly, Smith published an extensive analysis of The Aboriginal Memorial in 2001, at the very moment that he first began arguing for the emerging ontological significance of the term “contemporary”.15

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If the Australian artworld reception of indigenous art generally operated in a postconceptual field during the 1980s (Osborne thesis is that contemporary art is by definition postconceptual), as it gained the attention of the wider world during the late 1980s, more easily digestible signifiers of modernism (individual genius, abstract art, sublime aura) came into play. This was exemplified by the curatorial discovery in the early 1990s of individual stars such as Emily Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas. Their work met all the criteria of late modernism: large abstract painting by a very singular genius, the aura of its vibrant formalism becoming the object of private contemplation and existential awe. Ironically, in the new order of the contemporary, the very aesthetic magnificence of these abstract paintings had lost currency.

The curatorial turn to outmoded paradigms of modernism in the exhibition of indigenous art occurred at the very moment that relational art—which defined itself against the aesthetic nuance and individualism of modernism—began to capture the imagination of contemporary art curators. Thus while Australian indigenous art became a market and institutional success in the 1990s, curators of the burgeoning global art biennale phenomenon largely ignored it (except in Australia). To them it seemed more like an earlier modernism than contemporary art. This also masked the extent of continuing relational or postconceptual practices in indigenous art, thereby missing important aspects of indigenous contemporary art production and meaning.

The assimilation of indigenous art into the conventional—i.e. modernist museological paradigms that still largely reign in Australia’s art museums—occurred under the watch of newly appointed indigenous art curators. However, there was a payoff. Indigenous artists gained an inside run in the Australian artworld. Given that they comprise only two percent of the population, and judging by their market share, artworld discourse, media attention, appointment of indigenous curators, galleries devoted to indigenous art at State art galleries, special art prizes and funding opportunities, it could be concluded that in Australia at least they had gained a bigger slice than any other group, and by a long shot. The large exhibition of Australian art due to open at London’s Royal Academy in September 2013 will even begin with a special room devoted to indigenous art, “because”, said Ron Radford, Director of the NGA and closely involved in organising the exhibition—“it was here first”. “When they [the British audience] come in first”, he said, “they’ll see Aboriginal art, and that will shock them”.16 Shock them, I presume, because outside of Australia indigenous art has largely failed to penetrate the contemporary art world.

My sense is that Radford’s curatorial strategy, while well meaning, will simply confirm existing prejudices.

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Excess in the local does not compensate for lack in the global. Indeed, here it would seem a symptom of this larger lack. Indigenous art’s inside run in the Australian artworld is on the condition that it is indigenous art, as if in Australia it has a privileged place in a discourse of multiculturalism rather than contemporary art. It is only allowed to speak to the latter in the guise of indigeneity. This would appear to be the case at the upcoming Royal Academy exhibition. Judging by media reports, after the room of Aboriginal art “the show will be laid out as a chronological journey through the different art movements in Australia over the past two centuries”, through to “leading twentieth-century century artists like Arthur Boyd, Rosalie Gascoigne and Fred Williams, and end in the twenty-first century with international recognised artists such as Bill Henson and Shaun Gladwell”.17 If that sounds familiar, so will this—the newspaper report that I have just quoted from mentions the names of seven non-Aboriginal artists to be included in the exhibition, but not one Aboriginal artist.

The shock here is not so much the familiar chronology of Western art or the equally familiar separation of indigenous and Western art and the anonymity of the indigenous artist, but what this exhibition (as reported in The Canberra Times) of a national art signifies in the current discourse of the contemporary. It creates two impressions: that in Australia the old formulas of nationalism, identity politics and modernism reign, and that the triumph of Aboriginal art in Australia is to be understood within these terms.

No wonder that curators of contemporary art outside of Australia continue to ignore it.

IS THERE AN INDIGENOUS FUTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ART?: The modern and the contemporary share at least one thing: each dismisses the notion of indigeneity. However, each does it for different reasons and to very different purposes. Indigeneity is not in the lexicon of those remote artists working in the frame of Dreaming who initiated the so-called Aboriginal contemporary art movement. Rather, indigeneity is a concept of identity derived from concepts of race, ethnicity and nationhood developed in the modern European era. Here indigeneity took the form of the ‘primitive’, the anti-modern and the anti-Western. Thus within the negative dialectics of modernism it provided a platform from which to articulate a resistant politics and poetics. Hence it would be wrong to say that indigeneity is not an indigenous concept just because it is an ideology of the modern; rather indigenous activists made it an important sign of indigenous modernity. However, if indigeneity had a use in modernism’s negative dialectics as a site of resistance, in “the contemporary” its place, like that of the local in general, is much more ambivalent.

In the regime of “the contemporary”, indigeneity meets the same fate of all identity formations: the borders in which the modern had circumscribed and delimited them collapse. Hence, while the disjunctive temporality (and spatiality) of Dreaming and its postconceptual-like poetics should be enough to give those indigenous artists who still think according to it precepts a voice in the discourse of the contemporary, this is prohibited by the reception of their art within the frame of indigeneity.

Artists, curators and critics who largely articulate the discourse and reception of indigenous art are responsible for giving life to the concept of indigeneity. However, since about 1990 a large number of artists normally excluded from the contemporary artworld by the ethnic politics of multiculturalism, such as ‘post-black’ artists like Glen Ligon and Kara Walker in the United States of America,18 and post-Aboriginal artists like Gordon Bennett in Australia, have been deconstructing such essentialist formulations of identity—be they white, black or whatever. This did not erase ideas of indigeneity or ethnicity but it did transform them into a postconceptual discourse. In this way the burden of indigeneity acquired a contemporaneous intercultural edge. Many urban-based indigenous artists have followed suit and as a result been moderately successful in the contemporary art world, though the most successful, Tracey Moffatt, simply stepped outside the box—disavowing (or erasing) the concept of indigeneity altogether. It was a good career move but one that acquiesces to rather than contests the Western worldview that is still virulent in the

Pages 166-67 and 170-71: Richard Bell, The Dinner Party (digital video stills), 2013 Page 168: Vernon Ah Kee, stop that Black Cunt (after Andrew Johns 2010), 2011 Opposite: Vernon Ah Kee, #15 from the Hallmarks of the Hungry series, 2012 Photos courtesy the artists and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

discourse of contemporary art. As Bell has argued, being indigenous is not a prerequisite to making indigenous art.19 Nor are indigenous artists required to make indigenous art. Likewise being Australian is not a prerequisite to making Australian art, and nor are Australians required to make it. Who aspires to make Australian art these days? Such identity categories are no longer fixed boundaries that can’t be crossed, but temporary meeting places in which to build conversations, make relations or, as Bell does, make trouble. As Bell demonstrates in his art, indigeneity, like any idea, can only be contemporary through how it is made to be here, now, in the crossroads of contemporaneous traditions. What it means will not be found in the essentialisms of former times, but in the moment as its meaning is remade at every crossing, with every iteration. When indigenous artists realise this, they might, like Bell, start getting what they want.

Notes 1 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann eds, Robert HullotKentor trans., London: The Athlone Press, 1997: 8 2 Boris Groys, ‘Boris Groys in Conversation with John-Paul Stonard’, Immediations: The research journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, 1/4, 2007, 3-19: 14 3

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London: Verso, 2013: 163

4

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les presses du réel, 2001: 11-14

5

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Magiciens De La Terre’, Flash Art 148, 1989: 119-121, 120

6

ibid.

7

ibid: 120-21

8

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Altermodern Manifesto’, London: Tate 2009; seehttp://www.tate.org.uk/ britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm 9 Smith first sketched his argument in 2001: What is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity and Art to Come, Sydney: Artspace Visual Art Centre 2001. For his most complete account see Contemporary Art: World Currents, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011 10

Osborne, op cit: 24-25

11

ibid: 28

12

ibid: 164

13

Quoted in Charlotte Higgens, ‘Tate Opens the Door to Africa’, The Guardian, 2 November, 2011; see http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/01/tate-africa-contemporary-art

14

Bernice Murphy, Australian Perspecta 1981, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1981

15

Terry Smith, ‘Public Art between Cultures: The Aboriginal Memorial, Aboriginality, and Nationality in Australia’, Critical Inquiry 27/4, Summer, 2001 16

Quoted in Sally Pryor, ‘London Calling for the Width and Breadth of Australian Art Treasures’, Canberra Times, 28 June, 2013; see http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/london-callingfor-the-width-and-breadth-of-australian-art-treasures-20130627-2p0aj.html#ixzz2XSkykyZJ 17

ibid.

18

Thelma Golden, Freestyle, New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001

19

Richard Bell, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art It’s a White Thing’, in Robert Leonard (ed.), Richard Bell: Positivity, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2007: 27-32

<<Besiege Wei to rescue Zhao>>: a strategem towards a post-critical art Part 1

PAUL GLADSTON The histories of modern and contemporary art have been punctuated by recurring bouts of crisis thinking. Such thinking has been associated strongly (though by no means exclusively) with political discourses on the left where art has been presented more or less consistently under the durable influence of Marxist-Hegelian thought, either as a reactionary impediment or radical contribution to progressive social change set against a perceived background of historically formative divisions and conflicts in the socio-economic sphere. Examples of crisis thinking in relation to the development of modern and contemporary art include Dada’s politicised repudiation of aesthetic autonomy, the (largely one-sided) contretemps between André Breton and Georges Bataille over interpretations of materialism, Peter Bürger’s highly influential critique of the avant-garde and more recently, John Roberts’ Marxian upbraiding of post-structuralism and the politics of identity.

During the late 1980s and 1990s crisis thinking in relation to modern and contemporary art gave way to the rather more oblique nonrational critical outlooks and strategies of postmodernism. These outlooks and strategies significantly problematised the rationalist oppositional thinking which underpins Marxist-Hegelian influenced crisis thinking by upholding a highly pluralistic and shifting view of art’s value as a contributor to social change, not least as part of a dominant post-colonialism and identity politics. Their tendency towards the blunting of opposition

also coincided with and effectively supported (albeit unintentionally) a resurgent consensus-seeking neo-liberalism and its far-reaching suppression of disagreement and contradiction in the public sphere. Since the global financial crisis of 2008 there has, however, been a conspicuous return to the oppositional thinking which preceded postmodernism as part of a revival of interest in Marxian cultural analysis and related conceptions of radical democracy.

In this two-part essay I shall examine the recent revival of interest in Marxian cultural analysis and radical democracy critically as part of the mapping of a wider history of oppositional crisis thinking in relation to modern and contemporary art. In part one I shall argue that crisis thinking in relation to modern and contemporary art involves what are ultimately unresolvable shuttlings between differing conceptions of art’s optimum critical distancing from or proximity to society; shuttlings still very much at the heart of current neo-Marxian cultural debates, as well as attempts to align contemporary art with radical antagonistic democracy. In part two I shall attempt to look beyond conventional Western(ised) conceptions of art’s critical distancing from or proximity to society by examining the rather less clearly defined positioning of contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China. I shall conclude by arguing that contemporary art in the PRC holds out critical possibilities that have not only been overlooked or significantly downplayed in post-Enlightenment Westernised contexts but that also have the potential to resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-liberalism as well as the profound relativities of contemporary globalised society.

The term “crisis” was first used during the early fifteenth century in relation to medical practice as a latinised form of the Greek “krisis”, “a pivotal moment in the progress of a disease”. The latinised form also has a relationship to the Greek “krinien”, “to separate, decide or judge”, which derives from the root “krei”, “to sieve, discriminate or judge”, as well as “krinesthai”, “to explain”. The use of the latinised term crisis in non-medical contexts first took place during the seventeenth century, since when it has been understood to signify sudden losses of confidence, times of disagreement, confusion or suffering and extremely difficult or dangerous points in a situation.

Instances of marked stylistic disaffinity in the Western visual arts can be traced back at least as far as the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic during the early twelfth century. Crisis thinking in relation to the visual arts did not emerge in any readily recognisable sense however, until the nineteenth century. Following Immanuel Kant’s seminal identification of aesthetic judgment as a locus of mediation between the otherwise distinct spheres of practical and moral reason at the end of the eighteenth century—a vision that strongly informed the emergence of the sublime as a dominant aesthetic in European and North American high art during the early nineteenth century1—art became increasingly established as a focus for critical thinking and feeling in support of modernising social change.

As Jürgen Habermas has observed, the establishing of art as a critical other to society as part of the public sphere thus became a fundamental aspect of modernist thinking, superseding its traditional function as a largely occult adjunct to religious and aristocratic ritual.2

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During the mid-nineteenth century, art’s perceived function as a critical other to society became closely associated with Marxist-Hegelian influenced political thinking on the left, which considered divisions in the socioeconomic base a fundamental engine of progressive social change. Against this background, art came to be viewed as a site of superstructural struggle between reactionary and progressive cultural attitudes and therefore an index of wider, historically formative socio-economic conflicts and crises.

For more sophisticated Marxian socialists it also came to be viewed as a potentially active contributor to those conflicts and crises.

Within the contemporary international art world there is a continuing assumption that art has the potential to act in support of progressive social change. This assumption strongly underpins post-colonialist as well as other forms of art rooted in the dominant emancipatory discourses of identity politics. As such, it extends not only to those Westernised contexts that fomented the initial development of critical thinking and practice associated with modernism and postmodernism, but also to contexts where recent entry into modernity has engendered contemporary thinking and practice that diverges from and/or hybridises established modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. The former grouping includes First World (European and American) sites in which modernity —that is to say, industrial capitalism and urbanism—first emerged during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as others that became implicated in modernity/postmodernity through the spread of Western colonialist/imperialist influence. The latter enfolds sites in the Second and Third worlds whose relationship to Western(ised) capitalist/industrialist (post)modernity has only developed solidly in recent decades as part of the processes of globalisation.3 CRITICAL DISTANCE AND THE AVANT-GARDES: In Western(ised) contexts much of the recurrent crisis thinking relating to modern and contemporary art has revolved not just around questions of the supersession of artistic means (albeit ones that have in more recent decades been informed by the uncertain temporalities of poststructuralist thinking), but also, crucially, of art’s critical distancing from or proximity to society —both of which are crucial to Western(ised) conceptions of avant-gardism and post avant-gardism as well as more general notions of artistic criticality.

The first recorded use of the term “avant-garde”, in its accepted cultural rather than military sense, was by the Saint-Simonian social reformer Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues, who in his essay ‘L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel’, (‘The artist, the scientist and the industrialist’) (1825) argues for an advance guard in the arts to clear the way for wider social, economic and political reform. However, it is not until the middle part of the nineteenth century in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848 that the first recognisably avant-garde tendencies within the visual arts first began to manifest themselves.

At the forefront of this development was the critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, who in his writings on art first championed Eugène Delacroix and then Edouard Manet as exemplary painters of their time.

Baudelaire’s coining of the term “modernité” (modernity) to signify the experience of modern metropolitan life as a series of fleeting ‘just nows’ as well as his injunction that the artist-flâneur should seek to represent the ephemeral state of urbanised modernity, rather than a mythical or historical past became key aspects of a Western modernist understanding of progressive avant-garde artistic practice.4 Another major influence on the development of European avant-garde art during the mid-nineteenth century was Gustave Courbet whose rejection of the established conventions of neo-classical and romantic academicism in favour of an earthy combination of allegory and social realism in paintings such as A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) and The Artist’s Studio: a Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life (1855), combined with his openly libertarian life-style and direct engagement with revolutionary politics (not least through his membership of the Paris Commune in 1871), first gave practical definition to the idea of the modern bohemian artist.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century the term avant-garde became associated increasingly with the idea, as expressed by Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, Théophile Gautier and others, of “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake). The conception of ‘true’ art as an autotelic medium—that is to say, one separated from any moral, didactic or utilitarian function—as well as a commensurate testing of art’s established technical, and stylistic limits, first manifested itself as a basis for collective artistic practice during the second half of the nineteenth century through the work of European and North American artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement.

The Aesthetic Movement’s rejection of any moral, didactic and/or utilitarian function for art, did not, as it might first appear, also involve an outright dismissal of art’s critical/political significance. Rather, it was an attempt to secure the position of art as a locus of free cultural expression beyond any moral, conceptual and practical constraints and therefore, as the marker of a wider conception of social autonomy and the self-actuating individual.

Later, the traces of this tendency towards libertarian aestheticism and subjective agency would manifest themselves not only in relation to the highly variegated formal experimentation of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, but also the preoccupation with formal abstraction which became a principal focus for the visual arts as part of high modernism from the early to the middle part of the twentieth century.

Today, it is usual to divide avant-garde visual art of the early to mid-twentieth century into two broadly divergent, though to some extent overlapping, streams: first, the ‘aesthetic’ avant-garde, who saw the progressive development of visual art practice under modernism in formalist-specialist terms as a move towards increasing abstraction; and second, the ‘politicised’ avant-garde, who sought to bring about progressive social change through a critical engagement with/immersion in everyday life. The first of these streams—which remained culturally dominant within North America and liberal-democratic capitalist Europe throughout much of the twentieth century—is strongly associated with the writings of the critic Clement Greenberg. In his early writings, Greenberg argues that a truly avant-garde art is the product of progressive post-Enlightenment critical thinking, and that, as such, it should be distinguished from the regressive kitsch of socialist realism under totalitarian communism and of modern consumer culture under free-market capitalism.5 Later, Greenberg would go on to argue that modernist abstraction in the visual arts is the necessary outcome of a rational process of specialisation arising as part of the division of reason, practicality and aesthetic judgment set out by Kant as a basis for critical modernity at the end of the eighteenth century.6

The second stream in question is that associated with the artistic use of collage-montage and associated techniques such as the readymade.

As Bürger indicates, the use of collage-montage—which involves the excision (collage) of everyday objects, images and/or texts from their usual settings and the remounting (montage) of those objects, images and/or texts within novel artistic contexts—can be understood from a Marxian dialectical-materialist perspective as an attempt to sublate artistic practice within the life-world and in doing so to bring about a critical-oppositional reworking of the means-end rationality of the latter as part of industrialised modernity along the more playful lines of the former.7 The resulting undecidability of the artwork can also be understood to act as a locus for the immanent disruption of authoritative meanings;8 a significant consequence of which is the unsettling of works of art not only as a means of realistic representation but also as a source of categorical aesthetic experience (hence the Dadaist use of the term “anti-art”).

In addition to the division between aesthetic and politicised avant-gardes, it has also become usual, following Bürger, to further divide the twentieth century avant-gardes into two historical blocs: the “historical avant-garde” (HAG), which is generally understood to run from the 1890s through to the 1940s; and the “neo avant-garde” (NAG), including groups and movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus, Situationism and Conceptualism, which succeeded the HAG in the aftermath of World War II, before becoming a recognised part of the initial shift towards postmodernist sensibilities during the 1960s and 1970s.9

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The development of avant-garde art since the mid-nineteenth century is therefore a highly complex one involving an interweaving of successive realist, aestheticist and anti-aestheticist/anti-realist tendencies. Moreover, those tendencies can be divided still further between differing ideological positions; not only bourgeois-liberal (evolutionary) principles associated with the development of abstract art and Marxist (revolutionary) principles associated with the work of the politicised avant-garde, but also, as Benjamin10 and Trotsky, Breton and Rivera11 acknowledge, leanings towards the far right espoused by, among others, the Italian Futurists and the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl.

From the late 1950s onwards, visual artists and curators of visual art at the forefront of the Western (that is to say, European and North American) NAG began to embrace a socially and politically engaged view of the possibilities of artistic production as a critical resistance to the then institutionally dominant formalist/masculinist concerns of Greenbergian high modernism.12 In doing so, they progressively abandoned the grand Marxist and bourgeois-liberal abstractions that had once informed the thinking of the Western HAG in favour of a rather more focused micropolitical involvement with socialised constructions of the self and social relations of dominance. What is more, a similar shift in attitudes can also be understood to have taken place at more or less the same time among radicalised non-Western artists and curators who had by then appropriated collage-montage techniques associated with the Western avant-gardes as part of their own practice and who had begun to deploy those techniques as a means of actively resisting the assumed hegemony not only of Western high modernism, but also its underlying adherence to Western colonialist/ imperialist relations of dominance.13

In the wake of the failure of the European uprisings of 1968, there were also the beginnings of a pronounced shift towards self-reflexive criticism of modernist precepts as part of the theorising of art. A key aspect of this shift was a far-reaching Marxian critique of the avant-gardes.

As previously indicated, the work of the early twentieth-century HAG can be understood as an attempt to bring about a critical-oppositional reworking of the means-end rationality of the life-world along the more playful lines of art. By the mid-1960s however, argues Bürger,14 this critical project had been severely compromised by the NAG’s repetitious, self-negating use of collage-montage techniques, as well as the recuperation of those techniques by mainstream Western(ised) culture and the international art market.

Such thinking was powerfully reinforced by postmodernism, which during the 1980s rejected the critical-oppositional stance adopted by the HAG and NAG in favour of a post-structuralist view of the deconstructive possibilities of collage-montage (e.g. Rosalind Krauss)15.

This postmodernist perspective was developed still further during the 1990s by members of the October group, including Hal Foster, who argue that while the dialectical positioning of the HAG and NAG is now effectively redundant, the characteristic techniques of the avant-garde have nevertheless eluded wholesale recuperation by mainstream society as a result of their openness to the continual possibility of deconstructive (negative-productive) re-contextualisation and re-motivation in the face of changing circumstances of time and place.16

The common denominator which joins all of these differing positions is a shared preoccupation with the establishing of some sort of optimum critical distance between art and society. Even Foster’s vision of an uncertainly positioned and shifting post avant-garde remains in thrall to that preoccupation. By conceiving of a self-deconstructing avant-garde, Foster does not so much abolish the question of critical distance as open it up to multiple and changing responses in respect of unfolding differences in time, place and historical outlook. The critical positioning of art is thereby left open to further speculation on what might be thought of as a case-bycase basis.

ANTAGONISTIC AESTHETICS AND THE NEO-MARXIAN TURN: Marxian conceptions of the social-critical function of art were throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s heavily marginalised by postmodernist and related post-colonialist discourses which not only brought into question the fundamentally idealist millenarian outlook of Hegelian Marxism and its attendant truth claims, but also Marxism’s preoccupation with class inequality and conflict as a defining cause of historical change above all other forms of social difference. With the critical suspension of these defining principles of Marxian thought, art’s previously perceived status as a vehicle for avant-gardist intervention gave way to the now familiar multifaceted differentiations of identity politics.

In recent years, however, a new round of crisis thinking has emerged that seeks to readdress questions of art’s critical engagement with society. This new round of thinking, which has gained significant public momentum since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, is a distinctly pluralistic affair involving ‘neo’ as well as what might be described as radical ‘post’ Marxian visions of art’s social-critical function set alongside other rather less politically focused notions of a harmonising relational engagement between art and society. It is possible to interpret these differing perspectives as attempts to go beyond the paralysing complicity of postmodernism with consensual neo-liberalism by reasserting the value of discursive negativity as a necessary aspect of social progress. In all cases there is nevertheless an acceptance of the fundamentally complex and decentred nature of contemporary globalised societies as well as the profound inequities of late capitalism.

The first signs of a newly configured discontent with the hegemony of postmodernism/post-colonialism in the arts outside the residual grumblings of old-school Marxists (such as the British critic John Roberts) began to emerge around the turn of the new millennium. A major index of this emerging discontent is Nicolas Bourriaud’s conception of “relational aesthetics” which takes to task a still largely gallery-based postmodernist art for its failure to engage directly with society. At the core of Bourriaud’s thinking is not only an upbraiding of practices associated with postmodernism for their supposed lack of direct social engagement outside the gallery space, but also the positing of an actively engaged art which, as Claire Bishop has indicated, is intended as a locus for collective acts of social transformation and community building.17

Since the late 1990s variations on Bourriaud’s conception have become a staple of the international art world spawning countless supposedly socially engaged ‘relational’ artworks and happenings which overwrite and complicate a continuing Westernised cultural preoccupation with performative assertions of de-centred subjectivity as a source of critical resistance to authority. If the art world dominant of the late 1970s and early 1980s was the deconstructive neo-Dadaism of postmodernism (a position reaffirmed by Foster’s rethinking of avant-gardism in the late 1990s) and that of the late 1980s and 1990s the extension of deconstructive postmodernism as part of post-colonialist art, then their successor during the late 1990s and into the new millennium has been an art of community which has sought social change on the basis of immanent involvement rather than dialectical opposition or deconstructive displacement.

The reasons for the global success of “relational aesthetics” are perhaps not too far to seek. As what might be described as a hangover from the 1960s and early 1970s counter-culture sieved through the mesh of thirdspace identity politics, relational aesthetics has had a seemingly endless appeal to a network society literate generation, whose brand of political consciousness resides expressly not in critical negativity, conflict and crisis but in positive assertions of participatory choice and transparency.

For others, however, thinking and practice associated with relational aesthetics has proved itself to be thoroughly problematic.

As Claire Bishop has argued, the form of social engagement which relational aesthetics promotes is a highly consensual one that rather than challenging the prevailing social status quo, effectively parallels and reaffirms the recuperative effects of dominant neo-liberalism (an accusation that could just as easily be levelled at aspects of the post-May 1968 counter culture, not

least its eventual integration with global business). Bishop’s own response to the latent conservatism/idealism of relational aesthetics has been to draw attention to relationally ‘antagonistic’ art works which, she argues, can be understood to uphold some sort of critical gap between art and society, including a number of distinctly alienating works by Santiago Sierra, such as Workers Who Cannot be Paid (2000) and Wall Enclosing a Space (2003), where distancing between viewers and the social inequalities to which the artworks refer (e.g. differences related to homelessness and social mobility) are rigorously maintained. Bishop seeks to theorise her argument with reference to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s seminal formulation of a radical antagonistic democracy,18 which she suggests goes some way to addressing inescapable tensions between the profoundly de-centred subjectivities identified by post-structuralism and the continuing desire for a politicised sense of community—tensions at the very heart, she observes, of contemporary installation art.19

Alongside Bishop’s attacks on the latent neo-liberalism of relational aesthetics, there has also been a high-profile revisiting of Marxian arguments surrounding the social-critical function of art in the form of the joining of the Badiou-Rancière debate, as well as a renewed interest in Situationism focused on, among other things, the phenomenon of graffiti and street art. A full analysis of these complex and often highly philosophical debates and discussions lies outside the scope of this article.

However, the gist revolves, as it invariably does in relation to a Marxianinfluenced aesthetics, around questions of the ‘evental’ nature of art as a means of acting outside the suppressive spectacle of capitalism and its attendant social structures. The perceived role of art in relation to Marxian revolutionary politics has remained an inconclusively contested one, with Badiou maintaining significant doubts over art’s capacity to act as a genuine locus of radical social change and Rancière continuing to affirm its emancipatory possibilities.20

What all of these current debates surrounding the social-critical function of art, and in particular those involving a revisiting of Marxian thought, have in common is not only their continuing sense of crisis in relation to the development of contemporary art but also the positing of that crisis in fundamentally spatialised terms. For Bishop the principal difficulty with relational aesthetics resides precisely in its failure to sustain a necessary critical distance from society, albeit one of multiple and shifting subjectivities in the wake of the lessons of post-structuralism/postmodernism. For Badiou and Rancière the prognosis is similar insofar as it involves questions of art’s ability to distance itself from a disabling entanglement with dominant and inherently dissembling neo-liberal discourses.

Ultimately this continuing spatialisation stems from the division of art from society, which took place as part of the establishment of Western post-Enlightenment discourse. Within the context of that discourse all debates relating to the critical function of art have fixated on art’s closeness or distance from society. What has persisted is an unresolved, and in the final analysis unresolvable set of shuttlings between social engagement and disengagement with a critically detached art being open to accusations of elitism or irrelevance and a critically engaged interventionist art of recuperative complicity—over which also hover fundamental questions of where the limits between art and non-art might effectively lie. To move one way invites convincing arguments from the point of view of the other with no certainty in either case of grounds for an optimum distancing. Seen in this light Bishop’s argument is little more than a variation on the aesthetic distancing posited at the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction to academicism’s perceived complicity with the reactionary forces of tradition, and the Badiou-Ranciere debate as a philosophically nuanced revisiting of earlier and unresolved conflicts between crude and Trotskyite Marxism.

But what if we began to think of what for many is the unthinkable: the idea of a critically oriented art that is not envisaged on the basis of its distance or proximity to society? Could such an art exist without giving up the fundamental precepts of a critical post-Enlightenment worldview? Giving up those precepts would seem to involve either a return to

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pre-Enlightenment traditionalism or, perhaps worse still, a continuing adherence to the debilitating relativism of postmodernism. The alternative, however, would appear to be continuing entrapment in a double-bind of our own making; one which effectively diffuses the critical potential of art by positing that potential in what are ultimately unresolvable spatial terms.

In part two of this essay I shall attempt to address these questions with reference to highly authoritarian political conditions currently dominant within the People’s Republic of China widely perceived in Western(ised) contexts to be thoroughly antithetical to the post-Enlightenment conception of a critical art. In doing so I shall seek to draw attention to critical strategies that have been developed under circumstances where questions of art’s distance from society have little or no historical relevance, but where a critical art has nevertheless persisted.

Notes 1 See Barabara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980: 34-44 2

Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: an incomplete project’, in New German Critique, 22 Winter, 1981: 3-15

3

Here, the term “modernism” refers to modern forms of cultural thinking and practice that first emerged with the development of industrialised and urbanised societies in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term “postmodernism” refers to a diverse range of cultural/philosophical discourses and practices that first came together within an international context during the late twentieth century and that seek to problematise rationalist-progressive attitudes associated with Western(ised) modernism.

Here, “modernity” refers to economic and social relations associated with the historical shift from traditional agrarian societies to those dominated by industrialisation and urbanisation.

“Postmodernity” refers to complex and dynamic economic and social relations perceived to have arisen as a long-term consequence of modernity and in relation to postmodernism

8

Gregory L. Ulmer, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’ in Hal Foster ed., Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto, 1985: 83-110

9

Peter Bürger, op cit

10

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood eds, Art in Theory, 1900-1990: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1936]: 512-520 11 Leon Trotsky, André Breton and Diego Rivera, ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood eds, Art in Theory, 1900-1990: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1938]: 526-529 12

Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon, ‘Identity Politics in Photography and Performance Art’, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 237-264 13

Brandon Taylor, Art Today, London: Laurence King, 2005

14

Bürger, op cit.

15

Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985

16

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1996

17

Claire Bishop, Installation Art, London: Tate, 2005: 120-123

18 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985 19

Claire Bishop, op cit: 120-123

20

Kristin Ross, ‘Kristin Ross on Jacques Rancière’, Artforum International 45 (7), 2007; http:// artforum.com/inprint/id=12842, accessed 1July 2013

4 Charles Baudelaire,’The Painter of Modern Life’, in J. Mayne trans., The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, London: Phaidon, 1964 [1863]: 12-15 5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood eds, Art in Theory, 1900-1990: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1939]: 529-541 6

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison eds, Modern Art and Modernism: a Critical Anthology, London: Harper and Row, 1982 [1965]: 5-10 7

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984

Page 174: Santiago Sierra, Wall enclosing a space, 2003; Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennale Photo courtesy the artist Page 175: Raoul Hausmann, Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) (Mechanical Head [The Spirit of Our Age], c. 1920 Opposite: Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio: a Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life, 1855 Below: Santiago Sierra, Workers Who Cannot be Paid, 2000 Photos courtesy the artist and (in Australia) Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide

Public practice post disaster: SCAPE 7 Christchurch Biennial

Above: Maddie Leach, If you find the good oil let us know, 2013 Opposite: Fiona Connor, Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash, 2012 Page 183: Rob Hood, Buckets and boxes on poles, 2012 Page 184: Miranda Parkes, Nice to meet you, 2012 Page 185: David Cross, Drift, 2011 All photos courtesy the artists

The 7th iteration of the SCAPE Public Art Christchurch Biennial opens on 27 September this year, running through until 9 November. The major Christchurch earthquakes of 4 September 2010 and then 22 February 2011 twice caused the postponement of the previous biennial—a project that was featured heavily in Broadsheet 39.3, September 2010. SCAPE 6 was eventually realised as a series of individual artist projects in 2011/2012.

Curatorial convener for SCAPE 6—Blair French—continued working with SCAPE as curator for SCAPE 7, which will feature eleven new ambitious temporary public art projects presented alongside two new permanent commissions. Here he provides a brief background to the challenges of developing temporary public art projects in the post-disaster environment of Christchurch, then asks some of the participating artists to reflect on their responses to these challenges.

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BLAIR FRENCH: Development of SCAPE 7 has taken place within an environment of ever-present change and uncertainty across all strata of life and experience in Christchurch. Despite the frequency of my visits to the city in the almost three years since the first major earthquake, I have been constantly taken aback by the degree of visible change in the environment each time, and always reminded of both obvious and less apparent pressures and concerns facing its inhabitants. It has therefore been difficult to develop a framework for SCAPE 7 that seeks out the most productive and sensitive relationship to this situation. Like the participating artists, I have been conscious throughout of SCAPE 7 providing us with a unique challenge, a unique responsibility and a unique opportunity to work within an utterly unique set of circumstances.

One of the key challenges is the rapidity of change in the urban environment and the myriad forces—political, economic, regulatory, social—generating such change. Art in public space is generally approached as being site-specific, as being created in intense dialogue with the particular conditions of a site: both its material form and its social or communal operation. But the conditions of site at both the micro and macro level in Christchurch are volatile. The environments artists might have encountered on site visits to Christchurch and particularly through the cordoned off red zone territory of the inner city in mid-2012 have in many cases been radically altered in the period since; palpable remnants of destruction and demolition for example now literally cleaned away. A key challenge for the artists of SCAPE 7 is therefore to pitch work into a moment, recognising the inevitable transition at play around the work the instant it is revealed to its public. Few cities internationally, perhaps none, could so openly bear the condition of the palimpsest than present-day Christchurch.

Plans for the urban redevelopment of Christchurch—for literally rebuilding a city—are on a scale unprecedented in the region. They command public attention via media and other forums for public debate. SCAPE 7 will inevitably have a role in this discussion and rebuilding process simply via its presence as a process and a material event in the city. And this being the case it need not necessarily, indeed perhaps should not, take on urban redevelopment or models of a future city as its explicit subject. Nor should it limit itself to focusing back upon the recent history of the city as core, or literal, subject of the Biennial. On the contrary, SCAPE can offer Christchurch residents and visitors alike a newly rich and multi-layered experience of a changing city space via a biennial that acknowledges the trauma associated with the city’s recent past; draws attention to the strength of community determination to rebuild a civic home; makes creative, material propositions regarding the future form of the city and the ways in which it might be inhabited; and presents works that fire the imagination of viewers and create moments of beauty, magic and hope.1

With those curatorial ambitions in mind, I’d like to begin by asking some of the artists about their experiences of and opinions regarding key challenges facing them in the development of new public art projects for SCAPE 7. Whatever approach is adopted by an artist—performative, sculptural, participatory etc.—art in public space practice of the current moment is generally considered to be fundamentally site-specific. That is, work is developed and presented in carefully considered relationship to the spatial, environmental and social conditions of a given location. Given the devastating events of the series of Christchurch earthquakes, the rapidity of change in the urban environment and the myriad forces—political, economic, regulatory, social—generating such change, what do you feel have been the particular challenges facing you in developing a work within this context?

ROB HOOD (Christchurch): For me living in Christchurch and experiencing the quakes first hand was initially a feeling of disbelief. The shock and awe of the physical destruction wrought by the disaster and the power and fury of the earthquake itself has been immense. Now it’s about dealing with the post-quake disaster capitalism and all the social upheaval. For me it has been disturbing to witness the social and political havoc wrought on the city’s inhabitants, which is still on-going and will be for years to come.

There are of course the positive aspects of living in a city with First World infrastructure and resources in comparison to Haiti for example. What is most appealing is being part of a community where community initiative can have a strong healing effect—democracy without the bureaucracy.

This has occurred particularly on a local neighbourhood level where people worked stuff out independently of government agencies, sorting issues such as water, food and shelter immediately after the quakes. Later on came community projects such as “greening the waste” and Addington Action Co-op as well as a myriad of other interesting community projects. You can’t avoid these experiences; they are a constant part of daily life even three years after the quake. In terms of generating a temporary work the thinking for me has largely been around trying to inject some humour, some comedy into the public space, bringing a sense of the absurd to the wasteland.

I think humour can be a great way to approach complex subjects such as the earthquakes. It offers multiple angles to tackle an issue and perhaps often offers an easier way in or out. Perhaps it also adds some confusion and antagonism to the mix that is already awash with destruction and confusion.

FIONA CONNOR (Los Angeles/Auckland): It was overwhelming to come to Christchurch and try and think about sculpture. It was very destabilising.

It felt right to develop a work that frames or draws from what was already happening, but maybe that is what I always do. In Christchurch there are so many amazing sculptural propositions happening everywhere. The urge to destabilise or shift things in your work becomes redundant.

SHAUN GLADWELL (London/Sydney): My project has developed in direct response to the devastation in Christchurch. More specifically, the project is inspired by a local response to the (second) earthquake. My key reference and motivation was a YouTube video of local skateboarders riding within the newly transformed environment. I consider my project merely an extension of this local response by skateboarders rather than the autonomous creative projection of an author. The project is site-specific not only in terms of the environmental and social conditions but is also consciously situated within other creative responses to the devastation. If I were to define the project in terms of language usage, then it would be more a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist practice—an acceptance of what was already happening in Christchurch, rather than imposing an idea on the space (that was not somehow generated from pre-existing activity and production).

MIRANDA PARKES (Christchurch): As a painter, the degree to which the site of the work is taken into account varies greatly. Although everything that goes into my mind and eyes feeds into the work, still it is normally created in the studio and presented in galleries. Although studios and galleries themselves are far from neutral, both are purposefully organised spaces, removed to some degree from the messy stuff of life (particularly visually/formally). For a lot of my work I have approached the white cube (in its many current manifestations) as a sort of ubiquitous site for my paintings and created work that operates in relation to the threads of history involved with this space. Since the earthquakes, making work in relation to the gallery backdrop first and foremost has actually felt a little out-of-kilter, as the changes to my home, Christchurch city, have demanded all of my attention. It has been natural for me to want to begin to process and assimilate the affects that the earthquakes have had/are having on my own life and environment more overtly.

These ideas fed into my SCAPE 7 proposal as well and have even helped me to make new links from a personal practice perspective, between living and working here. The political, spatial and social changes of the city I live in have been jumping up and down demanding attention and so it is good to be able to reach into these (to a limited degree) to feed the work, rather than attempting to turn away from them. One of the challenges of the SCAPE project for me is simply in leaving the gallery space behind.

This would be a challenge for a work in public space in any context, however, it is further complicated by the public space of Christchurch being broken, messy and shifting. In order to maintain a formal tension in the work, I felt I needed to take the qualities of framing and isolating that the gallery offers and absorb it into the work, which is why it will take the shape of frames or fields. I also wanted to ask people to slow down and look at what is here. A feeling of being under pressure and in a hurry to resume ‘normal life’ and to get the economy rolling, has pervaded (invaded) the city since straight after the very first earthquake. I feel that the process of recovery and healing should be given its due weight and taken slowly. There can be value in inaction and reflection that has not been recognised.

MADDIE LEACH (Wellington): The challenges for me have been within the framework of SCAPE itself and its ongoing investment (not meaning financial investment per se) in permanent public works or long-term temporary sculptural pieces, and an established history (perhaps ‘mission’) of forming alliances between industry/fabricators/manufacturers and artists. My feeling has been that there is a maintained primacy, or desire, for physical objects and sites that remain fixed in relation to one another.

Despite the lightness and agility of the curatorial concept for this SCAPE, it has been difficult to radically align a project with notions of mobility and the unexpected, for example, within what I might suggest are drivers for conservative pragmatics of placement (within the four avenues, convivial walkable distances etc.) that speak more of a congenial, accommodating mode of ‘art viewing’ from (or for) a previous version of Christchurch.

I’d offer that the other challenge has been how to differentiate our project from the myriad pop-up art works in the locale that SCAPE will also exist in. On my last visit it seemed as though any car park site or vacant street corner might sport an assemblage of some form—again reiterating the presence of objects and materials visibly against backdrops of many others.

The energy of these proliferating projects and responses is no doubt a valid response to a city centre that is being deconstructed around its citizens.

Many seem to be staying in situ indefinitely adding to the competing and complex aesthetics currently at work in the city (buildings coming down new structures going up, open carparks and artworks that reflect a kind of literal-material condition of a city-in-flux). I suggest that SCAPE needs to tackle things differently in order to offer a perspective and alternatives to the growing stream of deposited temporary objects, architectures and community projects. I’ve been reading an essay by Peter Osborne on the relationship between Schlegel’s “Athenaeum Fragments” and Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art”. He quotes a note from Walter Benjamin that says, “It is not that what is past casts light on what is present, or what

is present casts its light on what is past; rather... what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”; that somehow the intelligibility of both history and ‘now’ collide diagrammatically. Jem and I are using this idea to forge an elusive but determined sculptural logic within the arrangement and reach of our project for SCAPE 7.2 DAVID CROSS (Wellington): While the work I am developing is certainly framed in relation to the specific contexts of Christchurch including, but not limited to, the earthquake, it is not site-specifc as such. For instance, it is not formed with a particular venue or location in mind but is more shaped by a number of contexts that pertain to Christchurch, both from the point of view of recent events as well as specific entrenched historical contexts. It is more place-responsive in the sense that it draws on two divergent frameworks (Christchurch’s historical obsession with sport and the seemingly unrelated issue of consistent geological instability since 2011).

The work seeks to utilise the former through the creation of a new sporting activity that will draw together a diverse local audience of participants to perform over the course of SCAPE. The game takes place on an inflated field and is predicated on negotiating an unstable surface to score points. Where unstable ground has been a constant reality for the people of Christchurch who have been forced into negotiating a certain psychological mindset of reactive fear, Level Playing Field attempts to recast the reality of a moving surface as something to be negotiated and overcome.

There have of course been a number of challenges in developing the work partly based on the constant transformation of the Christchurch CBD as building sites become gravel car parks, become new building sites in largely unpredictable ways. This fluidity is extraordinary and immensely difficult to predict which makes the possibility of site-specificty especially difficult. I made the decision fairly early on after visiting the red zone and having the SCAPE project manager explain the near impossibility of being able to secure with any certainty a site twelve months down the track, that the work would need to be able to operate across a range of potential locations. Of course on one level this enforced fluidity is site-specific but the work is certainly shaped as an engagement with Christchurch that could happen in a number of locations across the city. A related issue has been the consenting process. It has taken an eternity to get an exemption from building consent and even at this time of writing the process is not resolved.

Partly this is attributable to an understandable risk aversion but the logjam of building projects that has clogged up Christchurch City Council and resulted in national government intervention has also played a part.

BLAIR FRENCH: Could you perhaps make any comments on your first impressions of the city-post earthquakes when you made site visits in relation to thinking about producing art projects within that environment, and for those already living and working in the city, comment on the issues that seemed most immediate to you in thinking about working as an artist within public space in the city?

ZINA SWANSON (Dunedin/Christchurch): Having been in Christchurch for all the earthquakes and for a significant amount of time after they tapered off, it has been a strange time watching most of the places I would frequent disappear, including all the studios I have ever had—around eight in total.

One of my first concerns was whether cheap space would still be available for artists. It seemed unlikely to me that developers would be inclined to build cheaper spaces, but time will tell I guess.

MADDIE LEACH: I went to University in Christchurch and lived there for about six years on and off. Two of those years were spent in Lyttelton.3 My first visit for SCAPE was in August last year and we were given a tour of the red zone—still substantially cordoned-off at that time. I’ve visited on three other occasions since then and on my last visit Cathedral Square was newly re-opened. Its been interesting to see the rapidity of the process and the push to get citizens back into the ‘heart’, or at least to go and make a visit there.

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I came away from that first trip with a very strong sensation of not wanting to add anything or weight to the conditions on the ground. It seemed there was enough material to last for generations. I came away thinking about places that were at a great distance from Christchurch: where might it be that people in Christchurch could cerebrally transport themselves? Although the city was full of gaping new openings as buildings were removed and vast dusty carparks appeared, the already/always open space of Hagley Park counteracted this. Although I knew the city well, I didn’t feel especially sad at that point, just a certain kind of empathetic acceptance of the enormity of the task ahead. A few weeks ago when I was back, and the inner city was fully accessible, I walked up Manchester Street looking for the site of the old Civic Theatre. I walked past the Turkish restaurant and remembered flashes of its interior, sitting on embroidered cushions with small pieces of mirror sewn in them, in groups, after openings, with people I no longer really know.

Looking at its painted sign, I was surprised by a sudden palpable sadness.

I think it was a constellation—of a life lived eighteen years ago, recalled news stories of Manchester Street devastated on 22 February 2011, bricks falling and awnings collapsing, people dying nearby, and a sense of impending replacement with the new—as it had once replaced something else.

SHAUN GLADWELL: As a visitor to the city, the clearest reference I had was to my recent experience in sites of conflict in the Middle East.

The destruction in Christchurch was not dissimilar to urban environments that have suffered heavy artillery fire or airstrikes. It was the pattern of destruction that made me draw this analogy—some buildings remained

standing and appeared to be structurally sound, while others were completely razed to the ground. Barricades and demarcated restricted zones only reinforced this connection.

ROB HOOD: It’s the political aspects and how the central city is being reshaped with the urgency around the rebuild that is of concern. Particularly such things as the central government’s forced buy up of land for the newly minted CBD. The new city is going to be sanitised—no cheap studios, rents will go up and there is a complete sterilising of the centre.

DAVID CROSS: Walking around the red zone with Maddie Leach and Rob Hood last year, my initial feeling was to try and temper the extremity of what I was seeing as the determining factor in making a work. The site was of course extraordinary and the destruction immense but it was also curiously inconsistent based on specific buildings in specific streets.

I remember walking past Timezone which was spared any damage and seeing the video games and interactive dance machines lined up covered with a thin layer of dust. For whatever reason that image has stayed with me. To some degree it has helped shape my response in working with participatory games as a key context. Amid all the destruction and carnage there was something about the bright colours and sensory overload of Timezone that offered a viable mode of response, the possibility and value of activating pleasurable energies and bodily movements as a means of countering the greyness, stasis and inertia of the partially destroyed city.

BLAIR FRENCH: It seems to me that the rapidity of change I mentioned earlier intensifies the experience of temporality in the city (and thus works appearing in the city). Clear distinctions, for example, between temporary and permanent in the built environment seem lost in this situation. What are your thoughts on this? Has any sense of accelerated change impacted on the development of your project and in particular how you approach its temporality?

FIONA CONNOR: Yes, it is like the carpet has been pulled out from under the feet of the whole city, yet everything is still landing. I have never done a site visit and not had a list of ideas on the last day. I guess that is one reason Dan Arps and I want to make a common or usable public space so people could hang out and consider the site and the trauma the city has experienced.4 People have a lot of processing and healing to do. At best our work provides them with a different type of scripted space to do this in.

What you are describing here is what was a formal starting point for me, seeing a destroyed street but a bench or bike stand still standing straight and perky—these minimal moments.

MIRANDA PARKES: I really enjoy the idea of the distinction between temporality and permanence collapsing. One of the biggest emotions and challenges of the earthquakes themselves was that our ideas of stability and permanence were challenged on the deepest level and in fact our own mortality/impermanence became extremely obvious. The idea of permanence in the built environment and by extension, in artworks has become rather empty and just an idea. An artwork is an offering made at a certain moment. That is all it can be.

SHAUN GLADWELL: The notion of accelerated change and also the speed of recovery has certainly inspired my thinking in some respects. Many of the sites featured in the Youtube video I mentioned earlier (‘Quaked’) have been cleared and repaired. The memory of the destruction is documented through the creative use of those sites and forms in ‘Quaked’. My works attempt to simulate the broken forms that had momentarily found usevalue within certain communities in Christchurch. Of course, my process is manufactured and memetic. It’s a methodology closer to what Robert Smithson termed “ruins in reverse”—work entering the world in a preruined state and operating as a memorial to Dionysian forms that have been cleared and cleaned and repaired through the Apollonian reflex.

DAVID CROSS: I think there has been an intensification of particular temporal registers in the city, many of which are to do with the extraordinary speed of transformation. Certainly architecture has taken on a range of

time scales in-between permanent and temporary and this has a flow on affect for art projects, businesses and all aspects of the city’s renewal. There seems to be an enormous amount of thinking around what constitutes permanence and what it means to re-write the city. The discourse around the cardboard cathedral bears this out but so does the Cashell Mall pop-up retail precinct which has a very particular energy that was not there before.

This combination of practicality and ingenuity based on a pop-up mindset places the projects for SCAPE in an interesting register. On the one hand, this is an ideal context for temporary public art in that there are significant parallel—energies that are operating in the city to create ephemeral traces, new places of activity and engagement etc. But on the flipside there is a potential for the artworks to be lost in this groundswell of reinvention and to be seen simply as cultural drivers of urban economic renewal.

For an artist this is a complex tension to negotiate and has certainly occupied a good part of my thinking. While I have sought to activate pleasure and recreation as key contexts, hopefully this is not at the expense of a critical self-reflexivity around place, risk, community and psychological vulnerability. The accelerated change you mention does have an interesting connection with the intensities of competitive sport, where much happens often in a short timespan. Certainly a key driver of my work has been a conscious attempt to counteract the stasis of the assorted huge gravel car parks that now dot the city and which have almost no human presence.

By reinventing one of those spaces as a frenetic, colourful sporting field with constant physical engagement at speed, I am seeking to create an experience and place that seeks to continually perform accelerated movement and action over the course of six weeks.

MADDIE LEACH: A way of tracking this for me has been working with the Amateur Radio Club. In the eight months since I began my conversations with them, they have had a slow steady trajectory towards surrendering their club rooms in Galbraith Avenue in Avonside. The process with CERA (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority) was finalised across those months. Jem and I went to a club night in April—perhaps only ten or so of the members were there. When I visited in July it was their final meeting and “nostalgia night”. The room was full, perhaps forty people, almost all men, who know each other by call sign as well as by name. They showed slides of when they built their club building in the mid-1970s. Many of them were in the pictures, a lot younger, and also they referred quietly to colleagues now gone. It got built in stages by weekend working-bees and they couldn’t remember some of the details. They’ve always had an old tannery site next door to them with a couple of vast rundown timber barns, and temporary neighbours for a while, like the Mongrel Mob. Since the earthquake their land seems suddenly porous and old wells have emerged. Two ducks now live permanently in the front yard of the clubrooms. Their building is fine, it just sank a bit and they had to take 50mm off the concrete steps at the entrance to get the doors open. Their tearoom now had a floor that ran uphill. I arrived at the final meeting as they were debating what to do and where to hold their meetings after July. The room seemed divided by those who wanted to invest in a new building a permanent place with a sign for Branch 05, those who would merge with Branch 56 in Christchurch West, and those who would meet in an itinerant fashion—different pubs, garages etc. They have two mobile vehicles, and these now have to be parked at separate locations. These vehicles now become the most permanent ‘site’ for the club members and it seems our project links with them at an intensely practical but very poignant juncture.

BLAIR FRENCH: I’ll end with one of three questions posed by UK-based academic and writer Anthony Gardner towards the end of his essay for the Guide & Reader publication intended to accompany SCAPE 6 in 2010. It was posed in relation to art in public space practices generally, but seems to have a particular urgency when considered in regard to the question of art’s role in the urban ‘recovery’ process in Christchurch: how can art maintain its civic potency without succumbing to the will of authority?5

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SHAUN GLADWELL: I was imagining creative agents operating with civic responsibility while at the same time overriding the fear of persecution from their superego as per State paternalism/law/social norms, etc. The graffiti artist, for example, would strive to operate as radically and prolifically as possible, yet without an agenda for self-promotion, or through the general politics of graffiti—where a sign is imposed on the territory of another.

Rather, it would be graffiti for civic space. A recent example is the street artist who wheat-pastes the image of giant adhesive plasters over fissures and holes in post-earthquake Christchurch. The art is technically illegal yet its rationale or intention is ‘honourable’.

JEM NOBLE (Bristol/Vancouver): The civic sphere implies locality.

It is concerned with the machinations of place, with proprietary and administrative rights and responsibilities that shape access to resources, the provision of services, the arrangements and flows of human and nonhuman constituents. Civic space embodies public and private behaviours and, under conditions of capitalist economies, public and private property and business sectors, with growing emphasis on the agency of private interests in the contemporary neoliberal context.

‘Civic potency’ suggests a capacity to excite or transform relations among, across or between such constituents of place. It bears no implication of temporal conditions and may denote a capacity that comes and goes, existing for different durations at different times for as long as its civic context persists. It may be momentary. It may be expressed in a range of registers including but not limited to complementarity and antagonism.

To maintain civic potency suggests a given capacity and a temporal expectation. If civic potency is expected of art, as for example may be implied in a term such as “high-impact public art”, measures of potency or impact to determine the degree of transformation to which civic relations are tangibly subjected by it are challenged by indeterminacies in the scope of art and its potential effects.

Art is an assemblage of shifting material, social, economic and imaginative practices that contribute to the production of place (how it is used, narrated, contested, ignored, connected, bounded and opened), of publics (communities of engagement, inclusion and exclusion) and individuals (embodied conjunctions of multiple forces such as physical, social, biological, subjective and commercial ones). The civic potency of art may register variously throughout such formations and there is no necessity or priority in the ways these practices inter-relate. There is no discrete set of rules governing what counts as art, how it functions or where the boundaries of its spatial-temporal relations in the world should be drawn for aesthetic consideration.

The role of reception in the constitution of art became a defining aspect of discourse across various forms of art criticism (such as literature, music, fine-art) from the early twentieth century into the present. The role of an audience, spectator or participant in activating an artwork has been recognised as a productive factor contributing to what brings an object, idea or process into being as an artwork, alongside the intentions and actions of an artist. Authorship of art, in this respect, can be understood as an indeterminate and distributed phenomenon in which an artist’s role is one among many interpretive factors that may also include curatorial and commissioning influences, institutional processes and instances of direct and indirect aesthetic experience and consideration in different places and times.

Co-authors of an artwork who activate it as such through their own experience and interpretation are well within reason to claim an authority in their personal response, just as artists, curators, art critics and art historians are well within reason to claim different authorities of professional perspective. The relationships between these forms of authority is not governed by any structure external to the practices through which they are exercised and so there is no fundamental hierarchy of authoritative value. The indeterminacy of what counts as an artwork and of the conditions shaping its extension, activation and agency in the world means the objects of such authorities may coincide or overlap, they may

compete, collide conflict or cohere, or they may be bounded in separate, incommensurate ways of speaking to support, challenge or be indifferent to what transformations an artwork may make possible.

Art in civic space exists in acts of engagement and interpretation, but is first made possible through complex creative and bureaucratic labours. Developing a proposal requires authoritative judgement by artists regarding the effective and compelling deployment of their ideas and skills in a certain context. Curating and commissioning such artworks requires authoritative judgement in the assessment of artists’ proposals to inform commissions, in mediating artists expectations and shaping the direction of their work through knowledge of conditions, requirements and tendencies across diverse local interests. The possibility of art in civic space, at least the formal kind developed through administrative structures such as curatorial and commissioning bodies, assumes the intersection of multiple authorities, not least those imparted by communities of engagement and interpretation, which may support or resist artistic and curatorial visions and expectations variously over time.

A will to authority suggests an urge to settle a dispute in values, but antagonism is only one among many modes through which art excites and transforms civic issues and relations. Multiple forms of authority are a necessary function of art, including that proposed, commissioned developed and received as a civic concern. With this in mind, the question at hand can be answered with a reformulation: how can art achieve civic potency without admitting multiple authorities?

Notes 1 The preceding three paragraphs are drawn from my inroductory essay in the SCAPE 7 Guide and Reader being published by SCAPE Public Art in September to accompany the Biennial 2 Maddie Leach is working with British artist Jem Noble on a collaborative project, I was using six watts when you Received me 3

A small port township across the hill from the main city of Christchurch

4 Although creating their own discrete sculptural objects Fiona Connor and Auckland-based artist Dan Arps have been in close dialogue throughout the process, particular around the concept of the commons as it pertains to public space in Christchurch. They will work together to install their work in a shared location for SCAPE 5 Anthony Gardner, ‘Making Things Public? Contemporary Art in Public Spaces’, in Blair French (ed.), SCAPE 2010 Volume 1: Guide and Reader, Art & Industry Biennial Trust, Christchurch, 2010/11: 73

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Agrophobia: in the current climate, is it possible to imagine social change through open resistance demonstrated on the streets?

ANA TEIXEIRA PINTO “Pascal had his abyss that moved along with him”, said Baudelaire’s poem.

Posthumously diagnosed, the French philosopher and mathematician remains one of the most famous cases of “la peur des espaces” (fear of vast spaces), a condition that went by his name—“Pascal’s disease”—until in 1871 the German neurologist and psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal coined the term “agoraphobia”. By the end of the nineteenth century the mysterious disease had been pinned on the sense of awe and dread towards the urban void created by the Haussmann-isation of Paris, whose new avenues—much to the chagrin of old Parisians—measured up to thirty metres wide. Under the guise of improving social and sanitary conditions, Haussmann’s urban planning was in fact the blueprint for effective policing.

The straight streets, all stemming from the north-south axis, made it possible for troops to move swiftly and for the artillery to fire their cannons on rioters and insurgents. Given the size of the avenues, it became almost impossible to erect barricades. Haussmann felt his plans had played a large role in the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, commenting that had the works been finished, such a futile endeavour would have never taken place.

The ill-fated Paris Commune was, needless to say, a seminal moment in modern history. It embodied the elusive promise of genuine participatory democracy and of a political system built from the grass-roots up. As such, the Paris Commune remains, in many ways, the imaginary horizon for every protest movement up to the present day; and the moment, which gets continuously actualised—albeit in a symbolic manner—every time the crowds take to the streets in protest, or occupy a city’s square.

Urban planning has also remained inextricably linked with governmental designs. Privatisation, suburbanisation, gentrification, the creation of privileged urban enclaves and gated communities, have all presided over a decline in public culture, which, at length, resulted in the present democratic deficit. All of the above notwithstanding, the street and square have, of late, recovered their status as the locus for political life. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, from Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, to Stuttgart 21 in Germany, the masses have descended on the streets only to clash with the paradox that lies at the heart of Haussmann’s legacy, namely that defying the public space is a space where the public is not allowed.

Against the background of current protests—and in a serendipitous anticipation of the events in Taksim Square—the Istanbul Biennial elected agoraphobia as the theme for its preview exhibition at the time of writing on display at the Tanas project space in Berlin. Curated by Fulya Erdemci and Bige Örer, Agoraphobia conflates the notion of public space with the imperative of democratic debate—as the curators put it, quoting Hannah Arendt, “freedom necessitates a place”.

As the curators seem to suggest, art and politics meet in the “public sphere”. One could also add that the process we came to call modernity can perhaps be best described as the struggle to assert the res publica as a discursive space independent from both the “sphere of public authority” and the “private sphere”. That is, the struggle to wrest all human relations away from the domain of the domestic or the autocratic and into the arena of collective life. To paraphrase French philosopher Jacques Rancière, only in the modern age does what happens inside the home, between husband and wife, or inside the factory between management and labourers, cease to be seen as a contractual relation concerning only the covenants, and become a matter of relevance for the whole of the social body. In this sense, modernity represents a breach in the continuity between the order of nature and the social order, which was expressed in the notion of birth rights: the high-born rule over the lower castes; the wealthy rule over the destitute;

the strong over the weak; the father over the sons; the husbands over their wives. The rights of the citizen are the rights of those who have no birthrights; and democracy is the rule by those who have no—natural—right to rule. Democratic struggles are battles to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim to be ruled, for instance, by the laws of the market or of the Church. It was as a result of these conflicts that art and all other forms of cultural production ceased to be seen as private practices pertaining to relations of patronage, to become a matter of political advancement.

Needless to say, art is not a metaphysical entity; it’s a product of social relations. Though we tend to forget it, the world of art we inhabit is correlated with the rise of the modern State and its institutions, such as the university, the museum and the parliament. The democratic privilege of being a speaking subject is concomitant with the modern regime of representation, through which the repressed, the overlooked, or the neglected have found their voice. From this perspective, pictorial and political representation is fundamentally correlated, and art and politics are contingent notions.

Within the present exhibition, the artwork which better embodies the curatorial proposal is that by Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1968, after childbirth, the artist felt excluded from the art scene, leading her to conceptualise “maintenance work” as her newly found artistic practice.

In 1969 Ukeles wrote a manifesto entitled ‘Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition’, and began to call herself a “maintenance artist”. The manifesto proposed reassessing the role of the artist as a “service worker” devoted to the maintenance of the public domain. Accordingly, Ukeles, who got down on her knees to clean her gallery’s storefront—Washing, 1974. In Front of the A.I.R. Gallery on Wooster Street in Soho, NewYork—accepted an unsalaried position as artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation, and surveyed all forms of invisible labour that “keep New York City alive”, in the work Maintaining NYC in Crisis: What Keeps NYC Alive?

October 13, 1976. In I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), Ukeles interviewed three hundred maintenance workers who were part of the staff of a Manhattan bank. Asking them to discuss their daily chores, Ukeles prompted the workers to address their labour as art. The resulting narratives were later exhibited together with ancillary Polaroids in a collection of testimonials, which laid bare the modes of socialisation—and Page 186: Şener Özmen, from the series Untitled (Megaphone), 2005 Photo courtesy the artist and Pilot Galeri, Istanbul Page 187 left: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Home on Braddock Avenue, 2007 Page 187 right: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Self Portrait In Gramp´s Pajamas, 2009 Above: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby on her bed, 2005 Photos courtesy the artist and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Opposite: Jimmie Durham, The Doorman, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

by extension the modes of individuation—produced by labour policies.

Latoya Ruby Frazier’s photographic series—Home on Braddock Avenue, 2007; Self Portrait on Gramps’ Pajamas (2009)—addressing the demise of her industrial home town Braddock, Pennsylvania also conveys a poignant testimonial of the often forgotten human cost of globalisation and the thirdworld pockets left in the wake of capital flows, intertwined with the artist’s personal biography. Not all works, however, are so felicitous in addressing public interaction or in sketching out means of enfranchisement. In the performance Silence of the Sheep (2011), artist Amal Kenawy leads a herd of men crawling on all fours through the streets of Cairo. As the catalogue triumphantly announces, “the performance ended in a melee”, yet I must admit I wonder whether this was because “the sight of humiliated Egyptian men led by a woman in an hyper-patriarchal society was too much for the public”, nor am I convinced by the facile metaphor of “a populace led in thrall by an oppressive regime”. On the contrary, the performance seems to have a glaring blind spot. As one of the passers-by clearly articulates, the audience’s shock has perhaps something to do with the way day labourers could be easily hired to perform this menial task for a pittance, and how the performance, while attempting to question male dominance, unwittingly reinforces class privileges.

Other works are simply, conceptually innocuous. In Cinthia Marcelle’s 2005 video Confronto (Confrontation) a team of jugglers performs in front of a red light, exiting the scene every time the light turns green; each time the light returns to red an additional pair of jugglers joins in, until the group grows big enough to block the road. This time round, as the light turns green, the jugglers stay put, facing a battery of honks—for some seconds at least, since the video immediately fades to black and the sound seems to be looped into a crescendo. Untitled (Megaphone) (2006), by Sener Özmen, a photograph of the artist shouting through a megaphone aimed at his own ears, can almost function as an allegory—albeit unintentional—for the pitfalls of sketching an aesthetic answer to a political question.

But perhaps the difficulties of articulating a political position can be best expressed by describing the piece Protest is Beautiful (2007/2013) by the artist collective Freee, depicting a group of people holding a “slogansculpture” made of silk flowers. The artists claim that they sought to counteract media narratives of protest movements as violent and chaotic, yet—and as the sequence of events following all the outcry and dissent of the last years clearly demonstrates—a peaceful revolution is an oxymoron.

Protest might have to choose whether it wants to be beautiful or effective and the same holds true for art.

It is perhaps true that, as Brian Holmes noted, “as cultural institutions both public and private try to mediate between the logic of profit and prestige and the desire for alternative valuations”,1 what we call politically engaged art has become a game of liars-poker, in which the artists who simply claim to be political are embraced by the system while those who truly are get shunned by institutions and galleries alike. But I would put it differently: the challenge is not to represent political conflict, but to define it. And both protest movements and artists alike seem mostly unable to imagine social chance beyond the iterations of liberal democracy.

Agoraphobia, the prologue exhibition of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, which took place at TANAS in Berlin from 25 May–27 July 2013, aimed to unfold the core question of the public domain, central to the conceptual framework of the Istanbul Biennial, by questioning the politics of space in relation to freedom of expression. Curated by Fulya Erdemci, Bige Örer and Kevser Güler, the artists were Jimmie Durham, Freee (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan), LaToya Ruby Frazier, Amal Kenawy, Lux Lindner, José Antonio Vega Macotela, Cinthia Marcelle, Şener Özmen, Proyecto Secundario Liliana Maresca (Liliana Maresca Secondary School Project), Christoph Schäfer and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

Note 1 Brian Holmes, ‘Liar\’s Poker–Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation’, in Springerin 1/03: http://www.springerin.at

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Saturated intolerance: resistance in Turkey in different forms

Basak Senova Upon receiving an invitation for the Shifting Sands1 symposium approximately a year ago, I’ve been thinking about focusing on the phenomenon of intolerance by considering the authoritarian direction of the current government in Turkey. Nevertheless, I was also puzzled with the optimistic view embedded in that particular invitation, as it was confirmation of how things could be read and interpreted quite differently from a distance. While Turkey has been seen as a perfect example to lead the Arab world—mainly in the beginning of the Arab Spring, the public who support the secular political views consider the last few years quite oppressive and dark in terms of democracy, social order and political direction in the country.

In Turkey’s recent past there was always an unstable political climate with a constant social and cultural collective schizophrenia fed by conflicts between East and West, secularism and fundamental Islam, left and right, and eventually nationalism and separatism. It is a nation that experienced coup d’états in a loop of each decade: in 1960, in 1971 and in 1980. It is a past with visible ruptures. Hence, such ruptures may also raise sceptical questions, such as “Is it possible to fail to remember a repetitive past?”, “What if such an amnesia is a systematically constructed defence mechanism?”, “What if this defence mechanism is spontaneously programmed and applied on individuals by a system?” and eventually, “What if such a system constantly hacks itself through a cognitive architecture of dissociations?”

More ruptures in the collective memory of Turkey could also be detected through the change of the alphabet. Several centuries after accepting Islam, Turks abandoned their original alphabets, Orhon and Uygur, and began to use the Arabic script in the sixteenth century. After the foundation of the new State in 1923, the alphabet was changed in the entire country in 1928.

New books were written in Latin to be taught in the schools as the extension of the Unitarian State policy. This drastic change addresses ruptures in the history with the inability to read and access to the historical sources. It is essentially about the short and long-term memory loss of a nation.

In a parallel line, the story of the contemporary art scene in Turkey is quite short and lacks national references, since it has only developed over the last thirty years. There were individual, yet isolated efforts during the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the coup d’état in 1980 was a serious rupture together with the social, economic and cultural changes introduced by policies of the State along with the new migration flows. The 1990s followed these developments with the intensifying civil war between the State and the PKK,2 unaccounted murders, people missing in custody, pressure on the universities and the deliberate tendencies to create an apolitical generation.

At the same time, this particular decade started to shape the contemporary art scene with the increasing influence of the Istanbul Biennial, along with the accession of some artists into international contemporary art circuits and self-initiated major exhibitions organised by a large group of young artists, particularly in Istanbul. This was mostly the outcome of individual

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efforts and the successes of artists and curators, even for the institutions.

The Istanbul Biennial has a special significance in this development.

As there was a lack of museums or any kind of contemporary art institutions, the Biennial presented a noticeable mode of education for the young generation of artists. Additionally, during the 1990s these artists were against institutionalism, with the liberty to be politically and economically autonomous. The art market had other priorities and agendas, and regardless of a few exceptions, it did not really overlap with the contemporary art scene. By the end of the decade and the beginning of the new millennium, new institutions, artist initiatives, alternative independent formations and museums with diverse connections to the international art networks came into view in Istanbul.

The lack of any kind of subsidy and technical infrastructure not only drove the artists, curators and initiatives into inventing alternative solutions and ways of production, but also led them to become at last institutionalised. Most of the artist groups registered as associations in order to become eligible to apply for funds. After 2000, each sector of the contemporary art scene became an element of the commodified art marketplace, either through donations, funds and subsidies, or through their operational visibility.

The first generation of contemporary art galleries in Istanbul was opened in response to international demand. The first collector group mostly consisted of celebrities, investors and prestige seeking business people; as a result they caught the attention of the local mainstream. Subsequently, more art galleries opened with some becoming involved with “contemporary art”, while a new and diverse group of collectors began to commission contemporary artworks, consulting curators, gallerists and art dealers.

This development lead to an increasing interest in Turkish contemporary art by international collections, collectors and art dealers. Now there are numerous important art institutions that shape the art environment, such as SALT (an outcome from Platform), Arter, Depo, Akbank Art Center, Yapi Kredi Galleries and Publications along with IKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art) that organises the Istanbul Biennial and the Pavilion of Turkey at the Venice Biennale. All of these institutions are linked to private capital. Museums such as Sabanci Museum, Pera Museum, Istanbul Modern, SantralIstanbul, Project 4L and IMAGO were all launched in the 2000s, being private initiatives. Regardless of these developments, the overall situation challenges art production and artists. The market explicitly or implicitly dictates its own fields of interest and artists have been dependent upon a system that is based on accepted terms. There remain a number of exceptional individuals and entities though that transcend and challenge the authoritarian and the neo-liberal requirements of the art market.

These same conditions then merged with both a dysfunctional system of law and order and the country’s developing anti-democratic politics, resulting in rigid divisions within society. Middle ground ideologies began to dissolve with the government’s authoritarian approach leaving no room for either freedom of expression or criticism. Criticism of or questioning issues could only be in favour of the governing party’s policies.

At a rapidly developing pace, Turkey has become subject to Internet filters, various forms of censorship in the media, and unfounded criminal accusations against online platforms for alternative voices.

At this point, I would like to illustrate the situation through the most visible form of suppression—Internet censorship. Turkey has a long history of Internet censorship, becoming more noticeable and advanced since 2005. Beginning with a list of one hundred and thirty-eight keywords banned from Turkish domain names in 2011, Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK) eventually applied a centralised filtering system in 2012. To this day the laws relating to the Internet have been intentionally set aside and subject to arbitrary alterations and interpretations. As writer Özgür Uçkan says, “Up to this centralised filtering system, people were not really concerned about Internet censorship because they could easily bypass it (tunnels, DNS management etc). This indifference contributed also to legitimate censorship mechanisms.”3 Despite this social media sites and similar applications have been the main

Opposite: Burak Arikan, from the series Network of Foundations and Corporations through shared Board Members: Turkey Edition, 2010 Photo courtesy the artist Below: Zeren Göktan, There is Another Possibility (installation detail), 2013 Photo courtesy the artist and CDA Projects Gallery, Istanbul Page 192: Hera Büyüktasçiyan, In Situ, 2013 Photos courtesy the artist

communication tool for resistance, as well as the only way to circulate immediate information and news about ongoing events. It is obvious that the Internet has provided a platform for public organisation beyond the control of the government. Social media has functioned as a spontaneous platform for the resistance or as political writer and essayist Hakim Bey’s has termed as “Temporary Autonomous Zones”. With the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul on 28th of May 2013, the resistance towards intolerance took its own shape across Turkey. The suppression of freedom of expression and assembly, control of mainstream media and the government’s violation on secularism and law have become internationally visible. Now, this civic upraising designates a transition period in Turkish society.

In this context, as a curator what is at stake is the strategic movement of artistic practices that might constitute diverse opinions without being entrapped within this suppression. Instead of recording failures and repeating them as silent witnesses or victims, the critical issue is the investigation of the mechanisms behind these entrapments. I would like to conclude this text by navigating through some of the artistic practices of Burak Arikan, Hera Buyuktasciyan and Zeren Goktan that illustrate diverse artistic approaches, methodologies and different viewpoints, to understand this ongoing situation.

Burak Arıkan’s work, Network of Foundations and Corporations Through Shared Board Members: Turkey Edition (2010), confronts issues ranging from the political to the economical and cultural sustainability in networked environments, applying techniques such as network mapping and analysis, programming, and protocol authoring. His network map contains the tax-exempt foundations in Turkey and the public corporations listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Nodes represent institutions or board members, and connections represent board membership. The network database include three hundred and fifty public corporations, two hundred and thirty-four tax-exempt foundations and their three thousand three hundred and ten board members in total. The map organises itself by running as a software simulation where the names naturally find their position on the image surface through connecting forces, revealing the central protagonists, indirect links, organic clusters, structural holes and outliers. Clusters of institutions on this map show institutions of institutions, Arikan defining them as “super-institutions” which have

a high power concentration in society. Another of Burak Arıkan’s works, Islam, Republic, Neoliberalism (2012) comprises three network maps where mosques, republican monuments and museums and shopping centres dispersed throughout Istanbul, connect with each other within their areas of influence. These maps present a comparative display of network patterns that are formed through associations linking those architectural structures that represent the three dominant ideologies—Islam, Republic and neoliberalism—in Turkey. Network of Republic Monuments are connected through the physical proximity of the republic monuments and museums in Istanbul; Network of Mosques are connected through overlapping call to prayer sounds of more than three thousand mosques in Istanbul; and Network of Shopping Malls connect through the overlapping range of reach of the shopping malls in Istanbul.

Another artist, Hera Büyüktasçiyan opened an installation titled In Situ at PiST/// about a week before the beginning of the Gezi Park riots in Istanbul. Büyüktasçiyan addressed unspoken personal memories and histories in society with her research-based projects. In her works, the ambiguous relationship between the physicality and mental presence of an image sets the conditions of both the personal and collective memory of space. In Situ came into view as a result of a four month research and production residency provided by PiST///. Due to the course of her research on spatial, social and historical memory, Büyüktasçiyan focused on her own personal memory on the historical Pangalti Hamam building.

As one of the many stunning examples of the government’s attitude towards urban policy, this historical site was demolished in 1995 in order to build a five star hotel. With a unique poetic narrative language, Büyüktasçiyan’s installation reconstructed memory vignettes by activating compulsory acts of confrontation, integration, and adaptation. This work was made from cubes of soap—soap becoming the connecting device between acts of forgetting and remembering, speaking for both the physical and the mental.

In its referencing paving stones that have been in a constant ‘shift’ during the protests in Istanbul since Gezi Park, this installation challenged its audience by creating changes within the perceived pictorial space; overlapping the dialectics, processes and the dynamics of the resistance in Turkey.

The third artist, Zeren Göktan’s work Counter, is a project about women who have been subjected to acts of violence in Turkey. Although it is a very urgent and severe social problem, it is a subject to which the government has been totally indifferent. Counter is a two-tier work comprising an online memorial to the deceased and a series of shroud covers inspired by ideas of the afterlife in ancient Egyptian mythology fabricated by male prison inmates using beads. An ancient Egyptian shroud on a coffin tells stories, each pattern and shape is made from beads. The shroud embraces the body as an interface between this world and the next. The bead stringing is a similar act of coding, each pixel and each bead forming an object. The two seemingly stand-alone pieces are connected through QR codes embedded in the beaded nets. Through this ‘gateway’ the viewer is invited to scan the code embedded into the beaded shrouds to visit a memorial website where a digital counter indicates the number of women killed by violence in the year 2013 in Turkey, updated by an NGO and the artist after each death.

Each bead turns to a pixel; each murder turns to a number; and each story swings in limbo.

I not only see these works as another form of resistance, but also as the production of knowledge. Similar to how the brain operates through nerve cells acting together, these works illustrate how social, political, cultural and economic networks interconnect simultaneously in the country.

These works are significant at numerous levels for the realisation of and understanding the mechanisms behind multiple forms of censorship, and the visible resistance and its suppression in Turkey.

Notes 1 Shifting Sands, a two city two day symposium of speakers from the Middle East North Africa (MENA), focusing on art production and presentation in a region circumscribed by change and turbulence, was hosted by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA and presented in Sydney in conjunction with Artspace and Campbelltown Art Centre 23-25 August, 2013 (see http://www. cacsa.org.au/?ai1ec_event=shifting-sands-conference-sydney-adelaide&instance_id=34). This text was presented at the symposium, as was the following text by Sheyma Buali, ‘Fragmented images: framing, performativity and netwroks of circulation‘ 2 3

The Kurdistan Workers Party, considered a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government

Notes from ‘Resistance: Özgür Uçkan and Vasif Kortun in conversation with Basak Senova’; http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/92

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Touching reality ADAM GECZY War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

Carl von Clausewitz Of all the histories of warfare, the period in which Clausewitz wrote his famous treatise On War, the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, is perhaps the most stimulating and exciting. This era witnessed a fine balance between technology and physicality. To put it another way, it was not limited to outright hand-to-hand combat, such that it made military strategy more exigent, more apparent, and more complex. All the prerequisites of a victorious battle were referred to as an art: the art of manoeuvre, feint, and surprise. Battles were more organised and the best generals fought with a sophisticated knowledge of history, both of the immediate opponent and of battles of the past. Good battles, however grisly, were also forms of communication between each military commander and with others long dead. Thus war was a multi-levelled encounter, from soldier to soldier, officer to officer, general to general. It matched brute strength with intelligence and will. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, this was also the age when the mythology of genius ran high: from military to musical.

Beethoven dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon, while Hegel dubbed Napoleon “the World Spirit on horseback”. Balzac would later write about the nostalgia with which former soldiers looked back on this time, with its loaded rhetoric of heroism and honour. From antiquity to modernity, heroism and honour were always special traits in warfare since these were qualities that justified violence, while ensuring, at least in theory, that war did not descend into feckless barbarism. One had to face one’s enemy; in many respects the sports of boxing or of fencing are the last remnants of this venerable tradition. They are bound by rules, so as to determine that winning is a matter of skill, courage or strength.

In Thomas Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality, a video first shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2012, a manicured woman’s hand navigates pictures of the maimed and dead on an iPhone or iPad. Some heads are so blown apart they are rendered unrecognisable; some figures lie alone like wasted meat; other scenes depict a tumult. At certain points the hand pauses to touch a detail and flicks forefinger and thumb outward to enlarge it before passing on to the next scene. The images are relentless, yet the hand ‘views’ them with apparent clinical calm. This work is a worthy successor to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, however the difference between them is marked: with Warhol we are shocked at the inadequacy of our shock, while here that indifference has shifted to the proxy for our gaze, the anonymous woman’s hand. The suggestion that someone, as it were, is doing the looking for us, places us in a yet more compromised position since we are now at a tertiary level of mediation, doubly removed yet still witness. For where is the locus of our affect? Is it displaced onto the viewer? Are we rendered absent and our response anodine?

Certainly we are shocked by the brutality of these images, the ghastly remnants of conflict with the signs of unspeakable deeds, destruction and pain. But we are also made conscious of the medium by which this information is coming to us, the digital device which is the ubiquitous human prosthesis of the contemporary age. The secondary mediation, that of the hand navigating its way with a disconcerting, ambiguous mixture of nonchalance, curiosity and faint concern, mediates the images much in the manner of the commercial media itself that chooses and packages what it has to sell to us to consume. It is this knowledge that we are consuming something, as much as feeling actual shock and concern is just as terrifying

to us, inasmuch as we do not know whether this experience is about the horror ‘in itself’ or about the way horror is delivered to us, like any other offering; like a grotesque pig with an apple in its mouth. If the wounds on the corpses are real in the most didactically basic sense of the term of having precipitated pain and death, their context and meaning are nonetheless made ambiguous by the second party, whose aplomb borders on objective.

Truly there is a multiple layering of objectivity here: the inexorable objectivity of death, the lens (the French for which is “objectif”), the anonymity of the subject who is objectified in the partial object of the hand whose manner borders on the forensic, and finally ourselves, forced to mediate our own subject position between seer and seen.

This is a confusion that is played out, but with less quizzicality or conscience, in present day warfare, where killing has become a real life computer game. Drone warfare has opened up questions about accountability and conscience. It is the opposite to pitched battle with hand to hand combat, in which a soldier faces his enemy. There is no encounter; a soldier becomes an operator, whose mistakes, of which there are many as seen in the undisclosed amount of civilian casualties, can be attributed as much to the technological apparatus as to himself. But the absence of physical witness also tends to diminish conscience. The reciprocity of combat is eradicated, and war is reduced to a covert form of policing. It renders redundant all the former codes of honour in combat, such as the rare case when an enemy grants mercy, or the personal transformation that transpires when you see your opponent die. With drones, the enemy is reduced to a set of co-ordinates.1 Even if the images in Hirschhorn’s work are not taken from drone warfare, we are led into the terrain of a world in which suffering is brought about from a distance, physically and morally, and where the specificity of every human life collapses into a numb arbitrariness.

The progenitor to this turning point in the ‘war of nonengagement’ was the Gulf War, which earned the nickname “the Video Game War” because of the images broadcast from the cockpits of American bombers. In the provocatively titled The Gulf War did Not Take Place (1995), Jean Baudrillard examines the way in which images were used to misdirect the enemy; faked sequences were often aired on CNN and CBS for the purpose not so much of deceiving the American public but the enemy itself, creating false decoys. Baudrillard correctly identifies this war as a watershed in a New World Order, in which power is about the occupancy of channels of communication, and according to the capacity to manipulate and deceive. The question prompted by the Gulf War is whether it was not just a defensive issue to save Kuwai, but to assert the might of the dominant powers to the world through the mass representation of its military prowess.2 Despite the profusion of information aired on television and in the press, the information was heavily monitored and filtered.

There was a jarring contradiction between quantity and truth, although the perceived availability of information gave the semblance of full disclosure.

As we are reminded periodically but most fail to notice, this is the condition of almost all information that is now fed to us. With the exception of rogue organisations such as Wikileaks, the news is heavily vetted and packaged for consumption.

This means that the relatively new codes of non-engagement and surrogate aggression embodied in drone warfare have actually been with us for much longer. Just as drones have removed the bodily drama of the violent man-to-man encounter, we can encounter suffering and turmoil on a daily basis in one part of the world or another. Warhol had already begun

to point to this in images, which through their repetition and deadpan immediacy, had been all but drained of the context or purpose. Even the image of Jackie Kennedy, which we associate with President Kennedy’s assassination solicits no sympathy and next to no surprise. She is just an accessory to what has become an historical fact. Similarly, we can see the upheavals in Syria, the conflicts that rage in central Africa, protestors in Spain and Greece and so on and so on. We might say that these events have an atomistic nature, that is, they exist as items unto themselves without belonging to a causal chain. History, as in an analytically structured view of time according to causes and effects, is well and truly consumed by the exponential welter of information flow, where there is no driving idea, no evaluative hierarchy of values, no accountable flow of events, just events, events, events. There is therefore a massive gap that exists for the main actors at the epicentre and how these events are represented and processed from afar. Like floating signifiers, they are a cluster of constituents without direction or trajectory.

By very great contrast, in an era before wars and tragic events were not able to be represented except through the highly modified form of art (painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving), the effects were still understood as part of the body, through physical or mental wounds, and through stories. Perhaps the turning point in the imaging of conflict occurred with the still shocking footage made upon the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, of piled up bodies and of the emaciated survivors. But even then we are warned off any presumption that these can come close to the unspeakable truth of what occurred. In many ways, the Holocaust was a deeply religious change in humanity’s understanding of itself. From a Judeo-Christian perspective it surpassed Christ’s suffering. In one of his Communion Discourses, the philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard states: Or is it sorrow over the world’s sin and ungodliness, sorrow over the fact that the world lies in evil, sorrow over how deep humanity has fallen, sorrow over the fact that gold is virtue, that power is right, that the crowd is truth, that only lies prosper and evil prevails, that only self-love is loved, that only mediocrity is blessed, that only prudence is esteemed, that only half-measures are praised and only contemptibleness succeeds. Oh, in this respect you, a human being, I suppose, would not dare to compare your sorrow with the sorrow that was in—the Saviour of this world, as if he were unable to put himself entirely in your place! And so it is with respect to every suffering.3

Below and opposite: Thomas Hirschhorn, Touching Reality (video stills), 2012 Photos courtesy the artist and Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris

It was the Holocaust that altered the philo-theological perspectives on meliorism, benevolence and of humanism itself. That the greatest suffering had devolved back from the passion of Christ to humanity was one thing, but the hardest irony to bear is that, as a result of this, suffering is diverted, sublimated to become fact, part of the texture of information. The aftermath of suffering is that suffering has become an idea, a theory, rather than a presiding human and political preoccupation. It is product. It is news.

One of the masterful aspects of Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality is its invocation of touch. The term “reality” is meant with both irony and earnestness. These images of suffering and death are remote in more than one respect, and for that have an artificial air, and yet they did happen, we can be sure of that, and there is nothing so real as death itself. To touch the real, or the Lacanian Real is to touch the untouchable, for at the limit, to touch death is to be dead; otherwise the death is counterfeit or metaphoric.

The images in this work are however not intentionally metaphoric, except in so far as they stand for the continuum of images of death and destruction.

We don’t know these people’s names, we do not know the exact circumstances of their death, we do not know what became of the people around them. They are thus as removed from touch as removed can be.

And yet a considerable amount of our lives are involved in touching these digital devices; touching in order to make proximate the remote, but always in a state of dematerialisation.

The role of touch has long been long been an important factor in art. It began to surface as a point of interest with the work of Courbet and reached a climax at the turn of the century with Cézanne and later the work of Matisse and Picasso. Courbet’s Realism consisted not only in the subject—figures at work, common people and of animals in a state of conflict or rapture—but the very substance of the paint itself. Jettisoning the academic niceties of masters such as Ingres, in which the brush mark was close to eradicated, Courbet’s works show paint as alive and robust.

The physical substance of what was represented was reproduced in the literal substance of paint’s unctuous viscosity. With Monet, touch was no less evident through the way in which the hand nervously sought to replicate the myriad vicissitudes of vision. With van Gogh, the principal precursor to both the Fauvists and the German Expressionists, paint was laid on with the new invention of the oil tube; some paintings were painstakingly varnished to give the impression that the paint was still wet. And with Cézanne, touch was a highly subtle matter, especially in paintings in which the artist uses the virgin canvas or paper to speak for what cannot be adequately rendered or to connote a flash of light. Before Matisse, it is with Cézanne that one can perceive the painting in terms of its very facture; the painting is being painted before your eyes, simultaneously complete and always in the process of being made.4 But in Hirschhorn’s work the very obverse is true.

This is not just because it is not painting, rather it is because it forces the point so explicitly in terms of both the material ‘reality of life’ and the depiction of the act of touch itself. Yet, whereas in Impressionist painting we see the effects of touch and reproduce its sensuous properties intuitively, what we are faced with in Hirschhorn’s work is touch as a blandly instrumental act. Our aesthetic reading of the work accords with the extent to which our aesthetic reading is challenged, manipulated, vitiated, or annulled.

Hirschhorn is one of the world’s most successful and skilled activist artists, one of the few who can bring power to a work without reducing it to ideological dogma or reactionary coercion. Hirschhorn has long been active with social and participatory works that transcend the usual tokenism of “relational aesthetics”. Relational aesthetics, coined by the French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud in his 1998 book of the same name, refers to art that is participatory and more often than not ephemeral. The same period saw the fashionable burgeoning of interactive New Media art. Both tendencies were popular with curators of the time, since their assurance of audience involvement was especially attractive to sponsors and other funding bodies, for whom visitation numbers was a factor that would far exceed more intangible and harder to gauge considerations of philosophical and artistic value. In both cases, the role of the audience’s touch, if you

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will, was given greater priority than the artist’s mark. But this was all an illusion. Participation, the ploy of drawing art and life together, with all its respectable and sentimental humanitarian overtones, was intended to demystify the art object only to reduce it to something shorn of its seductive, intriguing capacity, its power to elicit wonder or profound speculation.

In his participatory works, Hirschhorn himself still has an overarching hold on the setting and the aesthetic. His style is an idiosyncratic and grubby rawness that is nonetheless obsessively laboured, quite often purposely overdetermined so that the viewer is bombarded with objects, materials, colours and textures.

In a 2003 declaration to the conservative Swiss government, Hirschhorn provocatively exclaimed that, “I WILL NO LONGER EXHIBIT IN SWITZERLAND”. In this short manifesto he proclaims: “for me art is a tool. A tool to confront myself with reality—art is also a resistance movement, art resists, art is neither passive nor reactive, art attacks—through my artistic work I will grapple with reality in its complexity, its density and its incomprehensibility. I will act in all its unclarity [sic].”5 We note the comment that art is a “tool to confront myself with reality”. The reality in Touching Reality is neither innocent nor simple. War is an unavoidable reality to the maintenance of democracy. The history of democracies over the last century has shown us that they require conflict outside their borders for them to exist. This has much to do with the colonial legacy, since it is an inalienable fact that a third (if not less) of the world’s population—and those who live under democracies—depend on the exploitation of the other two

thirds (if not more) if they are to survive. External war is also a necessary decoy to keep the semblance of peace within the democratic country.

The battery of fake realities available to us on television and the Internet is another reality. A reality is that people are dying every second from disease, starvation, crime and war. But it is this ample knowledge of these ‘realities’ that brings home yet another reality that it is well beyond our ambit, beyond our touch. What then is our position? What are we meant to feel?

In the absence of God, hopefully someone will tell us.

Notes 1 See also Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris: La fabrique, 2013 2 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did Not Take Place, Bloomington and Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995 3 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Hebrews 4:15’, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh, Bloomington and Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011: 94-95 4

For the best accounts of the role of touch in the work of Cézanne see Maurice Merlau Ponty’s classic ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, Sense and Nonsense, trans. H. L. and P. A. Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992, and Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986 5

Thomas Hirschhorn, 2003; text supplied by the artist, 2006

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Touching Reality was presented at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 5 October–30 November, 2013

Fragmented images: framing, performativity and networks of circulation Sheyma Buali Since December 2010, when the news broke of protest in Tunisia chasing out the then-president Zene ElAbedine Ben Ali, the Arab world has been a focus point. The title “Arab Spring” was given to the events that would unfold on TV and computer screens around the world. The global media highlighted the Arab world with their catchy ‘spring-y’ title, giving less airtime to ongoing movements in other parts of the world such as the UK, Greece, the United States of America, Brazil, Turkey, Cyprus, the Maldives and so on.

The Arab uprisings were treated as curious and experimental, and within a geographical bubble rather than part of an ongoing global movement on one hand, and as continuations of their own autonomous, historical trajectories on the other. Political backgrounds and ongoing practices of dissent were dismissed.

Like a movie, the drama that was created blurred between information and entertainment. As a heavily imaged (and yet ongoing) political process, the media presented the Arab Spring like a political drama set in an exotic region. In fragmented time of hyperreality, people all over the world were able to witness the breaking of the barrier of fear and the elation taking over the streets. While there was empowerment in this selfimaging, the icon of this iconoclastic time was the short-lived euphoria.

The authorless images we began to see appeared to be something between pain and performance, spiraling away from the leaderless uprises. Media hype and the era of the self took precedence over political mobilisation.

At the same time, the age-old process of imaging the Arab world as repressed, restrictive and extremist, apart from the rest of the world, unfit for democracy yet in need of an ‘awakening’ continues.

How ‘Arab’ was the ‘Arab Spring’?: The so-called “Arab Spring”, a term with an implication that changes with every ongoing event, pushed Arab culture and politics to the forefront.

This title given to ongoing political events geographically defined borders, placing the region within its own bubble of “awakening” and “protest”.

This year we witnessed a contagion that was (and is) not limited to the Middle East. People have risen in the nichomacean spirit towards better from Occupy, born in New York City’s Wall Street, and moved to tens of cities—including Arab countries, to protests against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, major protests about economic disasters in Greece, Spain and Cyprus; protests ousting presidents in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and the Maldives; women’s protests against Berlosconi in Italy; then Bahrain, Saudi, Kuwait; and most recently mass protests against the increasing governmental powers in Turkey and Brazil. Whatever the spark may have been, governmental exploitation, economic disaster, environmental concern, the energy transcended transnationally as people rose against their autonomous regimes and moved for radical shifts and social change.

In The Observer, Peter Beaumont referred to them as “the new protest”. Linking the events of Turkey and Brazil to protests of the past two years, he notes: “If recent scenes seem familiar it is because they shared common features: viral, loosely organised with fractured messages and mostly taking place in urban public locations.” He sums it all up by words on a banner seen in Brazil: “We are the social network.”1 The reference here is not just about the universality of the events, but also to the print media’s appropriation of social media as the source of people’s agency.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts referred to them as “pop up protests”, inappropriately insinuating that these are finite movements, streaming along as being fashionable. It is a wonder, however, if Watts was referencing the instant hype of these events. Despite the global mood, the Arab Spring stayed on as a headliner uprising. Sociologist and academic on Middle Eastern studies, Asef Bayat notes the continuous marginalisation of Arabs within greater, global events. “For a long time now, change in Middle Eastern societies has been approached with a largely Western Orientalist outlook whose history goes back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier.

Mainstream Orientalism tends to depict the Muslim Middle East as a monolithic, fundamentally static, and thus ‘peculiar’ entity.”2 The Spring of old beginnings: While the term “Arab Spring” is geographically binding, it also assumes that these events are new to the Arab world. The press’ continuous questioning over people’s agency and inspiration, from public space to the social media, graffiti and even global warming,3 was patronising to the people who physically rose against their governments to demand change. The print media, particularly the likes of The New York Times, was looking at this one as a generation awakening to the injustices they were living amidst. Thanks to the new advent of the internet, they conjectured, Arab civilians were able to see how the more ‘democratic and developed’ part of the world lived; and because of Google Earth, people were suddenly exposed to the lavish life of their rulers and elites. This demeaning description of events in the Arab world narrated that people were now informed enough to stand up for their own dignity.

Clearly, revolution and dissent are not new to the Arab world at all. Revered and despised leaders alike took their position via governmental takeovers. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser took power following the 1952 coup.

As did the despots: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muamer Ghaddafi, and Hafez al Assad—the Syrian President from whom current President Bashar al Assad inherited his rule. Bayat notes that discourses on “change in the Middle East” have been dominated by interventionist ideas like the USA going into Iraq to rid the people of their dictator, or waging war against extremism in Iran. This type of rhetoric castrated the perceived political agency of Arab citizens, making them appear passive. While the revolts that

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ousted governments shattered this image, it continued the condescending narrative of this discourse by naming it an “awakening” or placing it beyond the scope and capabilities of a universal rising youth. In February 2011, an article by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ section stated “the Arab world is dead, but by way of Egypt’s revolution, new life will be breathed into it”.4 Indeed, 2011 was the third revolution in Egypt in the last century after the 1919 revolt against the British and the 1952 coup that forced King Farouk to abdicate the throne. The Arab region as a whole has seen various sorts of dissent. Before rising against their own modern day governments, there was colonialism to contend with in Algeria, Sudan, Tunisia and Libya. Bahrain, a tiny Gulf country that was virtually unwritten about in the political press before 14 February, 2011, has been a ground for protests between the people and the British between the 1920s to the 1950s, then eventually the current government, demanding better wages, workers rights, and voicing against corruption, nepotism, oppression of the Shi’a population and totalitarianism after the dissolving of the parliament.

The late 1990s was an extremely violent time in Bahrain with a rise in torture and police brutality. And of course, we need not speak of Palestine, a nation that has resisted sixty-five years of occupation as part of everyday life.

The Intifada of the late 1980s was a major event that was headed by youth with stones, creating ripples in not only the Middle East, but the world’s imagination of self-determination.

United by Images: Networks, Visibility and Performance: Communications, live, visual or textual, have always had a central role in social influence by way of intellectual and emotional connection. In their book Small Media, Big Revolution,5 Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi argue that the media used in the 1979 Iranian Revolution offers a “Third World model of revolutionary process: populist, urban and based on ‘small media’”. This, written in 1994, yet again sounds very familiar.

Internet activism has been a core form of political interaction in the Arab world. Mobile phones, hand held cameras and online ‘citizen journalists’ told the stories that the press was curtailing. Bloggers have become household names—Bahrain’s Ali Abdel-Imam, Syrian Razan Ghazzawi and Egyptian Wael Abbas were all major voices long before the Spring of 2011. Movements in Cairo that had been going on for years, such as Kifaya and Shayfeencom, practiced their dissent around ideas on visibility.6 While Kifaya started out performing political actions in areas usually known to be heavily policed, Shayfeencom (meaning “we can see you”) is an online monitoring group, documenting police violence through photos.

By 2011, the mix of street action and online interaction lead to a borderless exchange within the global public realm: from urban spaces to the electronic public sphere. As Marshall McLuhan discussed in 1964, media became the extension of man. “In the electric age,” McLuhan had said, “we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action.”7 In her video piece Alone, …Together, in Media Res (2012), LebaneseEgyptian artist Lara Baladi cut together soundbytes which she mined from YouTube, of philosophers speaking about various social movements.

She included spiritual philosopher Krishna Murti speaking about the “tremendous vitality, beauty and love” continuing that people protesting are no longer in a “corner of the earth, but part of the whole humanity”.

Baladi writes in her text accompanying the video in Creative Time’s Report8 that these speeches could have just as well been about the current mood: timeless and universal. She includes cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek speaking about the universality of struggle, and the immediate recognition of the images of Tahrir Square because we have all seen them “tens of thousands of times before”. She connects hundreds of images she collected while in Egypt at the time of the uprising and mentions the millions that she sifted through, admitting that she herself ended up in an Alice-eque “rabbit hole” of images.

All “authorless” images sourced by the author as part of her presentation for the Shifting Sands symposium, 23-25 August, 2013

An eruption of images going awry: The Arab Spring was not the first political event to be mediated, but it was heavily mediated. By way of conveying and sharing emotion, it was the act of recording and the feeling of euphoria that we now remember from 2011. The recording, viewing and re-viewing, over and over again, of the unprecedented prerecorded live events that overthrew governments became part of the exhilaration. While the images empowered everyday people on the street into being agents of this new narrative, it also epitomised the ongoing spectacle of this hyperreality, fragmented it into bits, almost detaching it from itself. The images were milked, removed from their reality and streamed through an excessive airtime of unforeseeable past, present and future. The people in these images, live on behind the screens in their now uncertain lives, as people watched, temporalities were suspended.9 Realities were no longer as they were lived, but as they were viewed.

What we most commonly saw during the Arab uprisings were imagery uploaded from the ground then shared across the media board between news, art, blogs, and so on. Many of this was hazy, on-the-run imagery, either still or video; people shouting, arms up in the air, shirtless men, and the sound of takbeers (or AllahuAkbar!) These images, however, were not unique to the Middle East either. Common images that we saw from all the protests were the line of riot police, at times with a protester facing them, perhaps holding a flower; the image of masses in a public square, or masses marching down a major boulevard; and the image of people getting sprayed either by cans or canons. An emotional connection, communicated through these images, united the global masses. The image stands as purveyor of the emotional, while protest performed for the image.

Internationally, the Arab Spring was treated as a string of performances. Last May I received an email, akin to a travelling circus, the subject line reading “Arab Spring Comes to Brighton Festival Fringe”.

This of course wasn’t the first time this happened—by summer 2011 one could buy tickets to attend “A Night in Tahrir Square” at London’s Barbican Centre. The Venice Film Festival honoured Egypt as their country-in-focus (a first time sidebar) with their screening of the controversial 18 Days. And the Venice Biennale featured Ahmed Basiony, a performance artist who was tragically killed in the first weeks of the Egyptian revolution, in an eerie and crude manner, making his death part of the installation.

The aforementioned hazy images made their way into many different arts and media. The images were presented as if people, fighting in unanimity with soul with blood, shot them in real time; that the films were made in the spirit of their being there. But eventually the displacement of these images surfaced as canned—the same footage of the young activist with bloodied hands shouting “Allahu Akbar” appeared in two separate films: Conte de Printemps (2011), a short art film by Syrian collective La Chaise Renverse and Egyptian feature film Winter of Discontent (2012).10 While the images were placed in similar narratives, their placement out of context, in art and cinema, presented a fictionalisation of otherwise real,

ongoing events, turning the events into a romance, or a myth. As these images became more recognisable, the more saturated they became, and the need for Baudrillard’s sense of “indifference” comes into play.11 Recognising these images of euphoria, audiences were seduced by political events as entertainment, stating phrases such as “revolution is sexy”, with recognisable storylines and characters. The events were mythologised along the lines of exotic background of Egypt, “um ul dunia”, the mother of all myths now having gone modern, an awoken slumber of a giant voice of the democratic proletariat, the Western dream gone East. The narrative had the perfect arch for absorption.

A year passed between my discovery of the Syrian art video and Egyptian feature film, yet this man still stood in anguish. That moment will last there forever, he became an actor in a fragmented continuation of similar tragedies. This image, and many like it unfolded on TV screens in “public time”,12 running separately from reality. It became a time of drama, entertainment and un-won glory. This time employs actors, sometimes by will but other times by the randomly roaming eye of the camera.

Winter of Discontent opened at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival and went on to win awards at Cairo and Dubai International and Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festivals. The film with its hero protagonists, the activist and the journalist, added to the mythic euphoria of the people winning over the system that was supposedly recently overthrown. The 2013 film The Square, on the other hand, which promises to look at the “thorny road to democracy after Hosni Mubarak” was screened at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and given the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary despite it being screened in its unfinished state. The film also broke records for getting the most support in its Kickstarter campaign, over twenty-six percent more than the amount originally asked.13 Here we see, in literal and commercial terms, how the image preceded the event.

In his book Mediated,14 anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita discusses the contagion of seeing people emotional about something familiar, in this case: protest against injustice. This moves the viewers to take part in the event and be part of that moment. While all along the thread of images shared in cinema, art, the news and so on had this effect, there was a sway from the raw imagery that communicated urgency. By 2012, we saw less actors and more posed performers.

A story that seemed popular by the number of times it was repeated at the beginning of 2013 was that of Syrian women joining the army. From Sky News to the Washington Post and Vice, reports were being produced on the women in various armies. The Daily Mail maintained an on-the-ground feel to their images of “the woman sniper of Syria”, positioning her amidst war torn streets. In contrast, two months later Time published a photo essay by documentary photographer Sebastiano Tomada.

The collection of glossy, back-and-white full body portraits of women portrayed each with different combinations of face cover, Kalashnikov and/or a child in their arms. All of the stories make prominent mention of the women as hijabi or Kurdish (ie., not Arab). Marshall McLuhan

argued that the method of communication was part of the message communicated. Self-representation in political imagery made everyone fair game, but it also blurred into what de Zengotita calls the “age of the self” born out of the modern-day “culture of performance”. As media uproar heightened, protestors self-imaging moved towards the performativity of the camera that swayed towards a global audience and away from the politics on the ground. While cities around the world are still struggling, both in continuation and anew, the Arab world has started towards a more deliberate and performed imagery of politics rather than performed politics in imagery. Like unnecessary sequels, headlines like “Arab Spring UnSprung” and “Arab Spring 2.0” continue to put the Arab world in its own corner of exceptional peculiarity. And while we remain watching events in their increasing mode of performitivity, the reality on the ground is far from exotic, and anything but romantic.

Notes 1 Peter Beaumont, ‘Global protest grows as citizen lose faith in politics and the state’, The Guardian, 22 June, 2013 2

Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013: 4

3

Thomas Freidman, ‘The Other Arab Spring’, The New York Times, 7 April , 2012; http://www. nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-other-arab-spring.html last accessed 16 August, 2013

4

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, ‘The Arab world is dead, but Egypt may revive it’, The Guardian, 15 February, 2011; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/15/arabworld-egypt-revolution last accessed 22 August, 2013 5 Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994 6

Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East: the role of the visual in political struggle, London: IB Taurus, 2013

7

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964

8

Lara Baladi, ‘Alone, Together: Tahrir Two Years Later’, http://creativetimereports. org/2013/01/25/tahrir-revolution-in-media-res/ last accessed 22 August, 2013 9 Bilal Khbeiz, Fadi Abdullah and Walid Sadek, ‘Public Time’, trans. Kevin Sharro; presented at Home Works III, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005 10 Sheyna Buali, ‘Digital, aesthetic, ephemeral: The shifting narrative of uprising’, http://www. ibraaz.org/essays/48; accessed 26 August, 2013 11

Chris Rojek, ‘Baudrillard and Politics’, in Chris Rojec and Bryan Turner eds, Forget Baudrillard?, London, Routledge, 1993

12

Khbeiz, Abdullah and Sadek, op cit.

13

The Square press release: http://thesquarefilm.com/the-square-film-completes-successfulcrowdfunding-campaign last accessed 10 August, 2013 14

Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated, London: Bloomsbury, 2005

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<<Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place>>1 SHANE EASTWOOD When Hobart’s local paper reported MONA’s curators claiming the new exhibition The Red Queen as “a more serious and engaged exhibition than anything MONA had done before”, an immediate question came to mind—what might it be they are comparing it to? Despite one of MONA’s key The Red Queen theorists Brian Boyd quoted as saying traditions evolve by building on precedent, no comparison has surfaced on how the The Red Queen sits in relation to its forebear Theatre of the World and it’s curator, Jean-Hubert Martin. What is the significance of what Walsh calls a “way-finder... to a useful personal philosophy”?1 Jean-Hubert Martin curates with one eye on David Walsh’s Darwinism and the other eye on the moral fabric of an élan vital like organic array emerging or evolving as a humanum-in-process, contemplating nature

with animistic rapport. Walsh can be understood to be grounding cultural narratives (especially his avowed distaste for the “linguistic turn”2) with a scientific base knowledge, comparing extremes for novel synthesis and, seeking consistency; between the primary focus on evolutionary biological mechanisms and their permeability into the human social milieu. The Red Queen is arguably Theatre of the World’s rival explanatory encounter. What I mean by this is that in The Red Queen MONA has subsumed a Martinesque intuitionism of the human lifeworld; culture, consciousness or mind and limited it to a biologism that defines the human person solely by its biological nature as ultimate explanation. In the words of MONA’s senior curator, Nicole Durling, it rationalises by “stripping back add-ons... and looking at base behaviours”.

The first instance of active biologism is found in the exhibition title The Red Queen, adopted from an evolutionary theory with allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen character from Through the looking glass rendering mythopoetic the ‘survival mechanisms’ that gear biotic life to co-evolution in a competitive and unstable environment.3 MONA has loosely grouped works in the exhibition according to ‘chapters’ ranging from belief, language, data, play, storytelling, mating, pattern and memory.

The ‘chapters’ are not made as obvious as in the iTouch ‘O’; it’s been left largely up to the visitor to discern what coheres on a contextual level.

On the ‘O’ device, so far there about a dozen and half instances citing four theorists in relation to a gallery section ‘chapter’ or work specifically; the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, cognitive scientist Steve Pinker, the humanities academic Brian Boyd and ethologist Ellen Dissanayake.4 With only four authors cited so far for discussion about what motivates humans to make art, MONA looks to be disinterested in engaging and fostering an open discussion; its purpose is similar to Steve Pinker’s, to see “how far we can get with the simplest hypothesis for art”.5

MONA’s curators state that the “central question [for Red Queen] functions mostly as a filter through which works can be viewed and that their primary concern was bringing together a collection of interesting pieces”.6 Place the objectives of Walsh’s interest in anchoring art within an evolutionary biological paradigm and then it seems faced with the multicodal nature of art objects. And then plotting out the gallery spaces, it indicates MONA had a difficult time putting together the puzzle of how to make the excessiveness of human creative behaviours fit within evolutionary biological and psychological terms. The above confessed primary concern is largely obscured by a chorus of media statements, often but not always qualifying the ‘Red Queen’ concept as the “looking glass”. This takes on the further qualifiers of provisionality, tentativeness, the intended looseness, gentleness and lightheartedness of the adoption of evolutionary theory. These qualifiers are further diluted with the qualification that The Red Queen “doesn’t propose particular theories—it uses them as a springboard for discussion”. This claim clashes with the number of theorists they employ to furnish explanatory texts, since three of the four are all closely related in their literary Darwinian affinities. The applied trend apparent in the media statements and on the ’O’ seem at odds with the “primary concern” of “interesting works”: “There are theories that art is a biological adaption... So, of course, human beings are adapting to the things that are advancing around them”; the artworks are “all gathered loosely under the premise of considering what evolutionary impulse propels humans... to make art”; the themes are “sexual selection, adaptation and extinction”.

Irrespective of whether MONA is actually indecisive or not about its aims and despite Walsh’s relish for explanatory accounts, MONA’s defensiveness seems apparent.7

On the iTouch ‘O’ tour which MONA provides, the primary concern of The Red Queen is ideological: “Our interest is not, I must stress, the apparent motives, but the deeper, unconscious ones that are stamped, perhaps, in our genetic memory... look around you. Art, we argue (tentatively, partially and gently) can express the desire to impress upon another your superior qualities. It can advertise your fitness as an individual, group, nation or empire.” By publicising a much wider range of opinions and positions on biology as speculative or explanatory for human culture, MONA may have avoided such self-conscious disclaimers.

Despite confusion or failings in the attempt to align Walsh’s personal philosophical journey with explanations for human creativity, MONA has created a positive platform for attempting to understand the basis of human motivation to “make special”.

Storytelling and play predominate at the beginning of the exhibition, blurring the boundary between art and general cognitive play with a quote from Brian Boyd: “Human art, I propose, has evolved from animal play”. It is a fairly convincing start to the exhibition with visitors invited to bounce about on Chen Zhen’s circular trampoline tasselled with ringing Buddhist bells and artillery shells along its circumference. Directly behind the opposite wall is the performance artist Sachiko Abe, perhaps

mourning the lack of soundproofing and the general loudness of Australians.

Further down two specialised table tennis boards complete what is a novel and playful beginning for gallery goers.8 In Ali Kazma’s video works, Butcher 01 (2008), Kazma’s butcher exhibits a religious zeal through fusing labour with a sense of playful duty. The butcher, who claims to be the best in the world, strokes meat like some stroke fur jackets and springs lamb carcasses to life in his imagination with his reverent brushstrokes. There is a kind of mental hygiene exercised by the butcher that is synonymous with Zhuangzi’s account of a Taoist butcher and Lord Wenhui.9

In the ‘belief’ chapter are several ancient and contemporary works, of which Sung Hwang Kim’s From the commanding heights...

(2007) is a fascinating portrayal of auto-biographical escapist fantasies and circumstances buffered by urban-scape. The media favourite however has been the compacted eight-ton of incense ash forming Berlin Buddha

by Zhang Huan. In broadcasted interviews, MONA failed to acknowledge the deeper significance of the content of this work, observing only its rich devotional aspect and the irony of its eventual crumbling ephemerality.

The meditating Buddha presents a paradox for The Red Queen, in that an intuitionism (think Martin) ratiocinates like a scientist (think Walsh) without (ideally) conditioning the object of attention with one’s emotive outlook. Is it art, science or religion? The historical Buddha is commonly understood as being an empiricist in contemplative method, who meditated upon the causes of pain and suffering. Buddha tells us that by maintaining a relaxed position with an equanimous mind, the meditator observes the field of sensation and through this process, the initial dualism of consciousawareness. Experiencing a sensate-object, as it does in everyday perception of density or discrete surface-boundary, leads towards a perceptible objectless dissolution.10 This conscious awareness evolves to a new phase of spatial awareness. Thus Buddha’s body ‘erupts’ and ‘dissolves’ the convention of the common perception of its discrete physical boundary, as revealed by the Berlin Buddha. This is part of the key to bridging biotic process with the human through an attainment of spatial awareness that allows for new features and possibilities to be produced in the living world, which are not apparent in formative biological mechanisms. If Buddha’s aim is understanding the truth of reality or attaining Nirvana then how does “the deeper, unconscious [motives] that are stamped, perhaps, in our genetic memory” fit in with the description given with the telos of the meditative process? Buddha and similar-in-concept ‘distancing’ behaviors might need a Purple Queen hypothesis like Martin’s intuitionism; one that complements and yet is transcendental to The Red Queen biologism.11

At the beginning of exhibition, the iTouch quotes Steve Pinker in order to promote the attitude of distancing: “I want you to look at the psychology of the arts with the disinterested eye of an alien biologist trying to make sense of the human species... [W]e don’t want you just to think about the psychology, but about the muscle memory, the emergence of the urge to create into the light; and then about the space the manifested urge is received in and the rituals that take place around it.” This alien biologist surely engenders a sense of wonder, just the words alone begin to ignite the awareness, yet one fails to sense with the exhibition itself, unlike with Martin’s heterogenous pattern finding and semaphoric relations between objects, any warmly coherent rehearsal in the exhibition of “the urge to create into the light; and... the space the manifested urge” emerges into.

Singular examples clearly evoking imagination about the “urge to create into the light” and the ritual spaces to support it occur for example with Leni Riefenstahl’s majestic and godly body-beautiful framing of the 1932 Berlin Olympics, and more idealogically baked is MONA’s example of a spider weaving its web and Chiharu Shiota producing her work Red Line, argued as analogous in terms of biological “phenotypic extension”. The famous example Walsh has used in the past is that of the peacock tail; we’re all peacocks geared by the Red Queen hypothesis. Although it intends to posit that “humans are evolved for art”, the Shiota/spider phenotypic extension analogy is to my mind, an instance of over determining an evolutionary principle to the point that it obfuscates the complexity of the positions that emerge within the living entity, the human/person. Whereas the spider

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lives in a closed system within its environment, the human through its embodied mind and consciousness is more an open and incomplete project due to the various positions it is taken into by its environment, and/or can take in relation to itself and its environment. Shiota’s work employs a subject/object distancing tendency, a roleplaying enactment, something a spider does not consciously employ. In seeking consistency for motives from an evolutionary biological perspective, it might prove more fruitful to springboard similarities and differences within the organic array.

A richer discussion could be had perhaps through considering the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, who argue in relation to the organic array the logic of the living world is not entirely captured or subsumable to evolutionary biology and psychology principles.12 In Plessner’s theory, a plant is seen as having “open positionality”, an animal “closed positionality” and a higher level animal “centric positionality”. For the human, Joachim Fischer explains, “the theoretical viewpoint identifies a break in the circle of functions at the level of the human organism, a break in the sensory-motor-dynamicimpulsive bio-cycle”. Plessner refers to this break in the cycle of functions at the level of the human living entity as “ex-centric positionality.” Fischer further states; “Humans as “living entities” arrive at their achievements “through” media, which enable them to achieve things and at the same time distort those achievements. By dint of their “excentric position” they occupy a “utopian standpoint”13 meaning ”they stand always with one leg in the future... they ‘never will come home’ unless belief in a myth or religious sense is developed that closes the line of endless infinity to a “circular infinity”.14 The utopian standpoint is seen as a process implying an unfinished nature of the human being; as homo absconditus. The comparative excentric positionality appears then as the “standpoint” by which human cultural production appears and becomes necessitated. Plessner states for humans that “[t]heir constitutive rootlessness testifies to the reality of world history.”

Further to defining excentric positionality with respect to the body, Plessner makes a distinction of a fractured unity between living-centred or livedmedium body and having a (corporeal) body, with which the ‘I’ or person can reflexively sense degrees of bodily transparency or opacity depending on their unique equilibrium and relationship with the outer environment.

Discussing lived-medium body transparency, Thomas Fuchs explains that “forgetting oneself is the mark of successful bodily enaction”.15

At the exhibition’s entrance and exit is MONA’s gene-pool cluster, the Rabus family of four artists, who are presented side by side on three walls. The stitched textile relief nature of Renate Rabus-Schaffner’s two small works draws the viewer into “their” intimacy with a surprising charismatic depth of layers that could be said to parallel or inform the masterly draughtsmanship of her two sons, Till and Leopold. MONA might conclude this rapport signifies a potential fitness marker for sexual selection and that may be so generically speaking, but the works were a sense-thetic relief to all the art biennale-like Olympian statements that surround them. Questions of femininity and the mother-infant nexus by one of MONA’s so far less adopted writers, Ellen Dissanayake, also springs to mind as the all important foundation for human creative development and health. Unfortunately for the works they hang opposite the distractive air of table tennis selection pressures and not really close enough to be suggestive of a curated contrast. There is no constellation of a family of resemblances nearby that place “inordinate emphasis on life’s details”16 touching the interior of the ‘heart’. Renate’s work has been poached for a question about genetic heritability or phenotypic plasticity of aesthetic creativity among the family on the ‘O’. Possibly, the creative behaviour of a concentrated internal cultivation of transparency of the lived-medium body or soul, the live green tea ceremony by Maida Ueda and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sachiko Abe’s cutting papers rite and Uta Uta Tjangala’s introverted meeting of women spirits, all several rooms away, point to a missed way to constellate these works. Uta Uta’s work, one of the few indigenous artists to be exhibited, is presently deployed for a collocation of storytelling works and specifically to support the ‘O’-based exegesis (possibly the longest text in the exhibition) and its three-dimensional illustration; a contemporary contrivance on the

goddess Moira. Even with Rover Thomas’ Rainbow Serpent nearby sadly no sense of Martin-esque reverence has curatorially supported Uta Uta’s work here. In contrast again is Alex Rabus’ Red Riding Hood series. On the ‘O’ MONA has deployed a joke, music and various renditions of the story circa 1885 and from the 1950s onwards. This could be a very interesting moment in The Red Queen, since there are allusions to a migration or evolution of a fairytale commonly known as Little Red Riding Hood. The disenchantment here is that MONA’s choice literary Darwinist, Brian Boyd, has nothing to say about fairytales in Origin of Stories and since he claims that attentionholding strategies aid relevance and survival of a story, Red Riding Hood is a golden example with all its historical permutations, sexual socio-political intents, power-plays and utopian wishes.

With Ryoji Ikeda’s expansive data.tron and data matrix, located where Sidney Nolan’s snake was custom-fitted on the second floor gallery, one can assume Walsh not only likes the film The Matrix, but that perhaps reality for him is at the level of mathematical principle. Seeing Ikeda’s warp and weft of processual numerical data, one is reminded of Japan’s aesthetic tradition of contemplating an oceanic spirited flux—Ikeda takes tradition in an entirely new medium-direction.17 Whereas Buddha may have contemplated the phenomena of change as it appeared directly to his mind, here change appears as being constituted by an a priori mathematical reality. One can undertake something of a phenomenological reduction and imagine the sensation of the surroundings as just that numerical data in flux, but maths doesn’t seem to explicate what the direction-giving-principle in mathematical quantising could be. Physicist and cosmologist, Max Tegmark, with his own Mathematical Universal Hypothesis (MUH) states that maths not only describes a theory of everything but is the universe essentially.18 Another physicist David Deutsche, differs from Tegmark’s assertion, stating that “our present conception of computation, knowledge, evolution and physics, is missing something”. He asserts that “complexity resolves itself into a simplicity at the higher level, about which we can have knowledge that we cannot express with the form of knowledge about the lower level.

Even if we could express it, it wouldn’t be explanatory”. Furthermore, “the important thing is that there is such a thing as the genuine creation of knowledge, ex nihilo”.19 A biological evolutionary insight to art doesn’t quite fit and though a conceptual bridge between abiotic and biotic life appears to be on the horizon with the notion of dynamic kinetic stability (DKS20), evolutionary biologists are generally not known for seeing biotic life in mathematical terms. Within The Red Queen one can surmise there might be another yet unstated agenda with regard to the order that reality assumes in the world. This is indicated with Walsh’s poetic and Platoniclike references to the eternity of ideas on the ’O’, possibly in what seems some opposition to Joseph Kosuth’s stringent conceptualism in One and Three Brooms (1965) presented in another part of the exhibition.

Despite the fallacy of an “ontological merism”,21 where parts are deemed ultimate in explaining features and motives, the tendency is to over-determine the permeability of biologism in the living world as evident in the exhibition’s publicity and on the ’O’ (the catalogue is yet to be published). Perhaps this is not the only view Walsh adopts, as he questions where and how morality arises. There is still another six months or so to go for the exhibition and MONA states it is still evolving its conceptual premises. Being a mediaevalist in the Renaissance man sense, with one foot in an alchemical soulful-like cosmology and the other in the new idol of the Reason of science, is what seems to bring the intuitionism of JeanHubert Martin and the science mindedness of David Walsh together. Put another way historically by Hans-Peter Krüger; “The natural philosopher directs his attention to disclosing the specific character of vitality and its levels of interaction in categories, while the biologist investigates living phenomena in accordance with his empirical concepts.”22 This synthesising of the two is a closer reading of the antifragility I argue ultimately animates MONA’s reason for being a platform for a “way finder... to a useful personal philosophy”.

level of the human body, in which the phenomena of the mind come to the fore as the new mediators of the circulation of life”. And, “Philosophical Anthropology cannot be confused with evolutionary theory, because the latter considers all forms of life, including the human living being, relative to the common principles of evolution and, as such, provides a naturalistic description of all forms of life within the theory of evolutionary epistemology and social biology, i.e., according to the principle of adaptive self-preservation of the individual organism and the principle of adaptive genetic reproduction through the organic individuals. Philosophical Anthropology, on the other hand, takes a systematic view of the contrast between forms of life, at least in the comparison between animals and humans, and as such allows for the burgeoning of a unique logic of a specifically human ‘living world’.” See Joachim Fischer, ‘Exploring the Core Identity of Philosophical Anthropology Through the Works of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen’, Iris 1, 2009: 153-70 14

ibid:

15

Helmuth Plessner, The Levels of the Organic and Man, Introduction to Philosophical anthropology, trans Lawrence Scott Davis, unpublished manuscript, 2009, [1965]

16 Thomas Fuchs, ‘The Psychopathology of Hyperreflexivity’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy New Series, 24/3, 2010: 239-55 17 Alex Rabus, Renate’s garden, Neuchâtel, June 2007; see http://www.renaterabus.ch/ curriculum_en.html 18 See for example Yusuke Aida’s ceramic murals and public monuments as well as monastic stone gardens, and indigo textile crafts 19

Max Tegmark, The Mathematical Universe, 2007; see http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646v2.pdf

20

’Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Walsh Deutsch’, SHIFTER 16: Pluripotential, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich eds, New York: 2010: 5-14

Notes 1 The title of this text comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, when the Red Queen tells Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” See John McDonald, ‘What lies beneath’, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/artand-design/what-lies-beneath-20130704-2pcuq.html?skin=text-only%3E; July 06 2013

21 Addy Pross, ‘The Evolutionary Origin of Biological Function and Complexity’, Journal of Molecular Evolution 76/4, 2013: 185-91

2

22 In relation to the fallacy of ontological merism, physician William Hurlbut states “a living being is not merely a mechanism but rather, a dynamic system, an interactive web of interdependent processes that expresses emergent properties not predictable from the biochemical parts”, William Hurlbut, A. Suarez and J. Huarte eds, Is This Cell a Human Being? Exploring the Status of Embryos, Stem Cells and Human-animal Hybrids, Springerlink: Bücher, Springer, 2011

3

23 Hans-Peter Krüger, ‘Persons and Their Bodies: the Körper/leib Distinction and Helmuth Plessner’s Theories of Ex-centric Positionality and Homo Absconditus’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 24/3, 2010: 256-57

Jean-Hubert Martin and David Walsh, “Mona Backgrounder: email communication between David Walsh, owner of the Museum of Old and New Art and the curator of Theatre of the World, Jean-Hubert Martin,” 2013: 1-4 interview with David Walsh, 24 January 2013

4

The thematic branched out respectively into an elaborate food and entertainment feast, ‘Curioser’ led by Walsh’s ‘life artist’ partner Kirsha Kaechele and into the inner city Dark Mofo PW1 food hall, where young blonde males cross-dressed in red and revealed intimate secrets to seduce the unsuspecting, fairly machismo, ‘straight’ set among the throng

5

Two more hybrid evolutionary psychology/anthropology thinkers have been mentioned but yet to be published for their views, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

6

Amanda Lohrey, ‘High Priest: Amanda Lohrey on David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art’, The Monthly, December, 2010: 85

7

Vicky Frost, ‘The Red Queen–Mona, Hobart’; see http://m.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ australia-culture-blog/2013/jun/19/mona-red-queen-hobart

8 Mark Fraser: “David revelled in the ‘didactic museum’. He loved learning, as you know. He spent his adolescence hanging out at TMAG and he loved it. He loved the didactic. So, as I say, the end result, now, of a largely non-didactic museum – although the ‘O’ maybe undermines that to some extent – it’s largely... it can be seen in a non-didactic way.” (unpublished interview with Mark Fraser 2012). And, David Walsh: “[T]he one thing that needs to be integrated into people’s psyche is that reality is a real exterior and functional entity that will exist with or without them.”

Interview with David Walsh, op cit.

9

Danser La Musique (2000-09); see image opposite

10

Zhuang Zi (Zhuang Zhou), Zhuangz Zi (or Chuang Tzu), Hunan Publishing House, 1996

11

Due to trapped moisture and heat inside the Berlin Buddha, it micro-blistered along its surface contour, perhaps an intended affect for the process of ‘dissolution’ 12

The reception of the work by MONA and the media so far can only take note that it will “crumble over time”. The artist in his interview had this to say, but only on the exoterics that have little to do with the esoteric motivation of a meditating Buddha: “People come from different races, with different colors of skin, different histories and cultures, different customs and traditions, and different languages and beliefs. But human nature is universal. Humans need belief. People need to look for different heroes who can speak to them.”

13 On Gehlen, Plessner and Scheler; “Each takes the human mind as his starting point, but begins by taking a view of the living body, and through comparative analysis of the various types of life–at the very least in contrast to animal life–establishes a break in life at the organisational

Page 199: Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron, 2009 Above: Kutlug Ataman, Paradise, 2007-13 Below: Chen Zhen, Danser la musique, 2000-09 Photos courtesy the artists and MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

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Total Hong Kong: artistic ecology and the typology of the survey ROBIN PECKHAM For an art scene as circumscribed as that of Hong Kong, the model of the survey exhibition is not a new phenomenon—in fact it is almost unavoidable, given the diminutive scale of the community it intends to describe—and yet it invariably announces itself as a new and pioneering innovation with each new manifestation. Such it is again with the latest exhibition project to attempt to define Hong Kong: Hong Kong Eye, organised by Parallel Contemporary Art and sponsored by Prudential, which follows on the heels of Indonesian Eye and Korean Eye in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Travelling to the Saatchi Gallery before being installed in the Swire Properties’

exhibition space ArtisTree in Hong Kong, the survey raises the stakes for the portrayal of the city’s artists by virtue of its strong commercial sponsorship and international exposure. It is also one of the first such exhibitions to occur at a distance from some arm or other of the government’s culture apparatus. While the exhibition has been the subject of vociferous criticism locally, primarily over the inclusion or exclusion of groups of artists, its motivations—by nature as suspect as any such corporate art project—have not been sufficiently analysed against the broader rubric of the survey show as a typology in the recent history of art from Hong Kong.

Much of the energy that is directed towards promoting art from Hong Kong, excepting the efforts on the part of the government of the territory, results in a general misapprehension of the status of art in the city. Increasingly, and especially with the recent visibility of the auction houses, blue chip international galleries, the art fair, and the nascent museum, observers are given to the assumption that Hong Kong must be home to a number of artists commensurate with its population at a similar ratio to somewhere like Beijing, or at least Shanghai. Nor is this logic new; much of the earlier support of the Hong Kong art community prior to 2000 stemmed from the assumption that it was only natural for a city with a film industry of a certain stature to also produce quality visual art (the same mythology now lingers on in the theatre).

The curatorial team of Hong Kong Eye fell victim to this same fallacy in scale if not in focus. An accompanying publication featuring a paragraph of introduction and a handful of images from each artist profiles some seventy five practitioners in or from Hong Kong; ultimately twentyfour were selected for participation in the exhibition, although only eighteen appeared in London.1 The book might be best understood as something of a curatorial sourcebook or a set of raw materials for research, but even so, its breadth indicates that the focus is more on presenting a comprehensive overview rather than a focused theme. This is linked, at least in part, to the curatorial team that consolidated these materials: Johnson Chang, principal of Hanart TZ Gallery and a noted curator of Chinese art; Nigel Hurst, director of the Saatchi Gallery and Serenella Ciclitira, the patron behind all of the Eye series exhibitions. While all three nominated and vetoed artists —particularly for the exhibition phase, which was clearly not as inclusive as the publication—ultimate responsibility for the makeup of the London iteration fell with Hurst due to his familiarity with the exhibition space and its audience, while the same is no doubt true for Chang on the Hong Kong end.

Due in part to this fractured approach, the exhibition diverges in key ways from the model of the typical Saatchi survey as developed in The Revolution Continues (Chinese art, 2008), Unveiled (Middle Eastern art, 2009), and The Empire Strikes Back (Indian art, 2010). Like these exhibitions, however, Hong Kong Eye does rely heavily on a group of spectacle-based installations that visually anchor the space with bright colours, surprising forms and sheer novelty that attracts the eye. In London, this role was played

by Amy Cheung’s Toy Tank (2013), a full-scale recreation of the titular object, in which visitors could sit and pretend to open fire on other works in the exhibition, and Adrian Wong’s In Search of a Primordial Idiolect IV (2012), an animatronic sculpture resembling a furry corn dog rolling on the floor and speaking in non-verbal utterances. In Hong Kong, Cheung’s tank was replaced by her Wonderland Taxi (2004), in which a life-size Hong Kong cab appears at a slightly skewed angle, but the configuration similarly retained the feeling that the smaller objects around these major installations were somehow orbiting them. Not coincidentally, Cheung and Wong both work in styles more recognisable as international contemporary art, and their placement both aided the legibility of the London exhibition for its European audience and declared the focus for the Hong Kong leg of the project within its own community.

Just as the term “Chinese contemporary art” indicated a parallel infrastructure of history that only recently began producing artists, whose work functioned clearly within the conversations of international contemporary art more broadly, Hong Kong too has long maintained its own ecology and aesthetics, and only in the past few years—since the arrival of the pillars of the commercial machinery of the international art world —have local artists working in a more globalised rhetoric begun to challenge this status quo. Hong Kong Eye does not exclude the former category:

Annie Wan’s ceramics were present but easily lost in the visual fray and Kum Chi-keung’s birdcage sculptures were scattered individually across a series of plinths, while on the other hand Lam Tung Pang’s naive paintings of animals appeared quite prominent, and Lui Chun Kwong’s modernist stripe paintings were added for the Hong Kong edition, but unfortunately none of these practices succeed without historical context. As an exhibition, Hong Kong Eye focuses far more on practices that code immediately as the global contemporary—precisely those artists who are now attracting market attention in the commercial galleries, like Kong Chun Hei and Joao Vasco Paiva.

Thus straddling a series of commercial and historical narratives that remain ripe for deeper critical analysis, Hong Kong Eye unfortunately passes up the opportunity to engage with these dynamics on an active level, instead choosing to position itself more or less neutrally as a survey that pulls equally from these various corners of art in Hong Kong. Kurt Chan, the noted art instructor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, delivered a lecture on the history of Hong Kong survey shows as a portion of the educational program organised by Asia Art Archive in collaboration with the exhibition.2 Chan depicted the general logic of the survey in almost universally negative terms: it is typically only a survey of the obvious, because curatorial teams rarely commit to the sustained engagement of proper research; the mandate of diversity drowns out individuality and uniqueness of voice; the even representation of schools or styles replaces deeper engagement with practices; the tendency is always towards the spectacle. He also noted that the survey is uniquely useful in the construction of discursive power, able to stand at the intersection of a complex of institutions, artists, market players and broad audiences.3 While it is unclear what the actors behind Hong Kong Eye stand to gain in particular in this way, the bragging rights for those able to “discover” and ultimately define the Hong Kong art scene seem to be increasingly tempting.

Historically, surveys of Hong Kong art have fallen into two rough categories: those interested in mobilising art in order to demonstrate a greater political or cultural truth about Hong Kong as a society, as with those organised through the official museum channels for the sake of mainland institutional observers, and those interested in gaining power over the Hong Kong art community internally. To this rough schematic it is now necessary to add a third category to which Hong Kong Eye might more comfortably belong: those attempting to market and, ultimately, profit from this association with Hong Kong art. A small city with a small art scene and, until recently, no major commercial stakes or players, Hong Kong has always been a convenient target for summarisation; now that the possibility of a market has appeared for Hong Kong art as a genre, the notion of defining this already bounded territory has become urgent on another level.

Borrowing further from Kurt Chan’s discussion of the history of survey exhibitions in Hong Kong, it may prove useful to compare the stakes and motivations of Hong Kong Eye with some of its predecessors—a conflicted territory into which Chan himself did not explicitly venture.

Chan began his discussion with the prehistory of contemporary art in Hong Kong by examining the exhibition Hong Kong Art Today organised by John Warner for the then-new City Hall gallery space in 1962.4 Prominently featuring the main engines of Chinese mid-century modernism, Lui Shou-kwan and Wucius Wong, that exhibition set the mould for both the Hong Kong Museum of Art program overall and the Hong Kong Biennial (mercifully renamed the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards in 2009, and later amended to the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards in 2012), popularising an open call model in which participation in an exhibition was synonymous with competitive recognition—a model that continues even now, although with less and less relevance for the contemporary art scene. Among other eccentricities, this bureaucratic system also introduced strict categorical divisions; although they have shifted over time and even temporarily disappeared, ranging from the cultural categories of “Chinese art” and “Western art” to, in the most recent iteration, medium-based labels like “Chinese painting”, “Installation”, and “Mixed Media”, they have also contributed to lasting divisions between

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modern, contemporary and traditional arts communities.5 This is a narrative that reached its apex (or nadir) in 1982 with the quasi-survey Hong Kong Art 1970-1980, an exhibition for which all of the works were drawn from the collection of the Museum of Art.6 Strong on modernist names like Luis Chan and Liu Kuo-sung, the institutional investment of such early attempts to define Hong Kong art was clearly on the side of the gradual evolution and revision of the traditional art forms of ink painting and seal carving; contemporary media made no appearance.

This gestures towards the political stakes of the representation of Hong Kong, especially in the curatorial bureaucracy of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department generally, both of which depend on cordial relations with colleagues at national and provincial museums in China for loans and access to scholarly materials.

Witness, for instance, the exhibition Hong Kong Art 1997, which attempted to do nothing less than serve up Hong Kong art on a platter for the handover to mainland China: a selection of works—again drawn exclusively from the museum’s own collection—were sent to Beijing and Guangzhou, featuring no political content, no contemporary media, and no conceptual work whatsoever.7 It was at this moment that Hong Kong’s conflicted relationship with Chinese identity became most apparent; some five years earlier the museum had already organised City Vibrance, which presented the work of almost fifty artists in “Western” or contemporary media—including Ho Siu Kee, Ellen Pau, Ricky Yeung and others with some staying power in the art scene—and yet the vision of Hong Kong presented explicitly to official mainland audiences was dominated instead by figures like Ding Yanyong, Fang Zhao Ling, and Ha Bik Chuen, a selection perhaps even more conservative than the surveys in 1962 and 1982.8

Hong Kong Eye, of course is hardly encumbered with such political questions, and yet there is clearly on ongoing curatorial interest in the notion of Chineseness. For this reason it may be that surveys outside of the public sector provide a more direct comparison, albeit a slightly less dramatic narrative in terms of the motivations behind these exercises.

The first private institution to mount such an exhibition was the Hong Kong Arts Centre with Turn of a Decade in 1989, which included work from Kurt Chan but none of the artists participating in the Hong Kong Eye, indicating a generational shift that has played out in the intervening two decades.9 Even more intriguingly, the exhibition shares only one artist —Adrian Wong—with the seminal exhibition The Hong Kong Seven curated

by Philip Tinari for the Fondation Louis Vuitton Pour la Création in the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2009. More so than any other single project, that grouping defined what the aesthetics and principles of contemporary art might mean for Hong Kong. Hong Kong Eye adopted a similar visual vocabulary, but by working exclusively on the level of existing individual works, rather than engaging with artists’ practices and commissioning new work, remained only on the surface and failed to push that same conversation a step further.10

In the final analysis, Hong Kong Eye did two things notably different from previous iterations of the Hong Kong survey—most importantly, it chose to build itself around a model of sponsorship and investment with much higher financial stakes and less political risk, given the current commercial focus on Hong Kong, than any of its predecessors; while brands like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Art Basel, Gagosian and White Cube have yet to set their sights on Hong Kong artists in a significant way, the fact that they interact with art in Hong Kong generally indicates a space for potential expansion that this exhibition intends to exploit. This means that there is not only, for the first time, the possibility of profitability in collecting or dealing in Hong Kong art, but also that there is a wealth of research into local contemporary art already produced and ready to be exploited. The book Hong Kong Artists: 20 Portraits and the Para/Site Art Space touring exhibition This is Hong Kong come to mind as curatorial projects invested in consolidating overlapping groups and aesthetics.11 Hong Kong Eye is the first exhibition to seriously claim Hong Kong as a corner of the international art world by positioning itself within a major validating Western institution and including primarily artists working in an

international style. This is, perhaps, an early step in what will indubitably be an ongoing process in the marketing of Hong Kong contemporary art; one can only hope that future entrants into this game will focus more deeply on individual practices, moments of heterogeneity, and engagement with concept and materiality beyond the sheen of contemporaneity. Failing that, the world may well end up with a vision of Hong Kong art that fails to include its artists.

Notes 1 See Johnson Chang Tsong-zung and Serenella Ciclitira, Hong Kong Eye: Contemporary Hong Kong Art, Milan: Skira, 2012 2 Kurt Chan also contributed an essay on Hong Kong modernist painting to the exhibition publication (see note 1) and sat on an ambiguous advisory board for the Hong Kong Eye project 3 See Kurt Chan, ‘From Hong Kong Art Today to Hong Kong Eye: Representing Hong Kong through Exhibitions’, Hong Kong Conversations 2013, Asia Art Archive, ArtisTree, Hong Kong, 11 May 2013. Video of the lecture is available online via Asia Art Archive; http://www.aaa.org.hk/ Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/4481) 4

See John Warner, Hong Kong Art Today, Hong Kong: Government Printer, 1962

5

See, for two examples among many: Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition 1985, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1985. Hong Kong Contemporary Biennial Awards 2009, Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2010 6

See Laurence Tam Chisheng, Hong Kong Art 1970-1980, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1981

7

See Hoi Chiu Tang, Hong Kong Art 1997: Collection of the Hong Kong Museum of Art Beijing & Guangzhou Exhibition, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1997

8

See Gerard C.C. Tsang, City Vibrance: Recent Works in Western Media by Hong Kong Artists, Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1992

9

See Oscar Ho Hing Kay, Turn of a Decade: A New Generation of Artists of the Eighties, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1989

10 See Philip Tinari, Guests of the Foundation: The Hong Kong Seven, Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création: The Collection A Choice, ed. Xavier Barral, Paris: Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, 2009 11

For the former, see Christoph Noe and Cordelia Noe, Hong Kong Artists: 20 Portraits, Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2012. For the latter, see Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, This is Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Para Site Art Space, 2010

Page 203: Wilson Shieh, Five Tallest Buildings in Hong Kong, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong Above: MAP OFFICE, Island is land (video still), 2009 Photo courtesy the artists

Something in the air: internet art as archive and strategy beyond the gates of the museum

ALEX GAWRONSKI It is curious that discussing internet art in the year 2013 can sound almost antiquated. At a certain juncture coinciding with the dot com boom of the 1980s, internet art was routinely touted as The Next Big Thing. At the same time, many arts theorists were announcing the onset of virtual realty in its most literal sense, as though its realisation in the near future were simply preordained. The strange feeling of nostalgia surrounding conversations about internet art is tied to the fact that although it is practicsed increasingly commonly, its impact on the more visible world of large-scale global exhibitions remains peripheral. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that the true venue for internet art is, naturally, the virtualised, ‘placeless’ realm of the Web. This in turn makes the notion of internet art’s accessibility to museums and galleries somewhat redundant. Yet this intuition of internet art’s seeming peripherality to the greater art world is doubly uncanny, when the internet has so radically altered the ways in which anyone with access to such technology views both art and the world generally. Meanwhile, the “virtual reality” discussed with enthusiasm by certain theorists a decade ago has manifested itself today in virtualised conditions—of capital, labour, art and culture—that are far more pervasive and far less obvious, and therefore arguably far more insidious, than those occasioned by donning a VR suit or

glove. For some, the internet’s radical questioning of standard demarcations of “good’ and “bad”, and thereby of the arbitrating roles of the critic and connoisseur, represents a new utopia of even exchange, a smooth space of interactivity that at its most enlightened, challenges the fairly rigid codes of quality imposed by museums and public galleries. For others though, the internet’s intimate relationship to contemporary art and culture is fundamentally compromised by its corporate ownership, its instalment at the very heart of global media. The multiple tensions that underscore internet art, as both practised and archived, further highlights core aspects of contemporary art in a cultural context dominated by a surveillant capital.

In a recent article ‘Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive’,1 theorist Boris Groys argues that the internet provides a genuinely alternative context for artists seeking to break the prestige and taste-making deadlock implemented by the normal processes by which art is deemed worthy of museum ownership.2 This is because practically everyone ‘owns’ the spaces of the internet or has the capacity to participate there socially and culturally, and to an extent that a traditional studio-based artist cannot. Originally, studio-based artists used their studio as a place or refuge, a context where creative experiments could be carried out in solitude and later revealed to

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the public. This manner of working meant that the individuality of artists, working in semi-seclusion in their private domains, was protected from the intrusions that commonly beset those working in situations more overtly administered and open to direct scrutiny. Obviously, this image of the artist as supreme individual has since been severely contested, particularly through the various practices comprising what is known as “institutional critique”. By a multiplicity of means it was clearly demonstrated by artists and theorists that the artist was not in fact a privileged being, but one whose labour was always dependent on attendant social, economic, technical and political factors. The private Self, a utopian construct and vestige of Romanticism that sought its most representative figure in the artist/genius, was shown to be nothing but a myth. This explains why many contemporary artists practise like elite contractors, working across sites to specific briefs that are realised collaboratively among a variety of specialists. In contradiction to this more or less corporatised scenario, Groys contests that the individualist utopian dimension of the practice of art has been reawakened through the mechanisms of the internet. Thus, the private Self of the artist in the studio has been replaced by the unlimited virtual space of the internet, where individuality is secured by the use of private passwords known only to their bearers. In this way, the very possibility of a genuinely subjective creativity has been transposed from the artist’s studio into the virtual space of the internet, where individuals are free to realise their greater project in whatever way they see fit and in apparent privacy and seclusion.

That is not to say that such a scenario is devoid of negativity.

Everyone knows, and Groys is certainly no exception, that the internet is privately owned and that it is by its very nature a space of surveillance.

Indeed, while philosophically championing its ostensibly democratic capacities, Groys indicates that the internet is also a hell, or as he would put it “paradise and hell at the same time”.3 Paraphrasing Sartre’s famous dictum “hell is other people”, Groys indicates that in the case of the internet, the “other people”, who according to Sartre seek to perpetually forestall us in the fixed image they already have of us, are multiplied a thousandfold. Now the internet user is constantly open to view, even if he or she does not directly experience the gaze of the other. In fact, the absence of the affects of surveillance even while they may be consciously known, only potentially increases the ‘hellish’ aspect of the internet. Indeed, there is probably no other context more prone to surveillance than the spaces of the internet. Concurrently though, these spaces are by their very nature prodigiously labyrinthine, meaning that the types of surveillance so presciently analysed by a theorist like Foucault or the “control spaces” mentioned by Deleuze,4 where the individual is obviously administered by authority, are less open to the immediacy of controlling observation. By the same token, it is impossible to view the internet as a totality: the sheer extent of internet content escapes any attempts to ‘know it all’, a truism that simultaneously makes it a “huge garbage can”.5 This issue of non-selectivity, while it may support an abundance of ‘trash’, alternatively makes it an antidote to the heavily administered, ‘panoptical’ spaces of the museum.

Moreover, internet art’s ambiguity in relation to the discourse of art history6 makes it for some one of the last bastions of a type of avant-garde practice that successfully eludes the conversion of real-time radical culture into ‘official’ knowledge. That is not to say that internet art goes un-remarked or more or less un-theorised: alongside the growing practice of internet artists are increasing numbers of theorists7 dedicated to expounding its social, political and cultural ramifications. For Groys in the end, the internet suggests two things for artists: either a reinvigorated utopian space of virtualised individuation or an archival space that effectively displaces the gate-keeping function of the museum.

The archival dimension of the internet as far as the practices of contemporary artists go, is particularly interesting once we consider that it is the primary means by which most artists’ practices are known to a broader public. This is true to such an extent that many of these practices will only be known from within the framing context of the internet. Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that those artworks known via an

artist’s individual website may theoretically only need to exist in that form.8 More generally, the work of contemporary artists is habitually reliant on the drafting of detailed proposals, including attendant illustrative imagery, and its subsequent thorough documentation. The latter is then released publicly and circulated online. This “re-synchronisation of art production and art exposure”9 means that for the majority of viewers, users of the internet, there is no longer any gap between art production and consumption: artworks are released online at precisely the same time as they are consumed globally. For some in the ‘culture industry’, this synchronicity has been interpreted in the most literal ways leading to the monetising of the internet as a type of virtual commercial gallery. Taking their lead from the massively successful transformation of consumer habits as a result of online shopping, these entrepreneurs view the internet fundamentally as a marketplace.

By extension, physical visits to galleries and museums become a thing of the past, while the audience for art is conceived almost exclusively as an elite, albeit amateur and idiosyncratic group of collectors.

In a more strictly archival sense, the internet website becomes a means of cataloguing and storing artworks virtually and in total absence of the need to amass works physically in museums and public institutions, the vast majority of whose collections often go publicly unseen in any case. In this way, the archival character of art on the internet presumes a similarly utopian aspect in so far as these archives are projected into a future irrespective of physical location and which, ideally at least, may live forever while increasing numbers of art institutions worldwide are forced to scale back or close down. Again, the virtualised conditions of the internet secure an open habitat for artworks, as well as for the individual identities of their creators, defining an indefinite haven outside the prosaic vicissitudes of history or basic real estate.10

The internet’s archival function in relationship to art also assumes pedagogic dimensions. Yet the brand of pedagogy it promotes is frequently maverick and eminently combinatorial, challenging the arbiters of a finalised version of the history of art. Far from automatically negligible, secondary or suspect, many art sites exist on the internet that have reshaped the way art might be produced and consumed. For example, a site like Ubu Web11 represents a comprehensive, scholarly and entirely independent archive of avant-garde and experimental art, historical and contemporary. As an online museum, its sheer scope, comprehensiveness and audience reach far surpasses that of most traditional museums. Furthermore, its actual content originates from a host of independently networked contributions. Another evolving internet archive, the East Art Map12, an initiative of the Slovenian art collective IRWIN, redraws the museological archives of modernity and post-modernity that favoured an almost entirely Westernised view of these cultural phenomena. It too, is an independent platform that may be altered according to viewer contribution. Yet another internet based counter-archive, Art Vandals13 was established by Swedish artist Felix Gmelin in association with the Rosebud Artist Cooperative and the Association for Temporary Art. Art Vandals documents incidents of art vandalism by people who describe themselves as artists. It does so against the recommendations of the actual museums whose boards prefer to keep public knowledge of such incidents secret. Art Vandals exists as an online archive that not only challenges the traditional sanctity of the museum by exhibiting affronts to it, but by implication, by suggesting that artworks in the age of the internet are forever open to re-editing, re-interpretation or annihilation. Purveying manifold archives of art, the internet, unlike the archives represented by permanent museum collections, is endlessly metamorphic and reinterpretable.

As far as its critical capability is concerned, Groys argues that with internet art the institutionally critical reflex has been rendered null14, replaced by a partial, though predominantly, liberatory space of refigured subjectivity. For him, as we have seen, the internet is a space of secrets kept, where the Self keeps its secret in the form of passwords unique to the individual. The critical manoeuvre enacted by the practices of institutional critique was to rid art of its secrets and to expose art’s claims of autonomy to the future of ‘work’ in general.15 Nonetheless, if we trace a trajectory of some of the most acute examples of internet art, it is clear that rather

than replacing art’s critical capacities, it opened them to interventionist possibilities of a sort once only dreamed of by artists. Indeed, from the beginnings of what was termed “NetArt” in the 1990s, artists working with the spaces of the internet have interrogated those spaces on a number of sophisticated levels. They have challenged the presuppositions of unsullied transparency on which the myth of the internet’s instantaneity depends and they have used the internet to intervene in real-time and with concrete realtime effects.

An online artist collective like JODI16 for instance, recognised early on the fallibilities of the internet and its susceptibility to hackers and viruses. Evidence of the intrusion of these proved that rather than a smooth, personalised technological environment, the internet was a space particularly open to external corruption. Signs of such corruption would often cause panic in the user once they realised that important information stored on their computer had disappeared or been irrevocably altered or that the computer’s normal functions suddenly took on a life of their own. Such instances were even more alarming, because it was practically impossible to know where these intrusions originated. Keeping such phenomena in mind, JODI developed specialised software that took screengrabs from the internet and reorganised them in random and unexpected ways that mimicked the uncontrollability of viruses. In doing so they spoke specifically of the internet as a creative medium whose assumed seamlessness was underscored by the fundamental randomness of code that could be endlessly twisted and rearranged for varying conflicting purposes.

Without a doubt, one of the most well known17 examples of internet intervention was the so-called Toywar mounted in 1999 by the artist collective etoy against the multi-billion dollar eToys corporation. etoy had been operating as an artistic collective for two years before the eToys corporation brought a lawsuit against it aiming to force the artists to change their name. Instead, in the early days of ecommerce, etoy galvanised a diverse, globally dispersed band of anonymous “soldiers”18—each one personified in the space of the internet as a Lego-like figure with its own personalised attributes—to trade online against the shares of the eToys corporation. Whenever an online soldier made a ‘hit’ against eToys it was registered as a cartoon explosion on a schematic map of the world that indicated where the hit originated geographically. This strategy was so successful that shares in the eToys corporation plummeted, forcing the company to withdraw its lawsuit. Toywar became an almost mythic example of the way art, operating in an activist manner, could utilise the accessibility of the internet to provoke real-time affects. Here, the artist collective from within the networked domain of the internet simultaneously challenged the assumption that artists know nothing of technology or economics, a prejudice the eToys Corporation was certainly relying on in its hopes of scoring an easy victory. At the same time, etoy consciously deployed humour and a strong aesthetic sense in the realisation of this action, identifying the project clearly with art.

A more contemporary version of this type of tactical online activity is evident in projects of Ubermorgen, a Swiss/Austrian-American duo founded in 1995 by the artists lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. Fittingly, both artists were original members of the etoy collective. Since its inception, Ubermorgen has used strategies similar to those of etoy by intervening in the spaces of the internet to highlight its identity as a public and communal space, whose discreet parcelisation into protected units (individuals internet users), is only ever partially assured. As with etoy’s Toywar, a project like Ubermorgen’s GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself, 2005-08) deploys the internet as a dominant economic platform albeit in a parasitic way. GWEI serves Google text advertisements on a network of hidden websites and with the money earned in displaying these ads, redirected participants to buy back Google shares. In this case, the massive multinational Google Corporation’s own ads are diverted for profit that is then used to independently take control of the company. However, far from a literal exercise in online activism, the GWEI project, again like etoy’s Toywar, is also partly satiric in its simultaneous indication of the participatory aspect of the internet and the more commonly prevailing massive imbalance between the economic,

and by extension, political clout of individual users and that of global corporations.18 More directly successful, was another of Ubermorgen’s projects, part of its EKMRZ “economic trilogy” (that includes GWEI), “Amazon Noir” from 2006-07. For this project, a group of Ubermorgen’s ‘agents’ authored a software that was able to steal copyrighted ebooks from the Amazon website and then redistribute them on the internet for free. Provoking another legal battle, Ubermorgen were successful enough in their knowledge of the law to force Amazon to eventually buy the software they had developed to pirate their books. In this manner, they reversed the expected result that presumes that an independent, unfunded cooperative will always lose out to the interests of a powerful corporation.

Related in its militancy and deployment of the internet to produce real-time affects, was the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s engagement in what they described as “electronic civil disobedience”.19 In 1997 the EDT used software they developed called “FloodNet”, to stage a multi-stage virtual ‘sit-in’ in solidarity with Mexico’s Zapatista rebels’ fight against the Mexican government’s attempted wholesale implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The EDT distributed FloodNet software to a widely dispersed, sympathetic group of artists, activists, theorists and others. Collectively, and as the name suggests, FloodNet was used to swamp the computers of the President of Mexico, Mexican government officials and the USA Department of Defense which were all suddenly inundated with empty browser screens. This virtual intervention temporarily disabled the computer networks they targeted and forced the Mexican government into a dialogue with the Zapatistas who championed the basic demands of Mexico’s indigenous population and its underprivileged majority. By no means a simple case of politicised online evangelism, actions of this sort by the EDT, further proved that the internet was not merely a passive receptacle for individual consumption, where the individual was forever protected within a cocoon of their private browsing habits.

Of course, this type of overt political intervention that uses the internet as tool for art/activism represents but one dimension of the possibilities of internet art. Two further contemporary examples of artists who employ the impure medium20 of the internet to speak of the abstractly coded language, on which it relies, include the USA practitioner Mark Napier and the Japanese duo Exonemo. Napier exhibits his ‘studio’ online at potatoland.org. A founding member of the NetArt movement, potatoland documents some of Napier’s most influential projects. Two of these, Shredder (1998) and Riot (1999) disassemble in real-time the comparative graphic unity of the internet browser platforms. As its title Shredder indicates, this interactive program allows users to ‘shred’ browser content —including markups, text, code, images and links—that is then randomly rearranged in the creation of singular temporal compositions. Napier’s Riot was a response to the practically forgotten Tompkins Square Riots that occurred in New York in 1999 protesting the barely regulated gentrification of the East Village. Directing notions of privatisation towards the comparable use domain names on the internet, Riot was the “first and only multi-user browser”21 that simultaneously merged the browser’s web page with those of any other webpage surfed. The result was a disorienting amalgam of deconstructed web content that served to effectively flatten the apparent depth of internet space. At the same time, Riot commented more broadly on the internet as a paradoxically uneven field of vastly disproportionate equivalences. In a somewhat similar vein, the Tokyo-based duo Exonomo22 have developed software such as FragMental Storm (from 2000 but most recently updated in 2007) that carries out random web searches and displays the contents in a continual, disjointedly metamorphic pattern. An even more recent version of this software released in 2009, was specifically designed for iPhone users. Another slightly earlier project from 2004 ZZZZZZZZap is a “spam de-tuner” that processes and broadcasts spam that filters through Exonemo’s web address recombining it, while simultaneously using the raw file data to generate an accompanying “soundtrack”. The work of both Mark Napier and Exonemo, while not interventionist in the same directed way as some of the previous examples, emphasise the internet instead as

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an unfathomable mass of raw data that can be mined and reappropriated in infinite recombinations. By using the internet in such ways, these artists question the presumed naturalness and ease of its intelligibility.

Recently, there have been increasing attempts to move internet art into contemporary museums. Certainly most of the artists and collectives mentioned in this article have exhibited examples of their projects in public institutions. Undoubtedly, one of the initial reasons for internet art’s development was as a possible challenge to the traditional demarcating role of museums. What the ramifications are for the truly interventionist capability of internet art by the museum’s courting of it, remains to be seen, although it is unlikely that it cannot in some way be compromised.

This was definitely the case with regards the critical, material and experimental integrity of video art once it became a staple of global biennales and museums of contemporary art.24 In some senses, this transformation of internet art is already evident with particular internet projects that are clearly designed to sell primarily for their novel or plainly amusing manipulations.25 However, the day internet art parallels the ascendant popularity of video art seems a long way off. Similarly, the utopian claims that internet art already represents a serious alternative to traditional museum going, also seems idealistic beyond measure when contemporary art tourism appears to be at its zenith. Nonetheless, it is true that as an almost infinite artistic archive, for better and worse, the internet is at the forefront of how the majority of artists, curators, art students and the general public discover the work of particular artists. Theoretically at least, the mass reliance on the internet as an artistic resource challenges the need for the existence of tradable art objects in favour of the artwork as an evolving series of virtualised conceptual propositions.

However, the conjoined resources and influence of global biennales, art fairs, high-profile museums and commercial galleries would still seem to hold almost uncontestable sway over what gets considered worthy to be deemed art in the first place. As for the notion that the internet supplants the traditional artist’s studio with an online haven of reinvested creative subjectivity is also contestable. Obviously the degree to which a person’s online identity is corruptible or open to identity theft even, is significant: a personal password targeted for ‘cracking’ if there is someone with the will and motivation to do so, will not stay protected for long.

The privacy of online subjectivity thus remains forever precarious.

Additionally, the idea that internet art spells the end of art as critique is also questionable, as is already attested by the small number of examples offered here. Still, it is true that such critique does not operate along the lines of institutional critique as it is normatively understood in art world parlance: those artists working within the spaces of the internet critically do so in ways that do not automatically aim unlike much ‘classic’ institutional critique, to expose the “lie of images”.26 That is to say, criticality as far as internet art goes, arrives at the same time as it is consumed or intervenes, without providing a distance whereby the viewer might passively contemplate the ‘lie’ exposed. On the one hand, it is the sheer labyrinthine, cumulative and metamorphic aspects of the internet as a vast interlinking archive, and on the other, the internet tactically practised as real-time calculated randomness that promises an alternative to the habitual fixity of authorising institutions of art.

7 Some of these include Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, Tilman Baumgärtel, Tom Corby, Ricardo Dominguez, Geert Lovink, Gene Ray, Gregory Shollette and Peter Weibel 8 Indeed, playing devil’s advocate, and considering the sheer sophistication of contemporary graphic media, we could contest whether an artwork posted on the Net had ever been physically produced.

Groys’ considers the semantics of such ambiguity surrounding the ‘reality’ of art on the internet as confirmation of its fundamentally conceptual orientation. See Groys, op cit.

9

ibid.

10

Of course, the internet requires basic access to the required technology including cables, transmitters, modems etc. Access to it is therefore also significantly dependent upon physical restrictions 11

www.ubuweb.com

12

www.eastartmap.org

13

Defunct in its original form, the archive now exists at http://www.temporaryart.org/artvandals/index.html

14

Groys, op cit.

15

By revealing its underlying dependencies and structures meant that the mythic autonomy on which the traditional image of art depended was subsequently replaced by a much more prosaic, even cynical attitude to art practice and the role of the artist 16

Joan Heemskerk of the Netherlands and Dirk Paesmans from Belgium

17 Certainly for what was largely an artistic exercise, the Toywar was so successful in its real-time intentions that it appeared on the nightly news, a media context habitually devoid of any reference to contemporary art whatsoever 18

There were 1799 of these online ‘soldiers’ numbering artists, lawyers, university professors, business people, ‘riot-kids’ and ‘freaks’; www.etoy.com

19 For example, by Ubermorgen’s own estimations, it will take participants at least 200 million years before they can realistically claim to ‘own’ Google 20

The EDT are Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic

21

Groys argues that the fundamental virtuality of the internet environment means that it can never be properly considered a medium. See Groys, op cit.

22

www.marknapier.com/riot

Notes 1 Boris Groys, ‘Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive’, e-flux journal 45, www.e-flux.com

23

www.exonemo.com

2 Processes where historically “nobody could explain why one artwork was more beautiful or original than another”. ibid.

24 UK art theorist Julian Stallabrass suggests the rapid historicisation of video art as a result of its overexposure has come “at the price of the profound transformation of that art”. See Stallabrass, op cit.

3

25 “There are some examples of artists selling versions of online work in limited editions with certificates of authenticity, along the lines of video art, but the gesture appears even more absurd than with video, since the work also appears in its original form for access by anyone with an Internet connection.” ibid.

ibid.

4

See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992: 3-7

5

Groys, op cit.

6 See Julian Stallabrass, ‘Can Art History Digest Net Art,’ Courtauld Institute Digest online http://www. courtauld.ac.uk/people/stallabrass_julian/2011-additions/Digest.pdf, Courtauld Institute, London, UK, 2011

26 See Jacques Rancière, ‘The Misadventures of Critical Thought’ in The Emancipated Spectator, London & New York: Verso, 2008

Ten rooms: the real spaces of Asian-Australian artistic interaction REX BUTLER AND A.D.S DONALDSON On 28 October, 2012, on the occasion of a Government White Paper on the topic, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard stood up in front of an assembled crowd of business leaders, academics and community representatives at Sydney’s Lowy Institute and announced the next one hundred years as Australia’s “Asian century”.1 The sentiment was commendable, overturning as it did long political indifference to the region and even actual racist and exclusionist practices. The only problem was that it was about a century too late. It has always been an “Asian” century in Australia. Before the country was settled by Europeans, Australia was part of Asia, and Aboriginal and Asian cultures traded with each other along the northern reaches of the continent. Even after it had been settled but before there was an “Australia”, much of the world mixed and dealt with Asia through Australia. And yet none of this economic, political and cultural exchange has ever featured in our art histories, which have always emphasised the art of white colonialist Europeans above any expression of “regional” aesthetics.

It has always been tempting from this perspective to think of Australia as a small, underpopulated and only recently settled nation, hanging precariously off the bottom of Asia. The country would be a cultural and geographical exception, separated by its English colonialist past from its neighbours to the north. It would be the same old provincialist story of isolation and belatedness, only this time in relation to a different centre (and we can see this narrative gaining currency in the twenty-first century with the rise of the new Asian superpowers). But for us nowhere is marginal to anywhere else. Everywhere is connected to everywhere.

The world is round and there are no edges. To paraphrase one of our favourite authors, the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

And it is this conception that the Asia-Pacific Triennial, founded more than twenty years ago now, has attempted to grapple with since its inception.

But, in truth, the Asia-Pacific has been with us since at least the celebrated 9x5 exhibition of 1889, held at Buxton’s Rooms in Melbourne in 1889, which was undoubtedly one of the most important art exhibitions ever held in Australia, but not for the reasons usually given.

In this text therefore, as a way of exploring the true Asian century, the one that has just ended, we will take up a number of the real artistic spaces in which Asia and Australia have found themselves alongside each other, echoing their actual geographical proximity. We will select ten exemplary rooms, each telling us something different about Asian-Australian artistic exchange. In doing so, we want to point to a certain history of what we might call “UnAustralian” art, which is not merely a particular set of artists or even works of art, but a different way of thinking space, looking at Australia from the outside in and not the inside out, turning the world upside down so that it is Asia, Africa and South America that are on top and not Europe and America. In doing so, we also offer an alternative way of writing the history of Australian art: not as an official story of patronage and large State-sponsored exhibitions, but of incessant, small, ‘local’ exchanges between artists, trading ideas, techniques and ways of life.

ONE: So let us begin with that foundational Australian exhibition—said to mark the very “genesis” of Australian art2—held in the intimate spaces of an art supply shop at the “Paris” end of Collins Street, Melbourne.

The exhibition, of so-called “impressions” painted on cigar box lids, proved controversial, and Roberts, Conder and Streeton wrote a famous defence of their aims in The Argus of 3 September 1889: “That we will not be led by any form of composition or light and shadow, that any effect of nature which moves us strongly by its beauty, whether strong or vague in its drawing, definite or indefinite in its light, rare or ordinary in colour, is worthy of our best efforts”.3 Now, Smith in his Australian Painting reads this as a proposal for a nationalist art that would see culture here as something distinct. But for Alison Broinowski in her Yellow Lady, who sets the artists’ work within a wider geographical context, this apparently “Australian” moment was in fact “Asian”.4 The catalogue for the exhibition by Conder featured a Japanese cherry blossom. Roberts for his part had seen Whistler’s 1884 exhibition at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in London, which was one of the breakthrough moments in the introduction of the japonaiserie of French Impressionism into the English-speaking world; and it was Whistler’s quickly brushed tonalism with minimal highlights, which he had got from his study of Japanese woodblock prints, that largely defined the style of the Australian “Impressionists”, as critics of the time recognised.5 Indeed, borrowing from the mise-en-scène of Whistler’s 1884 show, the artists hung the room of the Exhibition of 9x5 Impressions in “draperies of soft liberty silks of many colours… Japanese umbrellas, screens and handsome Bretby Jardinières completed a most harmonious arrangement of colour”.6 And Roberts’ own studio was decorated with Oriental rugs and Japanese vases, and Conder’s with Madras muslin, liberty silks and Japanese fans.

TWO: But if Japanese art was in Australia, Australian art was also in Japan. In a small office in Tokyo in 1891, the Wesley College-educated Frank Nankivell, having run out of money on the way to Paris, found himself working as a cartoonist on the English-language satirical magazine Box of Curios. There he employed Rakuten Kitazawa, the only Japaneseborn member of staff, and taught him Western-style cartooning. It is Kitazawa who is widely considered the “father” of that late twentiethcentury globe-spanning phenomenon of Japanese manga and anime. For, after leaving Box of Curios, he went on to found Tokyo Puck, based on the American magazine Puck, and there trained Ippei Okamoto, the first newspaper manga artist, and Hekoten Shimokawa, the inventor of anime.

These two in turn are decisive for Osamu Tezuka, the creator of the Astroboy and Kimba the White Lion cartoon series and rightfully called Japan’s Walt Disney; and Tezuka is extremely important for Hiyao Miyazaki and Takashi Murakami, two of the world’s leading post-Pop artists. Thus it is perhaps not too much to say that, for all of the distance of the connection, Japanese manga and anime is ultimately an Australian thing. For his part, Nankivell, after four years in Japan, left for America, where he became instrumental in the establishment of the Association of American Artists and their organising of the inaugural Armory Show in New York, Boston and Chicago in 1913, said to be (although it was not) America’s first contact with the international avant-garde.

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FOUR: We see a similar paper lantern in the background of Rupert Bunny’s 1900 portrait of the well-known Japanese actress Sada Yacco in the role of ‘Kesa’. Yacco at the time was in Paris, performing the role at the Paris Exposition, as part of the first Japanese theatre company ever to tour the West. Bunny was later to make another portrait of Yacco in 1907, this time performing the mad scene in the role of ‘Le shogun’. And, indeed, Bunny was not the only Australian to paint Yacco: Ambrose Patterson, who was in Paris at the time, also painted her in 1900. But to return to the two images

by Bunny, the first shows her with her face and body turned away from the audience, and the second in full theatrical make-up turned towards them.

In the first, her nationality is not part of the meaning or narrative of the picture, while in the second we have the traditional mask of Japan staged for the world. In the first as opposed to the second, that is, it is her femininity that Bunny seeks to capture, her quality as an “everywoman”. After all, Yacco was a celebrity with whom Western women obviously identified (and even something of a feminist, for she insisted on performing with her husband’s company, despite his traditional disapproval of women performing on stage with men).10 And, indeed, aren’t we struck with the similarity between Bunny’s portrait of Yacco and his images of Frenchwomen emulating Eastern odalisques in his series of Turkish baths? That is to say, against either a simple Western view of Japan or an Orientalism, perhaps what Bunny is most interested in is a form of universal Belle Époque femininity—dreamy, theatrical, other-worldly—as opposed to any kind of cultural “truth”?

THREE: And, of course, Japan was in Europe, and therefore in the Australia that was also in Europe. At 25 Cadogan Gardens in Chelsea in 1899, the Adelaide-born artist Mortimer Menpes installed an entire Japanese interior at the centre of his house. Menpes, already renowned for his technically brilliant etchings, had first gone to Japan in 1887 and worked with Hokusai’s pupil Kawanabe Kyōsai, one of the so-called interface Japanese.7 It was, indeed, Menpes’ 1888 exhibition of paintings, drawings and etchings based on his time in Japan at Dowdeswell’s Gallery in London that led to Oscar Wilde’s immortal observation in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (whether positive or negative of Menpes, it is hard to tell) that “There is no such country. There is no such people. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention”.8 In 1840, Menpes travelled to India, Burma and Kashmir with his daughter Dorothy, who had previously been the subject of paintings by Menpes’ friends Whistler in 1885 and Gauguin in 1888 and 1890. In 1896, Menpes returned to Japan and produced with his daughter the best-selling Japan: A Record in Colour in 1901, the same year he set up the Menpes Press to put out the long-running series of books recording his travels (China, India, Venice, Paris). In fact, it was while he was in Kyoto during his second visit that he had built the fittings that he would later install in his Arthur Mackmurdo-designed Arts and Crafts House at Cadogan Gardens.

Generally understood as a follower of Whistler, Menpes in his interactions with Asia goes further than Whistler, who never actually visited there.

He performs what Broinowski calls the “Expatriate Shift”.9 For Menpes, it was a question not merely of the distant mimicry of a supposed Japanese aesthetic, but of the direct incorporation of a real Japanese space. In the entrance hall of Cadogan Gardens, every plane supports a Japanese fitting or piece of furniture, not as a style but as a physical object (on the floor were lacquer chairs, on the walls silks, and towards the ceiling wood-and-paper light shades).

Top: View of Menpes’ studio in the Japanese style, Cadogan Gardens, before 1899 Below: Rupert Bunny, Mme Sada Yacco ‘Le Shogun’ (scène de la foile), c.1907 Photo courtesy The Stuartholme-Behan Collection of Australian Art, The University of Queensland

FIVE: But it was not only in Paris that Yacco performed. Like the Australian light opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, also the subject of a famous Bunny portrait, she was a global superstar. On the same tour as the Kawakami Theatre Company played Paris and other European capitals, it also toured America, putting on seasons in New York and San Francisco. And America was an option for Australian artists too. For example, when he was twenty, some time around the turn of the last century, the Castlemaineborn printmaker Martin Lewis, who had briefly trained at Julian Ashton’s in Sydney and already been published in The Bulletin, left for America.

After stopping over in San Francisco and Chicago, he eventually ended up in New York where he found work as a commercial artist and illustrator.

It was there that he taught his friend Edward Hopper how to etch, which technique lead Hopper on to his mature work.11 Already something of an “Orientalist” before he left Australia—besides his knowledge of the Ukiyo-e masters, he was also inspired by the etchings of the Dutchman Marius Bauer—in the 1920s Lewis moved to Japan for five years, where he painted in oil and studied traditional methods of Japanese printmaking. Particularly of interest to him was what might be called Japanese art’s de-dramatised and anti-picturesque quality, in which the “firmament twinkles with lofty indifference to the little human scene”.12 It was a directness that he would bring to his depictions of inter-War New York, which can appear so much like the work of Edward Hopper, although in truth the influence flows the other way. Indeed, Lewis has been described as “pictorially the most psychological interpreter of American life as it is lived in its characteristic aspects”13—but, of course, the great irony here is that this archetypal American artist is both Australian and sees America through Japanese eyes. The author of Martin Lewis: Modern Masters of Etching, Malcolm C. Salaman, for example, writes of the atmospheric effect of Lewis’ Street Booth, Tokyo, New Year’s Eve (1927) that he shows “artificial light glaringly contrasted with the comparative darkness of a starlit night”14, a description that would apply equally to Lewis’ later New York-based Glow of the City (1929), or indeed Hopper’s Summer Evening (1947).

Above: The Drunken Buddha, published by the University of Queensland Press, Brisbane; translation and illustrations by Ian Fairweather Opposite: Kiichiro Ishida, The Lane, 1930s (?)

SIX: We wonder when Lewis was in Tokyo whether he might have seen the 1924 exhibition by the Sydney Camera Circle, held at the Shiseido Gallery in Ginza, which included photographs by the recently returned Kiichiro Ishida and was the first Australian art show held overseas since the Grafton Gallery Exhibition of Australian Art in London in 1896. Kiichiro had been introduced to photography by a Japanese photographer living in Sydney, Ichiro Kagiyama, who had already exhibited in Japan and who, unlike Ichida, would go on to have a considerable career, with many of his photographs being published by The Home in the 1930s. Indeed, it was only in 1941 after the outbreak of World War Two that Kagiyama returned to Japan after some thirty-five years in Australia. But, in fact, the real point here is that the “pictorialism” of the Camera Circle—and it is undoubtedly ironic that Kagiyama was never admitted into the group—was nevertheless influenced by Japanese aesthetics.15 We can see it in its misty atmospherics, its dispersion of the viewer’s attention, its lack of focus and its frequently decentred composition. Again, the vaunted “Australianness” of the Camera Circle—the fact that it is said to have founded a national school of photography—can be said to reveal its debt not only to a general Japanese aesthetic but also to particular Japanese photographers: Kagiyama, who was one of its first practitioners; and Ishida, who enabled the group’s first overseas showing.

SEVEN: Also arriving from Japan in the 1920s was the Oxford University-educated Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney, Arthur Lindsay Sadler, author of The Art of Flower Arrangement: A Sketch of its History and Development (1933) and part of a circle of intellectuals in Sydney interested in China and Japan that included the architect Hardy Wilson, Professor E.J. Waterhouse an Professor Alexander Mackie. Sadler is today best known for his so-called Japanese Room for the 1929 Roy De Maistre-curated Burdekin House Exhibition in Sydney, which included much of his own Japanese furniture collection and was an early attempt to fuse both art and design and European modernism and Japanese aesthetics—and in this, of course, it might remind us of Menpes’ Cadogan Gardens. But, in fact, the connection with Menpes goes deeper than this: the Burdekin House exhibition was sponsored by a certain Lady de Chair, and De Maistre when he left for England the following year painted for de Chair’s dining room at Carrington House in London an Orientalist fantasia in gold and silver paint based on Ernest Fenellosa’s influential Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, originally published in 1912.16 Back in Australia there was the Melbourne modernist Elizabeth Tweddle’s now forgotten “pink house” in Toorak in the 1930s, built to house her extensive collection of Japanese paintings and prints and, like Menpes and de Chair, a permanent built environment, as opposed to any merely temporary installation.

EIGHT: Hardy Wilson, as already mentioned, was part of Sydney’s Orientalist circle. A visit to China as a young man in 1922 had decisively changed his ideas about architecture, leading him to try to produce a fusion of Greek and Chinese styles. In the 1950s, he planned an ideal Australian city, named (of all things) Kurrajong, which was dismissed as eccentric and never finished. But, in fact, our national capital is itself a kind of ideal city built by an architect influenced by Asian culture and religion. The University of Illinois trained Walter Burley Griffin was a practising Theosophist at the time he built Canberra, which incorporates a number of ‘Asian’ design elements, such as feng shui. Indeed, the drawings done by his architect wife, Marion Mahoney Griffin, which are said to have been what won him the commission, were extremely japoniste in inspiration.17 Certainly, when Mahoney worked in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright back in Chicago before coming to Australia, it was said to be “filled with the spirit of Japonisme”.18 Griffin would eventually move to the Indian city of Lucknow in the 1930s to build another ideal city, bringing to his designs much of his experience of Canberra. And Griffin was by that time merely the latest in a long line of Australia artists, particularly Theosophists, who had made the pilgrimage to India: Aby Altson, who had worked for an Indian prince in 1904; Ethel Carrick, who travelled through Asia and the Middle East after the death of her husband in 1915; and later Flora Beresford, who would leave for India in 1950 and return only in the late 1970s.

213 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 2 . 3 2 013

NINE: If in each of these examples Asia is a single place or country, it is also a region, a network, a passage between places. And no one better embodies this than Scottish-born Ian Fairweather, who as a child was raised by his aunt until the age of six, before his father returned from India where he was the Surgeon-General of the Twenty-Second Punjabi Rifles. While studying later at the Slade School of Art in the 1920s, Fairweather also attended classes in Japanese and Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. And in 1929 he left for Shanghai for the first time. He was in Bali by 1933; and, before arriving in Melbourne in 1934, he is said to have visited Sri Lanka. Less than a year later, he was in the Philippines, before he returns to China. In 1936, he left for China for Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Borneo, before coming back to the Philippines. In 1938 he lived near Brisbane and then in Cairns in 1939, before moving to Singapore in 1940 to work at a desk job as part of the War effort, before being transferred to Calcutta and then Bombay, where he became the Temporary Captain of an Italian prisoner of war camp. Upon discharge, he returned to Melbourne in June 1943, before moving to Cooktown in north Queensland; and in 1952 that he launcheed his celebrated raft from Darwin to Timor, and the rest is national mythology. From one perspective, Fairweather can be seen as a Scottish Gauguin, but from another perspective he is a kind of “constellation”, connecting distant places and already embodying a globalised art world, in which no culture is marginal and there is Cubism in Aboriginal art, Western perspective in Asian art, and both Aboriginal and Asian art in Western art. He is our first truly “Asian” artist, as opposed to an artist from a particular culture. For is Fairweather not as much Japanese as Chinese, as Balinese as Aboriginal? Can the distinction between East and West truly hold any more with regard to his work? Put simply, there could be no Tim Johnson or Simryn Gill without Fairweather. And Fairweather himself was preceded less famously by Ambrose Patterson in Hawai’i, Theo Schoon and Guelda Pyke in Bali and even Ellis Rowan, the celebrated botanical illustrator, throughout the Pacific.

TEN: To conclude our brief survey here, we come back to the famous 9x5 Exhibition. If Australian art began with “impressions” painted on wood whose japonisme was repressed by the artists at the time because of their fear of anti-Asian sentiment, this same repression was not possible in the face of the human traces or impressions left behind by the human body in the architectural ruins that toured Australia in 1958 as the Hiroshima Panels. The post-War period was a time of official occupation followed by repatriation and diplomatic reparation (peace parks, Japanese Gardens, Japan’s joining of the Western Bloc). We could indeed draw up a list of Allied soldiers who spent time in Japan after the War as part of the occupying forces who became heavily influenced by Japanese culture and aesthetics, for example the Californian hard-edged painter John McLaughlin. But McLaughlin can also be seen as part of a tradition of AsianPacific artists, which included the earlier abstract expressionist Mark Tobey, who was himself part of a North-West School centred in Seattle, founded by the Australian Ambrose Patterson, which itself included many AsianAmerican artists. And this new Asia-Pacific connection is only one aspect of a century of increasingly globalised art-making. If it has only recently been noticed and turned into an ongoing exhibition, it has been experienced by artists for much longer than that.19 Asia has always been part of the Pacific, like a series of “islands” in a wider interconnecting “ocean” or “rooms” in a “house”. And it in is this “ocean” or “house” that Australian art must first of all be located: outside of itself, amongst others, not just a “here” but also a “there”.

4

Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996: 27-8. As will be obvious in what follows, like all scholars of Asian-Australian relations, we are enormously indebted to Broinowski’s groundbreaking book

5 The reviewer for Table Talk, 16 August, 1889, for example, writes: “Messrs Tom Roberts, Conder and Streeton are not at all free from the charge of ‘Whistlerism’”. Cited in Virginia Spate, Tom Roberts, Landsdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972: 65 6

ibid.

7

Broinowski, op cit: 51. For further details of Menpes’ life and work, see Gary Morgan’s extraordinary three-volume The Etchings of Mortimer Menpes, Stuart Galleries, Adelaide, 2012 8

Oscar Wilde, The Major Works, Oxford University Press, 2008: 235

9

Broinowski, op cit: 45

10

For a detailed account of Yacco and her widespread cultural meaning, see Shelley C. Berg, ‘Sado Yacco: The American Tour 1899-1900’, Dance Chronicles 16(2), 1993: 147-96, esp: 155 11 See the chapter ‘The Detour through Etching’, in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995 12

Martin C. Salaman, Martin Lewis: Modern Masters of Etching, London and New York: The Studio, 1931: 5

13

ibid.

14

ibid: 5

Notes 1 See Rowan Callick, ‘Back to the Big Picture-Asian Century White Paper’, The Australian, 29 October, 2102: 13

15

See Yuri Mitsuda (ed.), Kiichiro Ishida and the Sydney Camera Circle, Museum of Sydney, 2003

2

See Deborah Edwards (ed.), The Roy de Maistre Mural Room, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993; see also Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-68, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995: 59

3

Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, Oxford University Press, 2001: 78

Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton, ‘Concerning “Impressions” in Painting’, The Argus, 3 September, 1889: 7

16

17

On the Griffins, see Broinowski, op cit: 38-9

18

Broinowski, op cit: 39

19

See Peter Blunt and Nicholas Thomas eds, Art in Oceania: A History, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011

215 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 2 . 4 2 013

<<We’re quite schizophrenic. We can be seen as crazy, wacky girls, gender bending, twisted, costumes, popmusic, just wacky shit!>>1

LAURA BROWN Brown Council is a Sydney-based collaboration made up of four women (Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith), who work along the gamut of live performance and its residues, usually in the form of video or installation. Many of these works place strong emphasis on the nature of performance as endurance, for its potential to bring emphatic meaning to otherwise banal everyday activities that hold an undetected or under-appreciated capacity for artistic gravity. Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours, held in late 2012 as a part of Performance Space’s ‘Halls for Hire’ program, is Brown Council’s longest yet: a ninety-hour baking marathon held at the Country Women’s Association (CWA) headquarters in Sydney for its ninetieth anniversary. During the performance the four worked together in producing all one hundred and thirty-seven recipes from the CWA cookbook Jam Drops and Marble Cake to a strict set of CWA-style rules and with no retries allowed. Guidance was provided by CWA experts, and upon completing the final cake with little less than five hours to spare, the results were judged (the scones awarded ‘best in show’).

When an expanding chapter of contemporary artwork seems happy gliding only along its surface, the weight of Mass Action lies in the way it irrefutably implicates its four artists—first by way of its immediately physical demands, and then interpersonally as it places exceptional toil upon the relationships between these people—with its emphasis foremost on a shared ninety-hour feat of endurance, ultimately creating a space of radical intimacy (which we could read perhaps as an implied parallel to the CWA’s role itself as a women’s organisation).

With the endurance of Mass Action, we witness four women struggling (literally and symbolically) with the burden of their contemporary position, which seems to make it hard, or at least seems to demand a particular degree of exertion, to pay heed and give tribute to the women of past generations. Here, baking as a task stands as metonymic for the care and strength that previous generations of women have given us, but which we most commonly dismiss as insignificant, as “women’s work”.

By engaging in a single physically demanding activity for almost four consecutive days, and by channelling a focus that we might sooner identify with other more archetypal and near-legendary endurance performance works, such as those of Marina Abramovic, but which for these

Opposite: Brown Council, Appearing Act, 2011 Above: Brown Council, Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours, 2012 Photos courtesy the artists

women is potentially unparalleled in their practices as artists or indeed in their lives as a whole, Brown Council offer their salute to the history of women and their work that lies as formative, but nonetheless often dismissed within their own lives and work. Further, by doing so specifically in the form of boundlessly and frantically producing cakes, the artists retrieve their work in the kitchen, and too any other activities we might imagine would take place at the CWA, as legitimate sites of agency. Brown Council also reject the dismissal, which is in fact more likely than not to be from feminists themselves, of cooking because it may be too ‘traditional’ an idea of a woman’s role. And so, before we even begin to consider the exothermic effects of Mass Action as a performance work, we must take into account the fact that Brown Council and the women of the CWA are asserting their determination to ‘do their own thing’, and for the CWA to be acknowledged as a valid space in its own right, regardless of the connotations we might assume for it. For Brown Council, it seems this is a tribute which employs the medium of endurance performance, arguably the hardest of all in terms of physical and practical toll, and particularly so when it requires the effort of four participants rather than just a single artist. This is even more the case in an age when it is commonly presumed that attention spans are evershrinking and physical skill is less and less important (particularly as a contemporary artist).

As neither essentially a domestic setting, nor a public one, we might consider how the space of the CWA acts to configure our interpretation of this performance. The work would mean something quite different if the performance happened in one of the artists’ houses, or their shared studio, or again in a gallery. So what meaning does an endurance performance accrue in this context? In her 2012 book Artificial Hells:

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship2 Claire Bishop outlines the idea of “delegated performance”, which, to a degree self-explanatory in its title, may take a number of possible forms, as outlined in her essay on the topic. While Mass Action as a performance operates with the four artists at its centre, the context of the CWA and importantly, the involvement of its members, is equally vital to the work’s materialisation and interpretation.

Though we might not assume the CWA members and experts, particularly in the context of the ‘Halls for Hire’ as an art-institutional performance program, as being placed at the centre of the work in terms of artistic authorship or conceptual framing, they undoubtedly inform the work’s planning, its locational context and ultimately its practical resolution.

They are altogether necessary in providing a crucial connection in activating the circuit of the work. In this way, these women perform a certain kind of delegated performance.

One strand of delegated performance outlined by Bishop that applies here involves hiring people as stand-ins for the artists themselves, with the idea that these bodies are a “metonymic shorthand for politicised identity”,3 signifying race, gender, age, and/or class. Indeed, it is plausible that the women of the CWA stand to inform a certain analogous politicised identity as middle-class (and it seems usually white) Australian women, who might in actuality easily be the mothers or grandmothers of the artists or their friends. In this sense, by adopting the space of the CWA Brown Council welcome its connotative metonymic identity, encouraging this association in construing where they are ‘coming from’. Another type of delegated performance is that in which professionals are recruited for their particular area of expertise, their skills “incorporated into the performance as readymades”4. Importantly, these people are recruited for their ‘elective’ identity rather than as representative of a particular assumed politicised identity. From this interpretation, the CWA women hold a place in the work with their identities taken on as readymades in the performance; as a part of the structure that crucially informs the work and its reading. Of course, Brown Council hardly ‘recruit’ these women, but in fact enter their existing space. If delegated performance might usually be understood as operating by introducing the external identity of a ‘performer’ newly into the context of art, Mass Action removes the artists from their usual art context and places them into the no less specific context of the CWA. Although not actually replacing the artists themselves, the work crucially relies on other ‘performers’ for its completion (in all regards). At the very least, this has important ramifications for the interpretation of these artists’ labour and its value which is now connoted, constructed and judged in and by the context of the CWA and its experts, rather than purely by an art-world hierarchy or art historical reading.

There is an important question to be asked: do we assume Brown Council to be taking themselves and the CWA in absolute seriousness? It is an important question, because across Brown Council’s practice there runs always a defiant strand of humour, and we might wonder where this lies and how it operates in Mass Action. In conceptualising the project, the artists used as a starting point, by way of popular culture, the 2009 American film Julie & Julia. In synopsis, it is the story of a young woman who resolves to find her life’s purpose by attempting every recipe from the cookbook of her culinary idol Julia Child (a story taken from the real-life Julie Powell’s blog and resulting book on the undertaking). As you might imagine the film is a typical chick-flick, surveying Julie’s various ‘big questions’ with an entertaining and non-offensive kind of humour. A similar strain of comedy arguably charges Mass Action, and in a way it becomes a strange lighthearted kind of performance-art adaptation of a film adaptation of a real story. This humour acts as an adaptable tool that allows a convivial veil; an extended relatability that allows an easy way in, for artists and audiences alike, in dealing with and engaging in serious issues of contemporary feminism and its history.5 In this instance it is a humour with its basis in the absurdity of taking something to its logical conclusion (baking every recipe in the book in order to pay tribute to its author/s), which points us toward reconsidering some big questions of our own, the least of which might be the importance of the part of baking itself (and then, what else?) in the persisting

disregarded zones of our cultural history. While looking toward to the reverberations of popular culture in a work like Mass Action, it also becomes important to consider the technologies through and by which this work as an endurance-based performance was enacted, recorded, disseminated, accessed and experienced. Throughout its duration, members of the public were welcome to witness the performance during the designated opening hours of the CWA, and were also welcome to take part in the afternoon tea that marked its conclusion. Much also happened beyond this physical contact, with the entire performance screened ‘24/7’ via live internet feed that ran to a dedicated blog, on which each cake was photographed and published alongside live updates with written contributions by Jane Howard and Ianto Ware (who both had strong online presences with blogs of their own, prior to Mass Action). Following the conclusion of the performance, the blog remains live online to be accessed as an archive of all that transpired, including post-project reflections from Brown Council themselves. On the surface, the blog mimics the visual design of the CWA website and logo, inferring and affirming this connection in the design of its basic utilitarian purpose. Perhaps more interesting are the ways in which the performance was visually documented. With a closed-off, single-angle shot, the live video feed offered primarily an indexical report of the performance, providing a rudimentary YouTube-scaled, but nevertheless crucial view into the proceedings.

Of course performance works, unless deliberately undocumented, by now tend to be digitally recorded in some form or another. In his various writings on the topic of ‘Self-Design’ (our obligation to do, and the responsibility required in doing so), Boris Groys arrives at the point, having just discussed Nietzsche’s claim that “is it better to be an artwork than to be an artist”, that not only is it an actuality, but it is an expectation that “though not everyone produces artworks, everyone is an artwork”6. That is, we cannot avoid, in a time of an image-saturated and screen-mediated Facebook existence, being deliberate in the way in which we present ourselves to and design ourselves within the world. It is for this reason that while its nature as an endurance performance remains its meatiest point, the most intriguing part of Mass Action lies outside of the performance, in the poster image used by Brown Council for the purpose of all reporting and marketing of the work. It is a grainy black-and-white photograph of the four artists. Dressed in plain clothes and matching overalls, marching past a bricked and barred building and with determined stares, they picket large signs painted boldly with the words “MASS ACTION”. It could easily be a document straight from the feminist demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, which today we recognise typically imaged from the Women’s Liberation Movement in the USA and UK, but which of course happened in Australia too. On their signs, the text and title Mass Action at once makes a demand by way of instruction (for action to occur it must do so en masse), and describes the mode of this particular performance itself. What is so interesting about a work like this is the way it now becomes, as an ultimately feminist performance, unavoidably socially designed in its format and dissemination, and whilsedoing so embraces an audience far beyond the artists themselves as co-authors of the work, without this even being its main point.

Notes 1

See http://www.dasplatforms.com/superpaper/brown-council/

2 Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York: Verso Books, 2012: 219-239 3

ibid: 222

4

ibid: 223

5

See Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne. In the catalogue, curator Laura Castagnini and historian Jo Anna Isaak offer thoughts and research on the long history of the use of humour in feminist art, both in Australia and internationally

6

Boris Groys, ‘Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility’, e-flux journal 7, June 2009.

See also ‘The Obligation to Self Design’, e-flux journal 0, November 2008

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