Contemporary Visual Art + Culture BROADSHEET

contemporary visual ar t+culture b r o a d s h e e T

VOLUME 42.1 MARCH 2013

CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

T U R NE R FROM THE TATE

THE MAKING OF A MASTER

a light changing experience Now showing until 19 May

A RT G A L L E RY O F S O U T H AU S T R A L I A Avoid the queues. Book at PRESENTED BY

PRINCIPAL SPONSOR

bass.net.au 131 246

ORGANISED BY

EXHIBITION AND MEDIA PARTNERS

detail: J.M.W. Turner, Peace – Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842 © Tate, 2013

We used to

balnaves contemporary: photomedia ta l k about love Polly Borland Eliza HutcHison Paul KnigHt angElica MEsiti david noonan david rosEtzKy tiM silvEr glEnn sloggEtt grant stEvEns darrEn sylvEstEr JustEnE WilliaMs 31 January – 21 aPril 2013

Polly Borland Untitled XXXII 2010 from Smudge series.

Image courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne © the artist

adMission frEE

INFORMATION LINE 1800 679 278

artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Supported by

Contributors Rebecca Conroy: Sydney-based director, writer, curator and producer of situated works and events; Associate Director of Performance Space, Sydney 2008-10, also co-founding director, Bill+George ARI; currently director Yurt Empire, a performative encounter and occupation of a wasteland site in the City of Sydney slated for presentation in November 2013; has worked in various creative capacities for Gang Festival, Artspace, Aerialize, Pact Theatre, Well Productions, Watch this Space, Splendid Arts Lab, Campbelltown Arts Centre Shane Eastwood: Artist, art writer, compulsive philosophy reader and obsessive thinker; exhibited at Peloton Gallery, Sydney; Postgraduate, Newcastle and UTAS; currently trapped in the bowels of MONA, Hobart Blair French: 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 Look This Way, UTS Art Gallery, Paris Atelier, University of Sydney Art Gallery (2013), Formal Intensity, Tsagaandarium Art Gallery and Museum, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, ICAN Occupy’s EIDIA, Plato’s Cave (EIDIA House) Brooklyn, NY, USA (2012), We are all Transistors, Aratoi/Wairapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton NZ (2011); 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; currently preparing (with Adam Hill) a major exhibition Bomb, Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht (AAMU) to coincide with the festival of the Treaty of Utrecht June 2013; latest book is Fashion and Orientalism (Bloomsbury); currently working on (with Jacqueline Millner) Fashionable Art (Bloomsbury, due in 2014) Paul Gladston: Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham; studied fine art at Edinburgh College of Art and Yale University before taking an MA and a PhD in critical theory at the University of Nottingham; between 2005 and 2010, served as inaugural Head of the Department of International Communications and Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. His book length publications include Art History after Deconstruction (2005), China and Other Spaces (2009), Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists (2011), ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’, a special issue of the Journal of Visual Art Practice co-edited with Katie Hill (2012), and ‘Avant-Garde’ Art Groups in China, 1979-89 (2013); academic adviser to Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward Galleryn London 2012; editor of Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and the book series Studies in Contemporary East-Asian Culture Adam Hill: Sydney-based Koori artist and children’s entertainer. His work encompasses painting, installation, video, outdoor interventions and street art. Recent work includes a major commission for Campbeltown City Council and One in Four at Damian Minton Gallery; his next big project (in collaboration with Adam Geczy) is Bomb, Aboriginal Art Museum Utrecht, as part of the major cultural festival commemorating the Treaty of Utrecht Daniel Szehin Ho: Editor in chief of randian, an online magazine on contemporary art in China; freelance translator for art publications and institutions, most recently translating a book of interviews with Pu Jie, Double Vision: Pu Jie on Chinese Contemporary Art, History, and Society; writer on contemporary art and culture; Shanghai correspondent for artforum.com <http://artforum.com>; part of the curatorial team at Rough Canvas Omar Kholeif: London-based curator, writer and Senior Editor of Ibraaz, the leading critical forum on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East Olivier Krischner: Art historian and writer; formerly managing editor ArtAsiaPacific magazine and lecturer at the University of Tsukiba, Japan; co-editor of the forthcoming Asia Through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (with Fuyubi Nakamura and Morgan Perkins); curated After Effect (2011) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; researches especially modern and contemporary art of China and Japan Ian McLean: Research Professor of Contemporary, the University of Wollongong; published extensively on Australian art and particularly Aboriginal art; his books include How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, and Art of Gordon Bennett; contributor to a number of journals including Broadsheet, Artlink, Art Monthly, Third Test, World Art; writes on indigenous contemporary art Danie Mellor: Sydney-based artist; lectures in Theoretical Enquiry, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; received the Indigenous Ceramic Art Award and also the 26th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 2009 and included in the second National Indigenous Triennial in 2012

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 ro a d s h e e T Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

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

Muhammad Muhammad: Writer and academic who lives and works in the Middle East

RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery

Tom Nicholson: Melbourne-based artist; Lecturer in Drawing in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University; most recently exhibited in the inaugural Qalandiya International, Gestures in Time-Jerusalem Show VI, Al-Ma’mal Foundation and 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Parallel Collisions

REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland

Jack Persekian: Jerusalem-based curator; founder and director of the influential Gallery Anadiel and the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, and former director of the Sharjah Biennial; recently curated Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities at Manarat Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi; Never-Part, Bozar, Brussels; Dubai Next, co-curated with Rem Koolhaas at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany; and The Jerusalem Show, Al-Ma’mal Foundation Langsheng Zhang: PhD candidate, Research School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra; Associate Professor, School of Art, East China Normal University, Shanghai 2005-12; Adjunct Professor, School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne 2006-08; practicing artist, exhibiting in many countries and his work has been part of some major art museums collections internationally; curatorial or advisory role at the shanghai Art Museum and a number of public art museums or galleries overseas since late 1980s; contributor to a number of journals including ArtChina, Art Education and randianonline

volume 42.1 MARCH 2013

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 ro a d s h e e T

volume 42.1 MARCH 2013

COVER: Jake and Dinos Chapman, Altered Towers (installation detail), 2011 Photo courtesy the artists and White Cube, London, presented at 2012 Art Stage Singapore

18

18

THIS BELONG TO ME, THE ONE DOLLAR NOTE: THE ETERNAL RETURNS OF APPROPRIATION Ian McLean

23

APPROPRIATION: NO LONGER APPROPRIATE? Adam Geczy, Ian McLean, Danie Mellor, Blak Douglas (Adam Hill)

26

They don’t make art like they used to: Late last year in the Wall Street Journal , Camille Paglia mounted a frontal onslaught on contemporary art Adam Geczy

30

26

Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new: Sweeping art under the market Alex Gawronski

35

JUST A PRIVILEGED GUY with a megaphone… standing on MY soapbox… shouting MY views like they mean something…

Shane Eastwood

40

This exhibition is not a survey Blair French

45

The cult of Ai: A critical response to Ai Weiwei’s comments on the exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China Paul Gladston 35

48

Future perfect and great expectations: >> Reactivation <<, the 9th Shanghai Biennial Daniel Szehin Ho

53

Change in the making: celebrating forty years of Australia-China diplomatic relations Zhang Langshen

56

Mourning and remembrance; reinforcing the power of simple actions Olivier Krischner

60

THE GREEN LINE Muhammad Muhammad 63

64

POLITICAL FORM AND CONTENT Omar Kholeif

66

Rethinking the possibilities of the monument in the face of histories of dispossession Tom Nicholson, Jack Persekian

69

Seeking contexts for that ubiquitous place of public gatherings —the community hall: Performance Space’S halls for hire Rebecca Conroy

66

13 MARCH — 21 APRIL 2013

Chicks on Speed SCREAM

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: Chicks on Speed, production image for SCREAM, courtesy of Chicks on Speed and Kathrin Krothenthaler

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).

PALESTINE Tom NICHOLSON (Australia) | Michael RAKOWITZ (USA) | Larissa SANSOUR (Palestine) | Khaled HOURANI (Palestine) | Cornelia PARKER (UK)

Image: Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Palestine) (detail), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

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

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART pRESENTS

direct democracy 26 ApRIl - 6 jUlY 2013 Direct Democracy explores the changing nature of our engagement with the democratic tradition and examines the shifting forms of political agency, in both emerging and foundational democracies. The exhibition reflects contemporary social movements, unrest and the desire for change; modelling key social dynamics and possible futures. Featuring international and Australian artists, new commissions and invited works, Direct Democracy continues MUMA’s ongoing cycle of thematic and discursive interdisciplinary exhibitions. Curator: Geraldine Barlow

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

Damp, Untitled pencil 2010 courtesy of the artists Photo: Matthew Stanton

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre presents

Khadim Ali, Rushdi Anwar, Sanaz Fotouhi, Andrew Garton, Nasim Nasr and Amin Palangi 30 March - 12 May Nasim Nasr, Lion and Line, 2011 Two channel video installation, 5:05 mins Image courtesy of the artist

30 March - 12 May

BPOV MEAO (Behind Point of View, Middle East Area of Operations), 2009–10 digital colour photograph, inkjet on paper, 111.8 x 80.3 cm, acquired under the official art scheme in 2010, P10015.003

Casula Powerhouse Art Centre 30 MARCH – 12 MAY 2013 BPOV MEAO (Behind Point of View, Middle East Area of Operations), 2009–10 digital colour photograph, inkjet on paper, 111.8 x 80.3 cm, acquired underPowerhouse the official art scheme in 2010, 1 Casula Road, Casula NSW P10015.003 2170

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 1 Casula Powerhouse Road, Casula NSW 2170 Enter via Shepherd Street, Liverpool Monday - Sunday 10am to 4pm Admission FREE

OPEN DAILY 10 AM – 5 PM

Enter via Shepherd Street, Liverpool

ARTS CENTRE

2013 June www.greenaway.com.au

NOEL McKENNA | NASIM NASR | GAG ADELAIDE

May SANTIAGO SIERRA | GAG ADELAIDE

April

ART DUBAI

February HOSSEIN VALAMANESH INDIA ART FAIR ARIEL HASSAN

January KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE

NASIM NASR

ART STAGE SINGAPORE

SANTIAGO SIERRA

2012-2013

History

GAGPROJECTS AND THE BERLIN SPACE WAS ESTABLISHED IN 2007, WITH THE INTENTION OF ASSISTING IN THE PRODUCTION OF ARTWORKS AND STAGING EXHIBITIONS IN NON-CONVENTIONAL SPACES, AS WELL AS PUBLISHING.

For the past 21 years GREENAWAY ART GALLERY, in parallel to the official gallery program, has introduced Australian 201220112Art 010Fairs 20092in 008Sydney, 2007 Melbourne, artists to the world through 200Singapore, 5200420032Taipei, 002 Shanghai, Caracas, Puerto Auckland, Madrid, New2006 York, Rico, New Delhi, Dubai, and introduced foreign artists to the Australian 200Basel, 120001and 999199 81 public. Our role is also to assist 996our 1995artists 1994 in museum exhibitions and biennales, some which took place in Berlin,199 Paris, 31992Tokyo, Singapore, New York, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Auckland, Shanghai, Kochi 199and 1 Seoul.

The gallery has hosted over 300 exhibitions including major exhibitions by Tillers, Gascoigne, Rentmeister, Davila, Atkins, Watson, Cullen, Navarro, Morey, Greenberg, Kimber, Paauwe, North, Bennett, Nasr, Vance, Small, Bezor, Bradley, Haselton, Ehmann, Grauso, Hoban, Austin, Valamanesh (A&H), Treister, Lock, Grayson, Tipping, Shead, Smart, Darling/Forward, Fransella, McKenna, Collishaw, Folland, Kutschbach, Mechita, Croft, Dady, Sierra, Frith, Brown/Green, Roberts, Robinson, Du, Best, Zikos, Hassan, Geraghty, Chandler, Kennedy, Brassington, Hennessey, Dalpra, Abdulla, Geurts, Ferraris, Siwes, Leong, Pettifer, Kitson, Huppatz, Hunter, Marti, Nikou, Hugo, Moynihan, Morey, & more

l

MAT COLLISHAW

MICHELLE NIKOU LOUISE HASELTON MARK SIEBERT | GAG ADELAIDE

GREENAWAY ART GALLERY : ADELAIDE

March

tel +61 8 8362 6354

l

SALLY SMART | GAG ADELAIDE

image: Brad Lay, Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Definitely Someone Else Here, 2012

SASA GALLERY In the shadow of forgetting Aldo Iacobelli 12 February - 22 March 2013 Ordinary Escapes and Other Magic Celeste Aldahn & Ray Harris 2 April - 10 May 2013 At the interstices of clockwork Elizabeth Bevan-Parrella, Cathy Frawley, Elizabeth Hetzel & Tyler Rock 21 May - 27 June 2013

MARCH 2013 BRAD LAY SQUID > I

KATIA CARLETTI

Pulling Against Tide and Wind 7 - 23 March Opening 6pm Wed 6 March

APRIL 2013 LEENA RIETHMULLER Bodily Purity

CARLY SNOSWELL

Object of Obsession 4 - 20 April Opening 6pm Wed 3 April

MAY 2013 HAYLEY BRANDON Record

www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery Image: Ray Harris, Fantastical Escapes, 2012

LEE SALOMONE

Hirsute Collection 2 - 25 May Opening 6pm Wed 1 May

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

BRUCE MOWSON + ELLIOT HOWARD To 24 March

ANN BERG To 24 March

WENDY KELLY, MAGDA CEBOKLI, LOUISE BLYTON + GORDON MONRO 27 March – 5 May

MARTHA ATIENZA 27 March – 21 April

MICHAEL HARKIN 24 April – 19 May

JUDY HOLDING, MARTIN La Trobe UniversityKING Visual Arts+ Centre HEATHER SHIMMEN 121 View Street 8 May – 16 June

MILTON LONG

Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

22 May – 16 June

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: Martha Atienza, video stills from Gilubong ang Akon Pusod sa Dagat, (My Navel is Buried in the Sea), 2011, 3-channel video installation, Ed. 1 of 10, 31 minutes, 48 seconds. Collection Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila, Philippines

National competition for a major public artwork The Facade Project is presented annually by La Trobe University and the City of Greater Bendigo. Submissions are invited from contemporary artists for a major public artwork to be installed on the facade of the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre in Bendigo.

2014 s a m s t a g applications close 30 June 2013

For terms, conditions and entry forms visit latrobe.edu.au/vac or contact the Visual Arts Centre on 03 5441 8724. Applications close on Friday 31 May 2013.

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

www.unisa.edu.au/samstag La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

08 8302 0865

Image: Owen Leong, Tidal Skin, 2012, winner of the 2012 Facade Project.

Image courtesy of the Artist and dianne tanzer gallery + projects

Call For Submissions La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 2014 Exhibition Program Contemporary artists based in Central Victoria are invited to submit proposals to exhibit in the VAC Access Gallery in 2014.

Visit the VAC website for application guidelines: www.latrobe.edu.au/vac Deadline for applications is Thursday 28 March 2013 La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street, Bendigo, VIC, 3550 T: 03 5441 8724

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street E: vac@latrobe.edu.au Bendigo, VIC, 3550 W: latrobe.edu.au/vac +61 3 5441 8724 Gallery hours: Tue â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Fri 10am-5pm. Weekends 12-5pm latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

SP Broadsheet CALL Feb 13 half p1 1

15/2/13 4:55:59 PM

2013 City of Whyalla Art Prize

$25,000

acquisitive

Donated by the Corporation of the City of Whyalla

A Country Arts SA Biennial Prize open to all Australian residents for 2 dimensional artwork in any medium other than photography

entries close 5pm Friday 6 September 2013 enquiries 08 8644 7309 www.countryarts.org.au

LUMA | La Trobe University Museum of Art

I WANT CHANGE

Two Decades of Artistic Defiance, Disapproval and Dissent 20 February - 12 April

LUMA | La Trobe University Museum of Art La Trobe University, Melbourne, Campus Kingsbury Dr, Bundoora, 3086 T: +61 3 9479 2111 W: latrobe.edu.au/luma Opening Hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 5pm IMAGE: Meek, Begging for Change, spray-paint, 89.1 x 73.5cm. Collection of the Artist.

Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Choice Award - Plaque non-acquisitive

Donated by Country Arts SA Open to public 19 October 2013

Campbelltown Campbelltownarts artsCentre Centre 10am–4pm 10am – 4pmdaily daily 1June–6 June –July 6 July2013 2013

u a . m o c . e r t n e c t r a n w o tl l e b p m a c

Exhibition launch Friday 14 JunE, 7pm Exhibition launch Friday 14 JunE, 7pm

Linda linda dement dEmEnt & KeLLy KElly doLey dolEy tom eLLard Ellard & PauL paul Greedy GrEEdy troy innocent innocEnt & Benjamin bEnJamin KoLaitis Kolaitis stePhen stEphEn jones JonEs & Pia pia Van GeLder GEldEr Wade WadE marynoWsKy & michaeL michaEl candy ONE ART GALLERY ROAD

The CaTChing LighT exhibiTion has been produCed as parT of isea 2013. CampbeLLTown arTs CenTre is supporTed by The nsw governmenT Through arTs nsw and CampbeLLTown CiTy CounCiL. image: sTephen Jones, Tom eLLard and garry bradbury, Goodbye Tonsils severed Head 1984, sTiLL frame from performanCe.

Az Zabán-i Mádari: Sepás Gozáram, Doostat Dáram (From The Mother Tongue: Thank you, I Love you) Siamak Fallah

Brad Buckley John conomos Proudly presented by Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre

3 – 29 March Opening: Sun 3 March 5pm Open Mon – Fri 9 – 5pm, Saturday 10 - 3pm*

SATurdAy 2 MArCh – SuNdAy 19 MAy 2013 In conjunction with the exhibition the australian centre for Photography will publish a 300 page fully illustrated monograph and also a hardcover limited edition monograph numbered and signed by the artists

*Please note that there will be special events and performances during this exhibition in addition to these times. Details will be available on our website.

Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre Lion Arts Centre, Cnr North Tce & Morphett St, Adelaide www.nexus.asn.au

AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY 257 oxford street Paddington nsW 2021 T +61 2 9332 0555 | e info@acp.org.au

www.acp.org.au

Erin Coates (WA) Simon Horsburgh (VIC) Richard Lewer (WA) Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano (VIC) Todd McMillan (NSW) Sarah Jane Pell (VIC) Patrick Pound (VIC) Nick Selenitsch (VIC)

fremantle arts centre

inside running the sport of art 2 february–7 april

The Australian Centre for Photography is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments, the NSW Government through Arts NSW and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

A project by Richard Lewer and Ric Spencer

A Perth International Arts Festival event supported

by Visual Arts program partner Wesfarmers Arts

richard Lewer with, northside boxing gym, 2013, charcoaL on waLL, courtesy and © the artist. Photo bo wong

GET YOUR ART BUSINESS TOGETHER SHORT ONLINE COURSES FOR ARTISTS

$230 +GST (non-members) or $180 +GST (NAVA members) www.visualarts.net.au/whatson/onlinecourses

ART BUSINESS BASICS

SESSION 1 8 APRIL - 24 MAY 2013 SESSION 2 2 SEPTEMBER - 19 OCTOBER 2013

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

MAXIMISE YOUR EXPOSURE

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

SESSION 1 8 APRIL - 24 MAY 2013 SESSION 2 2 SEPTEMBER - 19 OCTOBER 2013 EXPANDING YOUR CAREER

SESSION 1 13 MAY - 29 JUNE 2013 SESSION 2 2 SEPTEMBER - 19 OCTOBER 2013

curating and collaborating

CONNECTING YOU IN THE REGIONS AND BEYOND

researching and documenting engaging the community

SESSION 1 13 MAY 29 JUNE 2013

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 (artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 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.

All Art Spectrum products are Australian made and of the finest materials.

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.

This belong to me, the one dollar note: The eternal returns of appropriation1 IAN McLEAN White students often wonder why First Nations and Métis artists are applauded when they appropriate and distort Western culture, while White artists, if they just dream of quoting Aboriginal images and styles, are pilloried.

David Garneau2 The dictionary meanings of appropriate and misappropriate are the same: to take something for one’s own use without the owner’s permission.

Appropriate also has an additional dictionary meaning: to use something for a purpose that it wasn’t originally intended for. Poetic appropriation is quite different. It does often use images without the owner’s permission and often for an unexpected purpose, but its practice descends from hermeneutics (from Hermes, the ancient Greek messenger of the gods): the ancient art of interpreting the world’s speech. Its methods derive from theories of mimesis and simulation that can be traced well beyond Plato to shamanistic practices of form shifting—of becoming animal through the use of dance, painting and masks that mimic the animal in question. To dismiss poetic appropriation as theft is to miss its purpose.

Today appropriation is so ubiquitous in contemporary art that it is not easily dismissed. Its critics have retreated behind laws about private property. The only movement to repress the central function of poetic appropriation in art was modernism, most obviously in the avant-garde quest for originality.3 These days, however, appropriation is applauded for its originality, criticality and ethics. It has a certain noblesse. In Claire Bishop’s words contemporary “artists should renounce authorial presence in favour of allowing participants to speak through him or her”.4 Why has this occurred?

The turn away from modernism opened the door for the return of poetic appropriation and the post-Western globalised world order cemented its place in contemporary art practice. As Western hegemony diminishes contemporary artists have had to become more open to cultural differences and multiple subjectivities. We have all had to understand ourselves differently. Appropriation is the way our brains do this—the “cross-cultural dynamics of a Creole aesthetic of migration and translation” have made us “all appropriationists now”.5 Poetic appropriation aims to, in Jacques Rancière’s suggestive phrase, redistribute the sensible, or fulfill the hermeneutic function of making visible what had been invisible or unclear.6 Things and images are appropriated not to reiterate their presence but to show what does not appear to be there, either because it is ambiguous, hidden, invisible or deliberately excluded in the very structure of the image. Examples range from Marcel Duchamp’s discovery of a fountain in a urinal to Michael Nelson Jagamara’s mappings of ancestors in the lie of the land.

Unlike the proverbial carpetbagger, the poetic appropriationist does not aim to possess the image but be possessed by it—Plato’s criteria for a good poet. The exemplary appropriationist is Paul Ricoeur’s discerning reader who abandons herself to the “space of meaning” (i.e. the heterogeneous play of signifiers): “it is always a question of entering into an alien work, of divesting oneself of the earlier ‘me’ in order to receive, as in play, the self conferred by the work itself”. If in appropriating the text the discerning reader makes “one’s own what is alien”, it “ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold… it implies instead a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego”.6 The appropriationist is the one that is appropriated. Like the shaman, she cedes her subject position and

19 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Opposite: Yirawala, Maralatj ancestress, creator of northern tribes, c.1976 Photo courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Above: Lucas Grogan, Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Been Out All Night Babe, 2010 Photo courtesy the artist, Gallerysmith, Melbourne, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane

autonomy to that of another thing. Thus appropriation isn’t just something that imperialists do to the colonised or the ruling class to the proletariat, and when it is this, the theft, as Marx predicted, eventually rebounds.

Now, as Métis appropriation artist David Garneau quipped: “White artists occasionally rip-off indigenous art, and… indigenous artists continuously rip-off Western culture”.7 Appropriation artists have had difficulty convincing modern lawmakers about the public good of their poetic project. The poetic use of images has become subject to the rules of capital through copyright laws.

The law respects the poet’s right to appropriate if he/she has the money and the copyright owner consents. Copyright (the right to copy) agencies have made it easy for appropriation artists—just fill in a few boxes and supply your credit card details. It can all be done with the click of a mouse. What could be fairer in our technocratic world!

Nevertheless, someone such as Imants Tillers, Australia’s most acclaimed appropriation artist, who over many years has appropriated an enormous range of texts and images, courts bankruptcy. While the costs are much higher if he appropriates an image of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny than say a painting by Eugene von Guérard (out of copyright) or a contemporary artist who practises the aesthetics of appropriation (who might likely waive the fee), he never can be sure. In the early 1980s the Australian proselytiser of appropriation art, Tillers’ friend Paul Taylor, sued a publication calling itself Art & Texta that satirised his journal Art & Text for appropriating its copyrighted name.

However, appropriation artists and the law seem to have arrived at a workable understanding8 and issues around poetic appropriation are now largely framed in ethical rather than narrow legal terms. Bishop observed that ethics has become the benchmark of critical judgments in contemporary art and aesthetic judgment has fallen by the wayside.9 Nowhere is this more evident than in non-indigenous appropriations of indigenous art. This is partly due to the legacy of colonialism, and partly because another law is involved. It is not just capitalism that demands a fee.

The primal scene of poetic appropriation by the Australian nationState is the 1966 one-dollar note. Desiring an Aboriginal theme for the new decimal currency, the Reserve Bank distributed photographs of bark paintings to the competing designers. Gordon Andrews’ “innovative”10 winning designs—as Djon Mundine called them in 2004—included appropriated imagery from a bark painting featuring the history of the ancestral hunter Gurrmirringu, as well as rock art depictions of Mimi figures and other motifs. Andrews’ composite mixture of such different sources —from different places, times and artists—is typical of appropriation art.

Shortly after the release of the one dollar note, the governor of the Reserve Bank, H. C. Coombs, received a letter from the Millingimbi Mission asking for compensation for one of its artists, David Malangi, whose painting of Gurrmirringu’s history Andrews had selected. Coombs had assumed that the paintings were “the work of some traditional Aboriginal artist long dead”11, so he must have been surprised to discover that Malangi was twenty years his junior. He was probably also surprised when he was advised that Malangi did have rights under Australian law.

Coombs wisely did not test this advice in court. Having just embarked on a life-long mission for indigenous justice, he was not looking for contrary opinions. He had what he needed. After consulting Malangi, he authorised compensation and personally presented him with a medal—a poetic act that according to Mundine had two important consequences: “it fixed the idea of the Aboriginal painter as an individually recognised art practitioner” and a precedent was set for indigenous artists to receive copyright.12 This is a classic case of appropriation ceding authority to the appropriated.

The ramifications went well beyond indigenous rights to copyright protection. Its most important consequence was the redistribution of the sensible: “to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals”.13 Here we see the nexus between aesthetics and politics.

The indigenous as a category of people had effectively become citizens of the Australian nation-State, which its citizens affirmed in the referendum that year. What then was heard that previously sounded like babble? Primarily

it was Aboriginal art. It gained visibility in the politics and law of the state that it previously did not have. It became the face and voice of indigenous Australians and eventually the brand of a nation. Further, in consulting and compensating Malangi, Coombs did more than honour Australian law.

He also acknowledged indigenous law, or at least this is how Malangi saw it. As with Australian law, the issue was not the act of appropriation per se but its appropriateness. Malangi did not want the dollar note destroyed—to the contrary its appropriation excited him—but to retrospectively secure its appropriateness, to legitimise it. His reasons had more to do with cosmology than his bank balance. As the primary custodian of the ancestral history of Gurrmirringu, in Aboriginal law Malangi was held responsible for the design on the dollar note and its public circulation.

More than 680 million notes were eventually printed, so it was no idle responsibility. Malangi did not think that his copyright payment of $1000 was sufficient14, but he and his Manharrngu brethren were very proud of the medal. He was deeply shamed when, many years later in Canberra, he lost it. A replica was made which Malangi believed just as effectively authorised his story, that is Gurrmirringu’s history. In its re-authorisation could the replica be more valuable than the original medal?

Gurrmirringu’s history had 680 million iterations through the dollar note. No wonder Malangi became known as “Dollar Dave” and Gurrmirringu’s history was referred to as “the dollar note story”.15 It is the ancestral history of the dollar note; the dollar note was in the Dreaming.

The one-dollar note, Malangi believed, was his, namely Gurrmirringu’s.

Andrews’ initial appropriation had returned much more than Coombs could have imagined. From that point the anti-colonial war was won even if many battles were yet to be fought. It made Coombs and Malangi lifelong friends. Between them they had performed an inspired poetic act worthy of mention in Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. However, it was probably only Malangi who understood the full poetic power of appropriation from his knowledge of Aboriginal ceremony, which is a form of controlled ancestral simulation by which Ancestors reveal themselves. This makes indigenous art a dangerous activity that can only be made and performed by the appropriate people with the right knowledge and kin relations to the ancestral history being revealed. There is, then, an ethical core to traditional Aboriginal art—a right way and a wrong way.

Further, replication is fundamental to how the cosmos is structured.

All things, animate and inanimate, are simulations of Ancestral spirits, and the inter-relations of things mirror Ancestral relations. Simulation is also how the world procreates. Life is not simply created once but must be continually re-created, so that “if people stopped doing their ceremonies and interpret their dreams, there would be no more Law, Dreamings, that is, no more people”.16 The simulations of Ancestral histories are necessary acts of procreation. This is also now a law of contemporary art as well as biology: “The only thing that will be retained is what can be remade.”17 Appropriation is the law of eternal return. The primal scene of poetic appropriation by the Australian artworld occurred in 1985 when Tillers painted The Nine Shots. Since then non-indigenous appropriation of indigenous art has become particularly dangerous ground. The reasons are political, not poetic.

The failure of political justice has created unresolved ethical dilemmas in regard to indigenous art, which have been amplified by the central role that ethics now plays in critical judgments of contemporary art. Thus while Tillers’ mistake was similar to what Andrews had made twenty years earlier, there was a very different outcome.

When Tillers appropriated Jagamara’s Possum Dreaming (1984), he didn’t simply infringe Australian copyright law, like Andrews he created an unauthorised and so inappropriate presencing of Ancestral histories. Jagamara, as the authorised custodian, was ultimately responsible —meaning that like Malangi before him, he was obliged to make it right. Otherwise, who knows what might return? Whether the latter collaborations between Jagamara and Tillers—the most recent being joint appropriations of The Nine Shots—re-balanced the cosmos is still out with the jury. Collaboration is a form of mutual cross-appropriation.

This is why collective and collaborative art practices are a standard

21 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

strategy in the post-appropriation art of relational aesthetics that dominate today’s art biennales. Relational aesthetics is primarily about the relational agency of the various players in the aesthetic experience. Collective and collaborative practices are also ubiquitous in appropriation-rich indigenous cultures—and also mainly concern the relational agency of the various players—and thus a canny way for Jagamara to assert his agency and right the imbalance inadvertently made by Tillers’ mistake. It also explains why there are increasing collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous artists. However, practice and theory rarely meet in the anxious politics of the contemporary. In Australia the promises of poetic appropriation and collaboration have yet to be fulfilled.

Last year the Melbourne dealer Beverley Knight, who has long dealt in indigenous art, pulled an exhibition by the white artist Cameron Hayes. Her reasons were not the art’s lack of poetry but complaints she received from Tiwi artists about its content. In a word, Hayes was censored.

Objections were made about appropriated clan designs on kitschy felt sculptures in the form of funeral poles. Also at issue was a painting of a football ground because it was depicted littered with beer cans. The Tiwi were upset with the art’s satire of their life and values. The kitsch of the felt funeral poles mocked Tiwi ancestral histories, just as the beer cans denigrated Tiwi morality, now given a sinister twist by the Intervention.

Lucas Grogan is in even more trouble. If Hayes drew the rancour of Tiwi artists, Grogan seems to draw fire from an urban demography.

According to his Melbourne dealer Marita Smith, it mainly comes from “a small group of urban-based Aboriginal activist practitioners”.18 One is Ryan Presley. A graduate of Griffith University, his series Blood Money —simulations of Australian banknotes that included appropriated indigenous designs—won him the 2010 graduate art prize and secured him an exhibition at Brisbane’s Jan Manton Gallery. Two years later, when Grogan joined the Jan Manton stable, Presley quit in protest. Presley had joined the gallery when Tillers and Jonathan Kimberley—both nonindigenous artists who collaborate with indigenous ones—were in its stable.

Their work obviously passed the test. Grogan’s did not.

Objections to Grogan’s work date back to the beginning of the Intervention in 2007, when he was still an art student and relatively naïve about the artworld. He had several successful exhibitions at this time in Newcastle (where he is from) and Sydney. The works that drew most attention were striking black and white ink drawings on card cut to the shape of bark paintings and closely emulating their distinctive sensibility.

Bark painting’s graphic lucidity had clearly seduced Grogan. Compared to Hayes, Grogan’s art displays much more empathy for Arnhem Land art, and his sometime wry social commentary is playful, not mocking. His gay punk subjectivity is also very much in evidence—as in his preference for elongated male Mimi-like figures with elongated penises. In one work two such figures masturbate together. In another, two similar figures are joined in one body, and give birth to cascading beer bottles. If he were indigenous, Grogan might be considered the Kent Monkman of Australian art.

In Canada “Monkman’s cheeky interventions… [are] eagerly collected by the rich and by important institutions”19, but in Australia Grogan is an artist under siege. Curiously, the most complex and interesting reaction was not from the local community but from the aforementioned Garneau, then part of the Canadian Aboriginal curatorial delegation to the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Garneau discovered Grogan’s work at the Biennale SafARI Fringe festival and was immediately interested. As he explained in a letter to Art Monthly, its Aboriginal style and “salient content: alcohol and sex… echoes similar strategies that are happening and that I want to encourage in our contemporary, Canadian Aboriginal art community”. Garneau was intent on buying a work but “my jaw dropped to the floor when I was told that the artist… is not Aboriginal but a white guy ‘appropriating’ the Arnhem Land rrark style”. Garneau “talked at length” with Grogan and found him “a sincere young man”, but could not believe that such blatant cultural theft was occurring in Australia, especially in a prestigious venue.20 His shock stemmed in part from his Canadian experience: “Few non-Aboriginal artists in Canada would engage in such (mis)appropriation.”21 Garneau was particularly vexed that “there was

no critical context explaining this rather dodgy aesthetic/political move”.

Should all artworks come with ethnic identifiers, as Aboriginal artists generally do, to avoid such embarrassment to the unsuspecting buyer?

Garneau’s complaint wasn’t against Grogan (he thinks artists have a licence to be contrary) or his work in particular (he liked the work), but against the apparent social tolerance of aesthetic miscegenation in Australia when it is instigated from the white side. He wanted to know “if the uncritical appropriation of Aboriginal art is a trend in Australian art and curation?”22 The answer is yes. Critical or uncritical, Grogan is only one of many non-indigenous artists directly engaging with indigenous art in Australia even though it remains a fraught zone. This is not the place to discuss the reason why such engagement is taboo in Canada but only risqué in Australia, though it might explain why Garneau’s letter in Art Monthly received, he told me, “an avalanche of negative response (I don’t remember a single positive reaction) and no public support from Aboriginal folks in Australia”.23 Nevertheless, Australians (indigenous and non-indigenous) have not been reticent in criticising Grogan. These criticisms are in a slightly different register to Garneau’s, but they stem from a similar moral outrage at colonial injustice. One of the co-curators of the Fringe Festival, Margaret Farmer, resigned over Grogan’s inclusion, and after being selected as a finalist in the Off the Wall emerging artists’ exhibition at this year’s Sydney Art Fair, Grogan was deselected because “senior curators in the indigenous community… had ethical concerns and issues”. Jenny Fraser spelt out the problem. It wasn’t cross-cultural engagement: “There are many positive examples of Aboriginal artists collaborating with others.”

Nor was copyright the main focus: “it wasn’t just that Grogan was ripping off designs in order to make money”. The main issue was “the context that he presented them in… gross portrayals… with Aboriginal people engaging in oral sex, boozing and vomiting”.24 Similarly, TextaQueen, who makes graphic comic-book-like imagery about cultural identity and gender not dissimilar to Grogan’s and who describes herself as “a non-indigenous person of colour”, objected to Grogan’s depiction of “black figures often in misogynistic scenes involving alcohol and sex”.25 Mundine objected to Grogan’s depictions of Mimi-like figures drinking from beer cans and vomiting. Mimis might be famous for their promiscuous party-going but according to Mundine, Grogan uses such themes “in a demeaning way to Aboriginal people, (suggesting) that they’re all drunks and they sit around and get pissed… You wouldn’t take the bleeding heart of Jesus image and stick it on toilet paper”.26 However, as Mundine well knows, contemporary artists have not been adverse to making blasphemous works about Jesus, and extremely inappropriate indeed transgressive behavior is a frequent subject of art and myth of all cultures. Grogan clearly likes rather than disdains bark painting—he is not a satirist—and one can interpret his subject matter as attempts to put the art to contemporary use. Garneau read the paintings this way, and bark painters have also depicted such contemporary blights as petrol sniffing. Yet Mundine’s complaint resonates because of the Intervention (which amongst other things repealed anti-racism laws) that frame it. There is nothing like war to sharpen one’s anxieties.

In this troubled atmosphere Grogan’s art opens old wounds.

Accusations of moral laxity were just flack. It goes to deeper ethical questions about subject positions and relational agency. TextaQueen doesn’t think that “it’s his story to be telling. It really personally affects me as a person of colour”, she was quoted as saying.27 She is opposed to nonindigenous artists initiating dialogue with indigenous artists: it “is a role for an indigenous artist to undertake”.28 This is very similar to Garneau’s position: Some Aboriginal artists appropriate Western art styles to deconstruct colonialism… they clearly have the right and duty to ‘talk back’ in the ‘master’s voice’ as well as their own. The reverse, however, is not equitable.

To steal the voice of the oppressed under the weak claims of appreciating the style, because it is Australian and that he is doing it ironically, exceeds credibility and propriety.29

For him indigenous appropriation of either Western or indigenous art is “sanctioned taking”, whereas he dubs white appropriations of indigenous art “misappropriation”, because it is “the acquisition of property without either the rightful owner’s permission or a public sanction”.30 If only Grogan was indigenous, as both Garneau and TextaQueen initially thought he was.

Then he might be hailed as a new Gordon Hookey or Harry Wedge, though in my opinion Grogan’s work is closer to the decorative magic realism of Trevor Nickolls. To dismiss Grogan’s work as unethical is too summary and quick an execution. Truth and justice are hermeneutic not moral domains. We should not miss the opportunity to examine what Bishop called, in her critique of the ethical, the aesthetic regime’s ability “to think contradiction” and “the darker more painful complicated considerations of our predicament”.31 In making our judgments we should first ask if Grogan’s readings of indigenous art are insightful?

“To understand”, wrote Ricoeur in his essay on appropriation, “is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self”.32 Is this the case with, for example, Grogan’s history of beer bottles (referred to above)? The image references Yirawala’s history of Maralatj, the ancestral mother who gave birth to the Kuninjku clans and assigned them classificatory relationships. In apparently focusing (unlike Yirawala) on the two husbands that Ngalyod gave Maralatj, does the drawing reinterpret this history of human creation in the light of contemporary gender relations in Arnhem Land, or does it merely project Grogan’s tribal punk sensibility into this history and so, in Ricoeur’s terms, fail to understand his self differently? If the latter, the drawing is what Garneau designates “tribute appropriation” or “Wanabeism”. An example Garneau gives is the popular tribal tattoo, “symptomatic of disillusionment with one’s own culture, rather than marking an authentic relationship with another”. Though, he says with some irony, it might be symptomatic of the “desire for a post national body… cosmopolitan bodies released from origins. Free floating signifiers. Collage people”.33 If, however, Grogan’s work is a hermeneutics he cannot escape censure, as Tillers discovered when he painted The Nine Shots. The histories of Maralatj cannot be freely reinterpreted by anyone. This is the prerogative of the custodian. If Tillers made a similar mistake, he did not retreat from his practice and he welcomed the chance to collaborate with Jagamara.

From what I can gather, Grogan has gone to ground, backed into a corner, more worried about what not to do than where he can go. He needs his own Jagamara. This might prove difficult. His letters to Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts in Yirrkala were unanswered. Grogan tells the anecdote of the (unnamed) Yolngu artist who dismissed his drawings as “rubbish paintings”; i.e. paintings about nothing and without ancestral significance, akin to “Wanabeism” and not to be taken seriously.

At present, indigenous artists can freely appropriate the work of non-indigenous artists but, like time, it is not reversible. However, indigenous artists also cannot freely appropriate indigenous art and nonindigenous artists can appropriate non-indigenous art: an equality of sorts but nevertheless an unequal relation between the two traditions. Does it signal an incommensurable difference (i.e. “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality”) and thus the impossibility of cross-cultural dialogue and hence postcolonial politics, or a double bind, a “positive contradiction” that Rancière believes orders all regimes of the sensible?34 Or is it simpler: an example of positive discrimination, or maybe the rising power of indigenous law in Australian art? Or do we have to wait for political justice before artists can play with each other on equal terms? If Rancière is right, politics is something that occurs under the jurisdiction of the sensible; and it is art that distributes the sensible. Artists don’t wait for political justice, but act to rebalance the world. Maybe we need more nostalgia for the aesthetic regime to believe, as Rancière does, that poetry can dissolve the hierarchies of discourse.

Thanks to Una Rey, Nigel Lendon and David Garneau for their useful tips.

Notes 1 The title is taken from a statement made by David Malangi in an interview with Djon Mundine and Phillipe Peltier in 1995. Djon Mundine, ‘Some People Are Stories’, in Susan Jenkins (ed.), No Ordinary Place: The Art of David Malangi, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004: 28-41 [34] 2 David Garneau, ‘Apropos Appropriate Appropriations: After the Apologies’, Keynote, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2009 3

Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October 18, 1981: 47-66

4

Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum 44/6, 2006: 178-83

5

David Evans, ‘Introduction/Seven Types of Appropriation’, in David Evans (ed.), Appropriation, London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2009: 12-23 [19-20]. Evans was quoting and referring to the writings of Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, which are included in the anthology

6

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distrbution of the Sensible, London: Continuum, 2004

7

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981: 187-92

8

David Garneau, op cit.

9

Laura Gilbert, ‘No Longer Appropriate’, The Art Newspaper 235, May, 2012; http://www. theartnewspaper.com/articles/No-longer-appropriate/26378

10

Claire Bishop, op. cit.

11

Djon Mundine: 34

12

Quoted in David H. Bennett, ‘Malangi: The Man Who Was Forgotten before He Was Remembered’, Aboriginal History, 4, 1980: 43-48 [45] 13

Djon Mundine: 33-35

14

Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009: 25

15

Mundine: 34

16

Susan Jenkins, ‘This is our story and this is our country’, ibid: 12-27 [15]

17

Barbara Glowczewski, ‘Draw Me a Dream’, in Barbara Glowczewski (ed.), Yapa: Peintres Aborigènes De Balgo Et Lajamanu, Paris: Baudoin lebon éditeur, 1991: 166-67

18

Serge Daney, quoted in Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris: les presses du réel, 2002: 77

19

Correspondence with the author, 27 January, 2013

20

David Garneau, op cit.

21

David Garneau, ‘Letters’, Art Monthly Australia, 212, 2008

22

Correspondence with the author, 13 January, 2013

23

24

David Garneau, ‘Letters’, op. cit.

Correspondence with the author, 13 January, 2013

25

Jenny Fraser, ‘Grogan the Sellout Bogan’, 4 December, 2012; http://jennyfraser.blogspot.com. au/ 26

Textaqueen, ‘Textaqueen Leaves Gallery over an ‘Interesting Debate’’; http://textaqueen. tumblr.com/post/37103900078/textaqueen-leaves-gallery-over-an-interesting-debate

27

Quoted in Bridget Cormack, ‘The Ethics of Cultural Borrowing’, The Australian, 18 December, 2012

28 Bridget Cormack, ‘Another Artist Quits in Revolt against Style’, The Australian, 29 November, 2012 29

Textaqueen, op cit.

30

David Garneau, ‘Letters’, op cit.

31

David Garneau, ‘Apropos Appropriate Appropriations: After the Apologies’, op cit.

32

Claire Bishop, op cit.

33

Paul Ricoeur: 182-83

34

David Garneau, ‘Apropos Appropriate Appropriations: After the Apologies’, op cit.

35

Jacques Rancière: 56-60

2 3 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Appropriation: no longer appropriate?

See, it doesn’t hurt anyone! Fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.

If you google “appropriation” and “postmodernism” together circa 1,100,000 results appear in 0.21 seconds. Similarly, googling “cultural appropriation” you’d receive circa 8,530,000 results in 0.11 seconds. Any junior primer on postmodernism would tell you that appropriation, “the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work”, was one of the ‘pillars’ of that art movement and has been apparent since the oil and canvas of Picasso and Braque generations earlier. Post-WWII, hyper-appropriationists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg preceded their postmodernist successors Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger, notably all American. Australian culture of course being always succeptable to international influence if not fads, absorbed all ‘pillars’ of postmodernism, notably visual art with its somewhat absolutist application from the early 1980s onwards, until the movements’ utter exhaustion in deconstructing everything including itself.

Above: minimal apologies to Roy Lichtenstein and South Park, especially Cartman

In what could only be described as a storm-in-a-teacup beatup by the media about a long confused domestic issue, the headlined story ‘Painter quits in row over artist’ 1 in The Australian appeared on 27 November, followed two days later by ‘Another artist quits in revolt against style’.2 The story then disappeared in newsprint. But not elsewhere.

The first story alerted the public to indigenous artist Ryan Presley quitting his Brisbane gallery “in disgust” after Jan Manton Art decided to represent a non-indigenous artist (Lucas Grogan) “who draws on indigenous art” in his work. The follow through article stated that “a second artist”, “Australian-born Indian artist” TextaQueen “has walked out on a gallery after refusing to be in the same stable as a non-Aboriginal artist who draws on indigenous themes in his work”. Though not an indigenous Australian, TextaQueen who was “offended” by this artist who “had referenced indigenous culture and art-making styles”, confirmed her stance as “It really personally affects me as a person of colour.” As a result of “anonymous objections” Grogan’s drawings, which referenced bark painting styles and had “caused a stir”, had previously been withdrawn from the Sydney Art

Fair in 2008. The artist’s gallery dealer in Melbourne responded to this latest disquiet—“I’m not prepared to censor the work because of a minority group who are offended by Grogan’s work.”3 Coincidental to this story were the resonant media and public responses regarding Attorney General Nicola Roxon’s proposed highly contentious new discrimination laws making it unlawful “to offend or insult”. Media companies for example argued in response “that satirical material, political commentary and informative programming on matters of historical or religious sensitivity might be offensive or insulting to some but are part of the national conversation that is ‘essential for fostering robust social and political debate, and therefore to ensuring a healthy democracy’.”4 It is tempting to insert “visual art” into those notions of “debate” and “healthy democracy”.

Cultural appropriation and controversy have a track record in Australian art, no more so than when Imants Tillers, at the height of domestic postmodern appropriation, presented The Nine Shots in the 1986 Biennale of Sydney. Complainants denounced Tillers’ annexing imagery from indigenous artist Michael Jagamara Nelson’s painting Five Dreamings without the latter’s permission. Tillers didn’t realise at the time he had done “anything wrong”. (Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett responded “on behalf of Nelson” in 1990 with the painting The Nine Ricochets that re-appropriated Tiller’s imagery. And here Bennett is contextually problematic. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney recently announced at the time of printing the purchase, through their new MCA Foundation, of Bennett’s 1999 painting Home Décor (Relative/Absolute) Flowers for Mathinna #2, a typically chaotic appropriation of a “multitude of references… from [Western] art history”.)

Given Australia’s twenty-first century demography of postVietnam War multiculturalism it is hardly surprising that diverse groups are influenced by or borrow, appropriate or otherwise cultural agency regardless of their naîvety, contrivance or truculence. In Ian McLean’s preceding text, ‘This belong to me, the one dollar note: The eternal returns of appropriation’, he quotes Canadian Métis appropriation artist David Garneau as saying “White artists occasionally rip-off indigenous art, and… indigenous artists continuously rip-off Western culture”, as well as “White students often wonder why First Nations and Métis artists are applauded when they appropriate and distort Western culture, while White artists, if they just dream of quoting Aboriginal images and styles, are pilloried.”

The issue is not simply one Black or White, such that in launching the recent Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane last year, the QAGOMA in commissioning New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai for the Premier of Queensland’s Sculpture Commission found themselves “in the centre of a storm”, for his work The World Turns, a five metre sculpture of a bronze elephant tipped on its head staring eye-to-eye with a water rat, the latter, known as the kuril, being an Aboriginal totem for Kurilpa Point where the work was sited. Parekowhai used the kuril in his work after seeking and gaining local indigenous permission to reference it. But a local indigenous artist “objected” to “a Maori artist being commissioned to tell an Aboriginal story”, accusing him of “cultural theft”.

With the rapid appearance then demise of ‘the Grogan story’ (perhaps it needed Prime Ministerial intervention to generate a larger debate?), Broadsheet approached numerous national art professionals —artists, curators and academics, white and indigenous—with the view to pursue a balanced roundtable discussion, not directed against the singular artist and his apparent cultural transgression per se, but to articulate the larger issues inherent in cultural appropriation, copyright and “the ethics of cultural borrowing”, nationally and globally—to lessen the focus on one individual, and to illuminate ‘the bigger picture’. It became quite apparent that the ‘white demographic’ was keen to participate whereas from other sectors there was an unexpected silence, regardless of encouragement that this particular issue had been “running hot on Facebook”. Broadsheet, at the advice to seek “broader [indigenous] involvement and expertise” attempted to achieve exactly that prior and subsequent to the Christmas and New Year break (understanding the interruptions and lack of communication as a result of this period) but met with an arresting response. The roundtable eventuated as this, mediated by Adam Geczy—with singular presentations

by Ian McLean, Danie Mellor, and Blak Douglas (Adam Hill).

ADAM GECZY: In November last year it was reported in The Australian that a young indigenous artist, Ryan Presley, walked out of the Brisbane gallery that represented him (Jane Manton Art) in protest over the new inclusion of Lucas Grogan, a non-indigenous artist who appropriates Aboriginal art in his work. The discussion that follows does not attempt to dissect this event per se, but to explore the issues relating to it. In a period when both indigenous and non-indigenous artists and curators are reframing questions about indigenous art—its representation, circulation and entitlements —this discussion is timely. One presiding issue remains that while artists such as Presley may rage at the perceived impertinence of his gallery’s decision, the real problem with Aboriginal culture lies in the towns and on the street, and within the stolen hearts of the peoples themselves. Is this stand a case of political gaucherie, of dilettantism? Or is it appropriate to brandish such sensitivities for the very reason that the real problems lurk elsewhere—that is, to make an example of a situation in order to meet the real problem?

But there is more to this problem still, as it has to do with the very indistinct line between freedom of cultural exchange on one hand and cultural respect on the other. In many respect this is a problem that is being invoked and re-invoked at our present time as a condition of globalisation: communities and cultures are faced with their own collapse, which they must face without recourse to the paranoid inversions that lead to violence or unwanted sequestration. At the same time to quarantine and contain a culture is to force immobility on what is, in any case, a mobile set of ideas.

For who places the prescription on what can be used and what cannot?

Surely indigenous artists, particularly urban, are guilty of the same since they have not sought permission from elders to use one motif or another.

(Then again their elders have most probably been killed off.) In a recent text on cultural identity, religion, politics and ideology, Étienne Balibar argues that: The ultimate historical horizon is an ongoing process of interaction between communities and of cultural mixing leading to the idea that what makes subjects capable of individuation and of historical transformation is their capacity to translate, hence a dis-identification that is, at least, virtual, leading one to a “double conscience”.5 These words are pertinent, if contentious to the present dilemma for reasons that I hope you will elucidate. For both artists involved are partaking in their own quest of asserting a coherent idea of culture, and in doing so are also engaging in an interpretative “double conscience”.

IAN McLEAN: The ‘real’ issues of culture are always in the world. Art is like religion: it can be a substitute for living in the world, but it is only interesting when the world is in it. Indigenous art is so interesting at the moment not just because there are talented indigenous artists but because the world is in it big time. The real world of social relations (or more precisely their lack) is what gives power to symbols (and takes it away). This is why many white people, including artists, are drawn to indigenous art: they sense its symbolic power. So this particular issue of reactions to a white artist appropriating indigenous art is not dilettantism or political correctness, but symptomatic of how power is organised in this postcolonial age of globalisation.

The surprise is not that it happened, but that it doesn’t happen more often.

The important question is now where to from here?

DANIE MELLOR: I tend to agree with the “surprise” that Ian suggests.

Given the amount of borrowing and the degree of global osmosis in the last two-three generations of Western artistic and cultural traditions, it is surprising that more wholesale appropriation—with or without permissions—of indigenous art has not occurred. I would also venture one step beyond the notion of “symbolic power” that Ian proposes, and suggest that in certain contexts, indigenous art has real power; it might be that the dichotomy of understanding between ‘symbolic’ and ‘real’ is one of the environments in which cultural slippage takes place. Adam touches on a salient point in talking about permissions gained from elders by urban artists (and no, not everyone is guilty, AG!), and that is the catastrophic loss of knowledge as a result of colonial settlement that has been experienced

2 5 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

both by Aboriginal people in Australia, and also indigenous nations abroad.

A question that arises for me around permissions where there may be an absence of ‘knowledge custody’ as a result of our history probably needs development. Are our protocols as effective as they could be, and do they still reflect the needs of contemporary culture, within both Aboriginal and broader Australian communities? One of the dilemmas that I see confronting artists—especially students and younger artists I am in contact with—who have backgrounds other than indigenous in Australia is a very natural trait of curiosity; I meet many people genuinely interested in artistic and cultural exploration, and not always for personal gain or credibility under the guise of ‘authentic exchange’, although it may (unfortunately) become so.

This has been written about extensively, and a rule of thumb in my experience—relevant perhaps for the subject of this discussion—is not always ‘what’ is done, but ‘how’ it’s done.

BLAK DOUGLAS (ADAM HILL): First and foremost may I just say, let the accused speak! I’d request to hear the ‘named’ reveal their knowledge on the cultures they’ve apparently ‘borrowed’ from. I became aware some years ago, of the langour that may present itself when creating ‘reactionary’ imagery (enter Mr Grogan). Modern Western art practice has oft demonstrated that it’s premise arrives from surface observation/ application. That is... (and all due respect given to those of whom distinctly fall into these categories)... a splash of paint here, a spatula stroke there and a three second/two metre arc with an aerosol can... done. Where is the song?

Where is the dance? Where is the ceremony? (opening night drinks with the artist?) Sure... go ahead and appropriate BUT... take us deeper than your salient applications. Demonstrate your status earned within the society from which you’ve borrowed or... stay well clear. For those few years spent institutionalised evidently FAILED to scratch deep enough, to reveal the sensitivity of a peoples exploited longer than most others on the planet. That said... may I suggest a ‘Colonial Inquest’ be sought here.

POSTSCRIPT The process of assembling the various voices and views turned out to be complicated, emotive, and fraught with hesitations, retractions, suggestions and silences. Distilled down to their base elements, the issues here are admissibility and entitlement. We also find ourselves in an historical realm that for the indigenous peoples who share lore and land go back many thousands of years, and for Western history, the period of iconoclasm and the sacralisation of images from Roman times to the seventeenth century.

In times when power is more apparently centralised—in the body of an emperor or a pope—images assume much greater power since they act in concert with the taboos and ratifications associated with that source of power (proscription against desecration, predilection for certain kinds of images and so on). But in an era when power is fluid and decentralised as in our post-postmodern time, images, we are told no longer have the same purpose, and have become diluted, or vitiated depending on one’s point of view, by mass imaging and the global corporatisation. For shock is now a commodity like everything else. While Muslim countries still maintain laws over certain images and other public visualisations (the woman’s body etc.), ‘we’ in the ‘enlightened’ so-called developed world deem such prohibitions the corrupt, reprobate and the unfortunate after-effect of forced totalitarianisms or otiose monarchies (like Saudi Arabia which is nonetheless in the West’s best interests to nurture and accept).

In a world of the globalised image and the commodification of the tragic it is therefore consoling to see that images have a strong personal, social, spiritual and political hold. The Aboriginal image—let us call it that instead of art for the moment—has had several births as we know, whether over forty thousand years ago, the images of indigenous peoples by the colonists, and the birth of Aboriginal art per se (i.e. in the Western sense; according to the Western historical institution and discourse) in 1972. Aboriginal art is the single biggest factor in bringing visibility and recognition to Aboriginal cultures in the ensuing decades. It has allowed Aboriginal cultures a foothold, albeit a surrogate and distant one, in places and situations that they otherwise would not have had. And in developing a liking or love for Aboriginal art, non-indigenous peoples, some of them, have learned to take greater interest in Aboriginal affairs and to take

WELL BRAD DARLING, maybe we should ask the prime minister ?

heed, to keep remembering the grisly plight they have endured, and in many respects continue to endure. Given that circumstances are still more than grim—‘Sorry’ is just a five letter word, Aboriginal welfare in remote communities continues to be in a parlous state, cultural tokenism remains rife, and where most white Australians continue to be blind to the ‘real’ Aboriginal world—it is only understandable that many indigenous people should be protective over their imagery and to take its misuse as a slight.

The counter-argument is one that has been active for two decades now, namely that if Aboriginal art wishes equity with non-Aboriginal art, it must then not quarantine itself from critical debate, and perhaps from appropriation, since to be exceptional in this regard is also to be inert and precious, and preciousness is always politically suspect since it is selfanointing.

But to say that both are right, or that Aboriginal art and culture can have it both ways is also glib. The better conclusion starts with remembering that when the colonists arrived on this land it was a confederate of nations as diverse in language and lore as medieval Europe. The word “Aboriginal” must be understood in parallel with “European”. But against this many of the Aboriginal cultures have died out completely and many urban-based people face the melancholy but noble undertaking of relearning their ancestral language which had never had a place in their life when they were young. Thus when it comes to culture the Aboriginal debate is as diverse as their cultures, as reflected already in some of the views above, that are only the very smallest taster of debates in flux. What Broadsheet’s experiment does indeed uncover is that we must now embrace Aboriginal culture as a plural and one that is estimably complex and dynamic.

Notes 1 See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/painter-quits-in-row-over-artist/storyfn9hm1pm-1226524510727 and http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/visual-arts/another-artist-quits-inrevolt-against-style/story-fn9d3avm-1226526043838; accessed 27 November, 2012 2 See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/visual-arts/another-artist-quits-in-revolt-against-style/storyfn9d3avm-1226526043838; accessed 29 November 2012 3

ibid.

4 See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/nicola-roxons-discrimination-laws-draw-flak-from-media/ story-e6frg996-1226549911052; accessed 9 January, 2013. It is tempting to insert “visual art” into those concepts of “debate” and “healthy democracy” 5

Étienne Balibar, Saeculum: Culture, religion, idéologie, Paris: Galilée, 2012: 46

Above: again minimal apologies to Roy Lichtenstein

They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make art like they used to: Late last year in the Wall Street Journal, Camille Paglia mounted a frontal onslaught on contemporary art This malaise is made more pronounced, she argues, by not only music, but by architecture that has its influential high priests (she names Koolhaas and Gehry) whereas art continues to languish. This seems like reactionary flimflam but it does not deserve to be discounted altogether. The famous Pareto principle dictates that eighty percent of effects come from twenty percent of causes, which can be used in social analysis, marketing and other enterprises. It can also be transposed to the opinions of ultra-conservative commentators: they are wrong most of the time, but on rare occasions they have an alarming grasp of the truth. It just remains to uncover in what respect Pagliaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s comment might be considered correct.

Camille Paglia achieved fame in 1990 as a literary and cultural commentator with her long, erudite and provocative book Sexual Personae.

Here she took up the model educed by Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy that art as to be seen according to the conflict and complementarity of two opposing forces, the Dionysian (ecstasy and chaos) and the Apollonian (order and harmony). Thus art is born of these essentially pagan binary tensions.

In a period when feminism in art and literary criticism was at its height, she

ADAM GECZY Reprinted in The Australian, it begins with the fiercely provocative opening sally: Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

27 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

received both praise and scorn for her defence of male artists, whom she sees as embodiments of particular creative and libidinal urges. The book was swooned over by eminent writers and critics like Anthony Burgess and Harold Bloom, and its erudition is everywhere to see. But already Paglia showed an aptitude for the quick swipe germane to editorialising. Critics who do not meet with her sympathies can be abruptly dealt with, and she was also prone to fall under the spell of her own brilliance. In her subsequent journalistic career as self-styled public intellectual, Paglia again alienated many women by describing what she felt were feminism’s negative effects.

One of them was to have robbed boys of appropriate role models, since the macho star and the superhero were now relegated to a suspect place of male aggression. Bereft of such stereotypes, boys were apt to waver in guilt and indecision. This point was, again, partly true but since she began writing there was never a stemmed flow of action heroes or types; action men continued to be sold in shops and models of powerful male heterosexuality have never been in short supply in popular culture.

Nonetheless, the shrill note she sounds about the doldrums of the art world seems to be a sign of the times. Only a week after her article appeared, The Observer reported Dave Hickey’s public statement of disenchantment with the art world. For him, art had become a subsidiary of the hedge fund business; the critic had begun to resemble a “courtier class”, advising the rich on acquisitions; and “works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn are the result of ‘too much fame, too much success and too little critical sifting’ and are ‘greatly overrated’”.1 This is probably true, but it is open to debate as to whether such artists are representative of the many, to which there are two answers.

They are inasmuch as they are the artists that are collected and which garner the most attention. The other answer is that they are not, and that there are thousands of artists and critics in continental Europe, in China and wherever else who have next to no interest in them. But with commentators as varied, as experienced and as influential as Paglia and Hickey expressing anger and disappointment at contemporary art, we might say it is a striking coincidence, a real problem, or we might ask for more detail.

Contemporary art, or some contemporary art, the art in their sights, might be specious and dispiriting, but what are the qualities that it needs? Hickey is well known for his defence of beauty, while Paglia blames the diminution of artistic quality on the “expansion of form” and the “contraction of ideology”. The former is put down to “the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and 1970s”, while the latter is blamed on artists having lost touch with their audience. Artists are in an enclave of “upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism

of the 1960s”. Awash with emotive adjectives (“brash”, “fiery”), Paglia conveniently misses the fact that it was precisely this antiestablishment attitude that brought about the “multimedia revolution” that “dethroned painting”. And yet painting has not been dethroned, mainly for the fact that it is the mainstay for upper class liberals to park their money.

It is worth parsing Paglia not because it is of any significant merit, but precisely because it is a graphic reflection of the kind of misleading posturing that diverts from the central issues. She bemoans the death of the avant-garde, which she sees as occurring because of her “hero” Andy Warhol. The death of the avant-garde is certainly ascribable to the weakening of ideology, but it is a common error to place the blame on art.

Indeed, Paglia’s diatribe is a symptom of a problem that has existed since the demise of the avant-garde, which is to make art a straw man for much wider social conditions that it itself reflects. Art is by no means to blame for the loss of faith in revolution and the quizzical attitude to change besetting politics. In art as well as politics, there is no longer a positive, or plausible ‘outside’ that poses as an alternative to the status quo. The contemporary political condition, as mirrored by the condition of art and culture, is one of constant alteration, slippage but no change. In the summer of 2011 the Islamists in Egypt smothered the emancipatory potential of their revolution; Occupy Wall Street did nothing in effect, and so on. Don’t blame art.

In a recent book that riffs on Jameson’s classic commentaries on Postmodernism, Post-Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of just-in-time capitalism, Jeffrey Nealon makes the point that: Under postmodernism and post-postmodernism, the collapse of the economic and cultural that Adorno sees dimly on the horizon has decisively arrived (cue Baudrillard’s Simulations—where reality isn’t becoming indistinguishable from the movies; it has become indistinguishable) we arrive at that postmodern place where economic production is cultural production and vice versa. And I take that historical and theoretical axiom to be the (largely unmet and continuing) provocation of Jameson’s work: if ideology critique depends on a cultural outside to the dominant economic logistics, where does cultural critique go now that there is no such outside, no dependable measuring stick to celebrate a work’s resistance or to denounce its ideological complicity?2 It appears that Paglia may have taken on a much bigger issue than she may have thought. But it is important to recall that the title of her article is ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’. In fact, Paglia is not hankering after an avantgarde but rather the opposite. In an abstract and unsupported flourish, she claims that the better creative work is being done in the field of industrial design whose products are shorn of “ideology and cant”. This sounds absurd given her previous comment that art suffered from too little ideology.

But there is still a percentage of truth in this.

Her citation of Warhol is relevant here. He “incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned”. A distinction needs to be made at this point since there seems to be the insinuation, in the highly presumptive final clause, that he was a visionary in this regard. Not so: Pop began in England with Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake. Warhol’s contemporaries such as Lichtenstein, Wesselmann and Rosenquist were just as active in promoting mass culture. But what Warhol managed to do unlike any artist before him was to create a micro-culture of artists, designers, film-makers, hangerson and misfits that not only were the audience-alibis to Warhol’s role as artist-guru, but who collapsed the boundaries between different forms of creative activity. Warhol’s Factory, which moved to three venues throughout its history, was an ad hoc stage, in which art and fashion were no longer rivals, but active complements. His designs were intended to have the viral capacity to move from the canvas—which was only their provisional and commodity-auspiced support—to be fabric designs or wallpaper (one recalls his cow wallpaper). Warhol never lost sight of his training as a designer of shoes in the 1950s, the illustrations of which he elevated into a charming sub-genre of their own that existed between commercial and fine art. It is this sense of fluidity in Warhol’s work that gives his discrete canvases, the large ‘major’ works that line the walls of the great museums and art institutions, a cool incongruity.

On an immediate level, and what is well known, the subjects of his work were meant as banal contradistinction to the ‘higher’ subjects that graced the traditional, historical idea of what a museum ought to display.

On another level, the serial quality of his work—the photo-serigraphy —challenged notions of uniqueness. The motifs in his work were all about spillage and dissemination; the image could go on and on. But this proliferation came at the price of meaning, since repetition has the power of annulment. In this way, Warhol confronted the viewer with the grim truth about fame. Fame is occasioned by relinquishing one’s image for the sake of a small set of facsimiles that are then circulated with promiscuous rapidity.

The price of fame is death; it is of no coincidence that his portrait of Marilyn Monroe appeared after her suicide. Warhol’s factory was a reflexive famegenerating machine; a cranking out of works that were genuine Andys, and as a site for the Andy himself to play at being himself as the artist. Warhol played at artificial celebrity, which could however not be separated from real celebrity. Warhol performed at celebrity and the celebrity was his art, and his art was his celebrity. Meanwhile, everyone was trying to find the real Andy behind the hard carapace of the deadpan ingénu. Warhol’s example afforded the highly valuable insight that the true self is indistinguishable from the false, made self. Warhol certainly made us rethink what it is to feel in front of a work of art.

It is only in the last decade or so that Warhol is being acknowledged as prophetic of what is becoming more and more evident in art, namely that we cannot just look at popular culture in art, but we must look for art in popular culture. For unlike his contemporaries, Warhol did not just transplant popular motifs onto the support of the canvas to defile the precious sense of high art, he purposely confounded the distinctions

from numerous angles and with different media. So again, Paglia is in part right with her assertion that better art is available in design, than in the galleries, but with a sizeable caveat that does not permit of her conceptual bigotry. What we are facing—and which in hindsight is availably incipient in Warhol—is a shift away from judging art from the vantage point of art. I have no wish to be cryptic here; however it is customary within art theory to position oneself as viewing through the lens of the frameworks of art, genre and tradition. In other words, this-or-that work of art borrows from an aspect of popular culture, a work recasts concepts of design to render its function non-functional, and another work rethinks traditions of painting. To a greater extent this is the theoretical position taken from the Duchampian legacy, which shows that an object’s identity is recast through its positioning within a gallery or its designation as art. So a shovel or a urinal seen in a gallery is art first before it is a shovel or a urinal. In the right contexts, as in State museums, the anchorage of an object as an artifact of art is apodictic, it is beyond dispute. One can dispute it, but such a dispute is always courted by the echo of the avant-garde; the disgruntled conservative critic, the outraged bourgeois. One is invited to dispute within galleries and one is safe knowing that such disputes fall on deaf ears and are worthless.

The best one can do in such situations is to make decisions as to what is good or bad art. But it is all art irrespective of what you think. Your view is part of the tacit cultural game you place in your own head, but it does not and cannot lead to a work being thrown out of the gallery in a way that one might return a dish at a restaurant. This circuit is itself of a piece with the much wider social condition of political helplessness, and the absence of an objective outside.

But what if we, following the cue of Warhol, were to look for art within other frameworks? The word “within” is crucially operative here.

This suggestion is not that closely related to land art or happenings, except in the respect that these genres had the capacity to be conscious of their artistic brinkmanship and could at best be audaciously willing to let the work dissipate and fall back into so-called real life. But on the other hand, the reformulation of these practices into the highly self-conscious and packaged form of relational aesthetics suggests that the a priori-ness of art—seen from the standpoint of critique and evaluation—be maintained.

Rather, what if we look for art within music video, fashion design, street art and commercial photography?

This exhortation is slightly more complex than it sounds. Since the 1970s, it has become increasingly acceptable to have exhibitions of commercial photography and fashion within art museums; and there is also now the relatively new phenomenon of the fashion museum (the largest of its kind is currently in Antwerp, Belgium). In the late 1980s when visitor numbers became an indicator, when popularity was conflated with commodity in the name of the rationalisation of museums to make them ‘viable’, such exhibitions became a popular staple. And it is as a result of this that pieces by Yves Saint Laurent and Vivienne Westwood unequivocally form part of art collections from the National Gallery of Australia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it is also thanks to this tendency that no one would dare question the art status of a photographer such as Helmut Newton. But again the action of placing an object or image from one station (design, popular culture) to the status of art is to perform an act of sublation, like the conferring of a knighthood. With the museum’s approval, such objects and images are relieved of the ‘is it really art’ debate. We look for ‘artness’ in the object or image with the satisfaction that it has been ratified by the institution, and by implication, history.

But my suggestion is different: it is to look for artness within popular culture outside the gallery framework. It is perhaps best to begin with the example of popular music, which is generically identified as classical music’s other. Like what fashion is to art, it is limited by its ephemerality, its pre-packaging and its commodification. Yet within pop music—used here for convenience to embrace all the sub-genres from indie to hip-hop —there is work of inventiveness, complexity and therefore of lasting merit.

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles’ The White Album spring to mind. While Justine Bieber will be remembered as a solely popular phenomenon, perhaps some Paul Oakenfold or some David Guetta will survive as music. The designers Viktor and Rolfe have featured objects —such as their empty perfume bottle—that are tantamount to art, that

2 9 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

are non-functional, but exist within the functional, wearable items within their ensemble. The work of Alexander McQueen has received growing recognition for its status as corporeal and living sculpture—and while it now graces art museums, his work was never expressly intended for them but for the catwalk and the fashion world. So too, Lady Gaga in certain videos, notably the Grammy Award winning ‘Bad Romance’ brings to her visuals a fusion that is worthy of Matthew Barney and would have put the Surrealists to shame. And a note on Matthew Barney: his Cremaster Cycle, which was hailed as a new direction for video art, drew directly from McQueen and from fashion photographers such as Nick Knight. The extent of the acclaim of Barney’s works as a new beginning is due in part to much of the art world’s ignorance of what was being produced in the fashion world because it was, simply, not deemed art and therefore beyond the horizon of interest and scrutiny. But while Barney’s work claims and holds a status as (great?) art, Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ makes no such claim, nor wishes to. It is a commercial product used to promote the song and herself as the latest pop icon. But it is within this whole that we have glimpses of art; it exists strikingly but somewhat immaterially bound within the tireless flow of the product. Perhaps more discernibly we can also cite street art. We need not go into the interminable debate as to whether street art is ‘really’ art, rather that some street art discernibly is. Amidst the generic muck of iridescent blobs we make out an image that we find well-achieved, stimulating, charming, or jarring—it stays with us.

What amounts to ‘discernibly’ is the next question. In the eighteenth-century two qualities were highly prized: wit and taste. They were both indefinable, but they were incontrovertibly existent. Given that the Enlightenment had by degrees entrusted the powers of judgment away from a godhead to that of the freethinking individual, its discriminatory powers were highly prized. Taste in the eighteenth-century had a far deeper resonance than it does today, which is largely confined to one’s taste in clothing, music, friends and how an interior is decorated, which are all indicators of an individual will and are watered down versions of the earlier incarnation. For taste in the eighteenth century had a moral gloss; it was a sense of refinement that extended to how to act in particular situations; with dignity, discretion and compassion. What we see today in the values of taste are implications of the same but in the faintest form. It is also true that the ability to discern in matters of aesthetics and morality have become debased by the higher value given to its economic counterpart; the ability to judge quantifiable value.

One of the undeniable hallmarks of the artwork in the heyday of postmodernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the very absence of taste. Some of us may still remember the special issue of Artforum published at the end of the 1980s decade which included the reflection that the most commonly used word in the critic’s lexicon was “banal”. The unrepentant culprit of this was of course Jeff Koons, who openly saw himself as the successor to Warhol, who no doubt started the ball of banality rolling.

The age of kitsch was a celebration of capitalism at its most aggressive and rapacious, in which consumption and excess was so overheated that it had no room for the containment implied in the practice of taste. While kitsch was more commonly discussed than taste, or the deeper historical concept of taste per se, it was the devaluing of taste that gave way to many critical jeremiads about the loss of art’s social conscience and art in a state of inglorious decline. According to this topos, art had relinquished its ability to offer us reprieve from the images preferred by the multitude by doing these images better than popular culture itself. What separated art at this time from analogous images of seduction in popular culture was that its products were not only to the service of pleasure; they were laced with irony and sometimes derision. In this respect art was doubly alienating. But in this regard, art was blamed for a condition of which it was the visual representative. For its patent cynicism was little more than the cynicism of global corporatisation and its hold on government policy, which led to the deadlock of power in contemporary politics, the dissatisfaction with democracy, and the impotence felt by the person on the street, an impotence whose temporary antidote is apathy.

But we now need to ask ourselves why some art, and the capsules of artness that I contend exist embedded within popular culture, continues to hold our attention. This is not a simple matter of rapt desire or the lure

of fetishisation in which we require an ever-renewing train of substitutes to interest us. Rather, it is because good art supplies the perennial function that offers us assurance and release in a certain goodness in the world. It is not a conventional goodness as in some vapid Christian benevolence, but more the reminder that excellence and something that is ‘truly’ worthy of us exists. If these qualities and glimpses no longer inhabit the fringes, or the outside (avant-garde) zones of art, but only within it, they need to be prized out. So here is the answer to Paglia’s forced and clumsy conundrum.

It is not that we have lost our gods, but we must know where to find them.

Much like Walter Benjamin’s angels of history hidden furtively within the thick and erratic texture of popular culture, art now resides within popular culture. Together with globalisation, popular culture is a far more expanded entity than it was in Warhol’s time, or even when Koons began his career.

Social media and digital communication means that that popular culture is folded organically into our lives. That art is not the refreshing and objective (outside) alternative is, once again, not the failure of art but an indicator of more complex weaves of social organisation, communication and the economies that accompany them. Those who complain and worry about the state of art might be alerted to two things: one, since the beginning of the independent artist and the independent critic in the eighteenth-century, art has always been moaned at and the fates have always been called to witness.

Two, it is important to know where to look. The economic constraints of overpopulation and urbanisation mean that potential artists are moving into film, graphics and decoration. This is not in any way to say that film or interior decoration are art, or to bring back old debates about the extent to which craft and design are art. Rather there are regions, pockets, enclaves and exceptions within these practices that are worthy of critical attention.

This is all a matter of making peace with the old opposition between fine art and popular culture in a manner that goes well beyond Warhol, although it was Warhol who motioned to the fact that art and popular culture are not interconnected, but instead, that art is a particular quality of attainment within the expanded field of popular mass culture. And for finding that quality we need to expand our capacity for discernment.

Notes 1 Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, ‘Doyen of American critics turns his back on ‘nasty, stupid’ world of modern art’, The Observer, 28 October, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-critic-dave-hickey-quits-art-world. I am grateful to Jacqueline Millner for pointing out this reference to me 2

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of just-in-time capitalism, Stanford: Stanford U.P. 2012: 176-177

Page 26 left: Alexander McQueen fashion Fall/Winter 2012 Page 26 right: Paul McCarthy, Static Pink, 2004-09 Photo courtesy the artsit and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich Page 27 top: Mark Dion, The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: The Uniforms, 2006 Photo courtesy the artist Page 27 bottom: Gowns by Viktor & Rolf Opposite: ‘Spicebomb’ by Viktor & Rolf Below: Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2010-11

Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;crisisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in contemporary art is by no means new: Sweeping art under the market

31 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Alex Gawronski Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. Thus, it was especially interesting to read a recent article extrapolating such a crisis by the highly visible American intellectual and Humanities Professor, Camille Paglia. Paglia’s recent journalistic essay ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ first appeared fittingly enough, in The Wall Street Journal.1 Exactly how capitalism can save art however, is by no means convincingly explained here. In this article, Paglia, who also lectures in Media Studies, writes generalisingly about the loss of meaning and innovation in contemporary art, while making various hyperbolic laments such as, “No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since… the early 1970s”.2 Such a claim is then juxtaposed with others proclaiming the “superiority” of today’s commercially viable cultural fields like architecture (‘superstar’ architects Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid are mentioned), industrial design, even woodworking3 and opera! What the contemporary art world suffers from according to Paglia, is a surfeit of upper middle class students and practitioners who collectively compose a fake Left whose very privileges are accounted for by the capitalist system they habitually attack.

Of course, the outcry over the inherent hypocrisy of artists on this point, and one not entirely unjustified4, has been made time and time again. Artists are attacked for their suspect idealism on the basis that “the commercial world… like it or not, is modern reality”.5 Curiously, Paglia’s argument upholding the radicalism of 1960s protest art and social movements turns to the ubiquitous scorn and disregard that contemporary artists tend to reserve for religions of any kind, specifically in contrast to the way in which 1960s artists (and perhaps more obviously, pop musicians like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) un-cynically embraced ‘alternative’ Eastern religions. In the end, the essay seems to seek a strange union of capital and “the spirit”.

Or is it really just the “spirit of capitalism” that is being upheld here over the right of contemporary artists to legitimately question the basis of their

own privileges? Naturally, Paglia frames such questioning according to the logic that by doing this, such artists have effectively cut themselves off from the people, as characterised by a “general public”. Given the accumulated affect of Paglia’s criticisms, it is worth considering some of their primary underlying assumptions regarding the role and relevance of contemporary art in society.

One of the most ‘radical’ presumptions of Paglia’s text is its assertion that there has been no major figure in the visual arts of “profound” influence for the last forty years. The necessary response here would not to automatically engage in a counter claim, listing living artists as proof to the contrary, although that would be easy enough. The real response would be to question what the author means by “profound”. Actually, is this word itself not overly grandiose, reactionary even, and more befitting of the strains of a Mahler symphony say, that is, of a major work that intends overtly to force us to ponder the cosmic enormity and complexity of the universe and the creative act in relationship to it? Or is the question of profundity here not actually one of popular appeal, where the artwork is granted major significance on the basis of sheer exposure? If the latter is the case, then it would be easy to mount an argument (fairly ridiculous) for music’s innate priority over the visual arts based on terms of sheer crowd reach.6 Ultimately though, the answer to these questions is hinted at when Paglia emphatically states, again entirely without innovation, that “the avantgarde is dead”, and with moderately more originality, that it was killed by her “hero” Andy Warhol. But how did Warhol kill the avant-garde exactly?

In Paglia’s view it was precisely because Warhol so plainly embraced the language of commercialism, thus finally blurring the lines between high (avant-garde) culture and low (commercial or industrial) culture. What makes Warhol’s by now, and by no means so easily transparent, disavowal of avant-gardism so profound is the way it actually displaces ‘profundity’ for the readily identifiable language of mass-appeal. Therefore, the profound appeal of Warhol was exactly the result of his savvy and apparently

entirely a-critical placement of himself within the very heart of (post-) industrial capitalism: Warhol’s “genius” was his strategic identification with the machine of capital that the Western industrialised nations responsible for inventing “contemporary art”, had made such an insistent dimension of every urban environment. For Paglia, this wholly unrepentant pursuit of public overexposure by a particular artist, expressly via the language of commercialism, is unproblematically good. “Genius” is equated in this instance with basic public appeal based on instant recognisability.

With this in mind, Paglia’s suggestion, although unsupported, of the sapping of “artistic creativity and innovation in the arts”7 is stated as partly the result of a related “expansion of form”.8 This claim essentially refers to the waning of painting as the foremost contemporary practice in the arts from the 1960s on. At this time, contemporary art began to embrace the “brash”9 and some would say esoteric, dimensions of multi-media practices as well as the deliberately destabilising and comparatively encompassing possibilities offered by installation art. This incurred what the author decries as the fading of permanence as a goal of art making.10 Yet how could this be otherwise specifically in relation to the conditions set in motion by contemporary forms of capitalism? Indeed, the circumstances of postFordist capitalism in which we have been living since the 1960s and 1970s, and which have only accelerated their influence since, overwhelmingly favour transience and virtuality as their primary determining features.

In this way, workers once used to stable, that is to say more or less permanent working conditions in static environments, found themselves increasingly outsourced to decentralised multinational corporations who expressed no personalised commitment to them at all. At the same time, with the rapid exponential growth of computer industries and technology, capital itself took on a virtualised form that could be traded invisibly across the globe effectively displacing ‘real’ money as the object of its speculations. More interestingly, increased leisure time, of which the arts is frequently argued to be a major beneficiary, began to imperceptibly merge with work time; people had more opportunities to work from home and work when they wanted to, yet it became simultaneously virtually impossible to state when you were or were not at work.11

Therefore, the lack of permanence in the arts that Paglia laments is in fact a fundamental product of the capitalism she professes to support, the capitalism that “ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women”.12 All of these claims are debatable in contemporary terms13 but what is certain is that contemporary artists, many of whom face extremely precarious living and working conditions involving for example, having to work in multiple unrelated jobs to merely make art in the first place14, have indefatigably mirrored the dominant conditions of contemporary post-Fordist capitalism favouring impermanence. And in this sense, they are doing precisely what Paglia’s “hero” Andy Warhol had done before them. Only, that now, conscious or unconscious of such conditions, such artists are structurally denied the very prospect of exerting a historically “profound” permanence. And more broadly, this is because the very concept of inarguable historical relevance has likewise crucially disappeared.

The solution to the faded permanence of art’s role within society, Paglia proposes, is the concerted embrace by artists of alternative and more influential cultural fields like architecture, engineering, industrial and graphic design. These artistically “undervalued”, less “pretentious” practices she maintains, are today ascendant over a predominant variety of contemporary art that functions allegedly as an “airless echo chamber”15 within which artists aimlessly babble amongst themselves. As an antidote, the wholly commercially dependent aspect of the aforementioned disciplines is hinted as a saving grace for art. It is through such fields Paglia contends, that technically and aesthetically sophisticated artifacts reach a global, potentially universal public. After all, compared to the audience scope of say an ipod or a personal computer, what hope does the relative hermeticism of contemporary art have? However, there is a fundamental ideological fallacy underscoring this logic whereby it is expected, in a post-ideological world, that contemporary art can no longer argue a case for its specialness or separation from the largely utilitarian domain of technologicised personal affects. These contemporary fetishes are proposed to outstrip contemporary art in both aesthetic sophistication and sheer

communicative impact. Still, is the real problem here not one of intention?

Just because hundreds of thousands of contemporary subjects own and interact daily with iphones does not guarantee the iphone, either as an aesthetic object or communicative tool, as a successful substitute for ‘art’!

Actually what differs between an iphone and all related technologies of this kind and a work of art is the way in which the former increasingly seeks to dissolve any awareness of the object’s functioning within the reality of the user’s life: like contemporary virtualised capital, such computer technology strives to completely dissociate the (unavoidably exploitative) realities of its existence by making it seem a natural extension of the owner’s subjective psychical and physiological universe. Much contemporary art on the other hand, even if it deploys such technologies, intends to compel a questioning of the assumptions of this basically biologisised view of technology and the world; art and contemporary art never more so, is always art-ifice.

Furthermore, in base capitalist terms, how is it possible to realistically compare a mass-produced commercially orientated product that aspires foremost at generating mass profit (or ‘public appeal’) to a discursive discipline, regardless of how overwrought and ‘entrepreneurial’ it might be, whose very discursiveness also endeavours to question the frequently disregarded naturalisation of contemporary capitalism and its most venerated products?

Linked with contemporary art’s assumed destructive expansion of form is what Paglia refers to a “contraction of ideology”.16 This phrase is more difficult to flesh out, but in the context of this text it is used to accuse the ideological dominance within the contemporary art world, of a “sanitised” upper middle-class. Such a class it is proposed, baulks at getting its hands dirty through engaging in the more ‘honest’ and yet more influential, work of designing and manufacturing industrial culture.

Attendant with this supposed ideological contraction is an upper middle class “blasé liberal, secularism”17 that habitually denounces all “spiritual” tendencies in art. This is in contrast, so the author claims, with art’s once “respectful exploration of world religions”.18 This last point is exceptionally ironic given that it arises within the context of an article endorsing capitalism’s rightful dominion over art, art being traditionally considered a realm of spiritual idealism alongside philosophy.

So how then does a renewed interest in world religions connect with capitalism’s supposedly unproblematically beneficial relationship to art? A question of this sort is particularly curious considering that religious anti-secularism is based at its purest, on a firmly anti-capitalist stance. It is curious too, that Paglia cites in this context, the “spiritual language… of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko… [whose work today] is ignored or suppressed”19, for the work of these artists stands at a polar remove from the decidedly anti-spiritual outlook of Warhol, Paglia’s idolised “murderer” of the avant-garde. But then wasn’t it the originary avant-gardes, who somewhat oddly, shared with religion an undeniably anti-capitalist outlook in their opposition to that system’s denigrating use of human beings either as cannon fodder or as factory numbers? Therefore, if we talk about the dead-end occasioned by the middle class institutionalisation of art as a potentially spiritual expression, can’t we also say the same of world religions? Haven’t the latter become more managerial expressly as a result of contemporary capitalism’s managerial institutionalisation of the ‘spirit’, in art also? So how then exactly can capitalism be good for either art or religion? Indeed, isn’t the greatest ideological contraction today the outcome of placing the dollar sign, that empty signifier20, before all else? Certainly capitalism is only really good for art in the sense that it equates maximum exposure, linked to strategic, selfinterested profit seeking, with success. And as far as religions are concerned, aren’t the most globally ‘successful’ today those like the various branches of evangelicalism, that argue the church’s ‘holy’ right to profiteer on this earth from practices that are only superficially transcendentalist?

Considering Paglia’s article as a whole, the fundamental questions she raises are three-fold; first, why does contemporary art fare so poorly in comparison with parallel developments in other cultural fields; second, and consequently, what can art do, realistically, practically and popularly within contemporary society and third, where has the “spirit” in contemporary art gone? Once again, the society to which the author refers, as evidenced by the title of her article, is one primarily determined by

3 3 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

prevailing forms of capitalism. While there is no convincing proof supplied to suggest contemporary art’s comparative irrelevance, the assumption that art should ‘do’ something is oddly aligned with certain varieties of often anti-capitalist, protest art that emerged most forcefully during the 1960s, an era Pagila returns to a number of times and which she obviously views as especially culturally formative. Considering the sheer extent of civil and social unrest visible during that period, it is unsurprising that certain artists and collectives were convinced that art had to serve an identifiable cause in order to excuse itself from charges of pure selfishness and social redundancy.

With regard to contemporary art, it is interesting how this demand that art do something has reemerged in many so-called relational practices that simultaneously look to deny the very existence of art as a historically determined discourse related to philosophy. The watered down re-workings of 1960s conceptual and performance art typical of relational aesthetics usually recast intellectual critique as positive feel-good social experiments that similarly prefigure art as banally literal in its aims and outcomes.21 Such work, much of it non-object based, also structurally imitates contemporary capitalism’s ideological demand for immaterial products, here in the form of good-natured, socially conscious actions ultimately hopelessly limited in their suggestive and political import. Tellingly, such art often aspires to reach broader, non-art audiences and would therefore seem sympathetic to Paglia’s vision of a reinvigorated meaningful art on two fronts, as capitalist friendly and socially orientated.

Less appealing to Paglia though about such popular contemporary art, would be its superficial focus on transience and apparent uselessness, compared with more user-friendly industrial forms of contemporary culture.22 Yet what does this reiterated misgiving towards uselessness, unpopularity, abstraction and opacity imply if not the kind of vocational slant that even higher education institutions have been forced to increasingly adopt. It is obvious that in the current climate higher education, including art education, is geared more towards the demands of the bottom line. Consequently, useless endeavours, in fact art is auspicious among them, are implicitly cast under suspicion as being a drain on contemporary society, which translates in reality as being bad for the economy. But isn’t the very uselessness of art, insofar as its use-value cannot be made explicit, what defines art in the first place? And this is by no means to support the elevated uselessness accorded art courtesy of standard Greenbergian tenets.

Indeed, this variety of uselessness is very useful to the commercial art sector as a supplier of predominantly elite, often corporate, forms of contemporary decoration. Against such use, isn’t it art’s right to question, paradoxically, even neurotically, the double-bind it finds itself in, in relation to an overweening globalised culture that is not simply practically capitalist, but unrelentingly commercial? Why should art be expected to break the bind of this paradox by coming up with a positive solution or by redefining art along the lines of the a priori positing of socially and symbolically useful objects and images? Moreover, isn’t contemporary art’s spiritual dimension not encapsulated by this very refusal to falsely claim the absolutely positive or negative, as if this were possible in any way?

Under the conditions of contemporary global capitalism that seek evermore a use, actual and symbolic, for everything at the expense of distracted or otherwise abstract thinking, isn’t art one of the few remaining areas in which such thinking might thrive and reverberate? The kind of linear can-do thinking that distinguishes Paglia’s essay, denies the subtle, indeterminate paths of influence that contemporary art initiates in contemporary culture generally. That a global art world, increasingly represented as a secondary aspect of the global tourist industry (in which architecture like Gehry’s plays an undeniable part), frequently translates as ‘successful’, art works that display overly descriptive or entertainmentleaning proclivities, does not do any justice to the contemporary practice of art. Indeed, contra to Paglia’s thesis that capitalism can save art, the frequently strained and unpredictable relationship between art and its markets, actually testifies to contemporary art’s continuing capacity for at least partial, resistance to its wholehearted integration into capitalist machinery. That this machinery is excessively fickle, thereby denying

again Paglia’s nostalgic yearning for artistic permanence, only means that art must function in the face of and despite, market demands. In fact, it is this stubborn ‘despite of’ that speaks most loudly of art’s continued critical relevance, a relevance that has little to do with avant-garde mythology, but which has much to do with valuing art as one of the few prevailing avenues of abstract, distracted, useless thinking.

Notes 1 Camille Paglia, ‘How Capitalism can Save Art’, The Wall Street Journal, 6 October, 2011; http://online.wsj. com/article/SB10000872396390444223104578034480670026450.html 2

ibid.

3 ibid. Paglia writes effusively about the particular creativity of one of her students a “virtuoso” woodworker, who earned a living as a furniture-maker proving that “Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs.”

4 On this note, consider just how expensive it is to study art in the USA. Given this, Paglia’s jab at hypocritical art school leftists seems at least partly, warranted 5

ibid. (italics my emphasis)

6 But then again, even as far as music is concerned, one would always have to ask ‘which’ music, for within contemporary ‘popular’ music there is a vast array of genres and sub-genres each with its own considerable audiences 7

Camille Paglia, op cit.

8

ibid.

9

ibid.

10

ibid.

11 “Working time and free time have no clearly defined borders. Work and leisure can no longer be separated. In the non-paid time, they (cultural producers) accumulate a great deal of knowledge, which is not paid for extra, but is naturally called for and used in the context of paid work, etc.” Isabell Lorey, ‘Governmentality and Self Precarisation’, in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray eds, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: MayFlyBooks, 2009: 197 12

Camille Paglia, op cit.

13 For example, doesn’t contemporary neo-liberal capitalism support and encourage new corporate aristocracies, while the majority of the world’s population still lives in abject poverty and while women workers globally are routinely paid less than their male colleagues?

14 “Voluntary, i.e., unpaid or low paying jobs in the culture or academic industries, for example, are all too often accepted as an unchangeable fact, and nothing else is ever demanded.” Isabell Lorey, op cit.

15

Camille Paglia, op cit.

16

ibid.

17

ibid.

18

ibid.

19

ibid.

20

According to Lacan, “$” stands as the symbol for “lack”, that which (emptily) propels desire

21 There are many examples this, most of which are well intentioned and which tend to collapse contemporary art into peripherally related fields like social work and straightforward pedagogy.

The majority of these examples, in doing so, ask that art achieve something immediate and ‘concrete’ in a social context even if what results is difficult to distinguish from a “slew of community-based practices that revolve around the predictable formula of children’s workshops, discussions, meals, film screenings and walks”. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London, New York: Verso, 2012: 21 22 On this note it is interesting to consider the example of Russian Constructivism, a key avant-garde movement that sought to institute its revolutionary political program, partly via the mass manufacture of common, industrially produced items. While the Constructivists envisaged a utopian social outcome in which people’s everyday lives were affected by revolution, can the same thing be said of a contemporary capitalist ‘revolution’ that prioritises particular, isolated technological fetishes?

Page 30: David Hockney, iPad drawings, 2010 Page 31: Andy Warhol, Self-portrait, 1986 Photo courtesy Helyn and Ralph Goldenberg Collection Page 34: David Hockney, iPad drawing, 2010

3 5 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Just a privileged guy with a megaphone … standing on my soapbox… shouting my views like they mean something…1 SHANE EASTWOOD I have spent thousands of hours in the bowels of David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and not because I love art. Critics and curators walk in and walk out and yet I and the other shadowy gallery attendants remain; deficient in vitamin D, but rich in proximity and intimacy with the mysterious MONA. In respect of contact hours and personal proximity MONA might be better known to me than anyone and I love its freedom.

Liberated from prosaic concerns of public galleries, MONA is free to play with all and any explorations of being and cosmos, but does any one really understand it?

During MONA’s infancy it was inseparable from its creator, the magnanimous gambling guru David Walsh. Walsh is intentionally elusive, dishing up one-liners to media, as well as in the unorthodox catalogue and the O-device (a MONA branded iPod replacement for wall labels), which suggests a possible conclusion that MONA’s objectives are undecided.

MONA’s genesis is Walsh’s personal metamorphosis. In his yet unpublished memoir2, a triadic conversation between himself at twenty (nihilistic), fifty (wise sentinel) and eighty (old guy) reveals our contemporaneous Walsh informing his youthful self that besides a remaining intellectual framework he has completely rebuilt his “personal philosophy” to reach his current nuanced, balanced account to the question of what constitutes reality. Whereas ‘Walsh at twenty’ can hardly rationalise the appearance of the social culture of humans beyond biologistic necessity, ‘Walsh at fifty’ observes that, “intentional meaning in art leaves wriggleroom for culture”. In a key passage, ‘Walsh at fifty’ provides a salient contradiction to emphasise his point about the necessity of integrating diverging and contradictory mindsets: “The [instrumentalist] theorist theorises that nothing is real, or that explanations mean nothing, but lives his life as if everything has meaning and purpose.” Here a division is struck between ‘objectivity’ and the ‘subjective’ domain of personhood and social intelligence. This domain contradistinction is mirrored by debates concerning competing approaches to analysing or synthesising objective accounts of reality and biology, coupled with human culture. Could this domain conflict be part of what drives Walsh and MONA’s presence to be counted as a serious platform for cultural debate?

In efforts to explain his neuro-atypicality as a numbers savant, some have suggested his cognitive functioning resides somewhere on the autism spectrum. Walsh’s memoir reveals a personal journey to become more self-integrated and socially integrated as an individual.3 He has been quoted as saying and has written repsectively: “my motives are complex and often internally contradictory. I don’t think I am capable of a consistent picture of myself”4 and; “I am not clear what my agenda is, except to discover one.”5 MONA seems like a weird life choice for a numbers guy, but seems to make sense when it is placed in the context of one’s search to know himself, to “make a mark” and to know the nature of reality.

One issue I am endeavouring to uncover is whether or not neuro-atypicality capacitates Walsh with a contra-distinctive ‘edge’ to ‘collide’ with, witness and track to some extent the antinomies of humanity.

Walsh claims neuro-atypicality does not explain who he is or reflect MONA’s motives, doesn’t think it “leads to insight about my motivations, achievements or failures”, and views the binary examples I use by Simon Baron-Cohen and Harry Hunt to identify people on the Asperger’s scale

as little more than shallow “pigeon-holing”. Asperger (syndrome) refers to a cognitive psychological spectrum bias, and therefore a predisposed mindset to pursuing certain questions rather than others, which suggests that if this “pigeon-holing” applies to Walsh then Baron-Cohen’s, Hunt’s and other researchers’ explanations do relate and could be influential to MONA’s challenge and the reasons for its existence. Although Walsh rejects any attempts to pathologise his brilliance, he acknowledges he has a gift for identifying systems and order in apparent chaos and that as a consequence we mortals might extrapolate he is thus in a privileged and unique position to view reality. What I suspect is that Walsh is engaged in an almost disembodied viewing of personhood, humanity and society through the art he acquires. MONA reflects this vision back to us on a ‘high bandwidth’, intended to shock and challenge the shibboleths of social convention.

Looking through this lens Walsh’s metamorphosis can be explained as fifty years of personal antifragilism and MONA its strange consequence.

Christian Boltanski, Jean Hubert-Martin and Walsh converse about chance, probability and God and in this conversation Walsh’s mathematising brilliance is evidently transferable and applicable to the appraisal of art.

“To eliminate God”, Walsh claims, would make things more simple because life is a “pseudo-random process.”6 This is no drinks-time head-spin, but rather a firm and developed life view repeated by Walsh who allows only “wriggle room for culture” and “intentional meaning”.7 Defining “pseudo-” in “random process” Walsh cites the evolutionary biological concept of “selection pressure”. ‘Art’ is explained and ratified by “evolutionary biologists now believ[ing] that the human brain evolved as a result of the selection pressure of art”8. With Amanda Lohrey, he explained that the museum experience is discerned in terms of a scientific outlook as a “gradualism”; “learning by increments through guesswork and experiment, but with constant attempts to falsify”.9 In his memoir the emphasis is likewise placed on a scientific rationale predicting occurrence of events by “mak[ing] multiple observations using multiple techniques”. Pseudorandom process as a concept viewed through a ratiocinating principle then appears to systemically or habitually organise Walsh’s life view, not least his approach to an explanatory account of human culture. He has claimed that artists make art to “get laid” and to defy death (a selection pressure process), which is revealing of his fascination with an evolutionary and biological explanation for human culture. This life ordering and ratiocinating principle correlates with research on an Asperger’s predisposition to search for the pattern to everything without telos or agent reliant (God) accounts.10 This is particularly pertinent to point out as proponents of biological evolutionary explanations take great pains to justify their premises based on a ratiocinating, biologistic-utilitarian principle for why art is performed and made. The subject, if not space of the ‘person’, is potentially undermined in order to re-situate the public imagination of the human-animal within its ecological habitat.11 Is this why the O-devices were designed to record data? One of their functions is to turn the art experience into statistics. It is arguable that Walsh attends intellectual debates (as with Boltanski and Martin) not just with an intellectually realised belief, but a predisposition to see life in certain ways that find structure and support through the systemising tendency of evolutionary biological accounts. This by no means implies that the weave of the person Walsh is not infinitely more complex but that his neuro-atypicality is perhaps a highly influential determiner of his tendency to hyper-rationalise.12

Walsh discovered how to showcase his collection and confirmed his convictions about the dullness of conventional museum classification when he experienced Artempo in 2007.13 Artempo constellated objects, art or otherwise, into playful yet astutely considered “collocations” of disparate works that demonstrated curator John-Hubert Martin’s penchant for characteristic structures conducive to rich imaginative associations.

Artempo presented modes of being such as consciousness reflecting, breathing or participating and plying through material strata. Full aspects remained interminably concealed, yet offered compelling glimpses of interiority through external means. Artempo and its Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonders) modality was perhaps the most difficult kind of imagineering that an evolutionary biological account could substantiate under the rubric of selection pressure or adaptability. Martin’s patternmaking among disparate works that are uninterrupted by didactic devices —sensorially filmic and of synthetic composure—somehow captured Walsh’s attention and imagination. The question remains, is Martin’s Artempo/(and now) Theatre of the World mindset also Walsh’s? MONA borrows the Artempo template but does it have the capacity to understand the depth of intellectual consideration of Martin’s visual pleasure only strategies?

Walsh states; “MONA is probably not interesting because of my particular mindset, [it is] possibly… interesting as I refuse to dumb it down.”

Pressed on the value of the interaction between contrasting mindsets, Walsh states that “you need people operating at the extreme in order to find a valid mid point” and by that contrast “we can find a new path”. As an example, Walsh points to the science lost under the “cataclysmic” collapse of the Soviet Union. Finding a “new path” through divergent extremes may be one of MONA’s modus operandi.14 Baron-Cohen defines systemising as “the drive to analyse systems or construct systems”. It specifically functions

in an instrumental manner, hence mathematics, pure and certain applied sciences are manifest examples of this kind of mental processing. BaronCohen indicates that systemising cannot process the “moment-by-moment” spontaneity of human social behaviour. Walsh similarly contrasts between a filmic version of events for Asperger’s (syndrome) and a series of integrated incidences for neurotypicals, which highlights Walsh’s preference for non-agent accounts that atheism exemplifies about objective reality.15 Harry Hunt develops an anthropology of two incommensurable yet inseparable domains, described as, “thing/tool knowing” and “person knowing intelligence”. Hunt classifies the “primary logic of the person domain [as] completeness—incompleteness and the primary logic of the tool domain as consistency—inconsistency”. There is a salient domain contradiction in Walsh between his instrumentalist self, who theorises that life has no purpose and he who then lives his social life with purpose and meaning.

Cultural products reflect the dominant domain ideology. Whether “person/purpose and meaning” or “tool/causation/systemising” the dominant domain informs the specific emphasis manifest in cultural products. This is easily apparent in the shift from the gods of antiquity to the mechanistic idol as archetypes, as our cultural master narrative has shifted.

To demonstrate manifest occurrences of domain collision, Hunt employs Freud and Bergson on the uncanny. Simply speaking, instances such as the partial fusion of “thing or tool” (Systemising) with person (Empathy) for example; personality or purposiveness is ascribed to a mountain, or a person becomes thing-ified, that is “transformed into mechanical and/ or purely physical objects”. Hunt highlights that the incompleteness of incommensurable domain fusion can be deciphered as our greatest source of creativity or destructiveness and that this perpetual imbalance is the precondition of our freedom.16 We can postulate that Walsh is aware of the domain-contra-domain dynamic that is decisively generating his and others attraction to certain cultural products. Our culture’s current attraction and desire for the mechanistic idol may also explain Walsh’s love for Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca and Erwin Wurm’s works. Walsh’s engagement with Jean Hubert-Martin is significant in terms of domain dialogue. Martin seeks to re-animate enchantment and pursues an intuitive cryptic-cross-word synthesis of objects that tantalises and suggests universals of personhood or perhaps even ultimate essence. This is in direct counterpoint to Walsh’s predisposed bottom up, evolutionary biological position. Martin’s and Walsh’s engagement is unique, paradoxical and private. Similarly, Wim Delvoye’s oeuvre is a great exponent of exploiting domain paradox and also the end-point ambition of consistency or completion that can mirror the tumult of domain mis-coalescence. There are countless other examples in daily life, inasmuch as a thing or shape can have a personality, to the point that Hunt perceives, “[t]he collision of incommensurable yet inseparable cognitive domains mean[ing] that essentially any event can become for us fascinating, compelling, numinous, and/or strange… until the ‘form of life’ thus engaged finally secularises, satiates, and/or disenchants”.17

If MONA could manifest and cognate that which constitutes the endless source of novelty in aesthetic experience and antinomies confronting humanity, it could perhaps better breathe Promethean fire.

MONA’s emphasis (excluding Martin’s Theatre of the World) is Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian. As explicated by John Armstrong, MONA’s trajectory largely follows the prevailing inclination towards the Dionysian spectrum of experience. Some fixate on the ‘sex and death’ adolescent obsession, but there is obviously something a lot more grown up and complicated informing MONA. Peter Timms declares MONA as “possibly the world’s first bullshit free museum”. Timms makes another ‘positive’ claim for MONA as a “Club MONA”, where “art has largely given up any pretensions to cultural gravitas and morphed into a blend of fashion and high-class entertainment”. On the first description of “bullshit free”, Timms might be right in many respects, but by renouncing the O-device at the beginning of his museum visit, he surely missed the vapid and jejune debasement of artworks that contribute to why MONA is perceived as the adolescent of sensationalism and why Walsh’s claim that he wants to democratise and doesn’t want to “dumb it down” can be seen as a point of conflict.18 Timms’ “Club MONA” insight is one that Walsh contradicts. One of the latter’s ambitions is “to make the consequences of what we are [and

37 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

do] more immediate”. He wants MONA to shake us out of our habitual blindness to the consequences of our actions and habits. One example proposed is visitors witnessing the slaughter and butchering of cattle in the museum might perhaps precipitate a spike in vegetarian lunches for the day. Asked if he intended to exhibit a corpse or cadaver, he says he proposed to have someone with dignity die on their death bed to precipitate a lucid interval about our aliveness. He asserts that he does not “accept that art is inherently intransigent and inherently incomprehensible to people who don’t have an art background” and vows to prove it and with science as well.

Walsh has political objectives and those appear to finally be on the agenda, with an upcoming lecture by homo-aesthetics author, Ellen Dissanayake, and future exhibitions surveying bio-cultural perspectives. This is obviously a different Walsh to the mascot Walsh-the-marketing-machine. Recently Richard Flanagan’s ‘tooling’ of MONA and Walsh in The New Yorker as “short of adulthood” and “conventional” suggests something is amiss; the marketing machine is stronger than the museum’s demand to be a serious platform and the curatorship perceived as more “bling” than substantial process.

In his memoir Walsh states that “we, through fits and starts, approach an understanding of objective reality”, and that he is “more interested in art as a modality for communication than a tool for discovering reality”. Walsh expresses his obsession, to a surprised younger self, about how art, science and literature and other modalities “often engage new ideas simultaneously”. This insight may have arisen from Walsh’s close association with curator Jean Hubert-Martin. Unlike Martin who “attempt[s] to present art for visual inspection only”, ‘Walsh at eighty’ considers “training” requisite for the appreciation of art, for example, with “aboriginal art” otherwise it is “just beautiful”. Walsh’s disdain for overt didacticism,

going beyond “fits and starts” might mean something like Armstrong’s “restorative age” where heuristic pathways composed of provisional, cognitive mapping tools create the potential for new interpretive pathways.

MONA to date offers little education for the art-goer, seeker of knowledge or detective searching for clues about the nature of reality. Instead, MONA relies on visitor’s curiosity to piece it all together incrementally. Objects are found “serendipitously” and things speak for themselves and offer “visual pleasure”. The idea of MONA ‘educating’ might be unrealistic or undemocratic and too Apollonian, yet Walsh refuses “to accept that art is inherently intransigent and inherently incomprehensible to people who don’t have an art background”. It might be argued that each visitor brings with them their own tools, needs and limits, yet to re-enchant and “perturb” MONA might well need to be more proactive with the ‘cross-disciplinary’ modalities.

The Apollonian is clearly sacrificed when it comes to the explication of Martin’s cognitive mapping skills or intuitionism operative in Theatre of the World. MONA’s lack of engagement with Martin’s intellectual underpinnings is a prime example of an opportunity squandered. What constitutes Martin’s intuition remains unexamined and unexplored, excluding the technique of collocating objects often of disparate taxonomies, as semaphores, poetically “convers[ing] among themselves”.19 Martin’s curatorial brilliance involves a certain kind of perpetual awareness and relationship, something of a daydream, the promiscuity and telestic spirit of childhood imagination. We are cosy in the Dionysian sensualism of the dream and objects and like little children sent away from the dining table we miss out on any explanation of the magic or the mysterious and privileged Parisian intellectual. As a curator Martin is an embodied engager of phenomena-cum-cultural objects; who is engaging, synthesising and

3 9 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

poetising. What is Martin’s primary philosophical dialogue and what are the basic cognitive tools for his intuitionism? Difficult as it might be to explicate it would be the crème de la crème to share and induct the uninitiated as well as the initiated into this rite of sense-thetic knowing. This could be an exercise in expanding self-consciousness towards something of Walsh’s interest in “objective reality” and Martin’s dream-making. Could Walsh engage this in an entirely unprecedented way—pioneer a way forward and shift the gears with research on cognitive mapping tools like an evolutionary biologist? Martin not only balances Walsh’s bottom-up analytic with, a top down sensorial and intuitive (poetic) synthesis but also subdues the clamour of opining that might interfere with the reception of cultural products.

In correspondence, Walsh quotes Martin who is “staggered by the importance taken by exegesis as opposed to creation… it is the strange topic of our culture to print these endless exegeses and to accumulate them instead of keeping them oral and let the discussions evolve according to time and generations.” What concerns me is that Tasmania is not culturally embedded like Paris. In the antipodes we do not have the cultural resources and edification to produce “endless exegesis”. Martin is more likely referring to the turgidity of French cafe intellectualism. Ironically Walsh has also expressed dismay at a lack of critical debate surrounding MONA. MONA may have to consider its impact is more local than global and to create its own salon of ideas.20

MONA’s future and how it defines itself (or not) will be informed by “antifragility”, a term adopted by Walsh from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: “how to live in a world we don’t understand”. Walsh explains the concept using an organic gardening technique; “permaculture is better than merely robust, it is antifragile. Robust systems are impervious to impactors; antifragile systems actually improve when perturbed.”21 Walsh believes that designing a “grand-plan” strategy for MONA would increase “fragility” whereas the converse leads to “antifragility [as] the willingness to access optionality”. Walsh conceptualises optionality combined with antifragility to be increasing the significance of “sub-components of a task, as tasks in themselves”. By undertaking “small iterative steps [that] would lead you to where you would not otherwise have gone, [for example,] if you get perturbed… if your ideas change—and they will—if you learn something from a conversation you have with a journalist—and I might—if the lights fail and it makes you think of something, or if you get hit with a bolt of lightning and your mind resets; all those things might perturb you from the path you were taking and that might be a good thing!” Elaborating further on the unpredictability of the universe, down to natural events and financial markets, Walsh suggests that, “what we’ve gotta do is have a world philosophy that allows for inherently unpredictable events, [and] not just allows for them—that’s called robustness—but that benefits from them; that allows for a better world when things go wrong”. For MONA to exemplify Taleb’s anti-fragility we can expect diversity, the recognition and use of local resources, unexpected curators and artists, the development of self-sustaining systems that incorporate an unpredictable degree of randomness.

Walsh within the domain of the objective still refers to the ‘numinous’ with the sense of wonder of “how the universe behaves as if it believes in mathematics”. Behind that sense of order and wonder is the mathematics of “Godelian incompleteness”.

Notes 1 Adapated from quotes by Walsh from Matthew Denholm’s ‘Temple of David’, The Australian, 19 January, 2011; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/temple-of-david/story-e6frg8h6-1225991011160 2

Though I have had almost nothing to do with David Walsh since commencing work at MONA, he has been generous with his time and trust by granting me several interviews and access to his unpublished memoir. For this I sincerely express my gratitude 3 Interestingly Walsh states the downside of self-integratedness and consequent sociability is a decreasing near perfect memory, ”being normal is not good if you want a good memory” 4

Gabriela Coslovich, ‘The Collector’, The Age, 2007

5

David Walsh, A Bone of Fact, (unpublished memoir), 2013

6

See Angus Grigg, ‘How Alan Woods Beat the Odds’, 2011 http://afr.com/p/national/how_alan_woods_ beat_the_odds_1WYIMYctxSivusBw06fcJJ : “The key to the formula was working out what weighting to give each factor.” Reading the Australian Financial Review’s article whether fictive or not, generated questions on how this might be employed at MONA. It seemed to be verified in an ABC interview at the ten minute mark, where Walsh mentions experimenting with patterns and algorithms in the museum. I have attempted to ask Walsh about this, his reply concerning only a proposed “shit hot” virtual MONA on iPads.

Online, ABC Arts, 2011. ‘Mona: Feel the Weird’; http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3170536.htm 7 Christian Boltanski, interview with David Walsh and Martin Jean-Hubert, 2011; http://www.venise. pavillonfrancais.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/chance-journal-anglais.pdf 8

Gabriela Coslovich, ibid.

9

Amanda Lohrey, ‘High Priest: Amanda Lohrey on David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art’, The Monthly, 2011: 78-86 10 Lindsay, an Asperger blogger has an illustrative account from her childhood on an Asperger’s processual non-agent intentionality account to life similar but not the same as Walsh’s, but instructive: “It’s particularly interesting for me to read about the apparent universality of these biases—agenticity, anthropomorphism, animism—because I don’t think I share them. Or, if I do, I think I have a much weaker tendency to use them. When I think about how I understood things as a child, what sticks out to me is how impersonal, how inhuman, my world was. For most of my childhood, I made the exact opposite assumption from the one described above—I wouldn’t even necessarily think about other people in the room with me, whom I could see and hear, as intentional agents; instead, I perceived them as a cluster of different, separately-experienced phenomena that all emanated from the same source: color, movement, lots of different sounds.” Lindsay, Patternicity, Agenticity, and Autism, 2009: autistscorner.blogspot.com. au/2009/12/patternicity-agenticity-and-autism.html 11

Matt Ridley in Red Queen (2003) sees sex as fundamental to survival as a selection pressure technique.

Compare Ellen Dissanayake, who emphasises the value of generating certain spaces for feeling through creativity or social contact

12

I acknowledge Rex Butler who directed me towards Walsh’s possible hyper-rationalising

13

See http://www.tra-expo.com/artempo/exhibition_en/virtual_en.html

14

David Walsh, personal communication, 24 January 2013; “the Soviet Union as a State treated its citizens with a less than appropriate level of respect. And yet Soviet science produced many wonders: bacteriophages as an alternative to antibiotics” 15 Brian Boyd provides an evolutionary biological account that he says expands rather than reductifies human nature and purpose. His account argues the inherent value for human culture, and art, in terms of its cognitive play and creativity as potentially decisive for survival if not human freedom. His account appears to re-enchant a mechanistic materialism that does not see a crucial role for cultural activity.

Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 16 Harry Hunt, ‘A Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Human Consciousness: Incommensurable Cognitive Domains of Purpose and Cause as a Conjoined Ontology of Inherent Human Unbalance’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, No. 9: 2009: 49 17

In Hunt’s opinion many parts of modern culture, including modern science is on an “Asperger continuum; the (S) domain of systemising. For the (‘E’) person-knowing intelligence domain in terms of ‘taking the role of the other”, Hunt sees the equivalent to consistency seeking as exemplified in the figure of Jesus as emblematic of completeness in this domain and Buddha likewise at the opposite end of the spectrum as “fullest expression of the self of open incompleteness”

18 One artist who has worked as an invigilator at MONA for the previous two years is currently working on a series of texts that ‘speak’ about some of the artworks at the museum. The texts are inspired by her experience of working ‘with’ certain artworks for a period of time and the evolving relationship, as well as a response to some of the text that already exists (predominantly the writing on the O-device). Feeling at times there is a missed opportunity to expand how one might engage with an artwork the exhibition aims to present different perspectives and explore new dimensions of art and commentary. It will be on show at Constance ARI (Hobart) in March 2013 19

David Walsh, Theatre of the World, Museum of Old and New Art, 2012

20

Walsh: “I recently commented in an interview that I felt that the critical response to Mona had been lacking. The responses were laudatory or castigatory.” See Stephanie Convery, ‘Something Bugs Me About Mona’; http://overland.org.au/blogs/lfmg/2012/04/something-bugs-me-about-mona/ 21

David Walsh, ‘I Don’t Know Much’; http://monablog.net/category/david-walsh/ “[A]s the most abstract formulation of a domain fusion model of the human mind”. Walsh’s atypical, contrastive predisposition and consequent perspicacity on the antimonies of human affairs informing his curatorial prospection and collecting habits if it were to be combined with Taleb’s trojan iteratively dispensing optionality offers a startling degree of rich metanarrative potential in terms of exploiting the nexus of domain dialogues of aesthetic and social import. In order to exploit a systemiser’s insights and objectives of flushing out the antimonies of human culture for novel pathways, the challenge for MONA is to ask some searching questions about the filmic, pattern finding and synaesthetically eyed god. This could be for example negotiating the Nietzschean balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian that Taleb favours for a Promethean outcome that might really tap below the surface perturbing MONA’s visitors into novel cognitive spaces

Page 35: Museum of Old and New Art carpark reserved for David Walsh Page 37: Museum of Old and New Art Photo courtesy Museum of Old and New Art Page 38: David Walsh Photo courtesy Museum of Old and New Art

This exhibition is not a survey Blair French Large shows tend to disappoint critics (and there’s an essay waiting to be written on the reasons why).

Lee Weng Choy1 The curatorial disclaimer of my title is not uncommon.2 (I have made liberal use of such curatorial statements myself.) On one hand it acts as a directive to the audience not to treat the exhibition as the manifestation of an exhaustive, utterly inclusive, all encompassing, perhaps totalising view of the vast array of practice within a particular time and place. It might be said to undertake a negative mode of self-definition—this is what the exhibition is not, these are the horizons of possibility to which the exhibition does not aspire (whatever the institutional PR might claim to the contrary).

More generously, and I think more aptly, this and similar statements regarding curatorial focus stem from awareness of the specificity of any particular curatorial subjectivity and its partially conditioning contexts and circumstances coming up against the complexity of current ideas, material practices and cultural forces (before we even mention financial and logistical limitations). Without wishing to necessarily bind the exhibition form to the curatorial subject, such statements can have the effect of saying, in effect, “please be aware that this is simply what I/we can—what I/we wish to and within particular circumstances are able to—contribute to the current state of affairs”, whether this be a view, an idea, a perspective, or the engineering of a dynamic situation. They mitigate grandiosity. Yet, and here’s the rub, as assertive declarations their apparent modesty sometimes merely thinly veils its inverse—they can direct attention back to curatorial self-knowledge regarding the complexities of the terrain traversed by any given exhibition. “See how astutely I’m negotiating the territory, identifying my own pitfalls…” As declarations they remain, as critic Lee Weng Choy would have it, immodest by definition.3

Equally, such statements can serve to clear space for the curator to pursue a uniquely idiosyncratic purview and/or highly argumentative exhibition-as-thesis and/or the construction of a rarely calibrated material experience. They have to an extent freed themselves from the responsibility (burden) of the survey’s otherwise desired wide-ranging inclusivity. They (such statements) set aside one set of expectations so as to concentrate viewer attention on the matter in hand—the specific intent and experience of the particular exhibition. That is, they ask, maybe demand, that we focus upon a curatorial project as something of a hermetic system with its own internal logic, as a mechanism for the independent generation of meaning. As such the implication is that it—we—need not look to make too much of the project’s relationship (or the relationship of the works of art it presents/deploys) to a broader artistic and cultural sphere. Nevertheless, this concentrated singularity of purpose can often lead to the development of a project that perhaps ironically makes a far greater contribution to the wider discourse and practice of art than another which purports to survey.

To extend the cartographical metaphor, such projects have the capacity to claim rather than describe territory—they can function as marker pegs staking a spot from which to gain a different perspective. Such curatorial projects are often, therefore, ambitious, difficult, opinionated and at least when of scale and within major public institutions, increasingly rare.

Most recently we might have begun to notice the vogue for survey exhibitions that disavow both their status as surveys and curatorial argument or theme. Instead, many of these exhibitions present conceptual frameworks or propositions that set out open-ended ‘spaces’ for artists to develop work within—the exhibition as laboratory model that genuflects to the particularities of location and moment. At worst, this can present us with little other than curatorial platitude and an absence of shape, direction and reflective intellectual context. This makes it extremely difficult for artists to find firm ground to work on, to identify a context that is simultaneously generous, supportive but where appropriate, also critically and culturally tensile, resistant. On the other hand, at best, we have the creation of the exhibition as the dynamic working ideas factory of contemporary art (and increasingly architecture, design, education and a range of social/creative endeavours), transposing vigorous manifestations of past and future into an innervating present, a context in which artists are supported to speculate and create the new within a broader cultural purview.

In many ways this idea of the exhibition as a laboratory can be traced back through discourse on the biennial over the past decade or so.

Critics such as Terry Smith have written and spoken of the biennial as the site where the future forms of contemporary art are worked out, or of the biennial as doing the work of art criticism. Hou Hanru is one of a number of high profile curators who has approached and utilised the context of the biennial as just this form of malleable, fluid, discursive research space.

Note the way in which his approach to the upcoming Auckland Triennial; ‘If you were to live here’—is introduced on its website: “Hou has invited artists to respond to the diverse cultural, social, architectural and urban characteristics of Auckland. ‘A triennial’, he says, ‘is a space for producing new aesthetic forms and social spaces. It is not only an occasion to see art, but an interaction between artists, people and the city to envisage possible futures’.”4 Without dismissing this genealogy, another history needs to be claimed for the concept of exhibition as open-ended laboratory, that of decades of curatorial practice within smaller contemporary, not-for-profit and alternative art spaces internationally (acknowledged by Smith in his recent book on curatorial practice, Thinking Contemporary Curating).5

Thus far I’ve simply made some relatively simplistic generalisations of the sort Lee describes as the “poorer cousin” of the declaration, but also immodest and audacious for their presumption of appraisal and insistence upon knowledge.6 These thoughts have arisen in response to recent additions to curatorial literature7, but more directly by the certain alignment of Australian art world schedules that saw four major institutional contemporary survey exhibitions and/or biennials presented in 2012: Parallel Collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia curated by Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor; All Our Relations: 18th Biennale of Sydney curated

by Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Pier 2/3 and Cockatoo Island; Contemporary Australia: Women at Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Brisbane with curatorial team of Julie Ewington and Bree Richards; and APT7: The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane with a curatorial team of sixteen ‘in-house’ curators, three ‘in-house’ cinémathèque curators and two external co-curators.

Opposite top: Brook Andrew, Time (installation view The Floating Eye, Shanghai Biennale), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Opposite bottom: Bababa International, Flue (installation view The Floating Eye, Shanghai Biennale), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

41 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

4 3 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Here’s my critic’s version of the curatorial caveat. This text is not a detailed, backgrounded study of these exhibitions in full light of their preceding iterations or their detailed relationships to other exhibition activity either across Australia or globally during the same period. That’s a far larger project. By contrast to that imagined undertaking, this text is merely a set of thoughts arising from a small set of interrelated questions that these exhibitions collectively suggested to me over the course of 2012. What do these exhibitions and others like them—biennales and institutional survey exhibitions—show and tell us about current Australian contemporary art and culture? (Or what can we look to them to reveal or manifest about the current state of play here?) How do—or can—they contribute to various developments in contemporary art here? That is, what is their creative, productive capacity? And do these forms of exhibition have particular, and perhaps over the past decade changed structures and purposes?

Why these questions now? On my part this may result from a form of critical nostalgia, a naivety regarding evolving drivers of change in contemporary art over the past twenty years, a misapprehension of the degree to which developments in my own knowledge of the field has changed my expectation of and approach to exhibition viewing, or simply wilfully poor memory, nevertheless it seems to me that we (members of the ‘artworld’, paid up or otherwise) once looked to these forms of exhibitions to give shape to the present conditions of contemporary art. We wanted such exhibitions to make claims on where we were and where we might be going. We expected something of the unexpected. We believed we would see something new to consider or to take up critically—whether specific work or threads between or arguments about. We looked to these exhibitions to drive things forward. I’m not so sure that we can anymore.

The four exhibitions that I note are of course significantly different in history, structure and purpose. Three of these are produced by major collecting institutions (with the fourth, the autonomous Biennale of Sydney also utilising two major collecting institutions as exhibition sites). So while we might look to the concept of the biennial or triennial in the title of two of those three (Adelaide Biennial and APT), any understanding of the biennial/triennial form as “a context for the exploration and questioning of the present”8 must be tempered by acknowledgement of the art museum’s role in preserving and interpreting the past and the way in which this informs the spatial context and environment of the exhibition.9 More importantly here, only two of these four exhibitions are specifically focused on contemporary Australian art, on providing some form of current survey or perspective upon local practice. The other two—the Biennale of Sydney and the APT—of course present Australian art within their international remits, often resulting in many of the singular highlights of their respective projects, yet struggling to present a coherent picture of practice in Australia or even a sense of its breadth. Of course, this is not their key remit, however an examination of what pictures of contemporary Australian art they construct and present to the world within their larger projects would be a worthy critical undertaking for another occasion. In Thinking Contemporary Curating, Smith’s analysis of the form and history of the biennial exhibition leads him to assert its specific status as a key structural component of and within the field of contemporary art. The inference here is that for all the diversity of condition and intent encompassed within the global plethora of biennials, all the curatorial energy expended on points of differentiation and distinction, certain key characteristics must connect these undertakings so creating a particular (and particularly influential) framework of (rather than for) contemporary practice. By my reasoning, this is not a frame as static armature but as evolving structure, generating influence. Smith claims the biennial as a structural component of the art system and therefore an entity with a form. He treats the growth and diversification of infrastructure as a determining force within contemporary art, and thus comes to this conclusion: “’The infrastructural’ is rapidly replacing ‘the curatorial’ as the problem to be grasped, the issue to which attention must be paid, and upon which energy must be expended.”10

Considering the infrastructural as the core issue at hand has significant implications for the appreciation and understanding of the efficacy—both potential and manifest—of particular exhibitions. Even when deployed simplistically, this approach begins to account for the sense we might have as viewers of the influence imperatives regarding

public visibility, design and presentation, visitation, education, as well as bureaucratic, governmental and financial responsibilities have upon the curatorial processes underpinning exhibitions such as the four mentioned above, or perhaps more aptly, upon the final packaging of the outcomes of curatorial processes.

Here the distinction between the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and Contemporary Australia at (GoMA) begins to crystallise. Both are recurring survey exhibitions of recent Australian art organised by and held within art museums. Although new commissions (or simply first presentations of new work) inevitably feature heavily, both exhibition models lean towards a survey of existing practice; a summation of—or more accurately a slice through—the present moment. To date there have been only two Contemporary Australia surveys, both curated in-house.

The first of these, Optimism (2008) was incredibly open-ended curatorially, seeking simply to identify and convey a prevailing mood or attitude. Hence the promotional statement: “Contemporary Australia: Optimism celebrates the ways contemporary artists envision the world, exploring it with hope, energy, passion, playfulness and, above all, with the commitment to questioning and invention that comes out of the artist’s studio.”11 Women was obviously far more focused in its curatorial purview. It defined, surveyed and historically contextualised a subject area—contemporary work by Australian women. But like Optimism, its overarching inclusivity with regard to practice coupled with the display and visitor engagement imperatives of the museum led to an at-times beautiful, certainly polished but ultimately very polite exhibition.

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art has a far longer history, dating back to 1990. While also an institutional survey exhibition, it has long evidenced a commitment to working with curators from outside the Art Gallery of South Australia, thus establishing an ever-changing and often triangulated institution-curator-artists relationship. Structurally then, the art museum sets up the potential for its own critique by and within the form of the contemporary exhibition. Having been by and large a relatively modestly scaled exhibition, curators have tended to identify a research or practice area, or a tendency within recent practice to focus upon. Different biennials have concentrated on the relationships between art, science and technology, or between art and environmental impulses, on the work of indigenous artists, on photomedia, on the lingering effects and traces of modernism on and within contemporary practice amongst other concerns.

Parallel Collisions, however, constituted a significant departure from its predecessors. It marked a convergence of the institution’s new ambition and commitment to active harnessing of contemporary art within the overall museum with the ambition of the curators to develop and produce a rigorously conceived and shaped exhibition in active collaboration with artists and institutions (as well as writers and designers).

Parallel Collisions incorporated all three broad impulses I noted at the outset: to survey; to construct a specific curatorial thesis and particularly in this case, visitor experience through architectural design and intervention; and to create opportunities for individual artists to respond productively to specific contexts of time, location and history.

Structured conceptually into three interlinking sections, it was everywhere sophisticated and polished. Indeed, this sense of finish and determination was almost overwhelming within the main section in the temporary exhibition galleries. Designed with the conceit of a “tracking shot”, a continuous, singular passage through spaces that reveal themselves (and wonders within) before dropping away behind the viewer, sequential movement as both metaphor and direct experience came to overprescribe the viewing encounter, binding it to curatorial intent and subjectivity.

But if this was, as I felt, a somewhat ‘locked-in’ experience, it was nevertheless a rare example of concentrated curatorial construction—not least with regard to maximisation of the experiential potency of spatial design. More importantly, this sequential construction was tempered by the precise design of individual spaces with and to the specific qualities of the individual works they housed, so that moments of pause resulted in distilled, almost intimate viewing situations.

Opposite: Tim Silver, Untitled (trauma 3, 4, 5 and 6), (installation view Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Parallel Collisions), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Breenspace, Sydney

However, the exhibition was more generative, both in terms of the resonance of individual works and of their signalling of key conditions and trajectories of the contemporary in Australian art, where artists’ extant works and new projects were realised elsewhere through the building, most particularly within the Elder Wing (housing the ‘historical’ collections of the gallery).

In might be said that the contexts, prior-experiences and associations of these spaces gave artists (and curators) substance to work with and on occasion against—a certain productive resistance that amplified potentiality of work and perhaps conversely, shifted a sense of the overall exhibition from that of a closed ‘white cube’ or art-institutional undertaking to a culturally reverberant, interventionist project. Projects by Jonathan Jones and Tom Nicholson drawing on and effectively redirecting aspects of the gallery’s collection in order to highlight the importance of it as a form of social history come to mind here, as does Richard Bell’s mural in the gallery vestibule and Philip Brophy’s twilight slide-lectures in the colonial galleries tracing an idiosyncratic art history of modernity’s representational violence upon the body.

There’s much that could be written in response to Parallel Collisions, but in the context of this short text, perhaps the key summation is that it was singular. Whilst I suspect it’s not likely, even possible, to successfully reproduce it structurally as a model for future Adelaide Biennials, nor do I imagine it possible to simply return to the modest survey approach of previous iterations. For better or worse depending on your perspective, in terms of curatorial and institutional approach, the 2012 exhibition was a game-changer for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art as an ongoing project.

Above: Stephen Bram, North wing, basement, 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Below foreground: Jonathan Jones, untitled (illuminated tree), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist Bottom background: Tom Nicholson, Evening shadows, 2010–11 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney All installation views Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Parallel Collisions

Although occasioned by and primarily pitched at large-scale exhibitions, as a coda of sorts I want to end this text with reference to a far smaller, although no less ambitious, one-off group project exhibition that remains a 2012 highlight for me in trying to consider the shaping and picturing of contemporary Australian art in exhibition form. The Floating Eye was curated by Aaron Seeto (with Toby Chapman) for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art as the Sydney Pavilion project within Inter-City Pavilions component of the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Featuring work by Brook Andrew, Bababa International, Shaun Gladwell, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi and Shen Shaomin the exhibition was superbly worked into a redesigned groundfloor space in a previously empty concrete block building in the heart of the city. While the ‘finish’ of the exhibition was necessarily rudimentary by comparison with any of the aforementioned large-scale undertakings, the spatial integration of and construction of relationships between otherwise quite distinct works imbued the viewing experience with an almost palpable urgency. The viewer had to literally move walls to open up and negotiate the corridor spaces of Bababa International’s architectural intervention (a work also involving the ongoing transformation, production, display and dispersal of solid objects and material forms), or adapt to the transition from noisy, lit, busy video spaces to the cold, refrigerated environment of Shen Shaomin’s installation. While deliberately no survey or attempt even at a snapshot of practice within or a discernible image of ‘Sydney’, the project managed to cover a significant breadth of practice forms, conceptual concerns and points of cultural and societal reference. By being open and transformative in its own form, porous almost in its structural openness to the extraordinary urban situation about it, The Floating Eye successfully manifested that condition of Sydney as a major Asia-Pacific city, with its specific qualities and histories married to a welcoming vulnerability to the impacts of globalisation, technological change and migration noted in the curatorial introduction. That is to say, here was the exhibition as microcosm of the twenty first century city unfailingly open to global networks, influence and ongoing “social, political and cultural transformation”.12 It’s projects such as these—modest in scale, dynamic in constitution, ambitious in conceptual scope—that I increasingly look to for new perspectives on, and indeed generation of current Australian contemporary art.

Notes 1 Lee Weng Choy, ‘Biennale time and the spectres of exhibition’, Artspace Critical Issues 7, Sydney, 2002: 22 2

In this instance I’ve distilled the statement from a longer point in the curatorial introduction to the 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. See Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor, ‘Parallel Collisions’, in Parallel Collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2012: 144. Crucially here the rest of the statement—the ‘positive’ component—points to a mode of curatorial practice in keeping with the concept of the biennial as a dynamic, productive form: “...it is an exhibition that has emerged from close conversation with artists, their ideas, a state gallery and a collection” 3

Lee Weng Choy, ‘The Untimely: Tehching Hsieh’s Out of Now’, Broadsheet 38.4, 2009: 285

4

http://aucklandtriennial.com/

5

See Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York, ICI Perspectives in Curating No. 1, Independent Curators International, 2012: 98-99

6

Lee Weng Choy, ‘The Untimely,’ op. cit.

7

Most particularly Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2012 and Terry Smith’s Thinking Contemporary Curating

8

Rosa Martinez, in Carolee Thea (ed.), Foci: Interviews with 10 International Curators, New York, D.A.P., 2001: 79; cited in Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating: 92

9 Indeed, Smith asks whether the absorption of aspects of biennial exhibition forms and curatorial approaches within museum programming is impacting upon the “subversive potentials of the biennial format”. Smith, ibid.

10

ibid: 99

11

http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2008/optimism

12

Aaron Seeto, The Floating Eye, unpaginated exhibition brochure, 2012

4 5 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

The cult of Ai: A critical response to Ai Weiwei’s comments on the exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China Paul Gladston Between September and December 2012, the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London staged a major exhibition of contemporary art by artists from the People’s Republic of China titled Art of Change: New Directions from China. Art of Change was the first exhibition of its kind to be held in a major institution in the UK since the Saatchi Collection’s well-nigh disastrous The Revolution Continues: New Art from China in 2008-2009, which strongly reinforced emerging doubts in the international art world about the sustained quality and critical sophistication of contemporary Chinese art, by presenting a scattergun array of works that were either clichéd staples of post-Maoist Chinese art (e.g. by Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Dali and Wang Guangyi), whose critical significance remained obscure (if it existed at all), or that simply reflected Saatchi’s personal tastes for the sensationalist, the profane and the scatological.1

By contrast with The Revolution Continues, Art of Change presented a select and carefully coordinated body of installation and performance works that in each case not only had discernible critical/ philosophical intent, but that on occasion also made novel and unexpected uses of the now ingrained techniques of international post-Duchampian art. The organisers of Art of Change were also at pains to elucidate the possible significances of the works on show by providing a substantial online archive of information on the development of contemporary art from the PRC as well as a catalogue addressing key theoretical and historical issues.2 Stand-out works in Art of Change include Wang Jianwei‘s Making do with the Fakes (2011), a juxtaposition of absurdist performance video and a functionally derailed ping-pong table, and Liang Shaoji’s Nature Series (ongoing since the 1980s), sculptural readymades smothered in fibres deposited by live silk worms, both of which suggest complex counterauthoritarian layerings/interweavings of meaning.

Unlike The Revolution Continues, Art of Change opened to almost universally positive four and five star press reviews, most of which shared the view that the exhibition presented fresh insights into contemporary art and society in the PRC and, in particular, contemporary Chinese art’s critical engagement with localised authority. In spite of almost daily coverage of China in the international media, localised conditions surrounding the making and showing of contemporary art in the PRC remain largely obscure to outside observers. It is therefore unsurprising to find that almost all of the critics who reviewed Art of Change expressed degrees of uncertainty with regard to the precise significance of individual works included in the exhibition. Nevertheless, there was a near universal fascination with works of art whose possible significances were only partially grasped, but that were otherwise self-evidently engaged in a complex critical-discursive relationship with the extraordinary changes now taking place within contemporary China.

One reviewer was not impressed, however. In an article published in The Guardian on 10 September 2012 titled ‘China’s art world does not exist’, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei launched a scathing attack on the organisers of Art of Change accusing them of misrepresenting the position of contemporary art in China. In Ai’s view the show failed to address “a single one” of China’s most “pressing contemporary issues” and in particular the absence as Ai sees it of any significant “room for freedom of expression”.

Contemporary art in China is, Ai argues, “merely a product” without any “clear orientation” that “avoids any meaningful engagement” and whose only purpose outside China is “to charm viewers with its ambiguity”. While Ai accepts that work included in Art of Change is “certainly Chinese”, for him the exhibition as a whole cast “no critical eye”. It was, he argues, “like a restaurant in Chinatown that sells all the standard dishes, such as kung pao chicken and sweet and sour pork. People will eat it and say it is Chinese, but it is simply a consumerist offering, providing little in the way of a genuine experience of life in China today”. Ai concludes by saying: Although Chinese art is heavily influenced by contemporary western culture, it rejects the essential human values that underpin it. The Chinese Communist Party claims to deliver socialism with Chinese characteristics, but nobody understands what this means—including the people of China. Given this, and their lack of self-identity, there is no reason to expect a show of Chinese art created in the West to critique the system effectively. But any show curated without respect for the people’s struggle, without concern for an artist’s need for honest self-expression, will inevitably lead to the wrong conclusion. Anything that calls itself a cultural exchange is artificial when it lacks any critical content. What’s needed is open discussion, a platform for argument. Art needs to stand for something.3 In September 2012, Ai was still subject to effective house arrest in Beijing as a result of his indictment by government officials in China for nonpayment of taxes. In spite of the vehemence of his comments, Ai almost certainly did not see Art of Change. Nor is it likely that he was able to read the Art of Change’s accompanying catalogue in any detail, if at all, before his own comments on the exhibition were published. Ai’s own work as an artist was also conspicuously absent from Art of Change. We must therefore view his comments not as an informed attack on Art of Change but as a more generalised and perhaps opportunist critique of the often problematic presentation and reception of contemporary art by artists from China outside the PRC.

In recent years Ai Weiwei has become a familiar media presence in the UK and elsewhere. Interminable online rants, scathing public attacks on officialdom, headline-grabbing exhibitions and artworks, a series of alleged police beatings, apparently life-threatening hospitalisation, a BBC documentary by Alan Yentob, Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favour (2010), captivity without trial, a high-profile prosecution for ‘tax evasion’, a certificated whip-round among friends and associates to pay the bill and, more recently, a cinematic portrait of the artist as unreconstructed non-conformist by director Alison Klayman titled Never Sorry (2012) have collectively secured Ai’s place not only as an international media commentator of first choice on the subject of contemporary art in China, but also as a spectacular personification of resistance to Chinese authoritarianism. No television, radio or newspaper coverage of contemporary Chinese art outside China would be complete without at least a passing reference to Ai as China’s best known and perhaps most significant living artist. He is the international media’s Chinese cultural equivalent to Aung San Suu Kyi; a sanctified beacon of opposition now partially silenced by house arrest, though still evidently raging against the injustices meted out to himself and to others at the hands of the Chinese authorities.

In spite of its liberalising social and economic reforms of the last three decades, China remains a place of often breathtaking political brutality.

Open challenges to the authority of China’s ruling Communist Party, as well as anything that might be perceived to undermine the integrity of the Chinese nation-State are, as they were throughout the Maoist period, simply beyond the political pale. The consequences of transgression—extrajudicial harassment of self and family, detention, exile and even summary execution—persist in being both real and pernicious. However, with the increasingly precipitous unfolding of post-socialist modernity within China since the late 1970s limits on freedom of action and expression have become ever more mobile and ill-defined. As a result, panoptical self-surveillance and self-discipline as well as spectacular demonstrations of State power and growing material wealth are now the combined bulwarks of China’s prevailing socio-political order. Direct use of State violence is deemed necessary only in relation to extreme or recidivist dissidence. Ai continues to remind us of these thoroughly nasty and objectionable facts not only through his various acts of open resistance to authority, but also the state of home confinement he now finds himself in. His constant baiting of authority and refusal to bow to intimidation has resulted in a Kafkaesque backlash, the mere prospect of which would terrorise most into lasting and abject silence. For his defiance in the face of power Ai deserves our continuing attention and respect.

There are, though, significant dangers in the upholding of Ai as our sole representative/mediator of artistic resistance to authority within China. While Ai’s bluntly confrontational and often bombastic stance can be readily digested within Western liberal-democratic contexts, where romantic notions of heroic dissent in the face of overwhelming power still persist, it is by no means representative of the critical positioning of most other Chinese artists. Ai may have situated himself admirably behind enlightened Westernised humanist ideals of freedom and openness, but the sheer bluntness and reductive simplicity of his critical approach to authority have effectively foreclosed a more searching discussion of contemporary art within China, as well as the complex web of localised cultural, social, political and economic forces that surround its production and reception.

Within China there are, of course, a great number of contemporary artists who have brought together Chinese and non-Chinese cultural influences simply in pursuit of commercial success. There are also a very few who, like Ai, have adopted an openly hostile approach towards authority.

But there are also many others who have sought to develop sophisticated hybrid visual languages capable of sustaining rather more subtle/oblique

forms of critical reflection and expression. As part of China’s scholarlyacademic traditions, there is a long-established understanding that art has the potential go beyond the merely formalistic to offer meaningful social commentary and spiritual enlightenment. In accordance with that tradition, artistic criticism of authority within China has tended towards the poetic and allegorical as well as the exercising of symbolic forms of withdrawal.

This lack of open/direct criticism of authority is not entirely a matter of pragmatism in the face of continuing imperial authoritarianism. It is also considered a marker of civilisation. For the civilised Chinese artist, who wishes to rise above the vulgarities of power, poetic and allegorical forms of criticism not only resist easy definition, they are also assumed to have the force of an unstoppable spontaneity commensurate with the way of nature; one metaphorised in the Daoist classic the Daodejing by observations of the long-term destructive action of water on stone.

Art of Change was an important and ground breaking showcase for the complex range of critical-artistic responses to power and social change that currently exist within the PRC. While some of the works included in the exhibition encompass aspects of traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice as a resistant departure from mainstream Chinese life and politics, others present recognisably (and understandably) encoded responses to the tragic absurdities of a society still subject to crushing bureaucracy, corruption and lack of accountability. Examples of the former include Liang Shaoji’s use of readymades as sculptural supports for the depositing of silk by live silk worms, which resonates strongly with, amongst other things, the artist’s interest in Daoist and Einsteinian relativity; a distinct foil to current Chinese Communist Party supported-notions of rational-scientific progress. Among examples of the latter are videos and installation works by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Gu Dexin and Wang Jianwei that present often complex and highly oblique allegories of the combined effects and inherent contradictions of China’s entry into global modernity and the localised persistence of totalitarian power.

From a high-minded Westernised post-Enlightenment perspective, all of this presents itself as unutterably weak, complicit and, perhaps, self orientalising. However, China is not the West. There is little prospect of a shift any time soon towards the kinds of publicness and criticality now established in Western liberal-democratic contexts. Nevertheless, for those with the patience to see there are localised forms of resistance that, while easily overlooked from a Westernised point of view, will continue to act obliquely and perhaps tellingly over time on authority within China as part of a wider climate of diversification and change.

Ai Weiwei is right in drawing our repeated attention to the debilitating injustices of totalitarian power within China. He is also right to upbraid Western viewers for their inability to see past what are for them the pleasurable ambiguities of contemporary Chinese art. Less convincing, however, is Ai’s wholly reductive view of the critical possibilities of contemporary art in China. By insisting on his own stridently oppositional approach towards power as the only legitimate game in town, and because we are already highly familiar with that approach, it is he and not the Hayward who has misrepresented the contemporary Chinese artworld.

One might add that Ai is also in danger of romanticising the conditions of criticality in the West, which themselves more often than not fail to offer any direct or immediately telling resistance to authority.

In response to Ai’s call for “open discussion” and “a platform for argument”, it is perhaps high-time we all got over his now sanctified and highly misleading media presence. If Ai chose to reflect critically he would surely recognise the unsettling irony of that presence as a blockage to more open debate. Or, is his entanglement with the promotional demands of the international art world just too far-gone for any hope of redemption? Time will tell.

Notes 1 See Laura Cumming, ‘Fitting Home for a Veteran Collector: Saatchi’s new space in Chelsea is stunning, though the opening show veers from the sensational to the downright awful’, The Guardian, 12 October, 2008 2

Opposite: Ai Wei Wei after his alledged beating by police in 2009 Photo by Gao Yuan

Stephanie Rosenthal (ed.), Art of Change: New Directions from China, London: Hayward Publishing, 2012

3 Ai Weiwei: “China’s art world does not exist: a new London exhibition is putting the spotlight on contemporary art in China. I take issue with the whole notion”, The Guardian, 10 September, 2012

47 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Future perfect and great expectations: >>Reactivation<<, the 9th Shanghai Biennial Daniel Szehin Ho The Shanghai Biennale opened to great expectations in October 2012—with an international team of curators, an ambitious curatorial program, a brand new building and nearly one hundred artists from China and abroad, the bar was set high. So it was disappointing to see the Biennale falling into many of the same problems that bedevilled previous iterations and indeed art in China in general.

The main site of the Biennale was located in the newly restored Power Station of Art, originally the Nanshi power plant, about five kilometres south of the colonial architectural set pieces of the Bund.

The incredibly tight timeframe for the project—approved just in 2011 and in frenzied construction right up to and indeed after the opening—was just one of the many hurdles faced by the Biennale organising committee.

The building itself looked like a massive shanzhai (knock-off) version of the Tate Modern in London. Like the Tate, the Power Station of Art (PSA) was envisioned as the first public museum of contemporary art with over 15,000 square metres of exhibition space (and of course, it had to be bigger than the Tate); it is also on the waterfront next to the Huangpu river, within the former grounds of the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

The theme of this Biennale was ‘Reactivation’, unsubtly referring to the former power plant but also more problematically rhyming with the boosterism of a city hot on the heels of the razzle-dazzle of the World Expo. There were four sub-themes: ‘Resources’, about the generation of power, energy, and motion; ‘Revisit’, about rebirth and the revisiting of history; ‘Reform’, about the transformation of energy; and ‘Republic’, about republics of all kinds of people, “networking and resonating of energy”.

All this chatter about energy was maddeningly vague—viewers might be forgiven if they felt transported to the 1970s—and failed to cohere in any serious or significant way.

The looseness of the theme in itself was not a major flaw, since it was unlikely (and arguably undesirable) that a biennale of such scale and ambition could be shaped and melded into neat, coherent themes (though others disagree; see Carol Lu Yinghua’s review in Art Agenda)1. The real weakness of the Biennale lies in its execution: from elemental details concerning slapdash installation (photographs about to come loose, or distracting jumbles of video cables) or weird structural design (fire hydrants smack in the middle of two works) to the curatorial flaw of including far too many works for the space. Installation was done at breakneck speed. Several weeks before the opening, foreign artists and curators were startled at the lack of a roof in some of the city pavilions, while at the press opening, most of the works had not been installed (evetually local gallerists were corralled into helping). Yet one also wants to be forgiving: with nearly one hundred artists from around the world participating, and yet with ten months of preparation at best, under a budget of $US2.5 million, it was no wonder that one of the co-curators, Jens Hoffmann, declared that its completion was a “surprise”2.

Opposite: external view of the site for the Shanghai Biennale Page 51: internal view

The chief curator Qiu Zhijie recognised many of these problems, and responded to many of the resulting criticisms on his website. He stated that the chronic lack of funding meant he had to rely on students and volunteers rather than qualified staff; he also pointed out that qualified personnel was lacking, and many art professionals in China had not had first-hand experience of biennales abroad. There were also hurdles with payments since the Biennale was not authorised to handle foreign currency, and the problem of “loss of face” in refusing artists inclusion, resulted in the overly large number of works and artists.3

In retrospect, it was easy to predict that the simultaneous renovation of this mammoth space and the relocation of the Shanghai Art Museum there within such a short period would cause tremendous strains on an under-financed Biennale, particularly one that set itself an ambitious range of projects. To this, one should add that Qiu Zhijie had been appointed to the post a mere ten months before the opening. In China, all this seemed possible—after all, wasn’t the glittering, retro-futuristic Pudong skyline built in less than twenty years? Thus the PSA stands as a symbol of China’s breakneck transformation—economic and artistic—and unwittingly, the art world’s poster child for all the pitfalls this obsession with speed entails.

Just even on entry, an unsuspecting visitor could already get a flavor of the organisational miasma and red tape in the quest to obtain a ticket. The hapless visitor had first to reserve a ticket online (in Chinese; the advertised English hotlines did not work) then pick it up on the very next business day at a choice of six appointed offices throughout the city—but bafflingly not at the PSA itself. Thus properly documented, the visitor could enter the day after. (Like all bureaucracies, there was of course a reason: it was basically a crowd-management legacy of the 2010 World Expo. In other words, just in case millions decided to swarm a contemporary art biennale).

All this would have made for an incredibly infuriating experience if not for the fact that, in China, such rules are made only to be broken; perhaps tiring of the streams of non-Chinese-speaking art aficionados, the guards in the end lazily waved everyone through. It may seem churlish to complain, but it was a detail that reveals the dead hand of government in this Biennale.

Once inside, there were many big, spectacular showpieces.

Towering over the main hall was Huang Yongping’s Thousand Hands Guanyin (1997-2012), a massive circular column which reached right up to the ceiling and on which are purportedly a thousand (broken) arms of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin) wielding various talismanic and everyday objects. This assemblage of readymades heralded a spirituoaesthetic power of the everyday. It may have looked monstrous—but perhaps that was the point, a juggernaut of a readymade goddess. Of note —and of considerable elation to the crowds in the early weeks of the Biennale—was Chico MacMurtrie’s Totemobile (2007), where a Citroën DS changes, Transformers-like, into a totemic object of worship that simultaneously mocked and celebrated our obsession with the automobile

4 9 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

and technological progress. Due to a malfunction with the airbag, however, which was supposed to inflate to the tip-top as an eerie, seemingly living organic membrane, the intended nexus between the inorganic and the organic was absent.

A little further behind, above a very prominently situated cafe, was Wang Yuyang’s Light, Falling Like a Feather (2012). At first sight, the work looked like an ostentatious hotel-art set piece, radiating in fluorescent white several stories down the atrium in complex shifts of artifice—perhaps a pastiche of Dan Flavin meets Nude Descending the Staircase? Upon closer perusal, one could perhaps appreciate the idea of light in the form of fluorescent light tubes fluttering feather-like downwards in space. One also noticed an odd obsession with verticality: Huang Yongping’s column was echoed by Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Clone Pascale (2011), a stack of porcelain up to the roof, suggesting a fragile grandeur (and perhaps a comment on China?). A short distance away was Ouyang Chun’s Infinity Column (2012), where an apparently random range of objects was stacked, forcing us to reckon with the connections between objects, weaving links between the fragments of our vast material culture.

Certain works were situated terribly. Why, for instance, did Rahic Talifo’s Hurricane Project (2007–12), a collection of cheap plastic slippers, which for the artist was the one material unity in peoples across the Pacific, have to lead us through one corridor right to the cafe? Did this not become a commentary on how the cleansing power of typhoons might lead one to a nice latté? Or upstairs, with Sui Jianguo’s Wanderer (2010), a stainless steel ball sculpture designed to move around slowly, at 25cm per minute: though programmed to stop when it touched a wall, it was perhaps not the wisest idea to place it in a narrow corridor next to six of Lu Zhengyuan’s video works which were displayed on tiny TV monitors on the floor. All this uncomfortably resembled a bowling alley, though one supposed that this vision might please some viewers immensely. No wonder the movement mechanism had to be turned off, the work hemmed in within a tight space, thus completely obviating the meaning of the work.

By far the most serious problem was the cramped placement of loud, large-scale installations, which created a carnival-like atmosphere —not unlike an art fair, minus the money. Many individually interesting pieces were left to founder for the lack of space. The open area on the second floor was a case in point. It may have been alright for Lucy & Jorge Orta’s Nexus Architecture (2001), a piece where worker-overalls were linked together to highlight connections and uniformity, to be placed next to their Antarctica World Passport Delivery Village (2007), an installation with huts elevated by 0.5-1.4m—the predicted rise of sea levels—the possible transnational solidarity in the extreme and pristine environment of Antarctica. However, half a dozen pieces surrounded this: Jean-Michel Bruyère’s Congress of Shanghai (2012), with an elaborate stacks of chairs (which, incidentally, were installed weeks after the opening); the very tall Clone Pascale in porcelain; Yang Jiechang’s Republic of Fritz Hansel (2012); Ouyang Chun’s Infinity Column; and finally Danh Vo’s We the People (2012), drowning amid the mass of works, and Loris Cecchini’s wallscarification sculpture-installation (Gaps Wallwave Vibration) arranged along the walls. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to cram one piece too many looks like an accident; to cram six works looks like carelessness.

All these superfluous additions subtracted from the aesthetic experience, and eventually the Biennale felt like a massive jumble of pieces, an ADD warehouse of art. Once resigned to this though, there was much to discover—many works and artists rarely seen in China. This perhaps explained the excitement of the crowds—something exceptional in China where the appreciation of contemporary art is still in a nascent state and too often accompanied by dollar signs—the experience of this Shanghai Biennale was akin to a treasure hunt.

One notable piece was Simon Fujiwara’s wry installation, Rebekkah. A sixteen-year-old rioter (from the 2011 English riots) was taken on a two-week trip to China, where she “witnessed first hand what can be achieved when a massive-scale, national population pulls together towards one common goal, individual improvement through mass production and organisation”, visiting factories where items of her life—clothing, phones,

televisions—are produced. Then she visited the Terracotta Army site, where she was also cast as a modern-day terracotta replica. Multiple copies of Rebekkah line the staircase, forging links between China’s single-minded totalitarian past and present while also subtly pointing out the masslevelling effects of consumerism and social media (the Chinese explanation text was also subtly “harmonised”). The recasting of a contemporary British girl under a historic symbol of China creates a rich ambiguity of contrasts between Britain and China, order and disorder, authoritarianism and capitalist consumerism, and global economic and trade patterns. However, it should be noted that some of the copies had been broken and in the end the artist gave up and resigned himself to the fiasco.

Another point of interest was Wang Taocheng (in the ‘Revisit’ section), whose paintings stood out for their ingenuous combination of the format of a traditional Chinese horizontal scroll and very tongue-in-cheek, tragicomic tales of urban life. Traditionally, the scrolling and unscrolling of a horizontal scroll gave a temporal dimension to such long works, which often reach six metres in length; the eye followed depictions of misty landscapes, or bustling canals or palace interiors, allowing for a continuous narrative.

Wang Taocheng’s Romantic Person, however, cut across the back lanes of Shanghai to relate the everyday minutiae of life in one family—with humour, cussing, and an unsentimental visual style. Each painted scene tended to be long and revolved around an incident—some domestic argument or slight—with explanatory text in English and Chinese. The visual effect lay somewhere between a graphic novel, illustrated book, and painting with words. Within the context of one particular current in contemporary Chinese art that harks back towards traditional forms and content, Wang Taocheng’s works arguably harnessed the resources of tradition better than his contemporaries (like Ji Yun-fei, for instance, a painter renowned for his Three Gorges Dam Migration scroll), because he adapted tradition in terms of technique (graphic novel details and non-traditional colours) and narrative, and threw in a good measure of humour. His works felt truly and genuinely reflective of the present, rather than a pastiche of a historical style.

The ‘Reform’ section had a number of good works by nonChinese artists, including Monika Sosnowska’s Stairway, a work with a pressed-down staircase (“too high for the exhibition space”) and Ryan Gander’s installation of arrows, which pierced the exhibition space—Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument between Theo and Piet regarding the dynamic aspect of the diagonal line and attempting to produce a chroma-key set for a hundred cinematic), (2012). There was also Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades (shown at dOCUMENTA (13) last year in Kassel), an elaborately staged film with 200-year-old marionettes relating key episodes during the Crusades. It was an absorbing experience for the way it painstakingly re-enacted the actions and motivations of key figures, particularly from the Arab perspective, and for its contemporary relevance in the last decade of wars in the Middle East.

Surprisingly, perhaps, crowds in China were thinner than in Kassel; one would have thought that a country that presents the Opium War as a key event of national memory and trauma would be more interested in parallel experiences. One could ponder the reasons, but the lack of sufficiently explanatory wall text could not have helped.

There were of course also some great works by Chinese artists.

In the front room (of two) the installation The Quiet Bodies (2011–12) by Jiang Zhi, of used fireworks’ packaging mocked the official bungling that had led to the inferno at the Television Cultural Centre, next to the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters in Beijing. Officials at the State media corporation authorised an illegal fireworks extravaganza despite warnings from the police; the resultant blaze destroyed a section of the building and led to nearly $US1billion in damages. The installation was, as usual, a bit cramped. The second work, Light of Transience (2012), was more personal. At an idle moment, Jiang caught the light of the sun over cellophane, which created a reflective aura. That evening, he received news that his wife had died. By interweaving personal tragedy and myth into little moments of everyday magic, Jiang created a touching and absorbing work.

51 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

The best section of the Biennale exhibition proper was ‘Republic’. In the entrance section, Ho Sin Tung’s Hong Kong Inter-Vivos Film Festival (2012) was an installation that posed as artifacts from an imaginary film festival.

With about a dozen drawings from invented film moments, large film posters, and four video displays, it was as much a gentle mockery of the Hong Kong International Film Festival as an homage to film makers. There was also a strong thread of very local, Hong Kong-oriented sentimentality in the film posters, reminiscent of some other HK artists of her generation (Wilson Shieh came to mind). Zhuang Hui & Dan Er’s Yumen Photography Studio was also an engaging piece, with a photography studio taken over for a year to allow residents of Yumen to document themselves in photographs, this in a context where the once-booming town in hilly, arid Gansu province is in a phase of terminal decline due to the drying up of oil. Photographs of earnest smiles abounded amid kitsch backdrops.

One of the better works in the exhibition here was State of Shades, an ironic conceptual piece by Société Réaliste. With a serious face, the group embarked on a project aimed at “determining and collecting a series of ‘national art’ colors”. In this case, they analysed one hundred and seventyfive representative “national” oil paintings from the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. Each painting (done by a “national”) thus catalogued was analysed digitally with an average colour seeker software

and converted into a single monochrome tone—the average color of the painting in question. These one hundred and seventy-five paintings are presented alphabetically according to the title; thus, in the large hall, one saw one hundred and seventy-five monochromatic vertical stripes. The visual effect was not unlike an imaginary Pantone store and reminiscent of Color Field artists (particularly Gene Davis). This sum of all one hundred and seventy-five colors was then averaged to produce a larger wall painting of the Chinese national colour, “State of Shades: Chinese National Oil Painting Pale Brown”. Again, this work should have been allowed to shine, and yet a large white cube was installed in the middle to accommodate more works—a number of works on the outside and two video installations within. Still, State of Shades trenchantly mocked the ideas of national identity, national essence, national art precisely by pushing them to their logical, digital extreme—and it had all the more conceptual bite in China, where debates about art (or politics, or economics, or history, for that matter) depressingly often descend into arguments over the “national essence”. That this critique was executed through a “scientific” digital sampling was the icing on the cake, so to speak, since it tackled the reductive equivalence of art into bits and bytes —this in an age where much of our visual culture is mediated through the internet and digital imagery. It was a marvellous post-Internet approach to nationalism and tradition.

Away from the main sections of the Biennale proper were the City Pavilions, split between the Power Station of Art and a building near the Rockbund Museum, closer to the city centre. The City Pavilions offered a greater aesthetic experience, though again the quality and execution was very uneven—perhaps the aim was to allow for multifarious approaches to the selection of artists and the overall curation. Yet the lack of resources and perhaps of curatorial design meant that invited cities were left to their own devices—missing ceilings and walls prompted frantic international calls and meetings in the run-up to the opening.

The concept of the City Pavilions was nonetheless refreshing —the Biennale committee choosing its format wisely. Its aim was to move away from the nationalistic competition that can make an ugly spectacles such as the Olympics towards a focus on cities as important transnational nodes in the flow of people, capital, and ideas. It also allowed curators to focus beyond the horizons of the national, with its attendant concern with national representation, particularly in Asia, and questions of the uprooting of tradition under the sign of modernisation/Westernisation, to more of a concern with cities as living spaces and living machines that brought in, to China at least, possibilities of looking at works which interrogated the structure of spaces, logics of exchange, or just simply individual concerns.

In his curatorial statement, Qiu Zhijie mocked the Olympics’ slogan “Faster, Higher, Stronger”—“If we want to foster this spirit, we have to build higher skyscrapers, scrap the speed limits on highways, and take hormones.” He also wanted to avoid the mistakes of World Expos, where there is cultural equality but everything “boils down to evolutionism and futurology”: “Developed countries flaunt their eco-friendly, energy-saving new technologies. Poor countries put their original ecosystems on display.”4

Given this critical spirit, it was disappointing that some pavilions made rather uninteresting selections to emphasise local folk styles (Ulan Bator, for instance). The Sydney City pavilion, though well conceived, presented the problematic selection of a video of ‘a surfer’, however visually inventive was Shaun Gladwell’s Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi), (2012) —the curator perhaps wanting to play to the expectations of the public —while Bababa International’s Flue offered an experience of illusions of recessed walls and hidden objects, and Shen Shaomin’s Landscape of Confinement (2012) provided a reflection on melting ice caps with the reverse, that of ice being frozen through the consumption of energy.

Some pavilions highlighted their cities’ links to China and Shanghai. Dakar chose to present Kane Sy’s photographic series (Boulevard du Centenaire) on the Chinese presence in Dakar, while Sao Paolo had a quirky photographic series by Carla Zaccagnini which chronicled the street signs named after Shanghai in the Brazilian metropolis. The best in this vein was the Berlin pavilion, in which raumlaborberlin, a network and collective of eight architects, presented displays of Richard Paulick’s architecture (The International Ghost 1: Richard Paulick). Paulick escaped to Shanghai

from the rising fascism in 1930s Germany, and later became responsible for city planning in Shanghai. After WWII, he returned to East Germany and designed parts of the Stalinallee. It was an engaging display of a littleknown individual connection between Berlin and Shanghai. The collective also created a large architectonic structure of wood frames that served as a teahouse to the public. Its “relational” impact would have been much stronger in the middle of Shanghai’s People’s Square—impossible due to government disapproval.

There were some truly entertaining pavilions. Brooklyn’s CKTV presented artists’ interventions in karaoke in the form of video, challenging the notion of privileged authorship, as well as the borders of high and low/pop culture. The Lima pavilion showed an installation by José Carlos Martinat, All the Republic in One (stereoreality environment 12). A vast amount of data produced by architects, anthropologists, statisticians, economists and philosophers was presented on little coloured bits of paper, strewn about in the hall. With a long line of electric fans bordering the piles of paper, the fluttering bits and pieces created a whimsical work.

The Vancouver pavilion showed Brian Jungen’s sculptural installations.

Cetology formed the shape of a whale skeleton with lawnchairs, while Prototype for New Understanding #2 used Nike Air Jordans to recreate masks in the manner of Northwest Coast First Nations (this series was however quickly removed due to concerns about the parlous installation conditions). The contrast between the throwaway dispensability of consumerist goods and objects with longer time spans (skeletons, traditional masks) pointed to our impermanent ethos and underlying environmental concerns.

One of the most intriguing was the Pittsburgh Pavilion. In Jon Rubin’s Lovasik Estate Sale, the hall was filled with all kinds of knickknacks and assorted items—furniture, jewellery, figurines, personal photos, certificates, books—purchased from the Lovasik family and shipped to China. A loving material portrait of a family (reminiscent of Song Dong’s Waste Not), this not only commented on the willingness of people to throw away so much after the death of a family member but went much further, for the exhibition was a sale, where every item was available for purchase.

In these terms, at the very least, it was a success: during the week-long National Day vacation in October, so many people swarmed the pavilion in search of cheap pick-ups that the organisers had to limit the works in quantity and in price (different prices on different days), for fear that the work would literally disappear over the course of several days. After the sale, the proceeds would be used to purchase goods from a family in Shanghai and to ship them to Pittsburgh, where the project will appear in 2013.

To label Rubin’s work relational aesthetics is really to dilute the economic dimensions of the piece (though his work does start from the standpoint of human relations). It played with the logic of commercial exchange on a personal/family and international level, cut through the politics of exports and trade deficits, and engaged the audience tremendously to boot.

Collectively, the Shanghai Biennale had grand aspirations but lacked the means and the wherewithal to realise them. One could be charitable and take chief curator Qiu Zhijie’s view that the format and structure are being set for better, future Biennales. Yet without substantial changes in its organisation, finances, government support and most importantly, its mindset, the Biennale will always have a great future— always in the future.

Notes 1 Carol Lu Yinghua, ‘Taipei Biennial 2012 & the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, Art Agenda, 8 October, 2012; http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/taipei-biennial-2012-the-9th-shanghai-biennale-2012-2/ accessed 20 January, 2013 2 Xue Tan, ‘The Making of the 9th Shanghai Biennale: An Interview with Curator Jens Hoffmann’; http://www.randian-online.com/np_feature/the-making-of-the-9th-shanghai-biennale/2/ accessed 30 January, 2013: “I’m very happy and surprised; you have been here, you have seen the process.

It was a construction site one week ago. Now there is a perfect cafe and museum shop—things I would not even have thought about. All I wanted to do was to get the show ready. All of a sudden, there is a museum.”

3

Qiu Zhijie, ‘Where did the problems come from’ (Wenti chuzai nail?); http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/ article.asp?id=547 accessed 15 January, 2013 (translated by the author)

4 Qiu Zhijie, ‘Notes on the Map of the City’, 9th Shanghai Biennale: Reactivation. Inter-City Pavilion Project (exhibition catalogue), Shanghai Biennial, 2012: 30-33

5 3 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Change in the making: celebrating forty years of Australia-China diplomatic relations

Zang Langshen China’s knowledge of Australian imagery has expanded through the exhibition Making Change: Celebrating 40 Years of Australia–China Diplomatic Relations, held at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing (13 November—13 December 2012). Organised jointly by the Australian Centre for Photography and the College of Fine Art of the University of New South Wales, in partnership with the National Art Museum of China, the exhibition was a focal point of contemporary Australian culture in Beijing to mark the fortieth anniversary of the 1972 establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China.

The exhibition consisted of one hundred and seven photographic and moving images, representing the works of twenty-four indigenous artists1, together with historic images of the visits to China by Gough Whitlam in 1971, firstly as a member of the Australian Labor Party delegation and then in 1973 as Prime Minister. The exhibition drew considerable public interest in China and was covered by the major print and online media in Beijing and other cities.2

Unlike most art exhibitions in China, Making Change was charged with highly political content. It presented in two main aspects: Whitlam’s pivotal role in the two most significant events of the Labor Government coming to power in late 1972—establishing a diplomatic relationship between Australia and China and the rights of indigenous Australians; and the strong social commentary of imagery from contemporary indigenous Australian artists. An exhibition such as this is somewhat risky for China —where the authorities are often cautious of exhibitions or art events that raise issues around cultural identity or indigenous rights, and which may challenge the political or social status quo. However, any risky aspect

was overshadowed by the emphasis on popular historical images of Whitlam’s political legacy and the achievements of indigenous Australian contemporary art. The exhibition occupied five exhibition halls covering over 1,000 square metres. It has two distinct components—Whitlam as the visionary politician in China, which contextualises the bilateral relationship through photographs and film of his meetings with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping during his first China trip; and the contemporary artworks by indigenous Australian artists in various art forms.

Mervyn Bishop’s iconic 1975 photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hands of traditional landowner Vincent Lingiari, at the main entry hall drew the audience into the exhibition.

This image, placed central to the partition wall with seven portraits of young Aboriginal people on one side, beckoned the viewer to look behind the wall before moving left or right to the halls of art displays or looking behind to read the wall texts outlining the exhibition. Behind the partition wall, China’s political history and Australia’s part in that, fascinated the local audiences.

A screen displayed documentary footage of Whitlam’s motorcade for his meeting with Mao Zedong with visitors anxious to hear the commentary from the headsets. A series of historical photographs covering both the landmark 1971 visit to China, when Whitlam was leader of the Opposition and his official visit as Prime Minister and his meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were the object of careful study by the visitors. Among the images, there were a number of key characters from different political factions within the Chinese Communist Party—this stirred great interest amongst the older generation. For many young people this may have been the first time they have been exposed to such historical materials, but their curiosity to learn of and understand the history was evident.

Curatorial ingenuity in using images of Whitlam with Australian indigenous and Chinese political leaders gave the exhibition some cohesion, overcoming the challenge of displaying and integrating historical materials and contemporary artworks within the exhibition. But the challenge in putting together any international exhibition in China, and make it appealing to the general public requires even greater consideration.

To begin with, the title Making Change: Celebrating 40 Years of Australia–China Diplomatic Relations was given a more ‘arty’ flavour in the Chinese translation. The Chinese exhibition title “移动中的变化－澳大 利亚当代影像展” literally translates as ‘Changes in the moving–Australian Contemporary Photography and New Media Art Exhibition’. The subtle approach in title change may suit China’s current political cultural climate, though more likely it helps promote the contemporary nature of the exhibition and Australian society. The general perception in China about Australia has traditionally been confined to the natural environment and rich natural resources. Kangaroos, koalas, white sandy beaches, blue ocean waters and the Sydney Opera House are familiar images. Perceptions are widening, helped by the progressive flow of tourism, education and investment, where an increasingly sophisticated knowledge about Australia is beginning to filter through, especially healthy lifestyle, food and wine, innovation and technology. What is less known is Australia’s socio-political culture. In an article titled ‘China meets Australia through images’ published in the China Daily, it describes Making Change as a “response to the public’s rising interests in diverse modern culture Down Under” because “Australia has become a popular study and immigration destination for the Chinese”.3 In 2011 there were over 120,000 Chinese students studying in and over 540,000 Chinese tourists visited Australia.

Over the last four decades the image and understanding of Australia has been assisted through economic links that has seen China become Australia’s largest trade partner. Australians like to think that cultural activities have been an important part of the Australia-China relationship and in the visual arts area there have been many—and some of these have left very deep impressions. Early exhibitions in the 1980s including The Recent Hundred Years of Australian Landscape Paintings (1983) and in 1985 Fred Williams: the Pilbara series (1979-81) depicted for Chinese audiences the diversity of the Australian environment represented in differing approaches to painting the landscape. Important indigenous art exhibitions and collections have also shown, including Spirit Country: Contemporary Aboriginal Art from the Gantner Myer Collection at Shanghai Library in 2002, Aboriginal Art Works from the Janet Holmes à Court Utopia Collection at Shanghai Red Temple Art Space in 2007, the Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition at NAMOC in 2010, and Our Land–Our Body at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2011.

Australian contemporary artists, including indigenous artists, are no strangers to the Chinese art loving public. In 1988 Contemporary Australian Art to China 1988-1989, one of the earliest contemporary art exhibitions from Australia included artists such as Bill Henson, Jay Younger, Narpula Scobie Napurrula, Lindy Lee, and Mike Parr etc.4 In the first international Shanghai Biennale in 2000, Gordon Bennett and Emily Kame Kngwarreye were presented. Rarely in China has there been an exhibition that reflects directly upon the current issues within Australian society and culture and which might provide new perspectives for the Chinese audience. Through the imagery in Making Change, the audience was able to listen to individual stories, follow the artist’s eye and share their own feelings or experiences with the artist’s conceptual ideas, thus grasping the ‘big picture’ of political and social issues, particularly in negotiating or positioning indigenous culture in Australian society.

It was obvious to the audience that photomedia and new digital technologies are predominant platforms within Australian contemporary art. The perception of a remote or a confined Australian indigenous art practice was eschewed, exposed as more so daily urban life via international art practices. Warwick Thornton’s 3D single-channel video Stranded (2011), projected on a large screen which covered half an exhibition hall, was very popular with the queueing visitors.

Like most exhibitions there was a moment of panic during the preparation of the exhibition a day before the opening. A staff member of the museum raised the issue of cultural sensitivity concerning images of homosexuality, pointing to some of the images contained in Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s single-channel video Other (2009). The matter was taken to the Museum Director for approval —fortunately it was waved through by a viewing session of the video with the director. Homosexuality is a vexed issue in modern Chinese society, shrouded in ignorance. Interestingly a few weeks after the exhibition closed, an article titled ‘Being gay in China’ was printed in the China Daily, drawing on historical references and current social conditions. In the past discussion of such topics had been forbidden in the official press.

In another hall Christian Thomson’s three-channel video Heat (2010) occupied another large screen. The slow motion recurring portraiture of three young indigenous females with flowing hair and emotionless faces, the earthy background colour blended into the person’s skin colour, was thought-provoking and left the audience to consider issues of identity and universal concerns. In the exhibition catalogue essay ‘Change times, time changes’, co-curator Brenda Croft observes: Photo-media and moving image media provide indigenous artists with the agency to re-present our stories, our dreams, our desires, our (literal and metaphorical) reflections as we see fit, not as others see (or do not see) us.5 New media art forms are increasingly understood and accepted by the general public in China. For more than two decades Chinese artists have adopted and experimented with new-media art forms, with leading artists including Zhang Peili, Yang Fudong and Song Dong being internationally recognised for their art, which is highly politicised. In the exhibition foreword and in his opening speech, Mr Fan Dian, the director of the NAMOC, used the term “techniques of the visible” in highlighting the sociological significance of the new art forms which “permeate all areas of our life” in society, including China. The term was also used as the title for the 2004 Shanghai Biennale: Techniques of the Visible, which encompasses all still and moving images produced with traditional or modern technologies or techniques in that exhibition.6

5 5 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

It was a curatorial intention to draw a comparative line between Australia’s indigenous visual arts culture and Chinese contemporary art, as both emerging within the international art arena, within a similar timeframe to become part of world mainstream art. The phenomena have attracted professional interests in both countries. As the exhibition co-curators Felicity Fenner and Kon Gouriotis pointed out: “International exhibitions of recent years have registered widespread interest in the changing political landscape of Eastern Europe and Asia, including the attendant emergence of new art practices from cultures formerly considered peripheral to mainstream contemporary art, such as China and indigenous Australia”.

With reference to a number of major international contemporary art exhibitions, they articulated: “Since then, many exhibitions worldwide have unabashedly assumed more than a passing interest in the prevailing political climate of cultures in various stages of transition from peripheral to powerful global voices, as curators and consumers have championed the work of non-Western practitioners. Both China’s and indigenous Australia’s visual arts cultures have emerged as central to this shift.”7

A nation’s visual arts culture derives from the fabric of that society and it is inevitable that it becomes political. Major official exhibitions from Australia to China over recent years have projected some of Australia’s key cultural characteristics in indigenous art. This exhibition is no exception in successfully weaving modern Australian political history into contemporary Australian art discourse. The Chinese public might not be aware of the significance of the Australian political history of the Whitlam era, but for those that visited the exhibition they are now much better informed.

The two milestones of political change made by Whitlam, the establishment of diplomatic relations with China in 1972 and Australian indigenous rights, have profoundly affected Australian contemporary life and in the development of political and economic ties between Australia and China.

Where Making Change differs from previous presentations involving indigenous Australian artists is that the art departs from the visual traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ art. It places indigenous Australian artists’ creative thinking and practice into a global context; in other words, avoiding the stereotype that is lauded by the international art market.

Notes 1 The participating artists are Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Brook Andrew, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett, Mervyn Bishop, Daniel Boyd, Bindi Cole, Brenda Croft, Nici Cumpston, Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Genevieve Grieves, Gordon Hookey, Dianne Jones, Gary Lee, Ricky Maynard, Tracey Moffatt, and r e a 2

Identified nineteen printed and online media reports on this event including the China Daily local and international editions, the Workers’ Daily, the Art Newspaper, the Beijing Evening News, the Oriental Morning Post, the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily; www.people.com.cn, news.xinhuanet.com, art.china.cn, collection.sina.com.cn; to list a few 3 Lin Qi, ‘China Meets Australia through images’, China Daily, 16 November 2012, Beijing; ‘Australia reaches out to Asia’, www.china.org.cn/opinion/2012-12/07/content_27341110.htm; accessed 17 January 2013 4

The exhibition Contemporary Australian Art to China 1988-1989, was organised by the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education Toowoomba through the Chinese Ministry of Culture and the Australian Embassy, Beijing and the Australian Consulate General, Shanghai

5 Brenda Croft, ‘Changing times, timing changes’, Michael Fitzgerald (ed.), Making Change (exhibtion catalogue), Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 2012: 40 6

Fan Dian, ‘Forewords’, Making Change, ibid: 10

7

Felicity Fenner and Kon Gouriotis, ‘A Changing context for making change’, Making Change, ibid: 4-5

Page 53: Mervyn Bishop, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory, 1975 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite and below: Gordon Hookey, Terraist (video stills), 2012 Photos courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Mourning and remembrance; reinforcing the power of simple actions

Olivier Krischer An initial interpretation of Waste Not (Carriageworks, Sydney, 5 January –17 March 2013), is that it is a magnificent installation comprising thousands of salvaged objects, from family heirlooms, furniture, clothes, toys and even the century-old wooden frame from part of the family’s former Beijing home, to plastic bags, neatly folded for reuse, to a pile of disposable bamboo chopsticks, some used. All are things kept aside by Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan (1938-2009) either because of their sentimental value, or their potential to be reused—in some instances, good quality products retained for that special day that never arrived. When the family was told to rebuild part of Zhao’s house, she even instructed Song Dong to keep the large main beams in case they wanted to build later. As a vast, accidental museum of social history, these objects speak of hardship and forbearance, directly reflecting the decades on which contemporary China has been rapidly constructed, as well as lending themselves to particularly modern experiences such as rapid social and urban change, displacement, political and economic upheaval and, throughout, a resounding sense of survival, of having lived to share the tale.

Alternatively, I now think of Waste Not as a kind of performance, a slowly unfolding process that is not yet complete. It’s not for a lack of familiarity.

Indeed, over-familiarity with the work probably led to this dilemma. I have worked with Song Dong’s artist wife Yin Xiuzhen, when she was installing her installation for the 2003 Biennale of Sydney. I had also met his older sister, Song Hui, who oversees the project at each destination, “because she knows where everything is”, Song Dong says. In 2009 I also translated his mother’s writing, about some of the thousands of objects she kept.1 Then after I returned to live in Sydney I was called in to assist with the translation and installation. Again I found myself in the evolution of this project, even closer than I had before. I watched it unfold, as it has in nine venues prior, from opening the crates, emptying their carefully numbered boxes, to unpacking their myriad contents, assembling the house frame, then laying out thousands of objects—including flower pots, bowls, clothes, utensils, plastic bags, disposable chopsticks, and cakes of old soap. I repaired some broken bowls by winding fine wire around them, allowing them to stand in their former shape.

As we worked, the team heard stories about some of the thousands of objects that had accumulated over five decades of ‘living’—the network of installers, museum staff and viewers for whom the work has become a shared memory, are all part of its legacy. There is a certain magic in stories.

For example, when we had finished putting the house’s front door on its original hinges, the team became intrigued by a piece of black twisted cord still attached to one side of the door frame. Was it to latch the door or window open? We remembered that Song Hui, the artist’s older sister, had after all, lived in the house, so we asked her. She explained how there used to be a guava tree growing in front of the house, which had started to lean when it got tall, so the family had used stiff cord to tie it to the house’s frame, to keep it upright. I could immediately imagine the large leafy fruit tree that would have shaded us where we stood, and this made me wonder about the invisible spaces and years, that envelop these objects, carried with them from place to place, shared intermittently with the more curious.

I first became involved with Waste Not in 2008, when I went to Berlin as an assistant to the Tokyo Gallery, from Japan. I met Yin Xiuzhen there again, as she tends to come along and help with the installation when her schedule allows. Sometimes Song Hui’s daughter joins the family too.

In Sydney, Song and Yin’s own daughter, ten-year-old Errui, came with her mother, making it very much a family affair. It was curious to see her auntie or father asking Errui how the previous installation had dealt with this or that problem of placing the objects. And throughout, Song Dong’s role was less a ringmaster and more of an advisor, such that filling out the space felt like a collaborative achievement.

A friend has sent through a link to a recent article in The Guardian newspaper titled ‘A user’s guide to artspeak2 which seems to describe part of the problem I’m having. It highlights the work of artist-cum-researchers, David Lavine and Alix Rule, who have (somewhat playfully) coined the term “International Art English” for that mode of English epitomised in the art gallery press release, which has been refined and globalised, they claim, through internet portals such as the e-flux mailing list. Imagine words such as “spatial”, “the real”, “platform”, “the everyday”, “trans-“, “proto-“, “post-“, and various -isms all in the same sentence—undeniably, words I also find myself using all the time, but I realised that this is the language I had found uncomfortable in using to describe Waste Not.

57 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Published in Triple Canopy, the original study employed software to analyse years of e-flux announcements to identify lexical patterns.3 Assuming e-flux and October to be at the centre of ‘our’ art world is obviously a little contrived as objective research, but presented as a creative, performative investigation it leads to some interesting facts—many we are already passively familiar with, yet rarely question their implications. For example, a term like “the real” occurs in e-flux English 179 times more than the official sampling of British English from the second half of the twentieth-century, known as the British National Corpus. In reading this I was acutely aware of the dilemma in subjecting Waste Not to such artspeak in this text. But I also wondered why “the real” was such a hot topic for art, and whether Waste Not was “real”?

The second time I saw this work was in New York when it was installed in the Museum of Modern Art’s mezzanine projects space in 2009. The translations of his mother’s writing had been finished in time for the book to be launched with the exhibition. At that time I was asked to interview Song Dong, being the first time we spoke at length about this project. Sitting in front of viewers beside the work, he explained that for him there is no division between art and life—not only for himself, as an artist, but for anyone. Speaking about the interest he had in ritual and a quality he called “latent form”, he spoke about Waste Not as a sculptural process, yet something that remained organic, in that he cannot determine all the variables and outcomes:

I have always liked the Chinese concept of ritual, even though it is usually associated with ancient traditions, when you create a ritual, you create a space, an aura around it at the same time. That space becomes a platform from which to observe the ritual. When I asked my mother to organize all the objects in her life, there was no ritual of exhibition in place yet; but because the duration of the exhibition is a kind of ritual, her reaction to the objects changes. In this novel context—a public space on view to thousands of people —with its artistic connections, my mother has found a new meaning in life. If she sits down and chats with museum visitors, for example, it’s different than talking to strangers at home. A stranger wouldn’t be able to just come into our house. My mother would have been on guard, not knowing who they were. But here, she can speak with anybody. She needed a personal and artistic platform on which to express herself.4 Song Dong has always described the work as a collaboration, simply acting as a tool for his mother’s own process; and when his mother was alive, the work carried both of their names. When Waste Not was awarded the grand prize at the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, his mother shared the honours, causing friends to joke that she had only created one artwork in her life, yet had entered a biennale and won its highest accolade. Song Dong would agree, pointing out that she had spent her whole life making ‘work’. In the current installation there are also some sections that showcase items handmade by

5 9 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Song Dong’s parents—including clothes made for him by his mother and a collection of DIY tools fashioned from metal by his father. Song Dong talks about these as his parents’ “works” (zuopin), and one senses that they evidence the presence of ‘art’ in his childhood, and a creative spirit in his parents. They also speak of the relationship between art and survival—as many of these items were created to supplement things the family could not afford to buy.

When originally shown in 2005, in Beijing, the work was very much a process of catharsis, for his mother to overcome her grief following the recent death of his father. His mother would sit in the gallery during the day, rearranging items and talking to people who came in. During the first exhibition his mother was still uneasy about which items might be too precious to be displayed. Each day he would notice her quietly taking certain things home, which she had spied in the installation space and decided were not yet for public display. At other times, Song found things amongst the amassed objects, such as worn clothes, that he and his sister remember throwing away, but that must have been salvaged by his mother.

In the last two decades in China, houses, streets or whole towns have been demolished to make way for new urbanisation, rural development and massive infrastructural projects, none better known than the Three Gorges Dam, which beyond its massive, practical use for hydroelectric power generation, symbolises the success of the ruling party as a monumental signifier of material wealth and technological progress.

Artists have reflected on this in ways that highlight the human and environmental costs, the crisis of identity amid such rapid urban change.

At the 2010 Asia Pacific Triennial, for example, Chen Qiulin showed Xinsheng Town 275-277 (2009), for which she reassembled an old house façade in the exhibition space. Chen’s hometown, in China’s western Sichuan province, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was half submerged by the Three Gorges Dam, forcing the town to rebuild on higher ground.

Much of her work has consistently explored such themes as displacement and a fragile sense of identity amid breakneck urban development. Building facades salvaged from the flooded area were originally shown in her 2006 solo exhibition at Beijing’s Long March Space, titled Migration. In addition to a row of salvaged old houses, blue-white-and-red striped woven plastic sheeting, associated with demolition and construction sites across China, was spread uniformly across the entire exhibition space. There were also large format framed photos on the walls and two video projections, one inside part of the reconstructed street façade. These salvaged elements, while touching on issues of personal significance to the artist, engaged in a kind of synecdoche, standing in for all those affected, and for all the areas submerged. There was a hint, perhaps unconsciously, at the collective experience. With such works in mind, it is the lack of metaphor or symbolism that I now find more interesting in the case of Waste Not—a total investment in the literal significance of Zhao Xiangyuan’s action and the family’s personal narrative.

Interestingly, Chen Quilin’s work recalls the magical realist twists in filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006), which tells the story of a man and woman each returning to a town in Sichuan, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, to search for their estranged spouses. Jia’s film seems to treat the massive population relocations, migratory labour, and the systematic erasure of space as experiences with broader significance in Chinese society, or even globally.5 In one scene, the man who had come in search of his wife and daughter he hasn’t seen in sixteen years meets a woman who knows them; their daughters were at school together. He asks to see their school photo, and she hands him a laminated group portrait. He stares at it for a second, then turns back, asking, “Which one is my daughter?” While he is not portrayed as distraught, one senses that part of him, of his life, has been lived without him, like being absent from one’s own historical trajectory. In another scene, the woman looking for her husband, who hasn’t contacted her for two years, meets a mutual friend at what appears to be a building site. Throughout the film Jia’s camera pans across large buildings being demolished, often by hand and sledgehammer. Here however, the labourers are shovelling what turns out to be an archeological site from the Western Han period (206 BCE-25 CE). Like a historical tug-of-war, one set of ruins reaches ever further into the past, while the others compete to construct a vision from the future.

Compared to the reach of the narrative of national history taken for granted in China—typically “5000 years of continuous history”—the acutely limited, personalised scope of Waste Not, upon reflection, seems quietly radical. To resist the collective unconscious, the cultural continuum, to focus unequivocally on the knowledge of one’s own family, is a strong statement in a country where socio-political policies and their effects—from the Cultural Revolution to the one child policy—have radically changed personal relationships. Unlike many of his peers, Song Dong’s practice has largely remained introspective, focused on his identity and his relationship with his family, even to the point of seeming obsessive or overindulgent.

He seems particularly interested in the family stories that describe episodes from his childhood that he had forgotten, or was never told, yet which have, he believes, accumulated to constitute the person he is today.

A selection of such family works in video, spanning from the late 1990s to the present, have been exhibited concurrently to Waste Not, at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. The most significant for Song Dong is Touching My Father (1997-2011), which comprises video performances and photography with the artist’s father, Song Shiping, and was the first time he had agreed to collaborate in Song’s work. At 4A, a pair of photographs shows Song’s father casually smoking, in a patterned shirt, looking comfortable. In one, the artist’s luminous hand ‘touches’ his father’s face, while in the other, it rests between his father’s chest and left shoulder, as his father gazes at it. “My ‘virtual hand’ was breaching that invisible gap between us”, Song Dong writes in the exhibition notes. Afterwards, his father accepted his work as an artist for the first time, not agreeing with his life choices, but rather resolving to offer pragmatic support, an act through which Song reads paternal love and mutual respect. “Touching My Father ,” said Song Dong “became the most important event in my life. Although the work has never been shown before, it opened the door for Art to enter my family life, becoming the centre of our lives. It also turned into the lifeline that brought the relationship between my father and myself into a new era.”

In another video, Listening to My Parents Talk About How I Was Born (2001) the artist casually interviews his parents, who take turns explaining the circumstances around his birth. We find out that his father was initially opposed to having another child, as the family was finding it hard enough financially just with Song’s older sister. However, his grandmother was adamant that she wanted a boy—and his mother admits she was happy to have more children. Song poses questions, encouraging his parents to recall details they may not have mentioned before; and in the process, here as in all these works, including Waste Not—the past, personal history, and the family as the central unit on which one’s identity forms, is strongly reinforced.

What makes an object valuable? Is it the value it is perceived to have by others, or the importance it holds for you? In her opening remark about Waste Not, Zhao Xiangyuan explains: “I think, that when someone is no longer among us, their things should still remain.” Later in her notes she writes of trying simply to “extend” the life of these objects, as an act of preserving memories. Waste Not makes this action significant, and invites others to share in its significance, by becoming part of its story, and viceversa.

Notes 1 His mother Zhao Xiangyuan’s writings were edited into four chapters: ‘Clothes’, ‘Eat’, ‘Live’ and ‘Use’.

See Wu Hung (ed.), Waste Not–Zhao Xiangyuan and Song Dong, Tokyo: Tokyo Gallery+BTAP, 2009: 65-188 2

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english

3

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english

4

The interview took place at MoMA in June 2009, and was published in edited form as ‘A Half Century Laid Bare’, Art Asia Pacific 66, 2009: 68-77 5 Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) won the Golden Lion at Cannes in 2006. While filming the movie he also shot a biopic, Dong (2006), about the oil painter Liu Xiaodong, who completed a series of paintings about similar subjects—notably migrant labourers echoing scenes of the movie, and vice-versa. In 2008-09, the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, held the exhibition Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, including works by Chen Qiulin, Liu Xiaodong, Zhuang Hui and Yun Feiji

All photos: Song Dong, Waste Not, 2013, installation views at Carriageworks, Sydney Photos courtesy the artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Tokyo

The Green Line MUHAMMAD MUHAMMAD The ‘line’ has always been distinctive, restrictive or admonitory. Historically in human life, the ‘line’ has had different meanings in various fields of study.

It has little value, but while it is less frequently used in some fields of study it is very definite and distinguished in others. For example, in manufacturing and engineering, the ‘line’ used to depend upon a slide rule; now its determination is digital. In geography, it demonstrates and determines frontiers, and in poetry and literature, it is just a conveyance of a concept and a presenter of words. But in the profession of conducting political and academic affairs it is very profound, even demonstrating many historical ranges. Moreover, in politics the ‘line’ conveys a profound discernment in and determination of major military, political and ideological strategies.

It is the same for the colour green. It is a simple, pleasant and relaxing soft colour on the one hand, but from a different view can convey a profound and deep ideological political concept. Even the tonality of the colour has a meaning, from its darkest shades to its lightest.

In political ideological science the colour green is not considered as an individual product however—it demonstrates a union. In relation to two parties and their ideologies, it is a combination that is born by the convergence of the two. Contextually, the colour green is meant to bring entities together, and is about reconciliation. On the contrary, in politics the colour white means acquiescence. If we agreed that the colour white means to surrender to the opposition then the colour green should be interpreted as a convergence between two opinions and political strategies.

The ‘Green Line’ in society and in the field of politics is profound and well defined. In countries such as Germany, the Green Line represents the ambit of a political party while in the Middle Eastern region it represents political reformation or an emblem of similar movement. In the conduct of politics both in the West and East, the line is a representation of entente, moderation, peace and democracy.

Why is there a particular meaning to the Green Line and how might this relate to the colour green? An art expert or a colour designer may be more capable in answering this question more comprehensively.

A psychologist, psychiatrist or psychoanalyst has more insight into colour and might in particular elucidate further regarding the colour green’s tranquiliser potential. Moreover, a biologist or a botanist might further guide us towards a better understanding of this particular colour. Green is a courier of positivity and inspiration. But why does the Green Line maintain its position in the face of opposition in politics both in the East and the West? And how does the difference of intensity (brilliance and dimness), length (shortness and tallness) and width (broadness and narrowness) of this line buttress a complex balance in the opinions of disputant parties and even changing their principals? The Green Line has a significant role in representing historical and symbolic political stands of parties. Chroniclers, diplomats, journalists, reviewers in political law, professional analysts and theoreticians of different political persuasions from every corner of the world acknowledge that when there is a desire to talk over entente, reconciliation, peace and amicable dialogues willingly or unwillingly, this process always includes the Green Line.

Nevertheless, how did the West and the East become what they are today and what has made it necessary to embrace and convey the Green Line between them? Why is the world throughout its history gradually, inexorably heading towards the direction which it is now? We recognise this in the two categories of distinctness of East and West. In politics we consider East-West in no way related to the compass points of North and South. Even when we talk about First and Third World countries or regions,

this is not related to any such mathematical classification. In the world of today, we constantly refer to religion and politics when categorising East and the West. Technically, we analyse the practical considerations and economic classifications of the world under the concepts of First, Second and Third World countries. It is said that a world view perceives the difference between East and West being determined by religion and politics. However, the concept of difference between First and Third World countries is based on economics.

This text candidly considers the notion of ‘East’ and ‘West’—to scrutinse this approach it focuses on how the differences between East and West have originated and gradually developed, through the periods of adolescence and to near old age. I will apply this inquiry to the Green Line between East and West, eschewing notions of the First and Third Worlds.

If one is patient enough to travel through the course of History and its historical episodes and markers, one might discover a path through the study of the trends of human progress from different perspectives of historical and political concepts. In this journey of discovery the scholar will be accompanied by Will Durant, Simon Dewar, Jawaharlal Nehru, amongst others. When we read their books it seems as if we are experiencing a faceto-face interview with these authors. We would need to consider the most brilliant philosophers of the West, such as Espinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx and Engels; the equally most famous philosophers of the East such as Imam Ghazali, Ibn Sina and Farabi; and the Greek philosophers Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Probably, after having this ‘discussion, we might be able to conclude why East and West became what they are.

Before the emergence of main religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is beyond question that ‘East’ and ‘West’ did not exist. Largely, the kings of that time had absolute power over the world.

But after the emergence of various religious denominations, the despotic rule of the kings and their militaristic attitudes eventually collapsed and were replaced by notions of ‘comradeship’—from brotherhood to community. This ‘comradeship’ was not influenced by the principals of despotic rule of these kings, but the subsequent religious values of each particular geographical region. Gradually and eventually, every region and then country in the world became categorised not by the ‘colour’ of kingship but by the ‘colour’ of these religions. Consequentially, the ‘colour’ of political difference, particularly in recent centuries, slowly took form.

Three thousand years ago, regional taxonomy was determined by royal and militaristic indices; two thousand years ago by religion; and from two hundred years ago until now a mixture of political and religious indices.

But politics and religion have always been intermixed, as have politics with kingship. These three forces have persevered, linked together like a line throughout the course of history, often differing in intensity, becoming ‘dark coloured’ or ‘light coloured’ in different regions and continents over time. Kingship has sometimes coalesced with religion (the Sassanid Empire ruled Iran for 400 years before the emergence of Islam), and at other times religion and politics (Britain, Europe and India). In this context it can be seen that religion throughout the West has been mainly ‘light coloured’ whereas in the East the opposite, more so ‘darkly coloured’.

In considering the similarity of the principles between kingship and politics throughout the world, any difference has almost exclusively been the result of religion. Though the West avoids religion, in the (Middle) East in essence religion is predominantly crucial and even politics has been forced to be obscured by or concealed under its banner. This approach has been advanced in the field of political ideology. The West’s progress in economics, industry

61 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

and trade owes much to its particular policies towards religion. After the Renaissance period Europe altered course, displacing religion and its priests to the anteroom of The Church, thus accelerating the flow of progress and expansion. But while the brand and ‘colour’ of the West and its philosophy is “Civilised Europe minus religion”, in the (Middle) East it can be simply summarised as “religion”. It can be seen from this that the West believed in and pursued progress while the East remained ‘underdeveloped’.

A historical conundrum then is to discover the reasons for the East’s dilatory causatum and whether this failure is rooted in religion. I believe emphatically that there is not just one single reason that brought into being the West’s progress and the East’s regression. Western ideology and its rapid progress are replete with many factors, while this is the same for the East and its atavism. Many rulers of Eastern countries sought ‘progress’ by reaching out to the developed West through the brutal subjugation of religion, but they not only failed in their attempts, their domains became more religious as a result. These miscalculations perpetuated their countries’ inchoate retreat.

Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Arab States bordering the Persian Gulf stand as perfect examples of this fact. But the question remains, why?

Eastern governments chose not to seek other reasons that might explain the ‘progress’ of the West compared to their own situations, abiding by their strict belief in religious ideology, and its fundamental directives. But this force of religion was not their only constraint; a further major historical factor which gradually caused (and remains the cause of) this manifest gap throughout history, is a parameter I will refer to as being multi-factorial.

Firstly, of its three aspects, the factor of geography determines a significant role in this gradual regression. For example, while Europe can be described as verdant, covered by highly productive farmland, the Middle and Far East regions have often suffered famine, earthquakes and floods.

Even in the story of Joseph and Potiphar that has its roots in some religious and theological books, there are references to famine, earthquakes, drought and floods. Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Glimpses of World History’ emphasises natural disasters especially in the Indian Subcontinent.

In those regions in the world which benefit from all four seasons, from which emanate adequate rainfall and fertile, productive land (which necessitates modern mechanised farming and technological processes—thus commercial growth), so it is closer to the truth that qualities of assurance and propriety which come from nature will transfer to the people living there. In other regions there is no such balance between heaven and earth, where there is no respite from either torrential rain or drought. For example, in several places in the Middle East and Africa there is hardly any rain at all.

Not only do some regions witness suffering from drought or flood, but also many horrible and tragic earthquakes. Throughout history there has been no mechanism demonstrating harmony between climatic and geographic features in these areas, between Man and land. Natural disasters have obviously contributed to these regions’ economic crises, their populations used to disorderliness, embedded and rooted in their bones; it becomes their way of life.

The second aspect flows from the first. The inhabitants of Eastern regions who face these recurrent crises in agriculture, leading to poor production, hunger and destruction look to the sky seeking answers, thus being more receptive to the metaphysical, spiritual or otherwise. In some parts of Africa where there is very little rain, people are more receptive to metaphysics, magic and superstition. So that would hold true if we state that the East is the symbol of compromise between wisdom and religion.

A magician, enchanter or a fortune-teller has little place in the contemporary West, while being commensurate with Africa. Thus, it might be said that when a person in Africa is dying of hunger, it would be absurd to ask him to be rational and lean to wisdom. Similarly, for a Westerner who is fully sated with a large stomach and seeking self-indulgence would not accept or believe in metaphysics or seek religious advice and disinclined to listen to the superstitions of the magician or the nonsense of an enchanter from Africa wearing worn out clothes. On the other hand the Easterner with one eye looks to the heavens seeking religious direction to fill his empty stomach while with the other he jealously regards the prosperity of the West.

An example, extracted from the book ‘History of the World’

by Jawaharlal Nehru—during the emergence of Christianity, a group of Christian missionaries entered one of the ports on the English Channel.

It was a very difficult trip and they endured much hardship before they finally stepped onto land. The missionaries asked all the citizens of the port to congregate in the town square so they could deliver a sermon.

They wanted to encourage the citizens to accept and believe in Christianity.

They did their best to persuade the citizens to convert. When they started to talk about God and metaphysics the fishermen of the port became reluctant and bored with the missionaries’ words. The fishermen then made an agreement with the Christian missionaries, asking them to pray and ask God to fill a lake full of fish in three days to help overcome the shortage of food for the town’s citizens. Then the fishermen would believe and accept the missionaries’ religion. But if the problem of a lack of fish was not solved in that time not only would this new religion not be accepted but the missionaries would then be guilty of misleading the town’s people and would be beheaded. The Christian missionaries began to pray. On the third day when their prayers were still unanswered and there was no evidence of more fish in the lake they saved their lives by escaping in their boat at night and returned to whence they came. An analysis of the reaction by the fishermen to this event is very important and even by itself is a challenging subject for discussion. Why didn’t the fishermen give way and accept the new religion in the first place? But if this event occurred in the Middle East, many people would become followers, and if in Africa, then what might the reaction be? What might happen if a hundred judges, specialists and professionals from all over the world were offered such a sensational summons? What would be the reaction in the three major regions of the world?

The third aspect flows from the first and second. Throughout history, the people of the European continent have enjoyed better nutrition than the Middle East and Africa. Based on statements by skilled medical specialists that in pre- and post-natal care nutrition is all important, especially in the development of the brain and most especially the cerebral cortex, ie. ‘grey matter’. If the mother has access to nutritious food during her pregnancy she is more likely to have a healthy and mature baby.

Most especially in the growth of the brain and its functions nutritious feeding by the mother has a direct influence on the baby’s future development.

With regard to professional and medical indices relating to a child’s growth, paediatricians and specialists believe that the development of the baby during pregnancy and breastfeeding stages will influence its mind, soul and appearance. Hence access to nutritious food is overtly significant in the moulding of such characteristics as decision-making, belief and wisdom.

Therefore, throughout history it can be said that the quality of food and religious belief has been intertwined in European, Eastern and African

cultures, even so far as directing beliefs towards different postures. Perhaps then, given that these are three different major geographical regions with three different climates and three related standards of nutrition, the outcome is to have three different belief systems. In attempting to modify these regions, the influence of kings, religious leaders and politicians has generally failed. They have been unable to make significant changes to these fundamental facts. Each of these three still exists—East and West striving to prove their superiority in power and competitiveness while Africa, always extant has been unable to compete because of widespread poverty and systematic deficiencies.

The most significant conflict between East and West came into being and developed under the ‘colour’ of religion. And so far the West has prevailed. Since the Crusades, before and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and with the dominance of technology, the West has always imposed its superior strength on the battlefield, whereas the East often appeared wistfully helpless. The East has rarely smiled in victory. Some Eastern victories were but a sudden gleam or a singular movement. There have been those who were astute and took up the West’s dominant culture, having a positive wisdom and intelligence as a criteria for looking at this environment, but not forgetting their ethical code and religious faith, nor extinguishing their origins. Nonetheless, the most important and fundamental conflict between East and West has been the conspicuous difference in belief.

The West believes in secularism, with religious fundamentalism having no significant place in the conduct of civil affairs or policies of a nation, while in the East such fundamentalism ensures the ongoing strict maintenance of doctrine and belief. On occasion a prominent artist or scientist from the Above: A Separation (film still), 2011 directed by Asghar Farhadi

East might loudly proclaim that the East is equal to West, but this person does not forget his identity nor origins. He might imagine that he favours the East and is reluctant to lean towards the West, but in truth he finds the East wanting.

It might be asked, during the past one hundred years, from 1912 to 2012, how many asylum seekers have fled from East to West, and in comparison, the opposite? It cannot be denied that a flood of the East’s great scientists, artists, politicians as well as religious identities have emigrated to the West. How many unpretentious and unbiased Westerners who have emigrated from West to East have settled down looking forward to living there? I am not able to recall such a phase or process over the last two or three centuries, most especially during the last fifty years when statistics are more reliable and authentic. What do we interpret from such facts?

The demarcation existing between East and West is the distinct boundary of ‘wisdom’, and the main conflict is between the realism of the West and the idealism of the East. It might happen that a scientist or an artist arises from the East but it would be unlikely that he would become internationally eminent or noteworthy. Additionally, an Eastern artist who creates an exceptional artwork (and more often that not judged against the Western art canon) cannot articulate that the East is (culturally) dominant; on the contrary that artist, despite ‘keeping face’ with the East and its beliefs proclaims in the artwork that the East’s stance is inappropriate, irrelevant or unjust. Whereas Western affluence presents aberrations and falsehoods born by its culture—the West lacks motivation in producing ingenious, authentic and exceptional art works—repetition has replaced creativity.

In the East there are now artists who are able to declare through their artwork that “the situation is not good”, the autocratic and religious censorship in these societies leading to the birth of these artworks as pleas for succor.

6 3 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

It can be seen that although the West might have many things to say it lacks a motivation to do so. On the other hand the East has strong motivation, because of extreme suppression the only message that is heard by the world is the declaration of the existence of such a motivation which its art delivers. If an Eastern artist creates a momentous artwork and it becomes internationally well known and presents the East in an elevated pretext to the West, I find this an artificial context. But sometimes an exception does occur, like when two lines of blue and yellow combine or overlap thus making the ‘Green Line’. I assess such artists in retaining their Eastern identity while standing on this line. I believe that the duty of the artist from East and West is to prove how long this Green Line will continue to set an inherent alliance between East and West.

One of the most resonant contrasts between Western and Eastern art is in cinema. The West perceives its hegemony of cinema as historically ubiquitous. On the contrary, the East has historically been very poor (or kept so) in distributing potentially successful films. In recent years for example, Iranian filmmakers have begun to reveal many caustic truths about the country’s plights, and as a result many films have been banned from screening by Iran’s religious government. Within the region if a journalist or a politician dares to state the realities of society, they will at once be apprehended, detained and their views questioned, with the likely prohibition from any further statement or publications (or in the case of Jafar Panahi, banned from making films for twenty years). Journalistic, artistic and political careers are terminated, the crime being the revelation that the East is powerless—that religion has not a successful guide or directive against the hegemony of all things Western. Thus these governments fall back upon overt suppression and censorship, magnifying such issues of nuclear power, religion and hiding the realities of Eastern societies (domestic issues). In this way religious leaders use this fundamental principle as a tangible argument to mislead the people. Control of the family unit is a powerful ‘weapon’ in the hands of the religious leaders, enabling them to manoeuvre and beguile the people. Iranian cinema has in many instances endeavoured to reveal the reality of its society; that even religion is powerless to protect the family unit, the very foundation of that society. Instead of seeking to solve social problems such as the breakdown of the family unit, the faltering economy, youth and cultural issues etc., the nation’s theocratic government prefers to obfuscate its failure and that of the East (versus the ‘progress’ of the West).

In this regard we can consider the plights of filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi, the latter who directed the 2012 Academy Award winning film A Separation.1 This film has been presented in many Western film festivals and has gained many international awards. What can be understood from this film is a symbolic theme, that the East in many socio-economical aspects is progressively failing and deteriorating. After A Separation was screened internationally to critical acclaim the government banned the film inside Iran. But this was not so much a simple kneejerk reaction against the film’s social disclosures, rather an attack against liberal opinion. At the time the government publicly released an interview with a religious reactionary and film students of the Allameh Tabatabaii University in Tehran (run by the Ministry of Sciences, Research and Technology), who said, “This film discloses the realities and facts of the Eastern and religious societies. So it is not beneficial to the people to become aware of such facts and realities.

Therefore, we need not let the people know any of these truths.” This shows that Asghar Farhadi is sited on the Green Line (moving somewhat aerobatically), exposing the bitter truths existing in the religious social systems of Eastern societies, revealing the degree to which the platform of the family unit is founded upon lies and how this extends to the greater society.

In the film Simin (the main female character and wife) lies to Nader (the main male character and her husband) who in turn lies to his daughter and the family of their housemaid, the latter being the symbolic representation of a typical Eastern religious family. The narrative shows how this woman has grown up telling lies and being told lies by her family, accepting its values and rules. Simin’s desire to leave Iran with her daughter and Nader’s resistance to this, wanting her to stay with him while he worries about his sick father, is symbolic of the Iranian ‘condition’. In response to the importance of the retaining his (Persian) heritage of responsibilities to his

aged parent, Nader chooses to give up his wife to the West. In contrast, the housemaid and her family are seen as typically religious. They continue to lie and deceive to protect their life and their ‘empty’ family—‘empty’ in the qualities of being holy, pure and meaningful. Both girls in the two families, Nader’s daughter and the housemaid’s daughter, are completely lost and confused by the events of the narrative, and in the ensuing crisis seek which is the right course to follow. At the end of the film, Nader’s daughter is especially troubled—the film ends with her impending but unannounced decision as to which parent she will support and stay with. It might well be considered that sooner or later this girl will most likely accept and approach the West, and as a ‘fulfilment of truths’.

A Separation cleverly exposes the hidden truths of Eastern religious society, with Farhadi‘s voice clearly shaking the artistic world, so focused it has caused the theocratic leaders to grit their teeth and shape their defensive retort. It might be imagined that Farhadi‘s path will be continued by a new generation of Farhadis, who through the luminous artistry of film, will convey to the world the meaning, distinctive quality and ‘colour’ of the Green Line, its resistance, and in the context of East-West how long it is able to play the role of mediator or neutralist.

However, I believe that sooner or later given religious theocracy’s ‘empty hand’ of supporting such brilliant artists and high quality cultural platforms of expression such as cinema, the Green Line will lose its ‘colour’ and acquiesce to Western art and its realistic approach. As an example, we can consider the Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who magnified the power of the East but after fifteen years of making socially revealing films, escaped to the West as an asylum seeker in 2005 after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Paris he then founded a pro-Mir-Hossein Moussavi political campaign against the Islamic regime of Iran. Since then he has altered his artistic approach, now active in performing arts and politics.

In this text it can be claimed that the new generation or wave of creative emigrants, for example artists, filmmakers and writers, who have moved (or are willing to) from East to West, are The Green Line. Having escaped their origins, through seeking a new identity often in their new homeland they are neither considered Western nor Eastern, neither ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’. Accordingly, their powerful voice is the colour green, an overlapping combination of both ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’. But in conclusion I don’t see that this Green Line can even give any fundamental help to the East.

Note 1 A Separation (Jodái-e Náder az Simin, ‘The Separation of Nader from Simin’) (2011), written and directed

by Asghar Farhadi, focuses on an Iranian middle-class couple who separate, and the conflicts that arise when the husband hires a lower-class care giver for his elderly father who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. A Separation won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, becoming the first Iranian film to win the award. See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Separation

Political form and content

Omar Kholeif Larissa Sansour is an artist born in Jerusalem, Palestine who currently lives in London. Her work, which largely takes shape through the medium of film and video, is a bricolage of cultural forms. Sansour’s most utilised technique is that of appropriation. Borrowing heavily from the language of film and pop culture, the artist unfolds cultural stereotypes of the so-called Middle East, by untangling the innate hypocrisy inherent within society’s most widely mediated platforms. One of Sansour’s primary preoccupations is looking at the manner in which the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is presented to the international public through the mass media. She often re-enacts elements of the ongoing ‘conflict’ in her work, but rather than merely use self-referential cultural icons, she transposes iconography that will be familiar to majority audiences—spaghetti westerns, science fiction films, and graphic novels.

One of Sansour’s most infamous recent works is a nine-minute short film and photo series entitled, Nation Estate (2012). The project presents a clinically dystopian world that the artist has proposed as a remedy to the seeming ‘deadlock’ of the Middle East. The story begins with the protagonist (Sansour) returning to Palestine after a trip abroad, most likely in Jordan—the most familiar site of Palestinian emigration and refuge. She returns home only to find that all of the cities of The Occupied Territories and the West Bank have been transposed into one giant skyscraper. The entire Palestinian population is now ‘living the high-life’

in a glossy apartment block, that houses flats that are half New York loft apartment and half London council estate in style. Each city sits on its own floor; Jerusalem, the holiest of them all, on the thirteenth floor; Ramallah —the West Bank’s newly inaugurated capitol on the fourteenth and Sansour’s native Bethlehem on the twenty-first. The tense trips between cities, which were formerly patrolled by Israeli check points, are now easily accessibly by an elevator, and each floor’s lobby boasts representations of iconic landmarks. Our protagonist makes her way through the various security procedures and begins to produce a sci-fi meal using traditional Palestinian ingredients. Interestingly, the visual representation and the language that Sansour has appropriated for the film’s poster, ‘Living the high life’ is modelled after early poster campaigns from the Zionist community in Palestine, who sought to propose an exclusive utopian State.

By using the language of science fiction, Sansour draws correlations between the insular and the occult, complicating these ideological stances.

The resulting work can be considered, in some respects, a critique of the insularity of religion, particularly, religion that functions as a form of cultural identity. Still, the outlandishness of her proposal is illustrative of the artist’s desire to reflect on the inherent ironies, which make this most contestable of political tensions almost laughable in its inanity. This propensity towards using absurd humour can be evidenced throughout her career, and most explicitly in the artist’s preamble to The Nation Estate,

6 5 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013 Opposite: Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (video still), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

with the 2009 work A Space Exodus. Here, Larissa Sansour slices a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey and casts herself in the lead role of the astronaut making her way to the moon.1 In a political act, the artist claims the moon for Palestine, by puncturing its surface with a somewhat iridescent looking Palestinian flag—her gesture suggesting that the Palestinian community may only find sanctuary on the moon from this moment on.

Yet despite the poignancy of this scene, the artist cuts through the tragedy by infusing her film with features, which turn it into a critical pastiche of popular culture. Her lead character, with her oriental-styled space-woman boots, and the comic oriental soundtrack composed from Arabesque chords rupture through the serious beats. Tonally, the picture shifts from serious science fiction to comedy. While Nation Estate tackles these very themes less allegorically, it is no less humorous. This can be gleaned from the slapstick of one of the film’s photographs, in which the protagonist sits amidst piles of oversized half-eaten dishes—perhaps an allegory of an insatiable Palestinian hunger? Sansour’s face—stunned with a faint suggestion of a grin—informs us that Sansour is keen to let her audience in on the joke.

Nation Estate was developed as a response to an invitation to be part of the Lacoste Elysée Prize, a prestigious photography award presented by the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sansour was offered 4000 to develop a new commission, which would subsequently be presented in a group exhibition and to a jury who would award a winner from the group of shortlisted artists. The artist professed to being allowed free rein by the museum staff, with whom she was in contact. However, in December 2011, Lacoste, the prize’s sponsor made demands that Sansour’s nomination be revoked, deeming her work “too pro-Palestinian” to support. The artist’s dismay continued when the museum asked her to sign an agreement which asserted that she had chosen to withdraw herself from the competition voluntarily. During the Christmas holidays in December 2011, Sansour was propelled to send out a press release with the heading, ‘No Room for Palestinian Art’ outlining the ordeal, with the three images that she had developed for the prize attached. Within twenty-four hours of sending out her messsage, there ensued an outpouring of support for Sansour from around the world, gaining such leverage that—days later—the museum decided to cancel the prize altogether, and to forego its associations with Lacoste. When I asked Sansour about the rationale behind Lacoste’s decision-making, she asserted that it was the politics of the work that propelled the financial backer to take the standpoint that they did. Asked about the relationship between politics and artistic expression, Sansour argued: Granting an artist complete artistic freedom and then limiting this freedom as an afterthought because you don’t like what you see is completely inappropriate. And stating a desire to remain apolitical as a brand simply does not cut it. The apolitical argument is fundamentally flawed. Politics is omnipresent. The Lacoste Elysée Prize being a photo award, it is crucial to understand how politics plays a part in so much photographic work, in portraits, in architectural photo series, etc.2 At the time, Sansour asked me to comment on the incident, and I responded accordingly by penning an article for Frieze. At the time, I was rather optimistic about the events that had ensued. Indeed, what followed suggested that censorship of an artist’s work or her individual agency would not be acceptable within the inter-connected global arena. Furthermore, the cancelling of the prize proposed that any artist (with enough grassroots support) could override any form of institutional bureaucracy, especially corporate sponsorship, which has increasingly begun to form a cornerstone of funding for most major museums and arts institutions. Nevertheless, although the incident that surrounded Nation Estate was illustrative of a popular subversion of corporate institutionalism, the question remains —what occurs when an artist is producing work that doesn’t necessary tie into such a grand political narrative? Sansour was fortunate in that she was

able to garner the support of online activists from a broader spectrum than the art world itself to support her right to artistic expression. But what if an artist was being censored for tackling local politics? Or minority rights and was likewise, censored from an institutional opportunity? The support that Palestinians have within the international community is tantamount to a large-scale interest group. Contrarily, I wonder, what would have been the reaction had the censored artist been Egyptian, Canadian, or Thai, for example? I have in my own experience seen similar events occur to artists who have produced artworks that have candidly addressed queer politics, and likewise, other local issues.

Still my scepticism and frustration does not end there. Larissa Sansour, I believe, is now at the risk of becoming an artist known almost exclusively because of this controversy. As an editor of two publications that critically seek to analyse visual culture in North Africa and the wider region, I often receive draft essays and reviews citing the furore around Nation Estate as an indicative attitude towards all Palestinian (and at times, all Arab) visual culture. The more Sansour continues to garner press for this particular incident, the more likely her work will become entrenched in a dialogue about cultural attitudes towards Palestinians, as opposed to developing discourse around the form, concept, or ideas that espouse her work. This is not a case where the adage “all press is good press” is applicable.

Sansour is not attempting to sell a blockbuster movie or a celebrity tell-all book, but rather, to produce critical artwork that is discussed, theorised and canonised amongst fellow artistic practitioners. For this to occur, investigation into her practice must grow to reference not only different socio-political contexts, but also adopt different formal manifestations.

Some of the artist’s most challenging work I believe has grown from collaborations with other artists—some of whom have seemed like unlikely peers. For example, Trespass the Salt, (2011), a collaboration with Youmna Chlala (Lebanon/USA) is a hushed conversation between two groups of people seated around a dinner table. Here, the artists seek to dissolve the stereotypical assumptions of neighbouring nations, Lebanon and Palestine. A table with an overwhelming amount of food sits at the centre of two attractive groups, whose desire seems to be un-satiated by the gluttonous quantities before them. Through the spatial set up of this three-screen installation, it seems that these individuals all appear to be occupying the same dinner table. Yet, anyone with knowledge of the region will be aware that for these two communities, the Lebanese and the Palestinians, it is almost impossible for them to unite in such a way —borders dividing them. Over the course of a looped eleven minutes, the two groups speak in performed tongues about the most banal of things —their body language, sometimes uptight and at other times sensual, binds the individuals together.

Another popular collaboration that the artist has pursued has been the graphic novel, produced with Oreet Ashery, entitled, The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (2009). The alter egos for each artist, Sansour and Ashery, are granted superpowers and the support of local female ninjas, in order to help them save the future fate of Palestine. Interestingly however, instead of operating purely as a piece of educational material, or as one might assume, as activism, the project is perhaps more unique because it formally uses the narrative of the graphic novel to address adolescent human desires such as, gaming, play and fantasy. Larissa Sansour’s work is conceptually driven by a desire to re-appropriate the frameworks most often associated with popular culture, that is the American good guys versus the Arab fundamentalists (as in the FOX TV series 24, 2001-10; or in Showtime’s appalling Homeland, 2011-present), and to turn these archetypes into agents for an oppositional cause. By upsetting the formal balance, Sansour invigorates her viewers by requiring them not to suspend their disbelief. With this approach, she raises questions about the political positioning of nations, personas, objects, and perhaps, most crucially, of history and its contested self.

Notes 1 Recently seen in Beyond the last sky: Contemporary Palestinian photography & video, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 1 September–18 November, 2012 2

Interview with the artist, 28 February 2012

Rethinking the possibilities of the monument in the face of histories of dispossession This conversation between the Melbourne artist Tom Nicholson and Palestinian curator Jack Persekian took place in Jerusalem in November 2012 during preparations for the inaugural Qalandiya International (QI), an event of which Persekian is the founder and director, and in which Nicholson participated as one of a number of international artists invited to produce new commissioned works. The QI is a biennial event that takes place across Palestinian cities, towns, and villages. It focuses on exhibiting contemporary Palestinian and international art, highlighting valuable architectural sites, and includes talks, walks and performances. For the past decade, “Qalandiya” has been associated with the infamous Israeli checkpoint that continues to suffocate the West Bank, disconnecting it from Jerusalem and the rest of the world. This checkpoint has been highly pervasive in the media and in the visual and literary works produced in and about Palestine.

Countless stories about Palestinians’ daily suffering and subjugation take place there, offering sad but true glimpses of the oppressive regime of the occupation. However, “Qalandiya” suggests other connotations that have been deliberately smeared or totally erased over the years, but which, with a more intimate look, could be uncovered—the Qalandiya Airport for example (or the Jerusalem International Airport as it was initially called), the Qalandiya refugee camp, and Qalandiya village (which the Wall has divided into separate parts). Qalandiya is where many paradoxes meet. It was the point of connection with the rest of the world until 1967 and became the symbol of disconnection, isolation, segregation and fragmentation in 2000.

As part of an effort to track the processes and forms of engagement generated by the commissioned works for the QI, Persekian filmed a number of interviews with participating artists. His conversation here, with Nicholson, centres upon Comparative monument (Palestine), the work which was shown, as part of the QI, in the exhibition Gestures in time, co-curated by Lara Khaldi and Katya Garcia-Anton. Conceived as a proposition for a future monument, the work was articulated as nine stacks of one thousand different two-sided offset printed posters, configured as a single line in a disused tile factory in Jerusalem’s old city. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a set of posters, which were also pasted up around Ramallah, in the West Bank.

JACK PERSEKIAN: We are trying to document the projects that are important to us because they have been developed through a relationship that starts with our invitation, followed by an exploratory visit and culminating with a production/work, trying to see how the place and its context factors into the project we are eventually presenting. When you sent me that email with different proposals, I was really intrigued by the monuments in your hometown of Melbourne in Australia that have the word “Palestine” on them. And I was wondering what is it that brings the word “Palestine”to those places? Can you tell me about your project in detail? What you discovered when you came to Palestine, what are the most striking things in your opinion in terms of the discoveries you have made about the whole context of the Australian involvement with the IsraeliPalestinian conflict?

Opposite: Tom Nicholson, Comparative monuments (Palestine), 2012 installation view at Qalandiya International, Gestures in Time Page 68: Comparative monuments (Palestine) posters were pasted on walls throughout Jerusalem during Qalandiya International Photos courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

TOM NICHOLSON: In the way that many projects begin, Comparative monument (Palestine) started with a very simple impulse. I was in a tiny town about three hours away from Melbourne, called Mooroopna, where I was working on another project, engaging with a specific history of Aboriginal resistance to colonialism. That project was focused on an event in 1939 when Yorta Yorta people walked off the Cummeragunja mission, which had become kind of small concentration camp, crossed the Murray River, and formed their own autonomous community, at first as an encampment on the Victorian side of the river, and later on the flats between Shepparton and Mooroopna. This was the project that you saw for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in March 2012.

It was night when I was in Mooroopna and I saw this white war memorial, really brightly illuminated, a rotunda very disproportionate in size to the smallness of the town, bearing the word “Palestine”. Before we began to have our conversation about the QI, I was completely arrested by this, and photographed it that night. It was the isolation of that word on the monument. It didn’t say, for example, “Our soldiers served in Palestine”.

There was just this declaration or invocation: “Palestine”. Subsequently I discovered other similar monuments throughout suburban Melbourne, including one in the suburb I grew up in. The project began with this simple observation, about what the word or the name “Palestine” does or means isolated in that way. It was obviously intended to refer to a set of meanings in that era of the British mandate in Palestine that are different to the meanings that the name “Palestine” has come to assume, because of the subsequent history. This simple experience triggered the thought or the question about whether it would be possible to re-animate those monuments, and to have them function not just in relation to that history of 1917 and the capture of Beersheba or Bir Saba,1 which is the monuments’ intended subject, but also to animate a relationship to the events subsequent to that, and particularly to 1948, to the Nakba2, and to the meanings the name “Palestine” hold for us now. Between that point and now there has been a long itinerary, first of all to locate as many monuments around Melbourne that bear this word (I located nine in and around Melbourne, all made in the 1920 and 1930s, and belonging to this monumental convention of isolating individual place names, such as “Gallipoli”). As I became involved in the process of photographing them I began to consider how they might be used, but it was not clear to me how I would use them until I arrived here in Palestine. Before I arrived here, it was clear what their meaning might be in Australia, but I did not have a sense here of how they might be activated in this context, here in Palestine.

JACK PERSEKIAN: There are other names and places listed on plaques of these monuments as you stated, but why does it say “Palestine”?

TOM NICHOLSON: Many war monuments in Australia were made for the initial purpose of commemorating the First World War and have accumulated or had encrusted upon them other plaques for other conflicts, from the Second World War to the Gulf War or UN Peacekeeping roles.

On the war monument in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg for example, the name “UN Peacekeepers” is immediately above the inscription “Palestine”.

I have always found the palimpsests on these kinds of monuments fascinating. There is one in Florence, near the train station, at the end of Via Panzani, an obelisk that has been encrusted with twenty or so plaques, one of which commemorates the partisans who fought against fascism.

67 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

On the other side there is another plaque that commemorates all soldiers who fought for the Italian homeland, which of course includes the fascists the partisans were fighting against. There is something important about these inadvertent contradictions, the more complex meanings that arise within a form that by its nature works towards an unambiguous declaration, what Mihnea Mircan calls the monument’s “Freudian slips”.

Many monuments were made in Australia to commemorate the events of the First World War, including the famous capture of Bir Sab’a by the Australian Light Horse, which is regarded in military history as the last great cavalry charge. It is a very celebrated event in Australian military history, probably now less well known than Gallipoli.

Living in a country with an imperial relationship to Britain you are always aware of the ways one place implies the presence of another place.

For example the reading room of the State Library of Victoria, where I do a lot of research for my work, is modeled on the reading room of the British Library. In a city like Melbourne, there is often this sense of one place having embedded within it another place—in a very regressive sense in the context of imperialism. What I am interested in as an artist is trying to mobilise this sense of one place being embedded in another, but towards a kind of internationalism or solidarity. That word “Palestine” on these monuments stands for something that we would both reject, that both Palestine and Australia existed within the British Empire. I am trying to use this imperial link for a different kind of connection, which might be one of shared history, but also one of shared responsibility for that history. That sense of presence of one place within another is of course incredibly acute here too, perhaps more so than anywhere else on earth. Through its religious significance, and its often-dystopic histories, this place ‘contains’ many other places, and there is a sense that these monuments reflect that too.

JACK PERSEKIAN: What did you discover when you came here to Palestine and to Bir Sab’a? In our earlier correspondence we didn’t consider Bir Sab’a, but then in your research it came up as very much linked to the history of those monuments.

TOM NICHOLSON: True. At the beginning Bir Sab’a wasn’t my focus but at a certain point I realised that it was the key to animating these monuments, and also a way to move them from being things of generality (with the name “Palestine” they are not inscribed with specific histories). Focusing on Bir Sab’a was a way to locate this project in a set of specific histories, which are interrelated in a very odd way. Bir Sab’a was a critical city in the fall of the Ottoman presence in Palestine, subsequently coinciding with the beginning of the British Mandate. The capture of Bir Sab’a on 31 October 1917, the event these Australian monuments are designed to commemorate, took place just days before the Balfour Declaration on 2 November (which declared the British Government supported a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine), and was causally quite intricately involved with that declaration as well. But then it also has this horrific history in the Nakba, when the city was completely cleared by the Israeli army in late 1948. Once I began to think about Bir Sab’a specifically it became a pathway through these histories. When I arrived in Palestine, very early on we took a car trip to Bir Sab’a and I used a recently released book Once Upon a Land, produced by the Israeli NGO Zochrot, which includes an itinerary through Bir Sab’a, looking at different material residues of the Palestinian city that was effectively destroyed in 1948. That became for me a way to encounter the old city and its houses, its mosque, its streets, over the course of one long hot day of walking. Initially I thought that a proposition to re-locate these nine Australian monuments bearing the name “Palestine” to Bir Sab’a would be located in this very interesting central part of the historical city, where there’s the mosque, the colonial governor’s house, and Allenby Park, and all of these structures and forms and spaces that are rich with allusions to that imperial history.

But it was only at the very end of the day, as the sun was setting, at the last stop in this itinerary, with our heads filled with these imagined lives that we were constantly trying to project onto the material traces of the old city, that we arrived at this incredible open space wedged between the new Israeli city and the old Ottoman city. It was a space you could easily mistake for a derelict wasteland, surrounded by a fence without a gate. It was the old Islamic cemetery—the white specks punctuating the expanse were not only rocks and rubble, but headstones. It was both an incredibly moving and disturbing experience, particularly alongside the urban forms of superfast consumerist Israeli lifestyle, with malls and shiny new office blocks. As a raw experience it was very affecting and in that sense it felt clear that this was something to try to activate in the work.

One thing that has often governed my relationship to classical monuments is their absurd scale, their bulk, their overblown physicality and weight. There was something profoundly inverse to that characteristic of the monument in that vast expanse, that largely emptied space, all light and air. The work became a proposition, a proposition for a future monument, to make a line of these nine re-located Australian monuments, which would be a sixty metre long roadblock cutting across the busy eight lane city street running alongside the old cemetery. I imagined it as a grossly oversized kind of historical marker (of which we have many in Australia—“such and such walked past here!”), an absurdly overlarge thing was appealing in relationship to that space that was materially scarcely there.

The simple-mindedness of artmaking sometimes becomes useful. At a certain point when I was writing the text that describes this proposition, this very basic impulse from the beginning returned: that name “Palestine”, isolated. The proposition became the idea of a highly laborious and uneconomical way to make a line: “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”, “Palestine”.

That line, with these elaborate structures around them, somehow became the answer to the form of the work. It was a way to make those nine names sit next to each other, on the one hand to point to that cemetery and all that it means, but also to suggest a line that would bar the route the Israel army took into the city in 1948. I was thinking of the waves of soldiers who had been through that place. One of the things that is very striking when you come from Australia, when you circulate around Israel, is how intensely militarised the society is. You see soldiers everywhere. I know this is something you are completely used to, but it is very hard for me to get accustomed to. The idea there are still soldiers passing through that space in Bir Sab’a constantly was also part of my thinking, that the line would be maybe something that would speak to them in the same way that it would have spoken to the soldiers who passed through there in 1948.

JACK PERSEKIAN: I would now ask you how you think you would continue this project, what would be the interesting avenue you would want to discover?

TOM NICHOLSON: In a basic way, this work was informed by a desire to generate it through the relationship between two contexts, Australia and Palestine, and specifically between two colonial processes. It was a way to test the extent to which one can productively place these contexts or processes in relationship to one another, specifically Israeli colonialism and what happened in 1948 on the one hand, and what the British did in Australia, beginning in 1788, on the other. There is a kind of echo between Australia and Israel, that both were established upon an original crime that cannot be admitted or named. The euphemism we use for 26 January in Australia is symptomatic of that. In the case of Palestinian dispossession, what I find interesting is that people like the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, have very meticulously traced the process of violence and dispossession, the hundreds of Palestinian villages cleared then bulldozed in 1948, but also insisted upon finding a language to talk about it, something that is also very overtly expressed in the aims of that NGO Zochrot in Tel Aviv 3, to introduce the term “Nakba” into Hebrew.

Those colonial histories are not intellectual curiosities, but a daily reality, a lived thing in both contexts that is part of the way the memory of those histories is perpetuated. You said recently that this is one of the great failures of the Israeli project and it’s very similar in Australia: that the amnesia of the settler colonists stands in relation to this profound remembering of the dispossessed, which can’t be dislodged, in large part because it is simply a daily lived reality. Those echoes across the two contexts—though one wouldn’t want to be too simplistic making linkages between them—is something I am really interested in and was part of the attempt to make an allusion to the history of the Nakba in this first project. These linkages would be the thing I am interested in working upon further.

We talked recently about the title for this project, Comparative Monument (Palestine). I’m interested in using that again, the idea of a comparative monument, as a framework to work between the two contexts, to make forms that attempt to respond to the problems for artmaking that each of those contexts puts forward. It’s also a way to disrupt the nature of the classical monument, which is anything but comparative. The classical monument has to make the history of one people, or one protagonist, a discreet entity, the significance of which is not in relation to anything else that would destabilise its meaning. This project has been an attempt to rethink a form—the tradition of the monument—in comparative terms, where different historical experiences are being connected or understood in relation to one another, rather than monuments being ways for people’s parochialism to be buttressed.

In a concrete sense, one of the things I am very curious about is the very strange fact of the eucalypt being so omnipresent here in Palestine.

Obviously in Australia the eucaplypt is an indigenous plant—it’s one of the things that stands as a bulwark against the process and logic of colonialism.

Eucalpyt forests in Australia were—and still are—chopped down as part of the colonial process. Here in Palestine, the eucalypt has an inverted meaning, associated with the process of writing over the landscape, in a context where forests and green-washing are part of the desire to efface Palestinian history, where, in many cases, forests of non-indigenous trees are used to literally to cover over the traces of those destroyed Palestinian villages. There’s something in that presence of the Eucalypt here as a botanical form which I am curious to work with.

Notes 1 In Australian military history, the city is normally called Beersheba. Its Arabic name is Bir Sab’a. In 1948, the Arab-Palestinian population of the city constituted 98.5% of the population, and under the UN partition plan was to be part of the Arab-Palestinian State. In October-November 1948 the nascent Israeli army conquered Bir Sab’a as part of Operation Yoav, and the entirety of the city’s Palestinian population was killed or expelled. Much of the city’s population was gathered together at the city’s historical mosque and eventually forcibly transported by truck to Gaza. The city is today known in Israel as Be’er Sheva 2 Nakba (the day of catastrophe) is the Arabic name for the commemoration of the Palestinian people’s forced displacement that followed the Israeli Declaration of Independance in 1948 3 Zochrot is a Tel Aviv-based Israeli NGO: http://zochrot.org/en. Their recent exhibition Towards a Common Archive/Video Testimonies by Zionist Fighters in 1948 documented hundreds of hours of footage of the testimonies of Zionist fighters, members of the Haganah and Palmach militias, and the fledgling Israeli army, recounting in very specific terms the process of killing, dispossession and destruction in Palestinian villages and towns in 1948, from the position of both protagonist and witness

6 9 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Seeking contexts for that ubiquitous place of public gatherings —the community hall: Performance Space’s Halls for Hire

REBECCA CONROY In 2010 the Artist Run Initiative Bill+George received a ‘cease and desist’ order by the City of Sydney. Operating from a warehouse in a rapidly gentrifying Redfern, the members of the space were ordered to cease operating what the Council’s building compliance department nominated as an unlicensed “multi purpose artist hall”. As one of the directors of the space, the idea of being referred to as a “hall” prompted supercilious laughter; not because of the activities it implied we were doing (although that was somewhat funny), but because it revealed the stark limits to the bureaucratic language of urban planning. Looking back now, it is not a massive stretch of the imagination to see that in many ways Bill+George did function like a “hall”, providing rehearsal space and studio space for a specific community of people, as well as hosting events and gatherings. Like many community spaces or community managed resources, it too was run by a membership, albeit somewhat lapsed, due to the ongoing restrictions to our operation.

Perhaps it was the suggestion of “hall” that provoked us, with its implied notion of the ‘amateur’, much like a local musical society, or worse still the ‘recreational’, or god forbid, the ‘community arts centre’. It was only later I realised the strategic beauty of aligning the artist run space with the conventional community hall; as sanctioned space, as imagined blank slate, one could in fact blend in with the masses, and perhaps get on with the work of running a space without becoming a ‘disturbance to the local amenity’. It also offered a chance for playful mimic and subversive encounter, via an appeal to pragmatic concerns, and the need to abide by the rules and regulations of a space run for a common purpose. And so I was amused and curious to hear that Performance Space would be commissioning and presenting a range of new works specifically exploring these very kinds of spaces.

Halls for Hire emerged as a curatorial idea initially under the previous directorship of Daniel Brine, and was further developed and realised by Performance Space’s current co-directors, Bec Dean and Jeff Khan. The concept was prompted by critical reflection upon the logistical difficulties of mounting work within the magnificent industrial largesse of Carriageworks, alongside questions about audience behaviour, and specifically Performance Space audiences and spatial markers of identity.

Seeking spaces and contexts for programming beyond the building immediately opened up a somewhat obvious door to that ubiquitous place of public gatherings—the community hall. Implied in its usage is

the bringing together of members of a specific community for a specific activity, which among other things, functions to extend the identity of that community. Additionally it suggests the hall to be a kind of open neutral vessel for the staging of these gatherings, and like all impossible definitions of community it leaves unspoken and excluded much more than its moniker aspires to include.

Halls for Hire was a season of six new works that ran from August until October in 2012 across a diverse spectrum of spaces, from a school of arts in Clifton on the south coast, a bowling club in the inner west, the headquarters of the Country Women’s Association in Potts Point, a sports oval in Dulwich Hill, a cemetery and church in Newtown, and a trades hall in the CBD.

Each of the artists’ work engaged with their respective sites in ways that drew attention to how resources that are owned publicly, or which operate as non-commercial entities with a membership structure, are always sites for contest and in being so, are never the neutral spaces that might be implied by the term “halls for hire”. Each engagement by the artist directly or indirectly mobilised the existing political frictions within the space, and by doing so pointed to the rapidly changing utility of the community space in the ‘engaged community’ and the marketplace of local government service delivery.

Under New South Wales planning legislation each of the sites is technically classified as a “Place of Public Assembly”. Principal to their use is the “occasion for gathering”, which ostensibly mirrors the services provided by that of a dedicated gallery space or theatre building, designated as they are both for the production and consumption of culture. Pragmatically Halls for Hire was both a neat curatorial concept and rich site of benign or embedded conflict. It lent itself perfectly to a program of performance and encounter, in that each of the sites is already designed for large gatherings of people either for sport, recreation, worship, or cultural functions.

In addition to this readymade occasion, their built forms and range of existing cultural practices provided excellent sites for the artists in the program to situate their interrogations as either encounter or activity.

These occasions for gathering ranged from the explicitly and implicitly politicised practices of cake baking and flag making, to the abridged opening and closing ceremonies of physical culture on sports ovals, and the historical fictions of underground science experiments and real life ghost stories in church cemeteries.

Central to all spaces or sites of community gathering is the dual function of reinforcing existing social structures and identities, while providing time out from the post-industrialised working week. Designated community spaces such as halls, recreational fields, clubs and places of worship, provide opportunities for members of the “community” to demonstrate their membership, to participate in publics, and to collectivise their labour around specific group identities and their interests.

Contrary to the implied neutrality of a blank canvas, in many ways the community hall/recreational field/bowling club or church can be considered a community-curated space, or a high relief mapping of the political economy. Each site, evolving from a set of cultural practices, demonstrates how resources are mobilised, by whom and for whom. In the case of Arlington Oval in Dulwich, the site for Jane McKernan’s Opening and Closing Ceremony, a turf war was erupting in the literal sense between two different user groups—local dog walkers and the local district football association. While McKernan’s particular use of the oval prompted only one noise complaint (made on a night she wasn’t rehearsing), the site itself was literally overlaid by an ongoing contest between the local communities desire to continue walking their dogs on the oval, and the local football soccer district association’s contention that money be spent on upgrading the field to a totally synthetic surface. At stake here seems to be the needs of one group who subscribe to a specific use of the resource and the local community who subscribe to a geographic affinity with the field as a general community resource. But as with any notion of community, any attempt at definition is bound to bring one into conflict with those whom the definition excludes.

Community spaces in general make explicit the exclusivity bound up in any community. It does this by mandating a set of compulsory requisites such as the existence of a charter or a membership structure, which binds a user to adhere to its purpose. In more recent times, compulsory public liability insurance often necessitates users of the facility to be an

incorporated association bound by the regulations of the Department of Fair Trade. By necessity, this assumes a level of organisational competency, not available to all communities equally, and demands additional volunteer time that disproportionately affects those communities who have the least available to them.

Membership structures define the identity of the community and help regulate the purpose for gathering; they can exist as either a desire to re-inscribe the dominant power structures, or else to resist and speak back to dominant structures of power. In post-War years, civic spaces across Australia expanded as labour and nationalist sentiment mobilised their respective political powers. These spaces were typically the purview of white identity, or associated with organised cultural and political groupings such as the Country Women’s Association, the Returned Servicemen’s Leagues Clubs, Trade Unions, Bowling Clubs and Rotary Clubs—all traditionally allied with a predominantly white economic class, fundamentally patriarchal and derived largely from British cultural traditions. A slight tempering of the White Australia policy followed the advent of post-War immigration, and the presence of halls for hire allowed many of these newly arrived communities to forge their identities. In turn these spaces played a significant role in supporting the welfare of these recently arrived immigrants, thus contributing to shaping the character and vitality of many Australian towns and city centres.

The community hall, recreational public space, trade union hall, school of arts, are all principally amateur spaces designated for nonprofessional and non-commercial activity. This sets the art exhibition museum or theatre building apart from the relatively low entry barriers offered by the community space. By making membership explicit, and contingent on access and use, the community hall or recreational field makes transparent what the art gallery or theatre space renders obscure.

While the marketing strategies of the designated art space or theatre may aspire to a broader demographic, the reality is that the curatorial content of

71 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013

Opposite: Clifton School of the Arts Above clockwise from top left: Brown Council, Mass Action: 137 cakes in 90 hours Nighttime Twilight artist Hossein Ghaemi Nighttime Twilight Opening and Closing Ceremony artist Jane McKernan Nighttime Twilight artist Zoe Meagher Brown Council, Mass Action: 137 cakes in 90 hours All photos courtesy the artists

any venue is determined by understanding the specificities and distinctions of their respective communities. In the case of Performance Space it assumes knowledge of and interest in contemporary performance, and more often than not implies association with an artistic network, either professionally or via some other informal connection. This makes Halls for Hire, along with a number of other recently curated seasons presented by Performance Space particularly interesting. In a similar vein, its ongoing Clubhouse program draws attention to the benefits of membership culture, as the desire to play with the edges of this exclusivity presents opportunities for non-members to come into contact with contemporary performance in Australia, while also offering the artist a wonderfully complex set of opportunities to explore engagement in comedic and provocative ways.

Each site came loaded with particular audience expectations, architecturally structured around a central activity—a game of bowling, a social bar, a football match, an organising space, or place of worship—and readymade viewing experiences, and audience configurations which were predicated on participation and involvement. These already structured relationships between viewer and viewed, performer and audience in the community spaces made strange the conventional role of the passive audience member, and made messy the beginnings and endings of the ‘art encounter’. While the works themselves drew upon the social histories, audience behaviours and architectural forms of the actual spaces, they were reframed with a critical reflexivity and a heightened awareness of the participant’s encounter. This engendered a certain critical distancing in the activity and risked generating a kind of alienation in a space that otherwise functioned as a platform for genuine cultural engagement.

The bowling green, in recent years perhaps best illustrates the pleasure to be found by a younger crowd of urban dwellers rediscovering the cheap club prices of a bowling club combined with a recreational activity to which they are not bound by membership. The exoticising of the recreational pursuit of bowling, signified by its opposite marker, ‘the senior’ together with its designated social space makes it useful to a young inner-city crowd as an occasion to gather and mobilise their identities as vital, connected and popular, demonstrating their ability to keep pace with a rapidly changing menu of cultural identifiers. For the bowling club, as their active members literally die off, any strategy for attracting new members is necessary to stave off the liquidators. Alex Davies’ work located in the basement of the bowling club, fictionalised a scientific experiment and invited the public to assist in its quest to verify and document “unexplained electronic media aberrations”, providing a quirky historical frame to the site’s heritage. Similarly, St Stephens Church in Newtown which served as the site for a number of works in the long running NightTime program, recognises the need to collaborate with other organisations and community user groups, such as the Camperdown Dog Walking Club, in order to remain as active sites. The Anglican Church is certainly aware that its rapidly diminishing congregation is located precisely in a suburb, which counted in the last census data as having the highest concentration of people professing no religion. To an extent Halls for Hire, regardless of its at times irreverent content, was an opportunity to collaborate with the church in remaining open to the broader community.

Other works in the program adopted or extended the site’s original purpose. Spring Cursive led by Barbara Campbell was a workshop activity hosted at The Clifton School of Arts and consisting of calligraphy instruction and a guided walk by a local expert in the native flora alongside the escarpment leading to the building’s dramatic location facing the ocean.

The Clifton School of Arts is one of one hundred and forty such schools established in greater Sydney during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also named in various places as Mechanic’s Institutes. Although the moniker of a “school of arts” conjures up easels and dance classes, the building emerges from a tradition of providing teachings in science and liberal arts philosophy to the working class, which emerged initially in Glasgow in the early 1800s. The idea spread to Britain’s other colonies, and was particularly taken up with verve in Australia. Many of these volunteer-run institutions for learning later evolved into the TAFE system, local libraries, and other recreational amenities, as local government infrastructure developed.

The chance to respond to the pedagogic aspects of the building’s charter seemed organic to the artists’ current research at the nearby University, as was the timing of the workshop at the commencement of Spring, and Campbell’s desire to bring together the expert and the amateur in a mutually beneficial encounter. However, setting it apart from the building’s heritage was the differently configured class composition of the Spring Cursive’s participants, the workshop’s abridged duration, and a kind of heritage tourism brought on by the fact that most of the participants came from outside the area. These factors bring into focus the inevitable displacement and estrangement of ‘place’ from its ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ function.

The artists in Halls for Hire curated each space as a set of cultural practices, shaped by its social histories and architectural forms, by making strange the activity that defines it—juxtaposing, or bringing attention to the rituals of the site through their abstraction. All-female performance group Brown Council’s attempt to bake all one hundred and thrity-seven entries from the famous CWA cookbook within a ninety hour time frame, serves as a case in point—by taking a convention and exploding its primary purpose into gigantic ridiculous competition.

Of course there is a wry humour in this. But in mocking there was also much that was genuine in the Brown Council’s engagement with the history and the real women behind this iconic Australian organisation.

While the politics of CWA may be far removed from the queer spaces of contemporary performance familiar to the members of Brown Council, its organisational structures and collectivised labour of women bear significant crossovers. A resonant spatial politic emerges, as the kitchen becomes a battleground and an otherwise ordinary domestic occupation is rendered triumphant. Assumptions about gender and labour, private and public sphere are brought into contact with one another in ways that trouble the easy separation of oppression into simple categories of the powerful and the powerless, activism and women’s rights. Mass Action: 137 cakes in 90 hours demonstrates the subversive power of mimicry, particularly when it is underpinned by a genuine desire to honour as well as satirise the collective spaces of women.

In town-planning terms, the community hall stands alongside the postal service, the school, the theatre, the bank, and the church all of which were designed and determined during the industrialising era, when the hetero-normative family operated without question, and technology did not yet account for a rapid and fluid expansion of knowledge industries.

Today, all these spaces have been forced to diversify their functions and find new audiences, as their raison d’etre diminishes through new patterns of consumption in a ‘24/7’ global economy. As cities and urban centres globally are predicted to overtake regional areas as sites where the overwhelming majority of the population will reside, the need for connection and carefully managed populations will result in the evolution of ever more complex social networks and spaces for community formation. In a neoliberal sense, the construction of community yields a profoundly lucrative platform for the recruitment of citizens as active participants in the marketplace.

In particular, as sites for the mobilisation of identity, the community space and recreational zone take on an expanded role in extending the platforms of desire for ‘lifestyle’ in newly cosmopolitan urban growth areas.

In its darkest re-imagining, the ‘hall for hire’ of the future could become the privatising mechanism by which the community exists principally as desire: only available to those who can afford it, and where membership is structured less around a process of participatory selfdetermination, and more on a sliding scale of ticket prices into a community commensurate with wage earning capacity. Fortunately, Halls for Hire as a curious and playful season of works, opts into a future where the existing range of cultural practices, histories and architectural forms can be re-imagined as transformative sites to reignite community, through participation, intergenerational dialogue, and strange encounters.

Draw on your creativity… … join us at our new campus at Glenside Cultural Precinct Congratulations to our 2012 Graduates!

Anna Gore Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Hatched: National Graduate Show 2013 Jenna Pippett Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Hatched: National Graduate Show 2013 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2013 City of Adelaide Award Mary Ann Santin Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2013 San Remo Best New Talent Visual Arts Award

Adelaide Central School of Art is highly regarded for delivering outstanding education and training for a wide community of visual artists, and for the quality and success of its graduates and teachers. In our studio-based teaching program we emphasise structured learning, practical skills and intellectual development.

As a single-focus art school, all classes are led by our talented lecturers who are leading practitioners in their field.

Associate Degree of Visual Art Bachelor of Visual Art Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) • Full-time or part-time study options • Day and evening classes • Extended 34 week academic year • Pro Hart Scholarship open to Year 12 students • Defer fees through FEE-HELP Semester 1 18 February – 28 June 2013 Semester 2 15 July – 22 November 2013*

Short Course Program Our next Short Course series commences 6 May in our new premises Please contact the School to receive a program Take a tour We conduct regular tours of our new campus: call Andrew on 8299 7300 to make a booking Watch video interviews with our graduates and staff

by Sasha Grbich at http://vimeo.com/centralschool

* Applications for new students close 11 June 2013

image Ingrid Kellenbach Spacious Painting and Drawing Studio Filled with Beautiful Light, 2013 studio dimensions 12200 x 6670 x 3700 mm (L x W x H) one of five Painting and Drawing studios

PO Box 225 Fullarton, South Australia 5063 T 08 8299 7300 F 08 8172 0504 7 Mulberry Road Glenside [via Gate 1, 226 Fullarton Road] info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au

Affiliated with Flinders University and the Helpmann Academy

Bold Brave New Art

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Benjamin Forster Jess MacNeil Alex Martinis Roe Sanne Mestrom Scott Mitchell Joshua Petherick Linda Tegg

March 16 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; May 12, 2013 accaonline.org.au Image caption: Alex Martinis Roe,The Practice of Doing, 2013