DEAN CROSS 'Sad State' @ CCAS

SAD STATE

DEAN CROSS

Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 40+ years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.

Cover DEAN CROSS The Stain 2022

Pure pigment on Hahnmule Torchon, 169 x 84.5cm (ED 1 of 3 + AP’s)

Photograph: Courtesy the artist

SAD STATE

DEAN CROSS

Sad State (N/N consideration) (detail), 1962-2022

Timber, steel, brass, wire, felt, graphite, lacquer, iron, plastic, cardboard, dimensions variable

Image DEAN CROSS

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

There’s a dissected, standard upright 1960s Yamaha piano here, but no sound. Dean Cross’ body of work has always drawn attention to what anthropologist William Edward Hanley Stanner called, in his 1960s lecture, the Great Australian Silence on the ongoing reality of Indigenous life on this continent. The Sad State (N/N Consideration) installation actualises a vacuum of sound via a dismantled European instrument. Here are some things you may like to consider within the silence:

In 1788, merchants in China purchase sea-cucumbers from the northern part of the continent on which you are standing. Sydney is named and founded by the British Colony of New South Wales; several months later, battles begin which will come to be known as the Frontier Wars. To the north, the region now known as Papua New Guinea remains free as outsiders encircle and map it. The British continue to forcibly transform Éire into a land of large estates, decaying small towns and an ascendant, settler, Protestant elite from England and Scotland, prospering over the Gaelic-speaking Celtic peasants. The East India Company asserts territories of company rule across the Indian subcontinent, and the Mughal Empire is not happy. Venezia is a republic and a city state. Sicilia is a Kingdom. The western frontier of the newly independent United States of America continues to expand into modern-day Ohio; against the backdrop of the Northwest Indian Wars, treaty negotiations carry on with the Northwestern Indian Confederacy near the Ohio River; a serious massacre of Cherokee people is recorded in Tennessee. King Gustav III of Sweden devises a war against Russia to shore up domestic support for his autocracy. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, planter Nicolas Le Jeune is found not guilty of torturing and murdering six enslaved people in a case that comes to define the legal system’s support for the brutalisation of human property. The Ottoman Empire – whose leaders consider Christianity an antiquated, embarrassing religion – continues to stagnate. The Tây Sơn dynasty and the invading Qing empire are deep in active military conflict in Vietnam. Colonisers defeat Apache warriors in the heavy forests of the silver-rich Pinal Mountains in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The five colonies of the Viceroyalty of Nouvelle-France in North America have been ceded to Britain and Spain, and the last monarch of the Kingdom of France does not know he is on the verge of overthrow. The declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is falling under the power of the Russian Empire. The world is being made and remade by military invasion, settlement and battle; empires are ballooning and waning. Nothing is guaranteed.

It is 1788. In the Holy Roman Empire, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writes fifteen new pieces of music, including various trios and arrangements for piano. Composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose “Essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments” influenced Mozart, dies in Hamburg. In the Kingdom of Prussia, Immanuelle Kant publishes The Critique of Practical Reason, inviting his critics to provide proof of God’s existence. French author Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre publishes his Enlightenmentdefining novel Paul et Virginie, a love story set on the Île de France, now known as Mauritius, presenting an

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Une Tempête 2012-2022

Charcoal, aerosol and colour photograph on 425gsm Saunders Waterford cold pressed watercolour paper, 76 x 112cm

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

argument against slavery. The French-language opera Arvire et Évélina premieres at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris, mythologising the ancient British King Caractacus’s resistance to the Roman invasion in the first century AD; it is written by the just-deceased Antonio Sacchini, who enjoyed the patronage of Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, whose execution lies around the bend. Neoclassical artist Johann Zoffany, born in Marie Antoinette’s kingdom of origin, completes his painting Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, which records a moment in British colonial life in the Indian court of Asaf-Ud-Dowlah.

It is 1788. A piano is unloaded from the First Fleet’s HMS Sirius, along with other supplies for the new colony in Sydney. The piano’s owner, surgeon George Worgan, gifts it to settler Elizabeth Macarthur, who quickly masters God Save the King. Pianos continue to enter the colony over the next few decades, and each undergoes its own arduous and unlikely journey across oceans and land to a new home. The violent imposition of Anglophone, European culture onto the largest island in the southern hemisphere, and its immediate surrounds, has begun. (Cross’ work The Stain – an severely cropped revision of a rag-tag convict’s scurvy scars, abstracted to the point of mere dots and marks – is testament to the shameful, stigmatised blemish of early settlement in the new colony. Meet the ancestors, whoever they were.)

It is 1788. The word Australia has not been conceived, let alone written or spoken aloud. The modern nation-state of Australia – the Sad State named for Dean Cross’ exhibition on storms, stains and silence – has not yet been imagined. It does not exist.

During World War II, George Orwell wrote that a key feature of the British empire, which took theft as its goal, was that it was historically rarely acknowledged by British people. Instead, mateship and decency, fairness and egalitarianism were offered as the defining qualities of the national character. Hierarchy was dressed up as mateship, theft as hard work, state power as freedom and class as meritocracy; hypocritical double standards were projected as virtues to conceal the material reality of British imperialism’s maintenance. On this continent, settler-colonialism is intrinsic to politics and culture, and yet it still is looked past with indifference in daily life. Realised via the metaphor of the defanged piano, the implication of Sad State is that certain barbarous realities of life here, including this society’s genocidal foundations, are not just matters of the past, out of sight and out of mind, but that they are out of earshot. They are met with silence.

Lauren Carroll Harris August 2023

Lauren Carroll Harris is a writer, researcher and artist.

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Sad State exhibition installation, 2023

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

Image DEAN CROSS Sad State exhibition installation, 2023

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

Image DEAN CROSS Sad State exhibition installation, 2023

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

Image DEAN CROSS

A. Head (Glasses) 2016

Block ink on paper with timber frame and glass, 85.5 x 65cm

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

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B. Head (Amnesiac) 2016

Block ink on paper with timber frame and glass, 85.5 x 65cm

Photograph: Brenton McGeachie

Dean Cross is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney