Domestic Bliss

domestic bliss

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domestic bliss Deakin University Art Gallery 5 June to 19 July 2014

p ELIZABETH GOWER Untitled (lost and found series), 1987 Acrylic on drafting film 55 x 76 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

Introduction … objects, … domestic images, … are things you are bound to deal with.1 Urs Fischer.

Domestic bliss? Here is a nice irony. If such a desirable state exists, it must be, like happiness, momentary, and not means-tested. The couple who married last year in IKEA’s Tempe store have experienced it, symbolising to the world the romance of ‘playing house’. Perhaps they took the Swedish flatpack giant’s advertising catchcries (or calls to arms) too literally. ‘Home is the most important place in the world’ (is it? - IKEA Catalogue 2009); or the creepy, ‘Change begins at home’; or my favourite, illustrated by a big wooden cupboard, ‘Tony, here’s a Cabinet that won’t let you down’ (last one made up by me). Seriously however, IKEA’s ultimate, 4

summative slogan is aspirational; ‘A better everyday life at home’ which displays a touching faith in the power of the designed domestic space to generate a certain quantum of human happiness.

The home, this over-invested space of imagination and desire, is perfect for troubling by artists because it’s supposed to be a world that is relaxed and comfortable. But to use Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth century term this world is subject to phantasmagorias. These dreams and fears of the modern bourgeois in his city apartment, have now been transposed into phantasmagorias of consumption. IKEA serves this desire globally and, in Australia, we especially love the stuff: the five east-coast stores alone will get about 10 million visits this year.2

I do not even own my house; nor at the moment do I even have a dining table, (but am considering the Bjursta/ Henriksdal combo.) But even sans dining table, when my writing is going well, my home is the cosiest and charming of all interiors, it holds me in its palm, becoming my nest, my museum of shining, significant things; when my writing is not going well, my home is a filthy, abject prison. That is because my home, like yours, is doubled, it is both physical and psychical space. It is, according to Charles Rice, experienced as both material and immaterial, spatial, and imagistic, and these two interiorities don’t necessarily converge.3 Perhaps there is even more to it, perhaps the interior is conceptually speaking, a quadrupled space, consisting of actual space + immaterial concept, sensations, and emotions.

Another key aspect of dwelling in the interior is its purpose as a storage space for collections. In fact, so significant is this museum-like function in the modern interior that some nineteenth century French fiction, such as Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste of 1880, and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (Against Nature) of 1884, does little more than inventory the authors’ possessions.

Both novels are entirely composed of things-thingsthings; silly, valuable, cherished, loathed, useful, pointless. These objects are subject to editing, replacement, and constant additions. How to stem the rising tide of objects? ‘To dwell is to belong’, according to Heidegger, which rather cuts down on our alternatives, since to dwell is to store, array, and arrange.

But back to first principles; what is the ‘interior’?

From the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, domestic space became charged as never before with far-reaching significance. The most well-known definition of the interior is Walter Benjamin’s: ‘the interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his étui’, (his encasement, or second skin, casing, from Old French estuier; to enclose). Benjamin was talking specifically about the modern private individual’s home; and he was trying to explain ‘just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing’? Pace, Richard Hamilton, whose eponymous collage of 1956 for the This is Tomorrow exhibition in London both revelled in, and deplored, the consumerisation of the home.

Like Hamilton, Benjamin decided ‘appeal’ went hand in hand with anxiety. He proposed: ... the traces of its inhabitant are moulded into the interior; here is the origin of the detective story, which enquires into these traces and follows these tracks ...4 Here, with the appearance of the detective, of murder, mystery, and foul play, we encounter the flip side of the bliss coin. Anthony Vidler, writing beautifully on the uncanny, describes this essentially modern sensation as appearing hand-in-hand with the nineteenth century psychological interior. The uncanny as it pertains to the interior, is, he says, a domestic version of the Burkean Sublime, ‘an absolute terror, to be experienced in the comfort of the home’.5 Its favourite motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self’.6 At the heart of this anxiety, Vidler goes on, is a ‘fundamental insecurity: that of a newly established class, not quite at home in its own home’.7 There are some things Renovation Rescue and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition can’t fix.

Hal Foster, updating us on today’s interior, suggests the horror we face now is, ‘the world of total design’ with space both public and private entirely given over to imageability, an a-historical world made up entirely of projections of values of ‘functionality, rationality, efficiency, flexibility, transparency’, signalling ‘technocratic optimism’ while veiling financial and political power.8 For Foster, the ‘perfect’ house is the most uncanny as its ideologies are completely subsumed under glittering surfaces, hovering perpetually between image and object, confusing the actual with the virtual, the embodied with spectacle.

The perplexing, precarious and troubling objects in this exhibition, domestic bliss, subversively illuminate the contradictions and pleasures of the twenty-first century interior.

Dr Georgina Downey

Dr Georgina Downey is editor of Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2013 and Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Adelaide.

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Home Sweet Home: some interpretations of the domestic space and a doubled interior ‘Without it, man would be a dispersed being.

It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is the human being’s first world’.1 So Gaston Bachelard describes the domestic space in his seminal 1958 rumination on the home, The Poetics of Space. As Georgina Downey has demonstrated in her introduction, modern scholarly thought across a range of disciplines has positioned the domestic space as both psychical as well as physical. Of course, this is something that we also know intrinsically (albeit subjectively): ‘home’ is more than just four walls and a roof. Although the exhibition title makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to a picture-perfect ideal, the works in this exhibition show that the domestic space is a concept through which ideas pertaining to place, institution, value, mindfulness, politics, gender, and not to mention, familial dynamics, may be seriously explored.

Broadly, the artists in this exhibition do this in three ways: through the very materials and processes of their work; in using the domestic space as theme or setting; and thirdly, through reinterpreting or subverting held domestic traditions.

MATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS Katherine Hattam’s series of reconstituted kitchen chairs, ‘of, about, and from family,’2 had their origins around the kitchen table of the artist’s family home. Hattam collected the wooden chairs that her children, Will, Harriet and Charlie would paint bright colours; later, the chairs resided in Hattam’s studio, where they became ‘splattered with paint and life.’3 Specific Object - White (2009) refers as much in its transformation to the formal language of minimalism as to an inherent, material autobiography, and evidences an art practice that has proliferated from within the domestic space. The motif of the chair - metaphoric, anthropomorphic, standing in for a range of family members - has recurred in Hattam’s work, and in her artists’ book ‘manifesto’ Chairs and Books/The Vocabulary of Chairs (2013), she extends this thesis. Hattam’s chairs loom like characters in an ever-unfolding drama.

The work of Elizabeth Gower has also evolved through the lived experience of the domestic space and busy family life. The artist said: ‘I have often wondered whether my art process innately suited a fragmented lifestyle or whether it became fragmented because of the lifestyle. I’m not really sure which came first.’4 In both Untitled (lost and found series) (1987) and Savings #9 (2010), a bricolage of familiar, domestic materials and references to everyday objects may be found, through which the artist aims to draw attention to the detritus and wastage of contemporary consumption

t KATHERINE HATTAM

Chairs & Books/ The Vocabulary of Chairs, 2013 Artist book, individual pages 34 x 26.5 x 4 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

u YVONNE KENDALL

And it kept on growing, 2009 Curtain material, string, glue, wood, book 27 x 20 x 19 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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as well as provoke the viewer to look beyond the everyday and consider the meaning of life.5 Yvonne Kendall has similarly mined the domestic space for materials to use in her work, which have included toys, bedding, cooking moulds and curtain fabric. Kendall made And it kept on growing (2009) after relocating to another country, and speaks of the sense of relief in settling down after a long search for a permanent abode.6 For Kendall, the materials of her work are at one with her intent: ‘Textiles and household objects have a history imbued within them and this becomes an integral part of the work. People look at the works and respond intuitively...they are reminded of their Grandmother’s lounge room, for instance. I like to play with these connections and narratives.’7 Donna Marcus’ assemblages of found post-war aluminium kitchenware, such as 360 degrees (2009), a collection of gleaming muffin baking trays arranged in a modernist grid format, playfully extend this sentiment.8

The quiet repose of the ceramics of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and Prue Venables - masterful, handmade interpretations of everyday, household objects invite a moment of mindful contemplation. In the 1997 essay Truth in Form, Hanssen Pigott discussed this seeming incongruity in her work: ‘But, strange, I no longer care if the cup, with its careful handle, and balanced weight (the heritage of years of tea set making) stands unused among a quiet group of table-top objects arranged as a still life. It is still a cup - an everyday object as ordinary and simple as can be but from somewhere (because of its tense or tenuous relationship with other simple, recognized, even banal objects) pleasure comes.’9 Honor Freeman’s slip-cast porcelain sculptures present a similar dichotomy in their deference of the original (and often banal) household object.

In Days Measured (2008), Freeman pays homage to the humble kitchen sponge and bars of soap, half-used. Commemorated in their mid-life, these

p HANNAH BERTRAM

An Ordinary Kind of Ornament, New York, 2013 Ash and dust on concrete floor 300 x 400 cm Image courtesy of the artist

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so-familiar, transient objects, tenderly cast and finely hand detailed in Freeman’s beautiful pastel palette, implore us to notice the beauty in the everyday, to acknowledge the impermanent.

Similar themes may be found in the work of Hannah Bertram. Through An Ordinary Kind of Ornament, an ongoing series of fragile, ephemeral installations in which dust is transformed into ornamental carpets, Bertram explores the idea of preciousness inherent in the everyday, as well as notions of value as interpreted via ornamentation.10 In her installation for the domestic bliss exhibition, Bertram has incorporated household dust contributed by the Deakin University community from their own domestic spaces, extending the performative and site-specific aspects of the work.

STANDING ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: THE DOMESTIC SPACE AS SETTING Nadine Christensen’s No. 52 (2004) takes us to the threshold of the domestic space. Unlike the nonobjective ‘doorway’ paintings of Peter Booth,11 Christensen’s trompe-l’œil presents us with a more literal doorway into another ‘world’. Although the door to No. 52 remains firmly closed, the viewer

forever suspended in the transitional space of the threshold, a warm light emanates from within, and suggests at domestic harmony.

In contrast, Michael Doolan’s Green Story (Grandma’s House) (2007), with its velvety, uniform surface and windows and doors blankly shut is both beguiling and unsettling in its reference to the archetypal domestic setting of the cautionary fairy tale.12 Darren McGinn’s Building Blocks 2 (2013) resonates subjectively with Doolan’s work, although its archetypal form is of a more contemporary nature. Here, the artist references the ‘hip and valley’ house, a common design in urban fringe housing estates. A resident of Geelong, McGinn questions the uniformity of this urban sprawl as it propagates his home town: ‘What is it that defines place within the rapid construction of packaged communities?’13 In another reference to suburbanity, Claudia Damichi’s paintings recall the highly patterned, intensely coloured, ‘unnatural stillness’14 of the domestic interiors of the late Howard Arkley. The stage-lit objects within the domestic mise-en-scène of Damichi’s Light Conversation (2011) appear to be assembled in some

t CLAUDIA DAMICHI

Light Conversation, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 61 x 76 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery

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kind of strange conference, the silent mob of desktop lamps bearing witness to an almost suggestive interaction between the chair and the table.

SUBVERTING TRADITIONS There is a gentle humour to Lionel Bawden’s Pattern Spill (2014), fashioned from hundreds of coloured pencils, which playfully references the crochet ‘granny’ blanket and reinterprets the enduring, traditional domestic art. Similarly, through a subversion of or through referencing domestic traditions, Julia deVille, David Ray and Lucas Grogan aim to bring into question some of the more universal values of their milieu. In Egg Hunt (2012), deVille presents a taxidermied chick in a silver egg cup and arranged in a domestic dining tableau in order to highlight the relationship between the sentient being tenderly conserved by her practice and the food on our table. In Lights are on - Body is shown (2012), David Ray engages with the legacy of ornamentation through his charmingly wonky and loosely finished interpretation of the 18th century ceramic tureen, and demonstrates the tension between tradition and relevance in contemporary life. Lucas Grogan’s The Wedding Quilt (2013) celebrates the domestic art of

quilting and draws upon the tradition’s platform for social and political message.15 Self-portraits, some 4,000 blue roses and epigrams sourced from signs at marriage equality rallies, including ‘Don’t be a shit let us commit’ and ‘And low and behold the sky didn’t cave in’, adorn the quilt; an incomplete date in the centre of the work is a stitch the artist has left undone until which time he sees marriage equality legislation passed in Australia.

The ‘human being’s first world’ enables a lively discourse on the intensely personal to the macropolitical, and also proves an apposite platform for exploring the undercurrents of broad social climes.

The domestic space is a frontier at which boundaries are contested, recontested, established, fought and won; a space which holds and houses our innermost selves; a space to which we all return.

Emma Cox, exhibition curator

t LUCAS GROGAN

The Wedding Quilt, 2013 Cotton and mixed media on bemsilk 200 x 200 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Gallerysmith

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p ELIZABETH GOWER

Savings #9, 2010 Paper cuttings on canvas 66.5 x 66.5 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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p DONNA MARCUS

360 degrees, 2009 Aluminium 165 x 103 x 4 cm Image courtesy of the artist and dianne tanzer gallery + projects Photographer: Richard Nolan-Neylan

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p PRUE VENABLES

White trio with spoon, 2012 Oval bowl, bottle, pierced scoop and spoon Limoges porcelain, hand thrown and turned, pierced 13 x 28.5 x 24.5 cm, 22 x 10.5 x 8.5 cm, 12 x 21 x 12 cm, 5 x 28 x 5 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Beaver Galleries

p GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT

Two Jugs and a Bowl, 1998 Porcelain 13.5 x 13.5 x 7.57 cm, 13.4 x 10.3 x 8.7 cm, 13.5 x 10 x 7.9 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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p HONOR FREEMAN

Days Measured, 2008 Slip cast porcelain 6 components, 14 x 14 x 10 cm Image by Greg Piper, courtesy of Sabbia Gallery

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p KATHERINE HATTAM

Specific Object – White, 2009 Painted and reconstituted kitchen chairs 69.5 x 25.5 x 25 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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p NADINE CHRISTENSEN

No. 52, 2004 Acrylic on board 207 x 94 cm Image courtesy of the artist and STATION Gallery

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p DARREN MCGINN

Building Blocks 2, 2013 Ceramic, steel, wooden blocks and bone 18 x 49 x 27 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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p MICHAEL DOOLAN Green Story (Grandma’s House), 2007 Ceramic, nylon and wood 35 x 38 x 38 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox

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p JULIA DEVILLE

Egg Hunt, 2012 Chick, onyx, antique Royal Doulton ‘duck hunt’ baby plate, antique sterling silver eggcup & spoon, (68g 925), rubies 1.56ct, antique table 12 x 23 x 19 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery

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p DAVID RAY Lights are on - Body is shown, 2012 Porcelain 38 x 30 x 18 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Shannon McGrath

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p LIONEL BAWDEN

Pattern Spill, 2011 Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf Form: 30 x 23.5 x 33 cm, shelf: 5 x 30 x 30 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery Indicative of work in exhibition

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p LUCAS GROGAN The Wedding Quilt (detail), 2013 Cotton and mixed media on bemsilk 200 x 200 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Gallerysmith

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FOOTNOTES FROM INTRODUCTION

BY GEORGINA DOWNEY 1 U rs Fischer. Interview with Massimilano Gioni, Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, exh.cat. New Museum, New York 2009.

domestic bliss Exhibition dates 5 June to 19 July 2014 Deakin University Art Gallery

2 R osalie Higson, ‘A nation of flatpackers’, The Australian, December 03, 2011.

© 2014 the artists, the authors and publisher.

Copyright to the works is retained by the artist and his/her descendants. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder(s).

3 R ice, Charles (2004) Rethinking histories of the interior. The Journal of Architecture, 9(3), p. 276.

4 W alter Benjamin ‘Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1939) in Rolf Tiedemann, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, 1999, p 20.

5 A nthony Vidler, ‘Introduction’, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London England, 1992, p 33.

6 V idler, op.cit.

7 V idler, ibid. pp 3-4.

8 H al Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes), Verso, London and New York, 2002, p. 50.

FOOTNOTES FROM ESSAY

BY EMMA COX 1 B achelard, G., The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 1994 (ed), p 7.

2 H attam, K., The Family Romance exhibition catalogue, Australian Galleries, 7–25 August 2007.

3 ibid.

4 G ower, E. in Stones, K., Cut with the kitchen knife exhibition Education Resource, NETS Victoria, 2012, p 7.

5 G ower, E. in Kirker, A., Elizabeth Gower: Beyond the everyday, Queensland Art Gallery, 1991.

6 Y vonne Kendall in an email to the author, 4 February 2014.

7 ibid.

8 h ttp://donnamarcus.com.au/news/about/, retrieved 27 March 2014.

9 Hanssen Pigott, G., Truth In Form, 1997, quoted in Bruhn C., Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, http://architectureau.com/articles/gwyn-hanssenpigott/, retrieved 27 March 2014.

10 Bertram,

H., in http://www.hannahbertram.com/index/#/dust/, retrieved 27 March 2014.

11 S mith, J. with Embling J. and Lindsay, R., Peter Booth: human/ nature, National Gallery of Victoria , 2003, pg. 11.

12 Michael Doolan in an email to the author, 2 February 2014.

13 Darren McGinn in an email to the author, 12 March 2014.

14 Lindley, P. and May, S., Suburbia comes alive: Exteriors and Interiors, Howard Arkley Education Resource, National Gallery of Victoria, 2006, retrieved 30 April 2014, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/ arkley/education/essays05.html.

15 ‘ Patchwork quilts are the response of the individual to the wants and need for expression of themselves but are also a response to the domestic or political climate of the times…Where the needle becomes a pen…the quilt becomes a carrier of messages for many.’ Gero, A., The Fabric of Society, Australia’s Quilt Heritage from Convict Times to 1960, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2008, Introduction.

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The views expressed within are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views held by Deakin University. Unless otherwise indicated all images are reproduced courtesy the artist.

Unless otherwise indicated all photography is by Simon Peter Fox. Image measurements are height x width x depth.

Exhibition Curator: Emma Cox, Deakin University Published by Deakin University ISBN 978-0-9872954-7-7 Edition 500 copies Catalogue design: Jasmin Tulk Deakin University Art Gallery Deakin University Melbourne Campus at Burwood 221 Burwood Highway Burwood 3125 T +61 3 9244 5344 F +61 3 9244 5254 E artgallery@deakin.edu.au deakin.edu.au/art-collection Gallery hours Tuesday – Friday 10 am–4 pm Saturday 1 pm–5 pm Free Entry Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B Cover image: Katherine Hattam Specific Object - White, (detail) 2009 Painted and reconstituted kitchen chairs 69.5 x 25.5 x 25 cm Deakin University Art Collection Photographer: Simon Peter Fox Acknowledgements The majority of the works in this exhibition have been drawn from Deakin University’s Art Collection and others have been generously lent by the artist and their representatives. I am profoundly grateful for their assistance. Special acknowledgement must be made to Hannah Bertram and Lionel Bawden, who created new work for the exhibition, and thanks to Tiesha Ita-Ulima, Deakin student intern who assisted with the installation of Hannah’s work.

Special thanks to Jason Smith and Samantha Vawdrey at Heide Museum of Modern Art for the loan of their ‘Benwell’ table for the exhibition. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to Brad Rusbridge for his patient assistance with the installation.

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