HOUSE PARTY exhibition catalogue

A body of work by Dave Court

With assistance from and gratitude to: Adi Schmidt Mumm Alexis Tehel Arlon Hall Ben Trobbiani Chiara Graetz Court family Darcy Holmes David Musch Floating Goose Studios Freya Langley Gabi Lane Gavin Blake Henry Jock Walker Jimmy Dodd Joel Van Moore Letti K Ewing

Liam Somerville Logan MacDonald Marc Newbery Mark Chehade Matthew Fortrose Morgan Sette Nick Astanei Nicole Schwartz Patty Chehade Paul Atkins Reuben Gore Sam Berry Skye Sophie Horvat Suzie Tucker Tom Meakin

Words by Freya Langley

House Party explores the collapsing of postmodern dichotomies. Creation and destruction. Digital and physical. Public and private. It is an exploration of the metaxical1 nature of the Internet of Things (IOT) and Surveillance Capitalism epoch. Convenience and complication. Virtual and real.

Authentic and inauthentic. Through House Party, Dave Court examines the collapsing divide between digital and physical worlds and how their interplay impacts our perceptions of reality.

Court explores the technological and social zeitgeist his generation has grown up in: a rapidly changing world where, as digital natives, the internet has been a convenient tool and complicating force in their lives, but are still able to recall a time before ‘real life’ and the internet merged. House Party explores the metaxy of online and offline reality– as the two once opposing realms become indistinguishable from each other.

The internet promised us democratisation, connection and convenience; instead, it has become a tool for division, disinformation and ultimately, human automation.

Through House Party, a full-scale, immersive painted house, demolished shortly after its completion, Court explores online/offline, public/private and virtual/real metaxy through collapsing physical/digital art dichotomies.

In so doing, Court pokes at the broken promise of the internet with the creation of community through collaboration and art experiences that cannot be replicated online.

The digital preservation of the work through 3D renders and virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) challenges its destruction. The work no longer exists physically, preserved only as a “digital ghost” – it is simultaneously real and virtual. These metaxological physical artworks and digital media experiences allow audiences to be fully immersed in Court’s world, mediated through highly edited photographs, 3D renders and VR/AR experiences. Audience interaction with these objects will vary depending on where the objects exist on the physical/digital strata.

Projection-mapped responsive paintings and sculptures – require the audience to be physically present in the gallery to interact with the artwork – albeit digitally.

1 Metaxis is an idea of exisiting simultaneously in between and fully occupying two traditionally opposing states, ie. online and ‘real’ world.

For some viewers, this is the only way they will be able to interact with the work. This begs the question of whether there is a more legitimate way to consume art, and whether ‘authentic’ consumption is possible when the only way to engage with the artwork is through a digital replica.2 By collapsing digital/physical dichotomies, House Party challenges the idea of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ ways of creation and consumption.

The abstract sculptural paintings that exist physically and hang on the gallery walls are complemented with digital counterparts of the objects – viewable on the audience’s personal devices. The physical works are available for purchase, as well as digitally in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – a blockchain technology that allows for widespread distribution and exclusive ownership of digital objects.

The value of artwork is determined by the sign value, what social prestige the ownership imparts on its owner. Through this Baudrillardian3 understanding, art is therefore less about the item itself, and more about what it means to own something that truly cannot be reproduced – the performance of ownership.

NFTs epitomise this.

House Party explores the nature of exclusive, status-driven ownership and public commodity art and challenges this through creation of experience-focused work (VR/ AR) that cannot be purchased or replicated online.

The use of a house, a once domestic, private space, turned into a full-scale public artwork through its spectacle, digitisation and online public access, exists metaxically between once opposing realms.

Through the ubiquity of IOT technology and the convergence of our online/offline lives, surveillance capitalism is able to flourish. Surveillance capitalist platforms, such as Facebook and Google track our every movement as lines between physical and digital and online and offline merge.

This sees a collapse in the public/private dichotomy, as Facebook and Google gather bytes upon bytes of personal data; thoughts and behaviours that make us human are commodified and sold back to us. The possibility (and in the case of surveillance capitalism, the certainty) that we are being watched turns our private existence into a public performance.

2 Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) 3 Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila F. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994

This “removal of the backstage”4 puts our generation on stage 24/7, endlessly performing and searching for content – without a place to retreat to truly be ourselves. Court explores this idea of the diminished backstage through the juxtaposition of private engagement through VR/AR in a public gallery, using hyper-realistic, responsive digital media.

He treats domestic space as a substrate for materials and techniques used in public art to explore the collapse of public/private dichotomies. This makes the work as much a digital spectacle as it makes it a “backstage” sanctuary.

Through collaboration and community, House Party unites us in amending the broken promise of the internet and the struggle for human autonomy in the face of our species’ surveillance capitalist automation. Whether it exists physically or digitally, House Party is a catalyst for community collaboration. It is a launchpad for a conversation about how to build human solidarity in the face of generational anxiety, climate catastrophe, accelerating global capitalism and a resurgence of fascism. Court believes the only solution to these looming threats to our existence, is community and connection, online and offline.

4 Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019

Words by Logan MacDonald

A house party draws a distinctive mental image that we may have experienced personally or informed by American film and media culture. A house party is often used as a coming of age trope in movies and television1, featuring wall-to-wall teens, loud music, underage drinking, lewd behaviour, property damage, all occurring while parents are away.

Generally, in the end, the house party as a plot device is a fable about responsibility, maturity, and honesty (especially when the

protagonists ‘fess’ up to the parents). While Court’s House Party doesn’t draw on the same immature, archetypal wild teen party trope, it exudes as much rambunctious energy, similarling holding an Aesopian moral fable at its core2.

Court’s House Party unabashedly embraces the ‘now’ or ‘collab culture’ that occupies contemporary aesthetics seen in design, fashion, technology, and art cultures.

1 Wild Teen Party, TV Tropes - tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WildTeenParty 2 Aesop was an Ancient Greek fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop’s Fables. Although his existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop

House Party draws itself higher with conceptual art connections to the Provisional Theory of Non-Sites3 created in 1968 by seminal American artist and writer Robert Smithson (b. 19381973) and his Site/Non-Site series of works from the 1960s and ‘70s. Throughout his career, Smithson often sought to bring the “raw reality”of a locations experience oscillating between the internal and the external as a way to “muddy up the white cube”4.

Smithson’s Site/Non-Sites artworks were minimalist reinterpretations of their respective locations, including the re-arrangement of elements such as stones, trees or industrial rubble taken from the sites as sculpture, accompanied by maps, notes, and photographs that provided insights into the original place presented as an ‘abstract’. For Smithson, these samples became objective guides for audiences to help create a subjective response to a location and understanding of the landscape.

Within this context of Smithson’s Site/Non-Site theory, we can appreciate Dave Court’s House Party as an audience viewing his work. This same act of oscillation between spaces, states, and times that occupied much of Smithson’s practice similarly underpins Dave Courts’ practice that engages similar dichotomies and rituals that try to bring a ‘reality of place’ and time to the gallery context.

3 Smithson, Robert. “A Provisional Theory Of Nonsites.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam. University Of California Press, 1996.

4 Kandel, Susan. ” The Non-Site of Theory: Theory and Practice” in Frieze, 07, May 1995. https://www.frieze.com/article/non-site-theory

For Court, his Sites/Non-sites are not backwaters, industrial lots, or unpopulated sites that occupied much of the focus of the land art movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Instead, Court presents maximalist ‘abstractions’ of sites with locations focusing on experiences of inter-personal connection, individual representation, collective occupation and the different subcultures.

His installations and projects are often within music festivals, gatherings, and interventions facilitating collaborations with participants and empowering community members. House Party changes the formula for Court by re-occupying a soon to be demolished Adelaide Hills house as the Site/ Non-Site framework for his project. This site echoes two occupations; firstly, as the familiar and everlasting domestic space, an intimate and private space arguably home to traditional family structures and ironically free of parental oversight. Then secondly, Court’s spatial and colourful gestural, maximalist interventions create a makeshift home for his chosen family and community.5 For House Party, Court opts to go beyond the classic trinity of signifiers or referents that constitute Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965.6 Smithson, similarly to Kosuth, utilised familiar signifiers in conceptual art, which includes text, documentation such as maps, and the detritus objects, to create an objective understanding of a site.

5 6

Court’s work instead substitutes minimalist ‘samples’ for a maximalist approach with artistic interventions from the site, including augmented reality, sculptures and the latest artworld trend of digital, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) video based artworks. These works by Court permeate entropic energy that shrugs an artist’s compulsion to make physical artifacts that exist beyond time intended to outlast us all. Instead, Court’s practice proudly places itself as being of its ‘time’, with his paintings, photographs, videos and sculptures responsive to contemporary aesthetics. His works are sincere and subjective ‘signifiers’ or mementos to the impermanence of an event or experience, creating memories that we as viewers may wish to revisit or even re-enact.

House Party is a timely and ambitious undertaking by Court, which asks us as an audience to consider our personal and collective relationships to the impermanence of experience and the importance of sincere connection and community within a digitised, post-COVID neoliberal society in a perennial state of flux.

Conversation with the artist, Dave Court, 3rd June 2020 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81435

Soundtrack: Adi Schmidt Mumm Food: Ben Trobbiani VR design: Darcy Holmes Essay writing: Freya Langley Photo printing: Joel Van Moore Fabrication assist: Jimmy Dodd Publicity: Letti K Ewing Video and editing: Liam Somerville Essay writing: Logan MacDonald Install assist: Matthew Fortrose Photography: Morgan Sette Photo, video and assist: Nick Astanei Assistant Curator: Nicole Schwartz Gallery Director: Patty Chehade Video: Reuben Gore Photography: Sam Berry 3D modelling: Skye 3D printing and modelling: Tom Meakin