Exhibition Catalogue | Jacobus Capone: Beating Heart

Fremantle Arts Centre is situated at Walyalup on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodjar. We acknowledge the Whadjuk people as the traditional owners and custodians of these lands and waterways and extend our respect to their Elders, past and present.

We offer our heartfelt gratitude to the Whadjuk community and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to care for Country and share their knowledge – this generosity and wisdom helps us to understand and navigate Country safely and respectfully.

sat 24 aug – tue 7 sep 2021 fremantle arts centre

Art is a terrible thing.

Aim the lens, the pen, a brush or your heart at some media. Thus sensitized, intend, but before you can create anything those tools become mirrors forcing confrontation with yourself.

Who makes art must simultaneously unmake Self; take it apart brick by tender brick, slice it thinly enough to overexpose. Art may unite but creation often separates, forcing the artist toward wilderness, alone, with no group to hide in. And oh, what courage it takes to shoulder responsibility for one’s presence, cut open to receive whatever experience the universe presents: the soloist and his thing, his experience, alone together. The longer they are together, and the more they practice drawing the extraordinary toward the everyday, the closer to real life — the further from abstraction of it — they become.

Once I was action and active meditation. I drew my lines on high mountain walls where I left a trail of blood-red and black ink. I printed the aftermaths and whispered farewells to those friends who lost real blood, all the while saying goodbye to the former Self that ice and rock indelicately, repeatedly hacked away.

I needed climbing because I couldn’t meditate Self into the background much less oblivion. Risk and effort,

danger and beauty, it took great stimulus to wash clarity ashore, to churn in its wake. Fear often clarified but sometimes sustained effort carried to the logical conclusion of no more effort, was enough. I saw clearly then. And deeply. At first ambition soared and ego executed. Later, having lost too many, and too much, ego gave way to environment, to the lessons of survival and endurance.

I knew what it would take to strip down defenses, to clarify prejudice because the mountains taught their most valuable lessons after conscious thought exhausted itself on the back of physical effort. Overcoming the final pockets of internal resistance took much of and from me, literally, ME. For decades I didn’t understand this was a process undertaken to pare away preconception and expectation, to sensitize myself so finely that I could not ignore or judge or comment — I could only feel.

True sensitivity is a reward for lengthy practice, for rehearsal and effort, and for surrender. Perhaps this is the most powerful weapon in the seeker’s arsenal — that of a bowed head, of acceptance, to welcome the touch of the flame, the insight, and the damage. The clearest point of access is through submission yet, more often than not we practice imposition; until we realize that no one ever forces insight. It only comes when we give in, when we allow, when we see without aiming our sight. When we simply feel.

Mind gives way to Heart.

Effort gives way to Art.

By way of a circuitous path I discovered Jacobus Capone and the concept of “durational performance”, which I suppose my own practice had already introduced to me. But context matters. Context is magic.

The first piece I experienced was titled, Estrela Cadente. I stared at it intently for seven minutes and eighteen seconds, thinking, reasoning, believing I understood, but I didn’t, until I stopped seeing, and discovered feeling. I played the loop until the space around that shooting star reflected me back to me, until I could see myself within that space, freed.

And that is how I saw him, a literate moving within the environment, moved by it, shaped and changed by submission to it. A seeker. A seer who recognizes that time is a lens we may use to collect more light, to amplify details, focus intent, and ultimately, to integrate with the environment, its natural processes, its change and changing seasons. Accepting and using time means enduring, means rejecting the shortcuts and hacks the modern world insists will improve

our experience — or at least allow us to have more of them. Time is duration. Duration is commitment, persistence, the determination to see it through: through the dark, through light, through hunger, and thirst, through pain, through doubt, and into wonder, all the while knowing that who reaches the end will have been changed along the way.

So yes, art is a terrible thing. To make it takes from us, demands we do difficult things, arrests our breath, our footsteps, and teaches us, makes us change, makes us unlearn hard-heldonto lessons, and breaks our illusion of control. Art makes us admit we do not understand but wish to, makes us see that understanding only occurs when we surrender, which means giving up control. Art reminds us that a known journey ends at the limits of control, and to experience the unknown means we will have to let go.

MARK TWIGHT Mark Twight survived a twenty year-long career as a professional mountain climber. After retiring he wrote of his descent in a photo book titled REFUGE. Currently, he explores the intersection of art, action, and philosophy through his media project, NonProphet, based in Utah, USA. www.nonprophet.media | marktwight.com

Jacobus Capone and Maria Gomes Thanatousia, ongoing dimensions variable

Jacobus Capone Perdition & Prayer (detail), 2020-ongoing copper leaf, volcanic ash and glacial water on Japanese Mingeishi paper, 900 x 640mm each

the world as a series of experiences in ‘durational time.’ The French philosopher Henri Bergson posited that time as we experience it appears as a seamless narrative, but our experiences are like stills or frames within a strip of film that merely creates the illusion of continuity and integration when projected. It is the intensity of those separate moments of encounter that Capone brings to our attention.

“Nowhere beloved, can the world exist but within us” Rainer Marie Rilke 7th Duino Elegy

Jacobus Capone’s performances are initiated by an innate desire to be at one with his environment. Through these intense interactions, he internalises his engagement with the natural world to find a point of equilibrium. His 147day marathon journey to deliver water from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific while still a student at Edith Cowan University is prescient and provides an insight into his developing practice.

It remains an evocative, poetic, and in every sense an awe-inspiring work.

The poetry of his actions in the landscape lies not only in the beauty and simplicity of their presentation but in the access they provide to understanding what seems beyond us in our everyday experience. This comprehension is revealed by Capone through a process of unlearning that reveals a more transparent relationship to objects, places, and histories. His practice examines

In To love, that five-and-a-half-month journey across the country in 2007, he documented the daily rituals he undertook to mark time and chronicle his passage through the landscape. At the close of the day, a single linen cloth was used to wipe and clean the dust, soil, and sweat collected on his face. By allowing the landscape to be written onto his body as a responsive surface, this ritualized gesture embodied an attempt at dissolving the difference between inner experience and outer reality. He was acknowledging himself as being entwined within the landscape, not merely in coexistence with it. As striving towards a more holistic form of engagement with his immediate surroundings.

“Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us?”

2nd Duino Elegy

When in New York in 2013 Capone undertook an 11-hour durational performance holding a mirror to his chest while standing on the clock tower plaza in Long Island City. The Hallucination in Common, documents the artist capturing the moon’s

passage across the sky and reflecting its light out onto the city below as a form of direct communion with the cosmos. Holding and releasing; receiving and giving back.

“Trying to become it. — Whom can we give it to?”

Rainer Marie Rilke 9th Duino Elegy

His current work, Echo & Abyss, filmed in Switzerland and Greenland in 2018, is orchestrated in 13 chapters and presented in an unfolding journey installed in the central gallery of Fremantle Arts Centre. Like previous video works, it documents his immersion in the landscape, this time with a haunting soundtrack by Alex Turley. Drawing on Rainer Marie Rilke’s famous Duino Elegies, the videos document Capone’s ritualistic encounters with two extraordinary environments; Rilke’s birthplace and the journey to Greenland’s ice sheet.

There are echoes of those earlier works in this thirteen chapter magnum opus. The artist undertaking a journey, dwarfed by the landscape, communing with the earth. Capturing the sun and reflecting it back onto the land. Immersing himself and absorbing it, becoming part of his environment. Pondering existence.

Capone stands in for us in these vast and dangerous places. He is Caspar David Friedrich’s leitmotif, of the solitary figure in awe of the sublime.

Through him we too can experience the power, beauty, and resonance of Nature. His actions help us to

understand our place within the world and our short tenure on this planet. “… so we live, and are always taking leave.”

8th Duino Elegy

Death and mortality resonate through Rilke’s poem and echo throughout Capone’s work. Both are, in Capone’s words, seeking “an impossible unification with a greater whole.”

It may be an ultimate impossibility, but the quest is profound. The image of the artist knee-deep moving imperceptibly through the icy glacial pond is enthralling and engaging.

His communion with the striated blue rocks, his figure lost in the vast expanse of white snow, all these rituals can be read as an act of reconciliation between humanity and Nature. But they are also a warning, he says, stressing the “… fragility and disappearance of nature itself”.

The last section of the work is filmed in Greenland with the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier as the protagonist. Slowly melting and contributing 281 million tonnes of ice to the rising oceans each year, its death is a portent for the future of the planet. In this work Capone positions himself as an active participant, polarising humankind’s environmental impact while delicately exploring notions of ecological grief.

“But this: death, the whole of death, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.”

4th Duino Elegy

The other major work at Fremantle Arts Centre Thanatousia is an ongoing collaboration with the artist’s mother, tracing his mortality. One flag for each year of his life, repeating one of three statements: You will die; I will die; We will die. Hung throughout the corridors of the Arts Centre, it is an act of acceptance, of celebration, shared concern, and realisation while standing at the abyss. It is “an act of surrendering to life,” he explains.

Great art has always had that capacity to move us, shift our thinking, and dig deep into our souls. It is most effective, however, when the timeless space becomes charged with possibility and purpose. So, we emerge from our engagement with Jacobus Capone’s works, if not reborn, then, at least, more self-aware, more empathetic, and more attuned to our intimate and extended worlds.

Ritual is a recurring strategy in Capone’s work. Perdition & Prayer, in the current exhibition documents symbols and figures in a series of remarkable drawings. They chronicle the influences that shaped previous performative undertakings, the shimmering copper forms floating in a carbon blue field memorialising these objects and activities. Each is a transition and fixes meaning as the archive is continually deciphered and distilled.

PROFESSOR TED SNELL Professor Ted Snell, AM CitWA, is Honorary Professor, School of Arts & Humanities, Edith Cowan University. Over the past four decades he has contributed to the national arts agenda as Chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, Artbank, the Asialink Visual Arts Advisory Committee, University Art Museums Australia and as a board member of the National Association for the Visual Arts. He is currently Chair of Regional Arts WA, on the board of ANAT and the Fremantle Biennale. He is a commentator on the arts and a regular contributor to local and national journals.

Jacobus Capone Echo & Abyss — Chapter 6, Scene 9 (video still), 2018 synchronised 10 channel HD video, dimensions variable Composition by Alex Turley

Centre spread image: Jacobus Capone Echo & Abyss — Chapter 12 (video still), 2018 synchronised 10 Channel HD video, dimensions variable.

Composition by Alex Turley All images courtesy the artist and Moore Contemporary

Jacobus would sincerely like to thank Maria Gomes, Mal Capone, Amy Perejuan-Capone, Alex Turley, Erin Coates, Mark Twight, Ted Snell and the whole team at the Fremantle Arts Centre.

Fremantle Arts Centre is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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