Sitelines: Natasha Johns-Messenger

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Natasha Johns–Messenger

1

2

N ata sh a Joh ns– Messe ng e r

Linda Michael Heide Museum of Modern Art

Published to accompany the exhibition Sitelines: Natasha Johns‑Messenger Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 25 June – 25 September 2016 Curated by Linda Michael © 2016 Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, authors, designer and photographers.

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

Design: Ramona Lindsay Copyediting: Linda Michael, with Lesley Harding & Sue Cramer for Sitelines essay ISBN: 978-1-921330-51-3 Cover: Natasha Johns‑Messenger Echo 2016 installation view Heide Museum of Modern Art

Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia T + 61 3 9850 1500 F + 61 3 9852 0154 heide.com.au

2

Contents

05

Sitelines: Natasha Johns‑Messenger Linda Michael

19

The Mind as Architecture Melissa Bianca Amore

26 Plates 52 List of Works 53 Biography 54 Acknowledgements

3

4

Encircler 2016

Sitelines Natasha Johns– MessenGeR Linda Michael

A curiosity about the nature of things is at the heart of Natasha Johns‑Messenger’s work. An artist from Melbourne now based in New York, her philosophical bent informs art works that draw our attention to how we interact with our surroundings. She remembers when she first realised that you could look up at the night sky and see a star that doesn’t exist. This led to her thinking about how light works and whether anything in front of us is really there, ‘because everything is essentially a projection of light and we can’t know whether we are experiencing space and time in the same realm’.1 Within her enquiry as an artist, science is her conduit to learning about a world we little understand. She is fascinated by ideas from quantum mechanics, such as the uncertainty principle, where the better you know the position of a particle, the less you know its momentum; or the observer effect, where the act of observation changes the phenomenon being observed; and by astrophysical phenomena such as black holes, at the centre of which the laws of physics collapse. She attempts to replicate the feeling of wonder or amazement these discoveries inspire, by creating spatial and viewing experiences that make us question what is real and what is not.

Her practice has evolved from asking how an artist does something with this interest in the mysteries of the universe. How does one make art about these subjects without being literal or naive?

When scientific enquiry leads not to answers but to paradox and confusion, one of the choices open for Johns‑Messenger is to value intuition in the process of making art, using its ‘unknowing’ to access the kind of knowledge that lies beyond appearances. A fellow artist, Craig Easton, described her approach over a decade ago:

Rather than risk creating bad science, or bad art for that matter, Johns‑Messenger neatly sidesteps the burden of proof associated with the sciences and revels in the use of loose logic and, yes, even mathematics, to construct an in-between space.2

This openness made her a ready student of influential teacher Andy Thomson, an artist who lectured Johns‑Messenger at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in the 1990s. He was interested in the dimension of visual art that is resistant to translation, and encouraged his students to read in psychology, philosophy and science, broadening the scope of their practice beyond a naturalistic lifepainting tradition—the focus of Johns‑Messenger’s training until that time. She and fellow students Leslie Eastman and Daniel von Sturmer (in a different year) valued Thomson’s critical skills and knowledge of international contemporary art—he had been a student at Goldsmith’s College in London—and took inspiration the way he linked a spiritual and philosophical approach to the practice and history of art. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the phenomenology of perception, in particular, provided rich ground for Johns‑Messenger’s thinking about minimalism, materiality, and the viewer’s relation with the work of art. An excerpt from Thomson’s current writing indicates ideas still relevant to her art: Light, gravity and time are so crucial to our physical and haptic appraisal of the real some physicists think if you were able to turn gravity off, reality would disappear. The thing that links gravity, time and space is that you can’t see them, but you can feel and represent them. This confounds our socalled knowledge of the real because this sensate

5

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

knowledge, framed in the irresolvable tension between representation and the somatic, between matter and perception, supplies the unstable ground in which artists need situate their work.3

Thomson also promoted the idea of engaging viewers and collaborating with other artists, in the interests of extending limits and putting aside habits of style.

Johns‑Messenger continues to collaborate with Eastman, who has also worked with both Thomson and von Sturmer.

She has also long been attracted to the ideal of producing nothing—another way of dealing with the unknown. Yet, though she was inspired in her studies by the renunciation of art for chess by Marcel Duchamp, and the purity of Michael Asher’s almost non-existent site interventions, she continues to make works of art. One way in which she has responded to the dilemma of how to be an artist after Duchamp’s emphatic and enviable full-stop—he memorably wrote that ‘Chess is much purer than art in its social position’ as it can’t be commercialised—is by making nothingness the subject of her work. This is the reason ‘site’ is so important to her, as it allows her to feel that she is working with what already exists. She approaches a space with a mechanism rather than bringing an object to it: ‘I feel that if I am responding to a particular place it already has an aesthetic and I mirror that.’4 This blurring of divisions between the work, the site and the viewer, through a focus on site and perception, is Johns‑Messenger’s way of moving away from the commodification of the art object.

She uses the site to determine the parameters of temporary installations, and allows the perception of the viewer to become the work of art. She has characterised her art as lying somewhere between the practice of James Turrell, whose works shape and contain light, and that of Asher, whose temporary site interventions altered existing spaces. Both artists emphasise the ‘experience’, not the object. It is interesting that architects—an enthusiastic section of Johns‑Messenger’s audience—have asked on several occasions: ‘Where is the art?’, to which she responds: ‘It is the part you can’t take with you as an image in

6

your head; all you remember is that a set of things happened to you’.5 As suggested by their titles, Encircler and Enfolder, two works in Sitelines, are designed to act on the viewers, and their responses are the work. From a distance Encircler looks like a black iris within a circular frame: a large eye in the wall, so to speak.

When we look or lean into this hole, we see a black circle against a white ground in the distance, which seems simple enough, except that the longer we look the more optically and spatially confusing the work becomes. Sight lies. Blind to the mechanics of the installation, we can’t be certain if the white backdrop is also the gallery wall, or if the black disc is shallow or infinitely deep. Three dimensions flip into two and back again.

We enter Enfolder to move in a circle around a mirrored corridor, enacting something like a live version of René Magritte’s painting Not to be Reproduced, 1937, which depicts the back of a man who faces the back of himself in a mirror—a link noted by art critic Robert Nelson. He suggests that here too you … will encounter someone in front of you, a taciturn wanderer who is enigmatically duplicated at various moments and mysteriously preserves a regular distance in front of you. Actually, it is you, your image from behind who becomes your forerunner, the person whom you never see in the mirror. Your ghost from the rear leads you without a moment’s contact’.6

As in a casino or shopping mall, every surface is illusory, and often surprising. You try and catch yourself in the mirror ahead but instead see yourself from behind, moving away; or your doubled self. And just as in those public places, it is only when you inadvertently look askance that you face yourself in harsh and bright close-up.

Other new installations, photographs and light-works in the exhibition also explore the gap between what we think we know and what we perceive, building their illusionism on the site in which they are shown, in this case Heide Museum of Modern Art, its gallery spaces, gardens and sculpture park.

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

The appearance of Herethere, for instance, is determined by the material surfaces of the Heide gallery. Johns‑Messenger ‘literally made a piece of the floor and put it in the wall’,7 and laid a walllike piece on the floor. These two rectangles of the same size form a corner at the floor where they meet, so the piece on the floor looks like a shadow of the concreted ‘door’, or perhaps a bit of wall that has been peeled back to reveal the concrete. The concrete takes on the qualities of an image: vertical; framed within the white of the wall; and with a subtle, mottled surface, it echoes the qualities of several photographs displayed in the same room. Indeed some viewers have mistaken it for a photograph, from a distance. A simple reversal of surfaces makes us more aware of the space we are in, and materials we would often overlook.

Coda is a playful work in which two small discs of aggregate concrete are embedded into the wall either side of a mirror, so that reflection and reality slide into each other. As you get close the disc looks like a single object, though in fact part of it is real and another part is reflection.

Other works use mirrors to extend architectural and material features of the Heide site, and emphasise the existing relationship between its indoor and outdoor spaces. They enable us to see through mirrors rather than focusing only on our own reflections, expanding our awareness of where we are, so that we pay close attention to our surroundings, apprehending it anew rather than relying on automatic memory or logic.

Though Johns‑Messenger’s main installation in the exhibition, Echo, resembles mirrored corridors she has constructed elsewhere, its iteration is different to all previous incarnations, because of the way the architecture, views and materials of the Heide site— its usual state without her interventions—contribute to its construction and our experience. Echo responds to architectural configuration of the galleries in relation to the main entrance and to the gardens outside. The central axis of the building—both siteline and sightline—runs from the entrance through two gallery spaces to a large box window framing a

garden vista. The width and height of Echo is dictated by the measurements of this window, which we can see directly ahead as we enter the galleries. This view is repeated via the use of mirrors—the leafy vista is visible ahead as one enters the galleries, as it usually is, but to viewers familiar with the space, seems strangely out of reach, distant. Though it looks as if we can walk directly in a straight line through to the window, when we get closer, our expectations are thwarted. We become disoriented as walls and mirrors block any clear walking path, forcing us to slow down and consider where we are going. As one young visitor put it: ‘the gallery was amazing as I walked into the hallway … and BAM … it was as if you were in a different world’.8 We encounter illusory architectural features such as columns, and doubled windows and walls. While we might know they are not real, or use logic to tell us they do not exist, our visual perception seeks to tell us otherwise. We may even try to enter the illusory space mirrors, because rather than reflecting our image back, they extend space into seeming infinity.

If we reach the end of this work (which in plan view is a U-shaped corridor, though is often experienced as ‘labyrinthine’9) and turn back, we are guided by a small rectangle of transparent green film placed on the foyer window in the distance, a beacon that remains directly ahead even when we walk around corners. It echoes throughout the space as we walk out of the work, as the box window had drawn us in the opposite direction. A kind of magic is enacted, which makes us wonder what kind of space we are in, or laugh at our surprise. Another young viewer remarked: ‘I got lost in the mirror maze and I ended up apologising to myself’.10 And who is to say there isn’t something behind or within the mirrors that we fail to enter, or that things don’t remain the same even when we turn corners, or that sight doesn’t echo as much as sound?

All is complicated by our interaction with other viewers, and the exhibition becomes a social space, more spontaneously than with much post-1990s relational art.

7

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Wallthrough 2016

Wallthrough is experienced very differently depending on whether you are alone or not. It is a deceptively simple V-shaped construction, with a vertical mirror placed at the intersection of two plywood boxes with open ends. We can stand at one end and see an unadorned gallery corner of floor and wall: the basis of the show composed in a frame. At the other we can see ourselves in the far distance in an ‘impossible’ space and be utterly flummoxed: we thought we knew where we were standing. Or we may surprise a friend or stranger standing at the other end, seemingly in front of us, so the sculpture becomes a conversation device or a vehicle for play.

The two long galleries which sit at right angles to the central sightline are extended by smaller square galleries to the right, both with large windows overlooking trees. Views from these windows are

8

drawn inside for two installations, Skytree and Luchtbel (Dutch for ‘air bubble’). Skytree imposes the figure of the circle—a motif repeated in Johns‑Messenger’s work and the shape of the perceiving eye, a camera lens, a bubble, a cell, the sun and moon—on a view of cedar tree-tops against sky, which we look down into, as if into a cellar. Whether or not we are familiar with the site, this ‘sightline’ is disorienting, even vertiginous.

Luchtbel no. 2 is a real-time video of the view out of one of the side-gallery windows, projected onto a screen inside the same gallery at almost life-size.

This live video feed is processed through a program that builds interactive graphics, creating the large bubble that floats within the projected image. We first see Luchtbel as a softened, slightly grainy projection on a large screen visible from the adjacent gallery, a framed image of the Heide gardens with the

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

occasional bird or person walking in the distance.

Viewers standing behind the screen may also appear, magnified, dancing in and out of the mysterious bubble. When we enter the gallery ourselves, we can see the actual view out the window which, though beautiful, appears strangely less compelling than its image double. When we turn around we also become visible on screen—part of the projected image at the same time as any people walking in the gardens outside—and can interact with the bubble so that we slip inside and out of its perimeter, or appear to be holding it. The floating, unburst bubble is a dream image and contributes to the lightness of our encounter.

Johns Messenger has described the mechanism of her installations as ‘real-time image capture’.

The images ‘captured’ in Echo, Luchtbel and Skytree, for example, are living versions of those we might otherwise see through a camera lens or a periscope.

For Johns‑Messenger they relate to painting too, because they ‘came out of looking, and perceiving and pictorialising space’.11 Hence, even though the installations are three-dimensional, they are thus also pictorial, a quality that led her to describe her works as existing in 2.5 dimensions’.12 The colour and tone of the garden views at the centre of these installations are echoed in photographs Johns‑Messenger took at Heide over an extended period. These Sitephotos, and a related Sitefilm, delve into subtler layers of seeing, uncovering colours, shapes and lines present in the Heide landscape.

They document—generally in close-up, sometimes at a microscopic scale—a range of views and surfaces around the Heide site, from the distinctive texture of the limestone bricks in Heide II, to the mottled greens of a leafy view or the flat blue of a patch of sky, to sculptural and architectural details. Abstract, printed on matt paper and unglazed, the Sitephotos become more like paintings, loosened from their original reference and open to interpretation. The edges of things are prominent, and when enlarged seem to define planetary contours or landscape horizons.

For instance, the edge of a tiny section of Inge King’s sculpted steel13 becomes a high-horizon line in a dry, vertical landscape, to one viewer reminiscent of a

Fred Williams; or a section of curved bollard against a plain background becomes a cosmic mass.

The photographs and film were taken on multiple visits to Heide, when Johns‑Messenger spent time walking around, observing and connecting with the site more deeply, while also bringing her particular way of looking to its characteristic features. As in her installations and the exhibition overall, circles and rectangles predominate, referencing a classical way of composing pictorial space. Hence the Sitefilm is often symmetrical, with a circle or line at the centre of the screen. It offers a quiet, slow take on aspects of the site we might otherwise pass by: long, still views with a low depth of field attend to surfaces and edges, or register the shifting colours of trees and people set against inert stone or steel.

Using site as the means to develop content enables her to honour her graphic and formal abilities, which she would not consider enough in themselves to justify the creation of stand-alone works such as photographs and film. As someone who identifies as a ‘site-artist’ Johns‑Messenger says ‘it feels wrong to make something autonomous or arbitrary’.14 This is a bit like the dance between nature and nurture.

What is the artist’s and what is the site’s? She has studied the geometries of nature, the Fibonacci sequence and so on—Robert Lawler’s classic Sacred Geometry is a key reference—desiring that her work has a subconscious connection not only to the materiality of a place but also to its proportions and those of nature outside, and to the inner part of ourselves that is connected with this mathematics. ‘I feel like I inject this in to the making of the work: all is interrelated, everything is from the same source.’15 All this is filtered intuitively, not applied as a scientific system. Her aim is that as well as bringing us into the moment, her work brings us to a place that feels harmonious.

This is supported by a formalist aesthetic oriented towards balancing forms in space, in both two and three dimensions, evident in the way individual works relate to each other and are composed within the exhibition as a whole. Her skills were honed by

9

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Luchtbel no. 2 2016

training in geometric abstraction based in latetwentieth-century American painting, from Elsworth Kelly to Larry Bell and others. The large, modulated fields of colour in her matte, abstract photographs register the unexpected influence of Rothko. And Johns‑Messenger treats the entire exhibition space like a canvas wherein colour, scale and line are carefully orchestrated, while at the same time being determined by features of the site. She is not embarrassed by formalism—for decades an unfashionable and derided appellation—as she does not see that it precludes a conceptual approach, or a minimalist focus on the relationship of object, site and viewer. For Johns‑Messenger the art object is not as important as the perception of the viewer, an idea she owes to Minimalism—‘mother’s milk’ to her generation of art students16—in particular, for her, the light and space movement of the 1960s and 1970s based in Southern California.

10

Johns‑Messenger aims to create heightened experiences that emulate those moments ‘when someone passes away, for example, or during the time when someone is being born, [when] there is a different level of awareness that your whole body experiences’.17 She tries to capture the essence of such moments so that her work might induce an increased level of awareness in the viewer. ‘Of course there are a whole lot of other things art historically—formalism, abstraction, installation art, earth sculpture—that go into my work, but the optimum goal is to inject something of what I experience myself’.18 This essence is impossible to translate, but is everywhere evident in the tentative steps, exclamations and smiles of visitors, which convey their trepidation, joy and wonder in encountering her art. While her work is revelatory, it doesn’t seek to express any truth or knowledge but connects us in a vital way with the present moment.

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Notes

1. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, talk at John Wardle Architects, Fitzroy, 11 May 2016.

2. Craig Easton, ‘Natasha Johns‑Messenger: HERE’, Eyeline, no. 47, 2001, p 51.

3. Andy Thomson, from ‘The Contingency of Gravity: A Collaborative Project’, U/FT: A collaborative Field Project, nd. http://www.uft-gravity.com/ACollaborativeVisualArtsProject/ Essays/TheContingencyofGravity.aspx 4. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, filmed interview with Kylie Bryant and Matt Porter, thanks to Kylie Bryant, producer, Moppet Films.

5. Johns‑Messenger, talk at John Wardle Architects, Fitzroy, 11 May 2016.

6. Robert Nelson, ‘Sitelines review: Natasha Johns‑Messenger uses your illusion at Heide’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 2016, np.

7. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, filmed interview with Kylie Bryant and Matt Porter, 2016.

8. Darcy, class 7A, Epping Secondary College, 9 August 2016.

9. See Nelson, ‘Sitelines review’, 9 August 2016.

10. Cynthia, class 7A, Epping Secondary College, 9 August 2016.

11. Johns‑Messenger, talk at John Wardle Architects.

12. Craig Easton, ‘Natasha Johns‑Messenger: here’, review, Eyeline, no. 47, 30 June 2001, pp. 51–52.

13. Part of Inge King, Rings of Saturn, 2005–06, a prominent sculpture in the Heide gardens.

14. Johns‑Messenger, telephone conversation with the author, 15 August 2016.

15. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, telephone conversation with the author, 15 August 2016.

16. Leslie Eastman, telephone conversation with the author, 11 August 2016.

17. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, in conversation with Jan van Schaik, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 August 2016 18. Natasha Johns‑Messenger, in conversation with Jan van Schaik

11

12

Enfolder 2016

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

13

14

Echo 2016

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

15

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

16

The Mind as ARchitectuRe Melissa Bianca Amore

The room is the beginning of architecture.

It is the place of the mind.

You in the room with its dimensions, its structure, its light respond to its character, its spiritual aura, recognizing that what ever the human proposes and makes becomes a life.

—Louis I. Kahn1 ‘I perceive therefore I am’, wrote John Coplans in 1968, recasting Descartes’ famous philosophical dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’ for a catalogue essay accompanying Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler’s exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, California.2 Coplans’ statement re-ignited a radical shift that occurred in the history of sculpture in the late nineteenth century, when the pedestal was removed and artists began to study the language of sculpture within an extended field of vision. By the 1960s sculptures could be part of the land, the site, or an interactive kinetic environment.

These sculptural alterations to the landscape not only redefined the classification of sculpture but also the cultural field of architecture. Artists were applying the principles of architecture and the techniques commonly used in the visual arts to frame a renewed phenomenological experience. With this new openness emerging from the wake of Minimalism in the late twentieth century, elements such as light and space, as represented in traditional painting or used to define the spatial relations between objects, were being observed as tactile substances, as light or space itself. A shift from representing light and space to presenting pure light and space signalled a new interaction with the art object. Space was

being observed as both psychological and a physical, tangible volume. Artists were examining how the environment conditions the way a person perceives his or her body in space. As a result, the viewer was becoming the subject and the object, part of the work in continuum, rather than a distant observer, and a new relationship between the site, the work and the viewer was being formed.

Many artists were turning the pages of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which was translated into English in the late 1950s. The French philosopher was (and still is) the major source for the discussion about perception. He emphasised the body within space, and belonging to space, as the basis for understanding perception.3 The concept of Descartes’ ‘thinking being’ was re-evaluated in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘perceiving being’, providing the basis for new enquiry.

With this new awareness came further examinations into the contribution of language to the activities of thinking and perceiving. Generally speaking, language was seen to confine the experience of perception and spatial cognition within an organisational semiotics.

Questions were asked as to whether it was possible to perceive something – whether an object or a concept – without thinking it. And in order to perceive an object, must we already ‘think’ it?

Artists such as Irwin, Wheeler, John McCracken and James Turrell, who contributed extensively to new research findings in the study of perception, were examining theories of vision, experimenting with sensory deprivation and gestalt techniques, and producing large-scale, site-conditioned environments

Opposite: ThreeFold, 2015, MDF, LED floodlight, mirror, acrylic paint, plexiglass, installation view, El Museo de Los Sures, Brooklyn, New York; ThreeFold exhibition curated by Melissa Bianca Amore, organized in collaboration with the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, 2015

17

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

that examined the psychological effects of space, light and movement in relation to human perception.4 A new progressive art form that examined perception both as a medium and as a subject was emerging, most notably in Southern California and loosely defined as the ‘Light and Space’ movement. The desire to dematerialise the art object and extend the act of looking beyond the objective physical world to a more immaterial psychological space, informed these artists’ practice.

Natasha Johns‑Messenger began practising in the late 1990s, and her work echoes the sensibilities found in these older voices, though she creates intelligible structures by focusing more closely on activating and framing the site itself. She re-contextualises floors, walls and doorways, and photographs existing functional materials, to create new pictorial representations and objects of curiosity. In her work a direct reciprocity between art and site signals a new mode of ‘perceptual architecture’. Her installations, which I describe as optical prisms or spatial apertures, are primarily architectural cuttings, simulations and interruptions-in-space that frame perception and the site as two intertwining modalities, and as a system of spatial semiotics.

Each body of work is constructed on site, with materials such as mirrors and periscopic devices incorporated into the site simply to frame it and to extend the existing space beyond the tangible into an illusionary expanse. In this distorted reflection, both an imitation of the site and the site itself are presented, in chorus, stimulating a perceptual chasm between ‘what is’ and the appearance of ‘what is’. Her works question the authenticity of the very thing or object under observation, and completely alter the way we experience an exhibition site and the artwork within it.

In her optical arrangements, including her new work Echo, 2016, at Heide Museum of Art, Melbourne, and the earlier Threefold, 2015, installation at El Museo de Los Sures, New York, Johns‑Messenger creates a new type of cognitive landscape within the museum space, disrupting the body’s automated memory and its accustomed modes of navigating and orientation by modifying physical spaces familiar to us.

18

The site at El Museo de Los Sures was re-crafted, from modest materials such as fabricated walls, mirrors and LED lighting, into a labyrinth comprising multiple reflections, floating images and travelling light. Inviting a new optical deception between the eye and mind, ThreeFold produced a perceptual depth and parallel site views. The artist produced this effect by creating a visual gateway that reflected the outside of the building inside while the inside’s interior was projected outside. Here she created the illusion of entanglement in a continuous infinite fold, a homogeneous space which was ‘never the origin, never inner, never outer, but always doubled’.5 The viewer became inseparable from the space and caught in a mystifying mimesis that represented nothing more than the appearance of space. Conversely, the viewer’s body also became a reflection and a representation of itself as an object in space and experienced a type of reverse spectatorship.

In this space the artist provided valuable insights as to what generally occurs within the operation of perception. Her mechanism reflected the way in which reality, at a deeper level, is constructed and perceived; that is, by a set of categorical associations and by a multiplicity of representations and appearances.

We know only the world of representations, nothing more. Everything in the observable world, it seems, is represented by something else and nothing is ever understood autonomously. Through sophisticated optical devices Johns‑Messenger alludes to being inside the illusion of perception itself. Not inside the apparatus, but rather inside the operation of perception – the very thing that teaches and confines, as a system or ‘nascent logos’6 – and inside the visual frameworks that condition a particular way of seeing and reveal how perception is actually constructed.

Perception navigates experience and provides a pre-condition for seeing. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘We make perception out of the things perceived.

And since the perceived things themselves are obviously accessible through perception, we end up understanding neither’.7 This paradoxical quality characterises perception as something that both enables and limits sight. It aligns to the structures of consciousness that direct our awareness and

The Mind as Architecture

ThreeFold, 2015, MDF, LED floodlight, mirror, acrylic paint, plexiglass; installation views, El Museo de Los Sures, Brooklyn, New York

provides a foundation for the knowledge we attach to objects.

ask of ourselves: what do we actually ‘see’ with our imperfect perceptual faculties?

Our ability to perceive is developed during early stages of cognition when we learn how to construct associations to things and objects. Perception conforms to what we know. The difficulty here is: we need to know what it is we are looking at prior to becoming aware of any object we perceive. The operative word here is ‘aware’. What does it mean to become consciously ‘aware’?8 To illustrate this preconditioning, Johns‑Messenger re-tells the ‘myth of the invisible ships’. This story describes how certain native tribes located on the coasts of South America, Cuba and Australia completely ignored sailing ships entering their vision. This was not because they didn’t see the ships per se, but because the ships were so foreign that their limited perception did not allow recognition. They could not ‘see’ the ships. We might

This idea is also demonstrated in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from The Republic. The Greek philosopher’s theory is still one of the most compelling in Western philosophy illustrating the complexities of perception and ‘seeing’ and, more importantly, the difference between pure form and form. Plato uses the allegory to provide a basis for questioning what we see before us. It underpins his complex Theory of Forms which, in general terms, proposes that the forms we perceive, whether trees, people or objects, are merely shadows or copies of ideal forms and not the forms themselves.

Plato imagines a world where prisoners have been chained underground since childhood. Their legs, heads and necks are immobilised, which restricts

19

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Picture This, 2004, floor, fabricated walls, mirror, architectural cuts, plasma screen, theatre lights, wood; installation view, Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia 2004

their vision towards a wall in front of them. Their only source of light seeps into the cave from a fire burning outside and as objects or people move around the fire, shadows are projected inside the cave wall.

The prisoners begin to comprehend their reality as nothing more than shadows, and become conditioned to ‘see’ the shadows as real forms. When they make their world intelligible through language or sounds, they describe the object’s copy and not the object as it is. If a prisoner escaped, Plato proposes, they would recognise that the world as they perceived from within the cave was in fact an illusion.

It is at this critical moment, when the prisoner sees the pure form alongside its likeness or imitation, that they become perceptually aware. Plato’s clever allegory demonstrates that conceivably our conditioned world also conforms to what we perceive and that we construct our reality in such a way that

20

bears no resemblance to ‘things in themselves’, as pure forms. Everything is comprehended by our perception of it, and to repeat Merleau-Ponty: ‘We make perception out of the things perceived’.

Johns‑Messenger expands on Plato’s crucial idea that awareness begins when the pure form can be compared to the form’s copy or shadow, saying: ‘It is about being “present” in the space and having an awareness of where you are. That’s why I use the site as the primary medium’. Her works frame perception and disrupt our ‘pre-conditioned’ visual and spatial certainties on site, provoking the viewer to ‘see’ rudimentary materials, or basic architectural structures untouched and in their original context.

Picture This, a work installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004, conformed with this approach to framing perception. Exhibited on the wall were three representations of the MCA’s tiled

The Mind as Architecture

flooring: the first comprised some actual tiles, in frames; the second was a photographic reproduction of the tiles; while the third image was visible through a periscopic instrument made of mirror and perspex, which captured a direct image of the tiles in real time.

The major distinction between the tile representations, interestingly, was the viewing apparatus and its associated technique of imitation. Johns‑Messenger introduced new modes of seeing by prompting the viewer to engage in different ways with the same image. In doing so, she directed the viewer to the representation, or reflection, of the flooring, rather than to the floor itself, quietly illustrating the world of appearances and the complex relationship between a pure form and its copy. This idea is also ingeniously framed in Johns‑Messenger’s new work Herethere, 2016, at Heide, where she inverts the wall and concrete floor into a three-dimensional sculptural plane that dissolves back into the architecture, as a new presentation of the site.

perhaps now our reality is nothing more than the shadow’s shadow. Through images, reflections, and impressions Johns‑Messenger takes us into a space that resembles the reality we make up for ourselves, a space made up of perplexing apparitions. She reawakens the mysteries of perception by revealing the challenges faced when one is asked to observe and to objectively distinguish the shadow from the form. Johns‑Messenger’s mystical environments conceptually render the mind as architecture. She takes you beyond the realm of acute observation and to a space where seeing can only take place in the body. And where seeing is accessible only to those who can see beyond the shadow of appearances.

— This is a revised version of a text written for the exhibition catalogue ThreeFold, published in 2015 by the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York.

Through a process of exchange between the floor and wall the artist creates a ninety-degree geometric abstraction from these conventional structures.

Johns‑Messenger brings attention to the pure form, as a material, before it becomes re-worked or manipulated into something else. However, when we activate pure form by making abstractions or simulations of and from it, the pure form becomes lost or, rather, unrecognisable. The central question remains: which object do we attach meaning to? Do we attribute meaning to the tiles on the floor or the wall or to their representations?

It would seem that we attach meaning to the representation, rather than the ‘thing in itself,’ as a pure form. Our perceived world is already perceived and already constructed. And we learn from the perceiver, who is actively perceiving and limited by their very own perceptual faculties. This is the paradox of perception. Perception defines perception. In Johns‑Messenger’s installations, we begin to perceive space anew, as a psychological space open to new possibilities and unbound by restrictions.

We find ourselves, in the twenty-first century, further removed and detached from the real things;

Melissa Bianca Amore is a curator, critic and independent scholar based in New York.

21

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Notes

1. Louis I. Kahn, ‘The room, the street and human agreement’, 24 June 1971, republished in A+U, May 2012, https://www. japlusu.com/news/room-street-and-human-agreement.

2. John Coplans, Doug Wheeler, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA, 1968, p. 2.

3. Edmund Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, however in many ways Merleau-Ponty extends Husserl’s notion of the ‘phenomenological reduction’ and ‘embodiment’ giving greater emphasis on the role of the body, as belonging to space, with space, as a complete form, as the basis to understanding perception.

4. Maurice Tuchman, former curator at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, initiated an art and technology program from 1967 to 1971, which aligned artists with scientists and psychologists in the aim of fostering new research into aerodynamics, space, light and movement in relation to human perception. See Michael Govan, ‘Inner light: the radical reality of James Turrell’, in Jennifer Mac Nair Stitt and Phil Graziadei (eds), James Turrell: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Prestel Publishing, New York/London, 2013, p. 29.

5. See entry on ‘Mimesis’, in Michael Kelly (ed), The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998, p. 233.

6. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1964, p. 25: ‘By these words, the “primacy of perception,” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action.’

7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1964, p. 5.

8. Melissa B. Amore, Observing Observation: Phenomenology, Master’s thesis: Art Criticism & Writing, School of Visual Arts, New York, 2014.

22

The Mind as Architecture

Herethere 2016

23

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

24

Heide Sitephoto no. 11 2016

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

Heide Sitephoto no. 12 2016

25

26

Litline 2016

28

Echo 2016

30

Skytree 2016

32

Enfolder 2016

34

Enfolder 2016

36

From left: Heide Sitephoto no. 11 2016, Heide Sitephoto no. 12 2016 & Heide Sitephoto no. 3 2016, Luchtbel no.2 2016, Wallthrough 2016

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

38

Above: Coda 2016 Opposite: Luchtbel no.2 2016

Sitelines:Natasha Johns-Messenger

40

From left: Heide Sitephoto no. 13, Heide Sitephotono. 11, Heide Sitephoto no. 12, Heide Sitephoto no.3 2016

42

From left: Heide Sitephoto no. 8, Heide Sitephoto no. 10 2016

44

From left: Encircler 2016, Herethere 2016, Heide Sitephoto no. 8 2016

46

Heide Sitefilm 2016

48

Echo 2016

LIST OF WORKS

All works are courtesy of the artist.

Dimensions are height before width before depth.

Coda 2016

Heide Sitephoto no. 3 2016

Heide Sitephoto no. 13 2016

Luchtbel no. 2 2016

Concrete aggregate, mirror

pigment print on cotton rag

pigment print on cotton rag

custom computer program,

installation dimensions

paper, wood

paper, wood

video projection, sandblasted

70 x 82 x 41 cm

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

perspex screen in painted

Echo 2016

Heide Sitephoto no. 8 2016

Heide Sitephoto no. 14 2016

screen: 307.5 x 206.7 cm

wood, plasterboard, mirrors

pigment print on cotton rag

pigment print on cotton rag

installation dimensions

mirrors: 4 parts,

paper, wood

paper, wood

variable

each 241.5 x 263 cm;

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

35.2 x XX cm (framed)

409.8 x 619.5 x 808 cm

Heide Sitephoto no. 10 2016

Herethere 2016

wood, plasterboard,

overall

pigment print on cotton rag

concrete aggregate,

synthetic polymer

paper, wood

synthetic polymer paint on

paint, mirror

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

steel

installation:

two parts, each 220 x 100 cm

407 x 600 x 388.5 cm overall

steel frame, mdf

installation:

Encircler 2016

Skytree 2016

wood, plasterboard, synthetic polymer

Heide Sitephoto no. 11 2016

paint, mirror,

pigment print on cotton rag

Litline 2016

Wallthrough 2016

installation:

paper, wood

chromed aluminium,

plywood, mirror

410 x 312 x 389.5 cm overall

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

powdercoated aluminium,

180 x 18.9 x 86.5 cm

LED lights Enfolder 2016

Heide Sitephoto no. 12 2016

steel, synthetic polymer

pigment print on cotton rag

paint on mdf, fluorescent

paper, wood

lights, perspex

181.2 x 121.2 cm (framed)

208 x 400 diameter cm Heide Sitefilm 2016 single-channel video projection duration 14 minutes, looped

50

73 x 220 x 6.5 cm

Biography

Natasha Johns‑Messenger was born in Melbourne and currently lives and works between Melbourne and New York.

Johns‑Messenger is best known for her largescale, site-determined installations that examine spatial perception, phenomenology and light. Her installations, which use a complex process of imitation and illusion activated by architectural interventions and optical physics, extend the investigations of minimalist artists associated with the light and space movement in Southern California in the 1960s. She has defined the conceptual objectives of her installations as ‘three-fold’: ‘one, to dissolve parameters between art-object and its context by using the exhibition site as subject; two, to change the way immediate space is perceived or viewed by developing modes of representation such as realtime image capture inside optical viewing structures; and three, to create artworks that are predominantly experiential’. Messenger’s practice also includes photography, digital painting and sculpture.

In 2000 Johns‑Messenger completed a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA), from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited at major institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and the Contemporary Centre for Photography, Melbourne. In 2012 Johns‑Messenger completed an MFA in Film at Columbia University, New York, marking a shift into narrative film. Blackwood, her final graduate film at Columbia, won numerous awards, including the Columbia University Alumni

Award for Best Film, the National Board of Review Motion Pictures Award and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Best Director Award. It has since featured in forty film festivals. Her first graduate film, OffRamp, won Best Student Film and Best Actress at the LA International Underground Film Festival.

In 2015 Johns‑Messenger held a solo exhibition ThreeFold at Los Sures, Brooklyn, New York. In 2009–10 she was commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund for her work ThisSideIn, and in 2010 created Recollection for No Longer Empty at Governor’s Island in New York when she was a studio resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York under the Australia Council for the Arts’ studio residency program. In 2007 she won the Den Haag Sculptuur Rabo Bank Prize, presented to her by Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands, and in 2006 won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture with her then collaborative group Open Spatial Workshop (OSW) with Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell and Terri Bird.

See also natashajohnsmessenger.com. https://vimeo.com/175785837

51

Acknowledgements

Artist's Acknowledgements

Photography Credits

Natasha Johns‑Messenger would like to thank Michael Amore, Melissa Bianca Amore, Kerry Armstrong, Ben Bardas, David Coxhell, Leslie Eastman, Jaci Foti-Lowe, Ponch Hawkes, David Johns, Scott Klewer, Ramona Lindsay, Dave McKinnar, Linda Michael, Amanda Morgan, Brian Scales, Matthew Sleeth and Dennis Smitka, Samantha Vawdrey, Kirsty Grant and the amazing staff at Heide.

Christian Capurro: pp. 4, 8, 23, 26–27, 28–29, 30–31, 32–33, 34–35, 36–37, 38, 39, 40–21, 42–43, 44–45, 46–47, 48–49 John Gollings: pp. 12–13, 14–15 Jeremy Weihrauch: pp. 10 Natasha Johns-Messenger: pp. 24, 25

Curator's Acknowledgements Linda Michael would like to thank Natasha for her commitment, adaptability and generosity in realising this exhibition. Thanks also to the excellent construction team: builders Brian Scales, David Coxhell and the team from DC Construction, and installers Robert Bridgewater, Morgan Jones, Neil Pittock and Simone Tops.

I would like to thank Kirsty Grant, director of Heide, and former director Jason Smith, for their support, and all Heide staff for their work on the exhibition and related programs, particularly exhibition manager Samantha Vawdrey and education manager Carly Grace.

On behalf of Heide Museum of Modern Art I would like to thank John Gollings and Hub Furniture for their support of this exhibition.

This artist has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Exhibition supported by: This exhibition has been supported by the Bequest of Erica McGilchrist, who advanced the standing of women’s art throughout her lifetime.

52

54