Vantage Point 30 August–6 October 2013
The forgotten mountain, 2013, Jacob Evans
An
overview
A
map
of
of
the
the
city land
An interpretation of the past & The name of a real estate company*
Jessie Bullivant (AUS) Sean Dockray (USA) Lizzy Sampson (AUS)
Wietske Maas (NL) & Matteo Pasquinelli (IT) Amy Spiers & Catherine Ryan (AUS) Dominic Redfern
(AUS)
Curated by Will Foster
CURATOR’S FOREWORD This exhibition explores the conceptual vantage point of the building in relation to the city. It presents an opportunity to dwell in and on a landscape imbued with innumerable ecologies. The building and the city are probed in unison. In this exhibition the landscape is mapped through an aggregate of singular vantage points and processes. You will not find one complete view, and so must continue to navigate the terrain. The newly-produced works by six artists and artist collaborators cover a macro-to-micro scale investigation into space and are clearly concerned with enquiring within, overtly researching, understanding through discourse and redefining through intervention. The works are propositions, site-specific interventions, manifestos, videos and installations. In the lead-up to the federal election, several of the works overtly address the climate of social and ecological justice in Australia. The works are closely bound to the politics of land and land use. They dismantle and bring into the gallery issues and policies concerning power relations, workforces, geological resources and migration. Will Foster
LIZZY SAMPSON Lizzy Sampson is a Melbourne-based visual artist. Her work questions established systems, structures and values, and invites the viewer to do the same. In 2012 Lizzy graduated with a Master of Fine Art from RMIT. She has since been awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Artstart grant, undertaken two collaborative residencies: the Blindside Summer Studio and Local Energy, at CAMAC in France. In July 2013, Lizzy received the inaugural ‘Show Support’ grant for her exhibition Dollars and Sense at Firstdraft gallery in Sydney.
www.lizzysampson.com.au
SEAN DOCKRAY Sean Dockray is an artist and a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit organisation, Telic Arts Exchange, established to critically engage with new media and culture. His practice radiates outward from writing—both software and texts—occasionally into complex platforms that involve many people over long durations, taking on a life of their own. Sean initiated The Public School and AAAAARG.ORG. He has recently participated in the Encuentro Internacional Medellin and in exhibitions at the Royal College of Art, the California Museum of Photography and the Hayward Gallery in London. His writing has appeared in Cabinet, Fillip, and Volume and he has lectured internationally. Recent essays—“Interface, Access, Loss” in Undoing Property? (Sternberg Press) and “Openings and Closings” in Contestations: Critical Experiments in Education (Bedford Press)— have been published this year. www.thepublicschool.org www.aaaaarg.org
JESSIE BULLIVANT Jessie Bullivant graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) at RMIT in 2011. Jessie is the recipient of the Australia Council Artstart grant and NAVA’s Australian Artists Grant. Recent projects include SUPERMARKET International Art Fair (Stockholm), 2013 and an RMIT Mentorship with Susan Jacobs, 2012. Selected solo exhibitions include How to fold a fitted sheet, TCB, 2013; Giving Away Something That is Free, West Space, 2013 and Lift & Lower, (curated by Patrice Sharkey) Platform Art Spaces, 2010. Recent group exhibitions include Start (curated by Julia Powles), Blindside, 2012; Common Room, Rear View, 2012 and We Are That Within Which We Operate, Kings ARI, 2012. www.jessiebullivant.com
AMY SPIERS & CATHERINE RYAN Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan are Australian artists and writers who create artworks that provoke questions about the present social order—particularly about the gaps and silences in public discourse, the things that are not or cannot be acknowledged. They are interested in aesthetics and strategies that are disruptive and estranging. From October 2012 to January 2013 they undertook an artistic residency at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, Germany. They also recently presented work at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney. thefuturesofthepast.wordpress.com
DOMINIC REDFERN
WIETSKE MAAS & MATTEO PASQUINELLI
Dominic Redfern is a Melbourne-based video artist who works at the intersection of site, screen and identity. Over recent years his practice has become increasingly focused on the history of natural history and contemporary understandings of place.
Living in Amsterdam and Berlin, Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli established the Urbanibalism project in early 2007 exploring the Umwelten (environments) of different cities and organising convivia also in Utrecht, Brussels, Melbourne and Istanbul. Urbanibalism is the experience of the city as a spontaneous source of nourishment and form of life that grows dystopically and autonomously from any planned ‘city ecology’.
His work has been exhibited at home and internationally since 1998 at venues including the Perth International Arts Festival, Perth institute of Contemporary Art, the Chulalongkorn Art Centre in Bangkok, the Tate Modern, the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Hamburger Bahnhof, Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul, and Tokyo Wonder Site. In 2012 Dominic took part in the Experimenta Biennale, ReelDance, and the Anatomy Lesson at the Ian Potter Museum and in 2013 he will be undertaking a commission for Foxsports’s new premises in Melbourne, a work commissioned by Linden Gallery for the large outdoor screen at St Kilda Junction, as well as work in Scotland and Tokyo. Dominic is Associate Professor in Video Art at RMIT University. www.dominicredfern.net
www.urbanibalism.org Wietske Maas has straddled a miscellany of tangents from visual arts, taxidermy, sommeliering to radio-making. She combines artistic pursuits with work as a curator for the European Cultural Foundation. www.wietskemaas.org Matteo Pasquinelli is a theorist and academic researcher. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam, 2008) and he is currently undertaking research on the genealogy of German and French biophilosophy. www.matteopasquinelli.org
WILL FOSTER Will Foster is the Visual Arts Program Manager at The Substation and the Curator of Vantage Point. Born in the UK, he is an artist and curator new to Melbourne. His projects have taken form as temporary and mobile structures and the curation of multifunctional social spaces and events in both urban and rural environments. Major projects have taken place in Glasgow, Berlin, Istanbul, Fykse (Norway) and Melbourne. Foster is the founder and Co-director of Wasteland Twinning Network, Berlin, and Cabin Exchange, Glasgow. He is currently collaborating with Gabrielle de Vietri on A Centre For Everything, Melbourne. www.willfoster.co.uk
Custom-made powder-coated steel trolley, existing doors (5). Dimensions variable. In a gesture intended to unite the isolated spaces of the gallery as one, I will take the doors from their hinges and assemble them at an unfixed point in the centre of the ground floor. The doors will be held in a position that is neither vertical nor horizontal, in transit from one to the other. They will not be repurposed in functional terms, but rather suspended in a state of action which preferences the gesture over the material. The ground floor of The Substation building has been configured into a singular yet multiple exhibition space. This formation has been dictated by the previous inhabitations of the space, which in turn carry heritage listings as well as structural constraints. In contrast, the level above boasts a more open and flexible space, where mobile structures and furniture can be re-configured endlessly for multiple uses. The (non-heritage listed) doors that hang at each room’s entrance in the gallery space reinforce boundaries between each room. These doors are in an open position during an exhibition, and therefore in a state of redundancy (a door to decorate a doorway).
Drawing for Support Material, Jessie Bullivant, 2013
Support Material, 2013
JESSIE BULLIVANT Replica of Geoff Hogg 1985 banner frame, 2013 Fabricated steel, enamel paint. 500 x 210 x 210 cm Taking its cue from a local piece of public art at the Newport Train Station underpass, I will fabricate a replica of another structure built by the artist Geoff Hogg. In this new location, the frame will become one of many abstracted forms. The way it is viewed will be inverted, with the viewer rather than the structure being mobile.
The exterior of The Substation hosts numerous indicators of its industrial past and evolving occupation. Various objects that have ceased to function as originally intended rest in the area on the eastern side of the building. This area also accommodates a series of billboards that face the passing trains. Intended to be viewed in transit, the billboards act as windows into the current use of the space, as an art gallery. In its original form, Geoff Hogg’s banner holding structure was made to act as a mobile piece of architecture, a wall that moved outside of a building. It was carried by 6 people through the streets of the CBD, and thus viewed in motion.
Drawing for Replica of Geoff Hogg 1985 banner frame, Jessie Bullivant, 2013
SEAN DOCKRAY Staged Substation, 2013 For Staged Substation, I’ve had the three spaces in Gallery #2 (the main gallery, basement, and mezzanine) “staged” by a Melbourne-based real estate marketing company. Staging is the act of making a property more attractive to potential buyers—ultimately increasing its value—through the use of furniture, lighting, plants, paint, and other lifestyle cues. In Gallery #2, the main gallery is now a living room and kitchen; the mezzanine a bedroom; and the basement a bathroom. The gallery spaces themselves are empty during the exhibition, except that each room has one screen showing an image of that same room, but staged. In the physical room, the viewer stands alone, while on the screen the furniture sits without any inhabitants. Not exactly mirroring, nor surveilling, such an image casts a perverse projection, both onto the viewer and onto the possible future of the building itself. The Substation was once an integral part of Victoria’s high voltage electrified suburban rail system and is now an art space, but it might just become desirable condominiums or creative lofts if the forces of speculation lead the building in that direction. Real estate is a big money game and its players look for any competitive advantage. For this reason, one sees staged photographs of home interiors all over Melbourne, on billboards, attached to
home facades, and on the walls around abandoned lots. To cut costs, a growing number of the homes aren’t staged at all, but are virtually staged, which means that digital models of furnishings are rendered into the photographs. Vietnam, where the minimum wage is less that 20% of Australia, is a common source for staging labour (and it is a Danish-owned outsourcing company in Vietnam that produced the images for Staged Substation). Facilitated by the internet, photographs taken in Melbourne can circulate into Vietnam for made-toorder production in a factory of software and 3D models, and returned as a final image only days later. Such speed and efficiency is a counterpoint to the movement of real bodies through Australia’s notorious migration processes. As the camera “pans” across features within the staged image, a voice enunciates phrases pulled from the advertising copy of Australian real estate, like “residential brilliance” and “sublime outlook,” alongside disciplinary excerpts from the internal correspondence of the Vietnamese image outsourcing company, for example “avoid errors that could affect your salary.” Oscillating between addressing the producer and the consumer of the image, the language blurs the motivational and disciplinary. In truth, this is a language suited to the domestic space in the images themselves, where working and living are pulled into an ever tighter knot.
Props for a staged room, Sean Dockray, 2013
LIZZY SAMPSON Yallourn (Amendment Act), 2013, 2013 Yallourn (Amendment) Act, 2013 researches the site of one of Australia’s largest open cut coalmines, 153km southeast of The Substation at Yallourn. The work explores the relationship between bureaucracy, power, restriction and community, looking at both the history of the site and Yallourn today. Combining bureaucratic methodologies including wordplay and scripted statement with installation, drawing and social sculpture, the work focuses on a Barbecue and a Lookout at Yallourn, both managed by Energy Australia. These sites exist as platforms directing visitors to ‘appropriate‘ or official vantage points. The views obtained at these sites provide scripted imagery: a free community BBQ area at the foot of an imposing power plant and a huge open cut coal mine—infrastructure for secure and continuous1 energy generation. Central to this idea is the notion of an authorised history—an official viewpoint that, over time, can evolve into fact. In the years leading up the removal and destruction of the Yallourn Township, the State Electricity Commission (SEC) issued and then withheld information regarding the demise of the town of Yallourn. To-
day, the spaces in Yallourn are highly orchestrated and inaccessible. During recent visits, the Barbecues were not in use,2 photos were not permitted and the lookout entrance was locked. At The Substation, the Lookout and Barbecue become a warning rather than an invitation. References to the Barbecue imply that an icon of ‘Aussie culture’ could be nothing more than an image, while references to people gathering together are suggested but not exhibited. Yallourn bricks, which once formed houses and buildings, have been reconfigured to build a resource frequently recognised as a commons in Australia. Manifesting from a disappeared place, the people who retained these bricks sought tangible souvenirs of a community in which they once belonged. A small reminder that citizens used to occupy space in a town called Yallourn forms another parallel between the past and the present. Drawn from a virtual archive,3 Help to Save Yallourn manifests itself in a physical space again—a futile gesture to save a space that is already gone.
1 www.energyaustralia.com.au/about-us/whatwe-do/generation-assets/yallourn-power-station, viewed August 13, 2013 2 Three conflicting stories were heard about why the BBQs were not functioning, one of which is that the BBQs were turned off at the same time CFMEU workers were locked out and set up camp close by. 3 www.virtualyallourn.com
Yallourn brick, Lizzy Sampson, 2013
Mine, 2012 Text on paper (geographically accurate map of working mines in Australia), found sign. A0 (wall map), 15cm x 21cm ( folded maps). Using public datasets detailing the location of working Australian mines, along with open source software, the plotting of mining activity in Australia immediately forms a recognisable landmass. A single word raises the complex relationship between land rights, ownership, industry and cultural identity in this country. The gesture of giving and taking presents a choice, the consequence of which can be witnessed in the gallery over the course of the exhibition. In the physical and cultural Australian landscape, the giving and taking associated with the mining of resources has much larger consequences.
Let’s eat air, rock, coal, iron, the old stones of churches —Drunk of earth!
Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism, Slogan, Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, 2013
WIETSKE MAAS & MATTEO PASQUINELLI Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism (Melbourne Declaration), 2013 Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli The Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism is an enactment of the organic and inorganic voices of the city, of the liquid flows of minerals and invisible ecologies of microorganisms that constitutes the bodies of buildings and beings. The Manifesto reverberates through the stairwell and the electron (electrolyde) memories of The Substation building. The Transit Gallery billboards and gallery walls will exhibit its slogans.
Urbanibalism is the experience of the city from the perspective of ingestion and as a form of life that grows autonomously from any planned ‘city ecology’. Against superficial aesthetics such as food design and bioart, urbanibalism explores the greater metabolism of the city and the historical conflicts of the living matter at the basis of any culinary art. Urbanibalism is a new sensibility toward metropolitan natureculture, expanding upon the edibility of the city — the city then as a spontaneous convivium.
AMY SPIERS & CATHERINE RYAN Nothing to See Here (All that is Solid Melts Into Air), 2013. The Substation, Melbourne, Australia. Documentation of Nothing to See Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour Bridge). 2013. Underbelly Arts Festival, Sydney, Australia. Documentation of The Site Dedicated to the Active Effacement and Complete Disregard of History. 2013. Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin, Germany. There is no Melbourne skyline (only sky). No former Führerbunker site (just a car park). No Sydney Harbour Bridge (just a featureless view). No Taksim riots on Turkish TV (just a penguin documentary). No Aborigines in Australia (it’s terra nullius). No protest in City Square (it’s public space). No Australia if you come by boat (only PNG). Move on, nothing is happening. There is nothing to see here.
Still from Nothing to See Here (Removal of Sydney Harbour Bridge), Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, 2013.
Weed-covered carpark, former site of the F端hrerbunker. Berlin, Germany. 2013. Photo: Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan.
City Square in Melbourne, former site of Occupy Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia. 2011. Photo: Occupy Melbourne.
DOMINIC REDFERN Grounding, 2013, four-screen installation, stereo. I have made a number of studies over recent years that rely, in part or in whole, upon a close study of the materiality of the gallery space in which I am working. My work for Vantage Point extends a number of trajectories from this ongoing body of work. For this installation I have made a simple index of imagery examining the ground beneath our feet across the three levels of gallery three: the utility space beneath the floor, the main gallery floor and the steps leading us to the mezzanine. The audio, in a similar vein to the video, amplifies the existing conditions by recording and amplifying the ambient sound of the gallery—that which we normally ‘filter out’. In terms of my vantage point upon this subject matter, what I choose to highlight about these largely ignored parts of our environment, I am recurringly drawn the intersection of the organic and the manufactured. I seek out the zones where the natural forces of entropy—wind, water, gravity, and the passage of plants or animals— have worked upon man-made artefacts to lend them an organic irregularity. In Grounding we see the gnawing of rats on insulation, the spores caught as they blow in from ventilation shafts, the cracking floors as foundations shift, and the scuffs of many feet across rubber, steel and aluminium. These points where the articulated and organised are interrupted highlight and puncture the artificial schism between nature and culture.
Dominic Redfern, Grounding, 2013 (video stills)
Materially the work utilises the enormous resolution offered by high definition video to image surfaces in great detail, revealing textures and spaces hovering on the border of visibility to the naked eye. For me this is born of two interests. At one level it is formal: I have a long-standing interest in abstraction. The play of line, texture, volume, surface and space that is revealed in this process compels me to keep searching these landscapes in miniature. Secondly, as both consumers and producers have become obsessed with higher and higher resolution images, our eyes have been exposed to and become desirous of a greater level of visual detail in the moving image than ever before. I use high definition video to create such an excess of representational detail that our capacity to orientate ourselves and ‘read’ it is overwhelmed. The lush hyperrealism of high definition gives way as we are enveloped in non-semantic abstraction. For me this offers a means to critically reflect on video’s capacity to ‘represent’. It challenges both the idea that more information is more
understanding, as well as the traditional ‘realist’ and ‘naturalist’ traditions of the moving image inherited from cinema and television. These languages of the moving image have played an important role in the collapse of space and time in the modern era and continue to do so in our global moment. In my installation practice I have sought to re-inflate space/time in the moving image, initially working with one-to-one scale in both the size and temporality of my images, before moving progressively further into the hyper-particularised spaces I now try to create. While working in The Substation I was reminded of my time living in Yarraville when the building was derelict. This was when the ‘heritage’ graffiti that adorns its walls was being added and my work has ended up channelling this less lively, fallow period in its history, the time between its lives.
*The name of a real estate company
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.
Vantage Point Realty is a property agency located in the Melbourne CBD. ‘Vantage Point’ is also the name of several other real estate companies. In fact, as far real estate names go it is a popular choice. One such company, based in Califonia, is Vantage Point Real Estate. Their logo is reminiscent of the painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), composed in 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. In the foreground of the painting, a young man stands upon a rocky precipice, his back to the viewer looking out at the expansive vista. This image, hailed as the exemplary figurein-the-landscape painting, is frequently referenced, parodied and put to other purposes. The subject of Friedrich’s painting is absorbed in a state of self-reflection, gazing over into a murky sea of fog. In the property agency’s logo, however, the scenario is no longer that of selfreflection in nature. This is the world of real estate, and this is an image of a pioneer. The silhouetted figure wears a cowboy hat and a radiant sunset beams from behind the mountain range. In the subject’s hand is a pair of binoculars. The figure surveys the land in search of property—for you and for the company.
Will Foster
Vantage Point Real Estate logo, 2012.
Exhibition Dates: 30 August - 6 October 2013 The Substation 1 Market Street Newport VIC 3015 www.thesubstation.org.au Curator: Will Foster Publication design: Sarah Lyons & Will Foster Printer: Dawn Press All images copyright of the artists stated
Sarah Lyons Sarah Lyons is a Melbourne-based, multidisciplinary designer whose current research practice is central to an axis of architectural theory and sociopolitical philosophies. Interested in the powerful potential design and architecture obtain in regards to social change, Sarah’s work questions the relationship, past, present and future, between politics and our built environment. Sarah is a self-published designer. Recent projects include Architical, Pragmatics of Architecture and Building, and Politecture. A vantage point is a position of privilege in that it denotes and establishes a hierarchy between those with, and without an advantage. As with all positions of power, a vantage point is endowed with the opportunity to utilise its strengths within or without virtue. In light of our contemporary Australian context, we ought to review the vantage/s we each obtain and the modes in which it/they operate/s. Vantage Point in retrospect. www.architicalblog.tumblr.com
T h a n k
y o u
to all the artists involved, Jeremy Gaden, Sarah Lyons, Alice Clanachan, Ara Doaltian, Corey Mahar, Kristy Milliken, DAWN PRESS and of course Gabrielle de Vietri.
The Substation 1 Market Street Newport VIC 3015
Supported by:
The Substation Education & Public Programs Pilot is supported by: