Broken Homes: Andrew MacKenzie

In his article about Callum Morton's 2007 Biennale work, Valhalla, Andrew MacKenzie warns against reading the work as either a comment on contemporary war or in literal reference to the artist's biographical story. He argues that the broken home of Valhalla is "border country" , between public and private, the real and the constructed. MacKenzie notes that the scale of the work is important in allowing an audience to engage spatially, and for Morton to deal with the concepts of interiority and exteriority more directly. Mackenzie describes the work as "theme park size", a surprisingly evocative description that suggests a space which people can inhabit but are somewhat removed from reality. Mackenzie describes the effect as unsettling and alienating. Interestingly, despite writing a pointed and interesting piece, MacKenzie acknowledges that he has not actually experienced the work first hand.

Art & Politics: Raquel Ormella

I reviewed Raquel Ormella's Artspace exhibition for our assignment but thought I would talk about some of her other works currently on show at the MCA as part of Making It New: Focus on Australian Contemporary Art. I'm worried this will become a slogan comprises 9 fabric banners, each hand appliqued with text on both sides. On one side of each banner the text describes people of strong political convictions, while on the other Ormella expresses her insecurities about her own activism, wondering "Is it enough?". The stitching that shows through from the other side quite cleverly expresses the idea of a thought that plays on the back of the mind coming to the surface; something that one can't quite shake. Ormella is examining the role that political beliefs play in shaping personal identity. The hand sewn works reference protest banners, their craftmanship particularly bringing to mind the protests of the suffragette movement.

Raquel Ormella
I’m worried this will become a slogan 1999–2009
double-sided banners, sewn wool and felt
9 banners, sizes various

Art & Its Institutions: PIE

spat+loogie (Kat Barron and Lara Thoms) are a Sydney(ish)-based duo who's performance work, PIE, is showing as part of Primavera 2009 at the MCA. In the work, members of the public are invited to sit down with an artist or curator over a piece of pie and enter into a dialogue about art . A "menu" of conversation pieces is provided which topics such as the Shaun Gladwell-referencing "Is skateboarding art if you slow it down?". At the end of the conversation the participant may then share the pie with the art professional or throw it in their face.

The work examines the dynamic between those working within the art world and the public. The curators and artists are put in a position in which they must explain themselves to a wider audience or risk a humiliating pie in the face. The onus is on them to prove themselves to the audience.

A friend of mine recently participated in the work as an artist and was disappointed that the member of the public asked to participate did not engage in the work at all. She didn't want to eat the pie or throw it, was worried about missing a bus, did not want to hear about the work or discuss art in general, and in the end the artist just asked her what her star sign was. He said she was not judgmental or dismissive, just not interested.

Art & Audience

Late last year I was part of a group show at Firstdraft Gallery called Obliteration. The premise of the show was

to explore the physical and emotional continuum created through loss of self. The works exhibited are situated between self and non-self, dissolving boundaries between artist, audience and curator.

The work I showed was called Collective Heights and at the opening was simply a line drawn on the wall marking my height with my name written next to it and a sharpie hanging on a piece of string. The audience then added themselves to the chart completing the work. The intention was to explore the show's premise of obliteration of the self by creating a work in which the audience's participation completes the work as a whole, but also completely overwhelms the mark-making gesture of the artist.

Collective Heights 2008 (installation view)

Collective Heights 2008

Photographs courtesy Beatrix Curren

Art & Spirituality – Gordon Matta-Clark’s Descending Steps for Batan (1977)

The work of Gordon Matta-Clark appears perhaps more obviously suited to discussion in the context of Art & Architecture. Descending Steps for Batan is a performance/document carried out by Matta-Clark in 1977 in response to the suicide of his brother, Sebastian Matta, a painter who suffered from mental illness. For the duration of the exhibition, Matta-Clarke dug into the ground beneath the gallery floor, carving out a rudimentary flight of descending stairs. The dirt steps led downward but nowhere in particular, their final destination arbitrarily decided by the end of the exhibition period. Afterwards the hole was filled in. Descending Steps is one of my favourite of Matta-Clark’s works. Often it seems that much of what is described as spiritual in art exists on a grand, all encompassing scale. Matta-Clark’s simple work describes overwhelming loss and guilt, and I feel it is just as effective. To me, this hole in the floor speaks of transcendence.

Figure 1: Gordon Matta-Clark, Descending Steps for Batan (1977), Cibachrome 40 x 30 in.

Self Directed Work

Figure 1: Men sitting

Figure 2: Athletic Men

Figure 3: Men Walking Away

Art & Identity - Mike Parr and National Identity

During the last decade, Australian artist Mike Parr has developed a series of performance works that critique and challenge Australian national identity. One such performance, Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi (Democratic Torture) was performed over 30 hours at Artspace Sydney, in May 2003. Before a wall displaying textual excerpts from newspaper articles reporting on the Iraq war, Parr sat on a chair and had his lips sewn shut, an Australian flag attached in the manner of a prosthesis from his left arm stump. Parr remained this way for twenty four hours before electrodes were connected to his body, allowing an Internet audience watching a streaming of the performance to administer electric shocks to the artist.

Speaking emphatically of a collective shame, work is a traumatic, almost desperate critique of the Australian involvement in the Iraq War, and examines the impact of language on the nation's psyche. The title incorporates the peculiarly Australian chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi". Usually used as an encouraging mantra at sporting events, and associated with national pride, the words take on an aggressive, barbaric tone within the work. In sewing shut his lips and stripping himself of language, Parr embarks on a protest action that has become synonymous with those who have no voice with which to counter oppression. Scheer notes that the work was "a response as much to the media's facile reportage of the politics surrounding the invasion"1 as to the dubious circumstances within which Australia entered the war. Parr's protest then also rallies against the sensationalist headlines, lettered on the wall behind him. Parr shows us the destructive potential of language in informing a national identity.

1. Edward Scheer, Australia's Post Olympic Apocalypse? PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.1 (2008) 42-56

Collaboration - Soda_Jerk

Sydney-based artists Soda_Jerk are Dan and Dominique Angeloro. Soda_Jerk work with found material - audio, video, and still images - which they then recombine and recontextualise. For Soda_Jerk, video "conveys the sense of a fragment of time teleported into the now". Picnic at Wolf Creek, for example, is a ten minute video work that remixes video footage and sound clips from iconic Australian films. Soda_Jerk, collaborate not just with each other but also force a collaboration between themselves and the authors of their sampled material.

I don't want to pull pics off their website, but here's the link.

Soda_Jerk

Art & The Body - Robert Gober

Roberta Smith, Against Delusion: Robert Gober's Nuts-and-Bolts Americana, The New York Times, August 23

If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are the centres of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency. - Elizabeth Grosz

American sculptor, Robert Gober, explores the psychological implications of the human body through hybrid anatomical forms, fragmented bodies, and architectural and domestic spaces in which the body is absent yet implicit. Gober's language is one of duplicities – male and female, interior and exterior, public and private, animate and inanimate, present and absent. Commenting on Gober's 2007 retrospective at the Schaulager Museum in Switzerland, Roberta Smith notes the artist's ability to combine that which is personal and political, mysterious and accessible.1 Gober, who draws upon a composite of childhood memories and current experiences, describes his work as “formally rigorous but emotionally messy”.2 Gober often sites a composite of personal memories and current experience as a source for his practice, with this reflected in the hybridity and fracture of the objects he creates.

Figure 1: Robert Gober , Untitled Leg, 1989, beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, human hair

In 1989, Gober began what would become a series of disembodied partial limbs with Untitled Leg (Figure 1). The wax “amputation” is a cast of the artist's own leg, embedded with human hairs and dressed with a man's shoe, sock, and partial trouser. The body fragment speaks of absence, of detachment, of loss; the object is loaded with all that is not there. Gober did not place the limb on a pedestal; rather it was installed as if emerging from the gallery wall, describing an uneasy balance between interior and exterior states. Gober's disembodied limbs and appendages imply a psychological fracture. Julia Kristeva writes that in a state of abjection, borders between object and subject cannot be maintained.3 Rooted within the tradition of Freud's uncanny, Untitled Leg is difficult and unsettling because it provokes a reaction in which there is a hesitation in recognising the object as animate or inanimate.4

Figure 2: Robert Gober, Untitled (Candle), 1991, beeswax, human hair, yarn

Gober has spoken of his work as it is informed both by his catholic upbringing and by his homosexuality. In Untitled (Candle) (Figure 2), human hairs embedded in a wax base, provide an ordinary candle with overt phallic connotations. Gober's use of wax in the construction of his body fragments mirrors the transience and impermenance of the human body, with Smithson noting that Gober's objects are imbued with a vulnerability that defines real bodies. The sense of vulnerability is heightened in Untitled (Candle), a work in which a symbol of masculinity and virility is reduced to that which is destined to disintegrate. Gober has written of the impact of the AIDS epidemic, and the struggle that artists faced in expressing that impact within their work.5 Here the hybrid object of the candle/phallus suggests a painful memorial, while simultaneously referring to the corporeality of the symbolism of the Catholic faith, and Gober's uneasy place as a homosexual raised within the Church.

Figure 3: Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991-1993, wood, beeswax, human hair, fabric, paint and shoes

Untitled (Figure 3) takes the form of a lower half of a male body, violently protruding from the gallery wall to impose itself within the space. Arranged facedown, the partial figure evokes a disquieting sense of powerlessness and unease. The surface of the wax figure is punctured with a number of ulcer-like drains. The drain motif is recurring in much of Gober's practice. In this instance it serves to suggest a body that is leaking, the separation between inner and outer broken down, and emphasises the dual nature of the body as both private and public.

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1 Roberta Smith, Against Delusion: Robert Gober's Nuts-and-Bolts Americana, The New York Times, August 23 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/arts/design/23gobe.html?_r=1, (accessed August 10 2009)

2 Frances Morris, “Robert Gober” in Rites of Passage: Art at the End of the Century, 96, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995

3 Charles Penwarden, “Of Word and Flesh: An interview with Julia Kristeva” in Rites of Passage: Art at the End of the Century, 22, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1995

4 Ruth Ronen, Aesthetics of Anxiety, 42, New York: SUNY Press, 2009

5 Neal Benezra, “Plumbing Robert Gober” in Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the art of the 1990s, 46, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1996

Critical Review: Installation Art – Essence and existence – Nicholas Zurbrugg

In his 1991 catalogue article, Installation Art – Essence and Existence, Nicholas Zurbrugg examines the nature of installation art both historically and as it is presented by artists today. Zurbrugg argues that the language of installation can be exploited by artists to produce contemporary works that challenge and extend existing preconceptions of the parameters within which art operates. Zurbrugg asserts that the complexity of installation art’s spatial impact and its site specificity is primarily what separates it from other art mediums. Zurbrugg states that “existence determines essence”, that is, the existence of the work within a particular spatial situation is what determines the essence of a work.

Much of Zurbrugg’s essay examines the origins of contemporary installation as they arise from the historical avant-garde. Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1924-1925) and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) are examined as two works that set guidelines for what would become contemporary installation art. Zurbrugg argues that Merzbau, an evolving and interactive architectural installation that was created over several years within the artist’s home, set a precedent for installation art by implying that the accumulation of any pre-existing materials in any space may be argued to be installation if the artist considers them to function with an artistic value. Conversely, Zurbrugg states that Fountain suggested that any object, irrespective of artistic merit, may be legitimised in an art context if it is exhibited within a gallery space or signed by the artist.

Zurbrugg suggests that often it is movement, wether implied or enacted, which may distinguish more effective installation art from less effective static works that may “appear dangerously close to flower-arranging exercises and conjurers tricks”. The movement to which Zurbrugg refers may be kinetic action within the work itself, or as “installation-action” such as performative elements, or some physical or mental movement required of the viewer in experiencing the installation environment. Zurbrugg does not expand dramatically upon this point, rather, it appears almost as if a footnote to the essay. It is an interesting argument that unfortunately appears somewhat truncated in the context of the writing that preceded it.