Broadsheet 41

C O N T E M P O R A R Y V I S U A L A R T + C U L T U R E B R O A D S H E E T
CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

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VOLUME 41.2
JUNE 2012
4351 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia
www.artspace.org.au
T +61 2 9356 0555
artspace@artspace.org.au
Ofce 10am6pm, MonFri
Gallery 11am5pm, TuesSun
Image: Jem Cohen, Little Flags, 1991-2000, still from super 8mm transferred to dvd,
courtesy the artist and Gravity Hill Films, New York
ARTSPACE is supported by the Visual
Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative
of the Australian, State and Territory
Governments.
ARTSPACE is assisted by the New South
Wales Government through Arts NSW
and by the Australian Government
through the Australia Council, its
principal arts funding body.
ARTSPACE is a member of CAOs
(Contemporary Art Organisations
Australia) and Res Artis (International
Association of Residential Art Centres).
Everything Falls Apart
Curators: Mark Feary & Blair French
Part I
27 June 5 August 2012
Jem Cohen
Phil Collins
Sarah Goffman
Sarah Morris
Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck & Media Farzin
Part II
10 August 16 September 2012
Vernon Ah Kee
Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Jem Cohen
Tony Garifalakis
Merata Mita
Zoe Croggon
Black + White #2 2012
photocollage
courtesy of the artist
LIQUID ARCHIVE
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Cauleld Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Cauleld East VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues Fri 10am 5pm; Sat 12 5pm
19 July - 22 September 2012
LaUrence Aberhart
Bashir Baraki
Adam Broomberg &
Oliver Chanarin
Joyce Campbell
Zoe Croggon

Mathew Jones
Leah King-Smith
Nicola Loder
Maha Maamoun
Ricky Maynard
Tom Nicholson

Patrick Pound
RAQS Media Collective
Xochitl Rivera navarrete
Zineb Sedira
[The User]
Kit Wise
Saturday 28 July
11.00am 4.30pm
$30 full / $20 conc. bookings essential
www.monash.edu/muma/events
Keynote speaker: Sven Spieker, author of The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS
Symposium: Archive States Contemporary Art and the Document
Curator: Geraldine Barlow
CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012
NEW SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ART
126 AUGUST 2012 SALA FESTIVAL
www.cacsa.org.au
THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS ASSISTED BY THE COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, IT ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY, AND THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT
THROUGH ARTS SA AND HEALTH PROMOTIONS SA. THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS SUPPORTED BY THE VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFT STRATEGY, AN INITIATIVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN, STATE AND TERRITORY GOVERNMENTS
IMAGE: SUE KNEEBONE, PLANNING FOR PARADISE, 2012 PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST
Zoe Croggon
Black + White #2 2012
photocollage
courtesy of the artist
LIQUID ARCHIVE
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Cauleld Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Cauleld East VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues Fri 10am 5pm; Sat 12 5pm
19 July - 22 September 2012
LaUrence Aberhart
Bashir Baraki
Adam Broomberg &
Oliver Chanarin
Joyce Campbell
Zoe Croggon

Mathew Jones
Leah King-Smith
Nicola Loder
Maha Maamoun
Ricky Maynard
Tom Nicholson

Patrick Pound
RAQS Media Collective
Xochitl Rivera navarrete
Zineb Sedira
[The User]
Kit Wise
Saturday 28 July
11.00am 4.30pm
$30 full / $20 conc. bookings essential
www.monash.edu/muma/events
Keynote speaker: Sven Spieker, author of The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS
Symposium: Archive States Contemporary Art and the Document
Curator: Geraldine Barlow
Queensland Centre for Photography acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
YAVUZ ERKAN
essay by Francis E Parker
Proudly supported by
Yavuz Erkan Bubble gum (detail) 2011
youngblood
EDITIONS
supporting photomedia art in partnership with Queensland Centre for Photography
288x288mm, 24 pages, essay by Francis E Parker (MUMA), soft cover $15 for more information contact QCP on 07 3844 1101 or visit www.qcp.org.au
QCP
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Melbourne Art Fair
1 - 5 August 2012
SANTIAGO SIERRA
MAT COLLISHAW
PETER HENNESSEY
ARIEL HASSAN
MICHELLE NIKOU
HOSSEIN & ANGELA VALAMANESH
SH Contemporary
6 - 9 September 2012
DEBORAH PAAUWE
ARIEL HASSAN
181-187 HAY STREET
HAYMARKET NSW 2000
WWW.4A.COM.AU
KEN + JULIA
YONETANI
WHAT THE
BIRDS KNEW
3 AUGUST - 22 SEPTEMBER 2012
Ken and Julia Yonetani, What the Birds Knew (2012), Uranium glass beads, aluminium wire and UV lights. Courtesy of the artists, Artereal Gallery, Sydney and GV Art, London
See the Game Masters exhibition after hours
and stay for drinks, free music and games-
inspired mayhem in the ACMI Lightwell.
www.acmi.net.au/latebit
Game Masters: The Exhibition
28 JUNE 28 October 2012
ACMI, Melbourne
Thursday nights, 6-9pm at ACMI
GET YOUR GAME ON
late bit late bit late bit late bit
Child of Eden Ubisoft
NEW ART FROM SOUTH ASIA
14 July 30 September 2012
45 Osmond Terrace, Norwood SA 5067 T 08 8364 5075 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au
CRICOS Provider 01126M
Afliated with Flinders University and the Helpmann Academy
Your creative journey starts here
Associate Degree of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons)
Adelaide Central School of Art offers accredited tertiary degree programs and a range of short courses, workshops and masterclasses, suitable for
beginners through to experienced artists. Small classes and one-on-one interaction with our talented lecturers, who are all leading practitioners in
the eld in which they teach, contribute to an environment where creativity excels.
Secure your place: Applications for tertiary degree programs close Semester 2: 1 June 2012 | Semester 1: 7 January 2013
spencer
family
foundation
Ambassadors
for Adelaide Central
School of Art
In the School
Drawing Masterclass
with Christopher Orchard 18 23 June 2012
Painting and Drawing from Photographs #2
Masterclass with Chelsea Lehmann 29 June 1 July
Painting Perceptual and Conceptual Space
Masterclass with Chelsea Lehmann 3 5 July 2012
Short Course Program commencing 14 July 2012
Open Day Sunday 26 August 2012
In the Gallery
9 June 21 July 2012 No Place
Anna Horne, Amy Joy Watson
and George Zacharoyannis
28 July 26 August 2012 The Feeling of Light
SALA Exhibition with Morgan Allender,
Melanie Brown, Kveta Deans and Deborah Trusson
1 29 September 2012 Stewart MacFarlane
Ordinary Beauty: The recent and retrospective
work of Stewart MacFarlane
Photograph Ingrid Kellenbach
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THE 2012 BUNDANON TRUST
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM
Open to professional artists and groups, from
all disciplines. The program supports artists
new work, research and collaborations.
Artists are hosted in purpose-built studios
located at the Bundanon properties on the
Shoalhaven River in NSW.
APPLICATIONS CLOSE JULY 31
APPLY ONLINE AT BUNDANON.COM.AU
OR CALL 02 4422 2100
Art: Live it
The School of Art at the VCA offers undergraduate, graduate coursework
and research higher degrees in Drawing and Printmedia, Painting,
Photography, and Sculpture and Spatial Practice.
As a student you will be guided by some of Australias most progressive
art educators and respected artists within a creative learning environment.
Our programs include:
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art)
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (Visual Art)
Graduate Certicate in Visual Art
Master of Contemporary Art
Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) by Research
Visit us on Open Day Sunday 19 August 2012
or Graduate Information Night Thursday 13 September 2012
For more information visit www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/art
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VCA
SCHOOL OF ART
Pip Ryan, Master of Fine Art (Research), Happy Orang, 2011. Photograph by Drew Echberg
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45 Osmond Terrace, Norwood SA 5067 T 08 8364 5075 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au
CRICOS Provider 01126M
Afliated with Flinders University and the Helpmann Academy
Your creative journey starts here
Associate Degree of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons)
Adelaide Central School of Art offers accredited tertiary degree programs and a range of short courses, workshops and masterclasses, suitable for
beginners through to experienced artists. Small classes and one-on-one interaction with our talented lecturers, who are all leading practitioners in
the eld in which they teach, contribute to an environment where creativity excels.
Secure your place: Applications for tertiary degree programs close Semester 2: 1 June 2012 | Semester 1: 7 January 2013
spencer
family
foundation
Ambassadors
for Adelaide Central
School of Art
In the School
Drawing Masterclass
with Christopher Orchard 18 23 June 2012
Painting and Drawing from Photographs #2
Masterclass with Chelsea Lehmann 29 June 1 July
Painting Perceptual and Conceptual Space
Masterclass with Chelsea Lehmann 3 5 July 2012
Short Course Program commencing 14 July 2012
Open Day Sunday 26 August 2012
In the Gallery
9 June 21 July 2012 No Place
Anna Horne, Amy Joy Watson
and George Zacharoyannis
28 July 26 August 2012 The Feeling of Light
SALA Exhibition with Morgan Allender,
Melanie Brown, Kveta Deans and Deborah Trusson
1 29 September 2012 Stewart MacFarlane
Ordinary Beauty: The recent and retrospective
work of Stewart MacFarlane
Photograph Ingrid Kellenbach
CRICOS Provider Code 00301J CU-JCG-0044/BRAND CUJCG0028 Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology
Two powerful exhibitions showcasing works by some of
Australias most innovative new-media artists.
Open Monday to Friday 11am - 5pm & Sunday 1pm - 4pm.
For more information phone (08) 9266 4155, email
gallery@curtin.edu.au or visit johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au
1 JUNE 3 AUGUST JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
DENNIS DEL FAVERO
MAGNESIUM
LIGHT
AND
THE WORLD
IS EVERYTHING
THAT IS
THE CASE
Dennis Del Favero, Todtnauberg, 2009, video still, courtesy of the artist.
CUJCG0028-HP(240x135) CVAC col press.indd 1 5/9/12 4:55 PM
JunAug2012.indd 1 9/05/12 10:30 AM
lion arts centre north terrace adelaide south australia
www.aeaf.org.au | info@aeaf.org.au
+61-(0)8-82117505 | open free to the public
11am5pm tues to fri & 25pm sat
a universe of
small truths
julie henderson
20 July - 18 August
28 August - 9 September
Mark Themann
13 Voids
TOUGH LOVE
8 June - 7 July
liam benson (NSW)
romi graham (SA/NSW)
amira.h. (SA/VIC)
kate james (VIC)
tiffany parbs (SA/VIC)
ona roberts (SA/QLD)
The AEAF is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, and by the South Australian Government
through Arts SA. The AEAF is also supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory
Governments.The AEAF is a member of the Contemporary Arts Organisation of Australia. The AEAF program is supported by Coriole Vineyards,
McLaren Vale.
Image (from top): Tiffany Parbs, growth, 2009, human hair, cotton net, 800 x 580 x 35mm, photo: Terence Bogue
Julie Henderson, how will I know its you (dendriform), 2011, mixed media drawing assemblage, photo: Joe Felber
Mark Themann, [Detail from the exhibition 13 Voids], 2012
ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRES
ARTSPACE
GALLERY
King William Road, Adelaide
Phone 08 8216 8850
COUNTRY ARTS SA &
ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE
PRESENT
BREAKING GROUND
STRATUM
BY YVONNE EAST
30 JUNE 29 JULY
VISIONS
FOR NOW:
SALA MOVING
IMAGE PROJECT
3 AUGUST
2 SEPTEMBER
OUR MOB
2012
A STATE WIDE
CELEBRATION OF
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN
INDIGENOUS ART
17 OCTOBER
2 DECEMBER
Y
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raafat ishak
and tom nicholson.
proposition for
a banner march
and a black cube
hot air balloon.
70 Welsford Street, Shepparton VIC 3630
mail Locked Bag 1000, Shepparton, VIC, Australia 3632
p +61 (03) 5832 9861 f +61 (03) 5831 8480
e art.museum@shepparton.vic.gov.au
w sheppartonartmuseum.com.au
open 7 days, 10.00am to 4.00pm
public holidays 1.00pm to 4.00pm
Thursday 12 July 2012
to Sunday 9 September 2012

Raafat Ishak & Tom Nicholson
Proposition for a banner march and a black cube hot air balloon, 2007
Courtesy of the artists, Anna Schwartz Gallery,
Melbourne & Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Photograph: Christian Capurro
Noel McKenna, Alice (detail), 2012
www.unisa.edu.au/artarchitecturedesign/sasagallery/
BS June-Aug.indd 1 8/05/2012 2:54:30 PM
Image: Patrick Rees The Cuddly Rapture, Patrick Rees, 2012, single channel video, 17min
JULY 2012
DAVID DE BOER | The Unauthorized Collection of John Kaldor
AUGUST 2012
SALLY ARNOLD + SASHA GRBICH | CONVERSATIONS IN ELLIPSIS
curated by Lisa Harms
SEPTEMBER 2012
FELTspace @ Co/Lab Independant Art Fair
Art Platform, Los Angeles, US
UPCOMING | 2012 + 2013
THE WRITING PROJECT
For more details and information -
http://www.feltspace.org/the-writing-project/

FELTspace GOLD available for order/purchase and can be viewed
on our website
Open Hours
Wednesday - Saturday: 1-5PM
Or by appointment
(0400 010 930)
12 Compton Street
Adelaide, 5000 SA
feltspace@gmail.com
www.feltspace.org
Editor Alan Cruickshank
Assistant Editor Wendy Walker
Advertising Manager Fiona Scott
Publisher Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc.
Design Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr
ISSN 0819 677X
Copyright 2012, Broadsheet, the authors and artists.
No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.
Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc.
print post approved PP53 1629/00022
The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy,
an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments
Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Ofce:
Broadsheet
14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063
Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286
Email: editor@cacsa.org.au
www.cacsa.org.au
Subscriptions:
Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SAadmin@cacsa.org.au
The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not
necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
International:
RICHARD GRAYSON UK
Artist, lecturer and writer, London
BORIS KREMER UK
Curator, translator and writer, London
ASTRID MANIA Germany
Editor, writer and curator, Berlin
CHRISTOPHER MOORE Czech Republic
Writer, Prague; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online
VASIF KORTUN Turkey
Director SALT, Istanbul
JULIE UPMEYER Turkey
Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul
RANJIT HOSKOTE India
Curator, writer, Mumbai
COLIN CHINNERY China
Artist, writer and curator, Beijing
BILJANA CIRIC China
Independent curator, Shanghai
JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong
Curator, art critic, writer
PATRICK FLORES Philippines
Professor Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila
SUE HAJDU Vietnam
Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City
RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia
Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur
LEE WENG CHOY Singapore
Writer and critic, Director of Projects, Osage Art Foundation
EUGENE TAN Singapore
Director Special Projects, Singapore Economic Development Board
TONY GODFREY Singapore
Director of Research, Sothebys Institute, Singapore
GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia
Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta
NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand
Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, Auckland
Australia:
ROBERT COOK Perth
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia
RUSSELL STORER Brisbane
Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacic Art, Queensland Art Gallery
REX BUTLER Brisbane
Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland
BLAIR FRENCH Sydney
Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace
ADAM GECZY Sydney
Artist, lecturer and writer
CHARLES GREEN Melbourne
Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne
IAN NORTH Adelaide
Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia
VOLUME 41.2
JUNE 2012
CONTRIBUTORS
Haig Aivazian: New York-based artist, curator and writer; his artwork has been investigating the intersections between
the migration of peoples, the circulation of consumer goods and the propagation of ideologies; involved in a number
of curatorial initiatives such as Roads Were Open/Roads Were Closed (2008), Third Line Gallery, Dubai, and Associate
Curator Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial with curators Suzanne Cotter, Curator, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project
and Rasha Salti, Creative Director, ArteEast; the rst installment of his ongoing project entitled FUGERE (A Series of
Olympiadic Events) was commissioned and exhibited in the 9th Sharjah Biennial, 2009; has written for a number of
websites and publications including Bidoun and the Arab Studies Journal
Amelia Barikin: Melbourne-based lecturer, curator and writer; completed her Art History PhD on the contemporary
French artist Pierre Huyghe at the School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne, 2008; worked on
numerous exhibitions and arts projects both independently and with broader cultural organisations such as ACMI,
Experimenta, red gallery, TekniKunst, Bus Projects, Craft Victoria, Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts, and the
Biennale of Sydney; currently preparing a monograph on the contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe for publication
with MIT Press
Rex Butler: Associate Professor, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane;
author of An Uncertain Smile (1996) What is Appropriation? (1996) Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999)
A Secret History of Australian Art (2002) Slavo Zizek: Live Theory (2004)
Natasha Conland: Curator, Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery; recent curatorial projects include Made Active:
The Chartwell Show, on sculpture and performance (2012); opening exhibitions Simultaneously Modern: Et Al., Peter
Robinson, Dane Mitchell (2011); Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: The 4th Auckland Triennial (2010); previous exhibitions
include Mystic Truths (2007), the 2006 SCAPE Biennial of Art in Public Space, co-curator of the CAF 2 project for the
Busan Biennale in South Korea; curated et al.s the fundamental practice for New Zealands representation to the
Venice Biennale, 2005; in 2008 she was one of twelve international curatorial comrades appointed to the Biennale
of Sydney by artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; writes regularly on contemporary art and is co-editor of
Reading Room: A journal of Art and Culture published annually by the E.H. McCormick Library, Auckland Art Gallery
Duygu Demir: Programmer for SALT Research & Programs, Istanbul; worked on the inaugural SALT Beyoglu
retrospective of Hseyin Bahri Alptekin (2011), and editor of accompanying publication; co-curator I Decided not to
Save the World, Tate Modern Level 2 Gallery; worked on Istanbul Eindhoven SALT VanAbbe: Post 89; contributes to
magazines and online platforms including Art Asia Pacic, Articulus, Art Unlimited, Eyeball and Ibraaz, and previously
acted as managing editor for RES Art World/World Art
Blair French: Executive Director Artspace Visual Art Centre, Sydney; curatorial convener for SCAPE 6: Christchurch
Biennial of Art in Public Space (2010/11); and is curator for SCAPE 7 (2013)
Alex Gawronski: Sydney based artist and writer; recent art projects involve participation in the two-part exhibition
Between Site and Space, a collaboration between Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya, Tokyo and Artspace, Sydney
incorporating a six-week residency at Tokyo Wonder Site (2008); co-founder/director of The Institute of Contemporary
Art Newtown (ICAN), Sydney, 2007-, Loose Projects, Sydney, 2006-07 and Blaugrau, Sydney, 2000-01; writes for
Broadsheet and Column (Artspace, Sydney); currently teaches at the Sydney College of the Arts
Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer; Senior Lecturer in Sculpture and Art Theory at Sydney College of the Arts;
his most recent exhibitions have been Decapitated at the Museum of Art, Gyr, Hungary, and Beautiful Cities, Artspace
Sydney; upcoming projects include Bomb in collaboration with Adam Hill at the AAMU in Utrecht, Holland.; author of
several books including (with Michael Carter) Reframing Art (Berg, 2005) and Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions
(Berg, 2008); latest book is co-edited with Vicki Karaminas, Fashion and Art (Berg/Bloomsbury, 2012)
Charles Green: Art History, School of Culture & Communication, University of Melbourne; artist, art critic and art
historian specialising in the history of international and Australian art after 1960
Wes Hill: Hamburg-based art writer, artist, curator, originally from Australia; PhD in Art History, University of
Queensland; regular contributor to Frieze, Frieze d/e, Artforum, Art & Australia and Eyeline; exhibited Cultural It as
Wilkins Hill (with Wendy Wilkins) at Galerie KUB, Leipzig, Germany, 2012; curatorial projects include This is what I do,
2012, at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart
Helen Hughes: PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne; co-founder and co-editor of the
contemporary art journal Discipline, as well as an editor of emaj: the Electronic Melbourne Art Journal; Assistant
Curator at Utopian Slumps, Melbourne 2010-12; research assistant for the exhibition and book Cubism and Australian
Art (Lesley Harding and Sue Cramer, Melbourne University Press, 2009) at Heide Museum of Modern Art 2008-10; has
written for publications including Broadsheet, Art & Australia, Eyeline, un Magazine and Artlink
Reuben Keehan: Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; previously Curator,
Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney
Jacqueline Millner: Lectures in art history and visual culture, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University
of Western Sydney; has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals,
and catalogues of agship national institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Queensland Art
Gallery and the Art Gallery of NSW; her book Conceptual Beauty: Writings on Australian contemporary art 1994-2009,
was published Artspace Publications, 2010
Chris Moore: Publisher of randian www.randian-online.com; from 2008-10 the Shanghai correspondent for
Saatchi Online; has contributed to various other magazines and catalogues; has written monographs on Chinese artists
Xu Zhen, MadeIn and Shi Jing
Melanie Oliver: Writer and curator based in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand; Assistant Curator, Artspace, Sydney
2010-11; Assistant Curator Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand 2007-09; managed the Wellington
artist-run initiative Enjoy 2004-07; participated in an internship at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany 2007; currently
curating a performance video project for St Paul St Gallery, Auckland, and co-curating a collateral event for the 2012
Liverpool Biennial
Virginia Whiles: Trained as a painter, art historian and anthropologist; Associate Lecturer, University of the Arts
London; critic, curator and lecturer in ne art and cultural studies for over 40 years in Europe and South Asia; curated
exhibitions and published extensively on contemporary art, particularly from South Asia; author of Art and Polemic in
Pakistan (I.B.Tauris, 2010)
Kathy Zarur: PhD candidate with a focus on contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa and its diasporas,
Department of History of Art, University of Michigan; assistant curator, Sharjah Biennial 10; guest curator for art:screen
fest, rbrero, Sweden; artists in residence coordinator, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; holds certicate in
Museum Studies, University of Michigan
88
COVER: Imran Qureshi, All are the colour of my heart, 2011 (installation view, gouache on wasli paper, detail)
Photo courtesy the artist, Gandhara Art, Hong Kong and 2012 Biennale of Sydney
106
108
134
138
VOLUME 41.2
JUNE 2012
88
ALL OUR RELATIONS: 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR GERALD McMASTER
IN DISCUSSION WITH BROADSHEET
Blair French, Jacqueline Millner, Adam Geczy, Charles Green, Amelia Barikin, Reuben Keehan
94
CMON LETS STICK TOGETHER: ON COLLABORATION, INCLUSION AND CONSONANCE
IN THE 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
Adam Geczy
98
A PETRI DISH IN THE SUN?
Alex Gawronski
106
ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL
Jacqueline Millner
108
BLUE BUTTERFLIES: ON SHADOW SITES 1-11 AND THE WORK
OF JANANNE AL- ANI
Duygu Demir
110
SANGUINE IRRIGATION: A LOOK AT THREE SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS
BY IMRAN QURESHI
Haig Aivazian
114
SUSPENDED GESTURES
Helen Hughes
118
DANCE OF HISTORY: SRIWHANA SPONG LEARNING DUETS
Melanie Oliver
120
PROCESS AND MATERIALITY
Kathy Zarur
124
GREEK PLASTICS
Natasha Conland
128
ITS ALL RELATIVE
Chris Moore
132
PARALLEL COLLISIONS: IN THE SHADOW OF ALL OUR RELATIONS AND TRAUMATISED ART
Rex Butler
134
TRAUMATISED ART OBJECTS
Wes Hill
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LOST TO THE DEMONS: KHADIM ALI AT DOCUMENTA (13)
Virginia Whiles
ALL OUR RELATIONS
18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY ARTISTC DIRECTOR GERALD MCMASTER IN DISCUSSION WITH BROADSHEET
CHARLES GREEN: There seems to be a consensus regarding the apparently
lessening relevance of biennales, that to many of us, the almost endless cycles
of new biennales have at the same time become less and less exciting, except as
spectacle, and that the trajectory of this undoubted biennale phenomenon, which
has arced upwards since the early 1990s, seems now to be arcing downwards.
Many of the most interesting biennales seem to be occurring, at least based on
reviews, in the most peripheral and marginal locations often in circumstances
of real diffculty and extremity, and the older, established biennales seem to
have remained incorporated within the now-seamless feedback loops of the art
world, in which most politics, including politics of the Other, exist with little or
no disruption except in curators claims. This is not an over-theoretical analysis.
Would you please comment upon this?
GERALD McMASTER: For Venice, you have over one hundred years of exhibition
history; the other well-known biennales such as So Paulo, Documenta, and Sydney
have been in existence for half that time. Now it appears that there are over one
hundred and ffty biennales going on in the world at any time. How do you choose?
Return to the same one, seek out an unusual one, go where your friends go, its a
big choice. For the artist, biennales are a great opportunity to show ones works.
Indeed, there is a proliferation.
Robert Storr once said that there are over one hundred and ffty biennales
across the globe, so being distinct can be diffcult because each biennale wants
to be new and different. The Biennale of Sydney is a signifcant celebration of
contemporary art in the Asia Pacifc region. It is the oldest in this area; for the
next biennale itll be celebrating its fortieth anniversary. As I understand it, the
Biennale of Sydney was one of the frst to break away from the nationalist pavilion
models and select an Artistic Director to oversee the articulation of a vision.
I also understand it to be the launching platform for artists who have gone on to
become well established within the art world. Sydney as a city is an unquestioned
destination for visitors from around the world and so it goes without saying the
city is built for being an international venue for contemporary art.
JACQUELINE MILLNER: I would suggest most contemporary art seeks to engage
its audience. What is it about the works you have selected for this exhibition
that distinguishes them as being about engagement, or particularly successful in
meeting this criterion?
GERALD McMASTER: The exhibition that Catherine and I have curated is indeed
very much geared to engaging audiences rather than turning our backs on them.
The Biennale of Sydney in my view has always wanted the local audience to be
thoroughly engaged with seeing current trends in art from around the world and
here at home. True theres already a lot of art in Sydney during the year, but every
two years the Biennale of Sydney adds an extra cache thats celebratory. I still
believe art has a particular power to elicit meaning from, and for, many kinds of
audiences. I say this because we are now at a point where audiences are so much a
part of the experience, and the relation between artist and audience seems much
more important today. I dont mean as a way of generating revenue; rather, art
is more important to us than ever, and audiences are becoming more interested
in discovering art. I fnd the Nuit Blanche idea, which is played out in cities such
as Paris, Barcelona, and now Toronto (where I had the pleasure of curating it
in 2010), over a twelve hour period, has done more to make art accessible to
vast numbers in one short night. In Toronto, for example, in a short twelve hours
an estimated one million people are exposed to art. The fact that the Biennale
of Sydney is free encourages even more opportunities for engagement. We are
always going to compete with many other events, so it is important to consider the
artist as someone who makes us see and experience the world differently. What
Catherine and I have put together is an exhibition that delights the sensesall
the senses, from the visual to the auditory, from the casual to the interactive,
and from the responsive to the directed. Artists continually open up our senses to
seeing and understanding the world in new ways. The success of our show will be
what audiences take away and what they remember long after its over.
Working from a collaborative framework, the 18th Biennale of Sydney, All Our Relations will be a departure from previous Biennale of Sydney exhibitionsthe
theme will increasingly become apparent through the process rather than being imposed on artists and audiences at the beginning. All Our Relations intends to
focus on inclusionary art practices of generative thinking, such as collaboration, conversation and compassion. Artistic co-directors Catherine De Zegher and Gerald
McMaster have said: Drawing on the possibility of the present, the Biennale will emerge from the engagement of all participants by using a model that begins with
two curators in dialogue. A changing reality is apparent in a renewed attention to how things connect, how we relate to each other and to the world we inhabit.
Rather than one work appearing to link to one or two other works, projects will correspond as if evolving from each other and progressing through the sequence
of venues and buildings. Artists will work in a context that allows for mutual recognition and audiences from differing backgrounds will be part of this continual
development. The collaboration will take place on many different levels: in co-existence, conversation and juxtaposition but also in purposeful connectivity. Artists,
who can often feel isolated in their practice, will come together with neighbouring artists. This interconnection and interdependency will occur in the knowledge
that audiences, too, will take elements from the exhibition and connect them with their own experiences. The following is a discussion between co-director Gerald
McMaster and Broadsheet writers Blair French, Jacqueline Millner, Adam Geczy, Charles Green, Amelia Barikin and Reuben Keehan. The 18th Biennale of Sydney,
all our relations will be presented from 27 June16 September, 2012.
Opposite: Robin Watkins, The Luminiferous Aether (detail), 2009
Photo courtesy the artist
8 9 C O N T E MP O R A R Y V I S U A L A R T + C U L T U R E B R O A D S H E E T 41. 2 2 012
91 C O N T E MP O R A R Y V I S U A L A R T + C U L T U R E B R O A D S H E E T 41. 2 2 012
JACQUELINE MILLNER: How is your curatorial theme distinct from the now
over-familiar and much-critiqued notion of relational aesthetics propounded by
Nicholas Bourriaud?
GERALD McMASTER: Some might think there are similarities but there is no
relation, pardon the pun. What we came to understand was that during the
last century the world was overlaid by what Foucault and others said was a grid
that broke everything down into units and fragments, separated into distinct
compartments and so on. While this idea has triggered many wonderful ideas,
there have been consequences that the latter half of the twentieth-century has
been struggling to rethink new strategies for how peoples and ideas can come
together. This new thinking asks us not just about relations between ourselves
but also the more-than-human world, which in part is why there is a focus on
environmental concerns. Weve also moved beyond the period of multiculturalism
to one where there is mixing of different sortssocially, politically, artistically and
so on. Indeed, the world is transforming through migration/immigration, social
media, activism, etc. At the outset we said that our proposal wishes to capitalise
on a creative tensionbetween the artist, the audience, the city and countryfor
it is in the conuence, the meeting and making of ideas together, that positive
consequence can follow. From the outset we felt we needed to have a thorough
engagement with the artist and therefore stayed clear of an overarching theme.
In short, the process became the theme. While relations began early, we feel they
will continue through the installation process, and fnally it will be the audiences
wholl complete the process.
JACQUELINE MILLNER: What do you make of the objections against spectacular
artlarge scale, crowd-pleasing, entertainingsuch as those made by Benjamin
Buchloh, that suggest that such art erodes the potential for critical reection that
post-conceptual art aspires to?
GERALD McMASTER: I believe we were aware that the question of spectacle and
spectacular would surface, as it does whenever there is a biennale. We were
certainly aware that for installation within the confnes and structure of say
Cockatoo Island we would invite artists who would be able to address the spatiality
of the long-abandoned modernist spaces. So rather than think in terms of large-
scale (where there will be some) and crowd pleasing (where there will be some),
we thought more in terms of art that would be memorable. Something memorable
can come in different guises. It can be as simple as a story that two or more people
can tell or relate that is inspired by a work of art no matter what its scale. We also
felt that the spaces of Cockatoo Island or Pier 2/3 would provide their own sense
of the spectacular for which the art becomes complementary. The sheer size of
the Biennale itself verges on suggesting these ideas.
But, as we know from visiting any museum, or talking with evaluations
experts who are responsible to watch people looking at art they will tell us that
overwhelmingly the interaction with art is so brief that any critical reection
can only be seen as a residual effect. Im not saying that critical reection isnt
happening; what I am saying is that it happens in various ways, such as returning
for another visit, by talking and sharing with friends or colleagues, by taking
photographs to view later, by texting a friend about something youve seen, by
being led by gallery guides, or an engagement with the artist or artistic director.
Critical reection occurs in a variety of ways. I think that a work of art is just
the beginning of an engagement for critical reection; many of the works in this
edition of the Biennale are likely to achieve the potential.
ADAM GECZY: It has become increasingly evident that the Biennale of Sydney
undergoes a sort of fetishistic disavowal of its position within the Asia Pacifc
region at each edition, with its predominant thematics constantly directed towards
the Euro-American North by mostly artistic directors from that domain. Carolyn
Christov-Barkiegevs Revolutions that Turn was a somewhat paradigmatic example
of this fxation. What steps has your Biennale taken to address this question?
GERALD McMASTER: What can I say? My collaborator is from Europe and I am from
North America (Canada; which itself is a close cousin to Australia). Perhaps I can
talk about the 18th exhibition itself and how we have thought about this question.
First of all, I did not see Carolyn Christov-Bakargievs exhibition, but was here as
the Canadian Commissioner for David Elliotts presentation, who I thought went
out of his way to include more than half of the exhibitions artists from outside
the Euro-American region. Catherine de Zegher and I continue this same pattern.
As for artists of the Asia Pacifc, Id say about thirty-fve percent of the artists
come from the Asia Pacifc region, which includes Australia. Though this question
of inclusion/exclusion seems to be one asked in different ways by different
people, depending on the circumstance of the discussion, suffce to say what we
were at pains to look in unusual places such as Mongolia or in places where the
mainstream art world rarely travels. So were confdent we will have artists from
areas you least expect, to the extent this is another way we might differentiate
our approach from Bourriaud who is more bound to seek out the usual suspects
from major art producing areas of Europe or North America.
REUBEN KEEHAN: Your prcis for all our relations notes a shift in art away from
radical opposition toward a more nuanced exploration of human relationships.
But the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Wukan uprising have reminded us
that these to currents are not so distinct, that they may, in fact, operate through
a single movementradical experimentation with the form of participation,
directed against the imposition of power. We are the red line, you do not cross
us: this is the tone. Given that this extraordinary movement has emerged as you
have been assembling this Biennale, has this tone emerged in art, and will it be
registered on the exhibition oor?
GERALD McMASTER: We did not anticipate these events happening but we
did recall the very immediate and devastating consequences of environmental
catastrophes that in their own way bring us together. Our relationships are not just
human but more-than-human, which is suggested by our titleall our relations.
Various artists in their own way will address concerns specifc to their region;
indeed, these artists are responding to local, regional, national and international
dilemmas. The exhibition and the artwork will show how everything is connected
and that we are all implicated to some degree. We have said that the artists that
we are presenting engage with deep ideas and world issues, in a way directly
related to our senses, rather than in the negative and critical way we have become
accustomed to.
AMELIA BARIKIN: A media release states that the Biennale of Sydney will be
rooted in storytelling as it is currently being re-imagined as a coming-into-being
in relation. In the reciprocity that is storytelling, both teller and listener inhabit
the space of the story. Telling stories connects us and allows us to care, to be; it
fosters collaboration; it aggregates knowledge and generates new ideas; it ignites
change; and, ultimately, builds community. In this matrix, the different projects
can be compared to a set of story lines, which artists, curators and audiences
relate and translate. Through this process, a collective composition or new
gesamtkunstwerk is accomplished in the active generation of meanings realised
by all those who take part, each taking their stories home and beyond. In his 1936
essay The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin makes a distinction between the formats
of the novel and the story on the basis of an altered temporality. Whereas the
novelist is writing a story that must end, the storytellers tale is generated through
a communion of shared experiences that evolves from person to person, mouth
to mouth, place to place. This, suggests Benjamin, is the time of history rather
than of the historian: it is the time of a shared imaginary with a cyclical rhythm.
If storytelling has become a dominant mode within contemporary artistic practice,
what does this reveal about the structure of contemporary history?
Opposite: Everlyn Nicodemus, Bystander on probation No.14, 2007
Page 92: Farideh Lashai, El Amal, 2011

GERALD McMASTER: History is always around us and we live with it. Thus,
reading the past through the lens of the present or the artists brings it closer
to the frst person, bringing life to the work. By doing so, it allows us to look at
the works in interesting ways. As historians who focus on popular memory have
insisted, we experience the present through the lens of the pastand we shape
our understanding of the past through the lens of the present. Though we have
created a narrative, it wont be one that most visitors will follow; instead, we see
an unfolding taking place within the relation between audience and the art. What
we can imagine are many works of art (dots) that will be connected by audiences,
whether its on their own, in relation with a friend or relative, or by our guides.
We realise that storytelling is heteroglossic, or multivocal, so we anticipate a
lively interchange of ideas and stories.
We have also begun a kind of storytelling with Moira Roth on our Biennale
of Sydney web-site (called Moira Roths Gleanings), in which she says: Over the
coming months, I will conduct regular online exchanges with a selection of the
18th Biennales artists, as well as periodic exchanges with the two curators.
Artists such as Lee Mingwei and Nadia Myre will conduct a kind of performative
storytelling with audiences in a steady exchange of stories. Ewa Partums
interactive metapoetry, in which she scatters letters at various sites only to be
picked by participants, forms a new kind of poetics. These are just samples of types
of stories to be told and retold over the course of the Biennale and afterwards.
Indeed, audiences are important but their interaction with each other
or the art isnt everything; theyre not the central playersthe art and artists are.
The art is what audiences interact with, be it directly or indirectly. Audiences
participate through the senses. They tell each other stories; or they will keep
it to themselves only to tell their story later rather than try mess with their
mood or interaction with the art. For us, the interaction is not the art, only the
experience that is personal and that can be shared with others. A number of works
are interactive wherein audiences can engage or participate or merely experience
they will not be told what to do. How we have curated the exhibition allows the
audience to have new experiences from one work to the next where connections
are made or sensed.
ADAM GECZY: Is there a socio-philosophical subtext to your idea of collaboration,
and if so, to what extent is it compatible with the contemporary zeitgeist?
And collaboration, relationality, interactivitythese politics of inclusion that
curators have imposed on artists seem somewhat forced. Given the plethora of
biennales and their like is it that curators are now short of ideas?
GERALD McMASTER: As we have said, we began in collaboration that was borne out
of conversation but it wasnt the overriding rationale. We have some collaborative
projects that are both direct and indirect, in which artists work with each other or
across disciplines or with skilled technicians or with communities. Collaboration
doesnt necessarily mean working together, but the simple juxtapositioning of
works creates a relation wherein audiences will construct meaning. We were
thinking more about conversations through ideas such as collaboration and
interactivity. I cannot say if indeed curators are short of ideas or that there are
too many ideas, it is just taking one and working with it.
BLAIR FRENCH: This is the third time the Biennale has been partially presented on
Cockatoo Islanda post-industrial ruin of sorts that provides a spectacular stage
and appears immensely popular with visitors. It could be argued, however, that a
small number of specifc artist projects notwithstanding, the biennale exhibitions
have tended not to address the specifc and very complex histories embedded in
the site but in fact to ignore or implicitly displace such particularities of locality
and history. How are you approaching working with this unique site?
GERALD McMASTER: I agree with you whole-heartedly. When you attend the Venice
Biennale I think youll fnd most artists address its long, complex, and fascinating
history. This was not lost on us. Cockatoo Island is by defnition surrounded by
water and Sydney and is a seaside city, so in our exhibition the question of water
is very much in evidence. The works of Ed Pien, Monika Grzymala, Alan Michelson,
Jess MacNeil, Fujiko Nakaya, Jonathan Jones, Lyndal Jones, Carlos Garaicoa,
Khaled Sabsabi, Adam Cvijanovic and Cristina Iglesias, all address water to varying
degrees. As to it being a ruin of its industrial past, quite a number of artists
such as Jonathan Jones, Lyndal Jones, Carlos Garaicoa, Cal Lane, Peter Robinson,
Jon Pylypchuk, Philip Beesley, Nina Canell and Rob Watkins, Iris Haussler, Tiffany
Singh, Alec Finlay, Nicholas Hlobo, Ricardo Lanzarini and Imran Qureshi, all to
some degree address this highly attractive space. Many of these artists will come
quite early to work on their installations and will spend a good deal of time
reecting on this site. Some will address it as a colonial site, a staging area for
the disastrous effects of global climate change, its maritime history, its gendered
history, its mining potential, as a pilgrimage site, its modernist history, as a former
jail, or a refuge for various types of animals.
JACQUELINE MILLNER: How does the specifc location of Sydney, Australia, feature
in the exhibition, besides providing the actual sites? What is your understanding of
Australias place in the current system of globalised art?
GERALD McMASTER: Ill answer this as Ive answered others. Theres a sense of
internationalism at play, in that Australian audiences want to know whats going
on in the rest of the world, to be connected. This is what all our relations is
about. Australia has a curious history: not only are its original inhabitants among
the oldest in the world, but its also a country/continent that appears to be far
away from its colonial antecedents, but close to large Asian powerhouses such as
India and China. Indeed, its history of relations with countries in the Asia Pacifc
spans more than 5,000 years. Despite this history of engagement with the region,
its the more recent colonial history where the question of distance seems to
persistespecially in the art world.
What I also fnd unique is the character of the country and how it affects
the Biennale to some degree, and that it is, like Canada, a colonial country.
In So Paulo, Brazil, where the second longest-running biennale is presented, it
is a colonial country, it provides absolutely no voice to its indigenous inhabitants
in other words, this aspect of their identity is completely lackingwhereas in
Australia it is almost celebrated. To be sure, artists who happen to be indigenous
have become an important part of the Biennale. The last Biennale, directed by
David Elliott, placed a palpable emphasis on art from these often overlooked areas
of artistic production worldwide.
As I have stated, with so many biennales across the globe, being distinct
can be diffcult because each biennale wants to be new and different. The Biennale
of Sydney is a signifcant celebration of contemporary art in the Asia Pacifc region.
Sydney as a city is an unquestioned destination for visitors from around the world,
and so it goes without saying that the city is built for being an international venue
for contemporary art. An added dimension is Cockatoo Island, an artefact of the
past that provides such a superb backdrop for many artists. In fact, its nonwhite
cube character is now attracting many new kinds of visitors, such as families who
feel that galleries are a bit too severe.
Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist and writer, and since 2005 has been the Fredrik
S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where he recently
curated Inuit Modern: The Esther and Samuel Sarick Collection. He was also a
member of the curatorial team for the 2010 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto.
At the Smithsonians National Museum of the American Indian, McMaster was the
Directors Special Assistant for Mall Exhibitions and Deputy Assistant Director for
Cultural Resources. McMaster was also Curator, Canadian Museum of Civilisation.
Catherine de Zegher is a curator and writer, and Visiting Curator, Tpies
Foundation, Barcelona. Until recently, she was Guest Curator, Department of
Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organised On Line:
Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. De Zegher was Director of Exhibitions
and Publications, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and, for many years, was the
Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Drawing Center, New York. Before
working in North America, she was co-founder and Director of the Kanaal Art
Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium.
C'MON LET'S STICK TOGETHER
ON COLLABORATION, INCLUSION AND CONSONANCE IN THE 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
ADAM GECZY
On frst reading, the title for this years Biennale of Sydney, All Our Relations,
seems simple enough. At the beginning of their rationale to the exhibition
(Biennale website), Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster set up an opposition
that the exhibition seeks to address. We are moving on from a century in which
the radical in the arts largely adopted principles of separation, negativity and
disruption as strategies of change. The therapeutic ring of we are moving on is
rather seductive, and sets up the exhibition as both an antidote and a new horizon.
The (bad) twentieth-century was oppositional and negative, we have gotten over
this and are now embracing the new with an inclusive bountifulness that is more
accepting than ever before. But the ethos of collaboration and connectivity as
they call it begs more scrutiny. For underpinning their own principles is a moral
ought that is based on what is, frankly, scruffy reasoning. Inclusiveness is advanced
with an aggressiveness that makes a straw man of modernism, while posing an
attitude that brooks no alternative. The white Western male independent artist is
permanently imperilled. Those out of sympathy with inclusion in art subscribe to
an old reactionary world order. Beware.
The line that follows the one just quoted reads: Based on oppositional thinking,
such modernist principles proved tenacious and acted as a default criticality
in a world in which the drive to progress became more complicated and the
consequences more ambiguous. Working from the previous sentence, modern
principles we assume, are those that adopted principles of separation
and negativity. These principles are a default criticality. The cryptically
ungrammatical turn is not saved by the recourse to overt ambiguity: the drive
to progress became more complicated. Apart from a world we do not know
where this drive hails from, let alone why, how or what complications arose.
Nor is it ever settled whether such complications were good or bad, although we
assume bad. It would be very tempting to set about parsing the entire text, but
it is best to explore the two pillars on which this Biennale appears to be built,
namely modernism as a period of conict and the antidote of inclusiveness and
collaboration prescribed for it.
When artistic modernism actually begins is contentious. (Please bear
with me while I undertake a quick rehearsal of Art101.) It usually boils down
to three positions. The frst is late nineteenth-century, with Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism, and the abstraction of the picture plane. This is the formalist
reading that culminates in Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. The second
is in the mid-nineteenth century with the birth of photography and the modern
metropolis, and the alteration of modes of seeing. It was also the period of
Realism spearheaded by Gustave Courbet and later mile Zola, who were both
adamant about the social ramifcations of what they were doing. Realism really
meant representation of the underclass and work which at the time had a deeply
seditious and revolutionary import. The third is in the Neoclassicism of Jacques-
Louis David which came to defne the French Revolution, although it was already on
the rise as a stylistic fashion over a decade before. The simplicity of Neoclassicism
lent itself to various uses, and in the revolutionary hands it steered away from the
fripperies of aristocratic excess. What was important at this time is that a style
came to evoke the possibilities of human agency. In both art and dress, adopting
a simpler mode meant effciency and mobility. In many respects this vision of
the beginning of artistic modernism does not diminish its relevance to political
concerns nor with formal ones, rather these two qualities are built into overarching
efforts of renewal and betterment that, at best, are deeply moral. There was a
different morality at stake, to be sure, for the modernist artist working relatively
alone for a relatively indeterminate social body, in contrast with one ensconced
within patronage. Dogmatic as they may appear by now, these details serve to
demonstrate the transformative nature of modern art and its meliorist intent.
The question is whether these circumstances have changed in art or
whether the means by which they are achieved and received have altered. One of
the sources of the rage against postmodernism was its perceived lack of coherence.
The absence of a locatable movement or a dominant set of concerns was regarded
with distress, since it suggested disinclination to action or any committed set
of determinations. The stylistic pea soup of postmodernism was greeted with
contempt, but also welcomed by groups who had felt marginalised and silenced by
the former ethos of dominance. These shifts that began in the late 1970s are of
course conated in the century from which, according to de Zegher and McMaster,
we have moved on. If we adopt their terminology of negativity, we can say
that frst there was the more dialectic negativity of the avant-garde, then the
negativity at not having negativity. The term postmodernism diminished in use
with the appearance and embattled defnition of new media and then with the
emergence of the semantic white elephant The Contemporary.
But while again painting in broad strokes, it is tenable to state that the
late 1990s and early 2000s were periods of profusion facilitated by the digital
channels that had a paradoxical effect. It expanded the reach of Euro-American
discourses, political, artistic and otherwise, while also giving vent to voices of
slippage and dissent. These changes, gradual and from more than one source
allowed individual artists to group together physically, or according to formal
or conceptual family relationships. It was also the accelerating developments in
digital technology that spawned a new culture of collaboration, well before artists
had a chance to think of its ideological motivations or consequences: artists were
brought together through the multiple platforms of interfaces; it was also common
for artists versed in the image to come together with those versed in sound.
But what was occurring was nothing too new, except for the speed and uidity
with which it was achieved. It was, and still is, amusing however to see the
ideology that has grown around collaboration since the mid-1990s, which evolved
as a partner term to interactivity. In the shift from description and fact to ideology
these ideas became more consequential, which is to say more dangerous. To put
this differently, collaboration had come to be viewed less as a way of approaching
artistic (and other) production, but as a process imbued with its own special
virtues. And to do so immediately courts some of the more tired and vapid diatribes
directed at modernism: the sequestered, paranoid male artist, the individual
capitalist, the exclusivist, the anti-communalist ergo the anti-communist and
hence the capitalist. Why not just say that the white heterosexual male artist
working alone is capitalism in miniature? If such simplicities sound absurd, then
observe the extent to which, in this Biennale at least, it isalmost exclusively, but
not to give the game away entirelyavoided.
We can learn a bit from the German here, where kollaboration is
a solecism used by non-native speakers since it refers to people collaborating
with the Nazis. Because of this, Germans use the far more descriptive, innocuous
word, mitarbeiten, literally working with. (A commensurate solecism comes
to mind: John F. Kennedy called himself a donut in his address to Berlin in
1963Ich bin ein Berliner, which means I am a jam-flled donut, when the
correct phraseology is Ich bin Berliner.)
Since this stain, the verb to collaborate is the more innocuous and
factual cognate mitarbeitenworking with. Medieval manuscripts were
frequently the product of multiple hands, as were Renaissance frescoes. It was
common practice for the master to lay down the cartoon, or drafted ground form,
and to give his assistants instructions on how to fll it in. If an apprentice rivalled
the skills of his master he was given more and more responsibility, as occurred
with Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens before van Dyck branched out
on his own. Rubens could not have painted around a thousand paintings, while
also being a diplomat without a great deal of help. It was also acceptable for
Flemish artists of the time to pool their skillsno different from a video artist and
a sound composer coming togetheraccording to their differing strengths, such
as when Rubens teamed up with Frans Snyders, adept at painting animals and
Jan Brueghel the Elder, renowned for his plants and landscapes. While van Gogh
had unsuccessfully wanted to resuscitate the communal attitude with Gauguin
(perhaps one of the worst perpetrators of the male individualist myth),
Impressionist artists were known to paint side by side. Many of the artistic avant-
garde were socialists (inspired by Saint-Simon and Proudhon whom Courbet
painted) and anarchists. The idea of artistic movements has long been taught
according to the legacies of formalist teaching, ignoring or only nodding to the
political and social ideas that impelled them. Aside from exhibiting together,
the Impressionists were never a coherent group and they shared their disgust at
the ineffcacy and mendacity of the academic mainstream, whom they viewed,
correctly, as perpetuating political conservatism that was mercantile, militaristic
and nepotistic. The social aims of artists reached a new head with World War I.
The performativity and randomness of Dada sought to displace artistic autonomy
along with coherence and predictability, along with anything that could be
solidifed into a commodity. Dada and the Bauhaus were the origins of our ideas
of collaboration, except perhaps the political justifcations are today more
piecemeal and desultory.
Certainly the aspirations that appeared to reside in collaboration and
interactivity after they became in vogue in the last two decades or so have
underscored deeper fears about the very opposite. Greater and greater sums
were being spent on art, by artists alive or dead. The global fnancial crisis did
nothing to stem this ow on the higher end, since it is art that is invested in,
when confdence in the market is down. Art is also a very easy way of parking,
or hiding money. When it comes to art as a commodity, there is no philosophical
differentiation between artist groups and pairs, or individuals. What is important
is simply the belief in the longevity of the works value. I challenge anyone to fnd
an investor who collects works produced as the result of collaboration because
it reects a better image of community. (Although to do so would be the most
gallant form of altruistic mendacity, a version, but in farcically ham-handed form,
of buying Aboriginal art because it emanates spirituality and it helps the people
in question.)
Interactivity and audience involvement have been some of the most fraudulent
notions circulating around art, since these ideas were raised to the status of
principles by Nicolas Bourriaud after he coined the term relational aesthetics
in the catalogue to his exhibition Traffc in 1996, and then in what amounted to
his manifesto on the subject published two years later. I have written in these
pages on this ersatz movementBroadsheet 36.2, 2008which amounts to little
more than sanitised situationism. In many ways it also epitomised the condition
of most of the contemporary Left, namely as a diffuse set of moral codes puffed
up with sanctity, but bankrupt on the impetus for real changeSlavoj Zizek has
written extensively on this counter-productive Left in books such as The Sublime
Object of Ideology (2009) and Living in the End Times (2011). Indeed there was
something perverse about relational aesthetics insofar as it played a game of
diversity and randomness in common with the best advancements of Dada or the
experimental art of the 1960s and 1970s, but did so without concealing the proud
sanction of either doctrine or institution. Here one can be radical without losing
the safety net. This is not in any way to argue that all art produced today with
a component of the relationality is suspect. Sometimes it works very well, but
usually achieved without the dubious need for lip service or bowing to it as a credo
(the work of Francis Als springs to mind).
Interactivity, which begins somewhere around the same time is not
only born of the advancements in digital technology, but also a growing need
by governments and municipalities to rethink their strategies for patronising
art. Interactive art is relational art without the faux-radical edge of relational
aesthetics, because it usually involves a fxed object that anchors the object or
the action, be it an interface or something that calls for alteration by one or
more members of the audience. This sort of art practice was, and continues to be
especially congenial to government offcials whose decisions are part of a chain
of accountability. For the expenditure of public funds is far easier to justify on
a work, in which the public gets involved, that is, physically. What such trends
ignored was that art is by nature interactive in that it demands more of the viewer
than just looking, or that there have been creative works which people have
physically interacted with for centuries. It is called architecture.
Architecture, other than the installation of the works of art in their
respective spaces is another idea noticeably absent from de Zegher and McMasters
agenda, and is a particularly glaring omission, given the types of historical
and revisionist claims they are making. Deconstructivismas distinct from
deconstruction and deconstructionism, although they are all relatedbecame an
active term in architectural circles in both theory and practice around the 1980s.
The architectural equivalent of postmodern art, deconstructivisms theoretical
apologists were Charles Jencks, later Mark Wigley and of course the philosophical
wizard Jacques Derrida. Key architects included Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi,
Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. Deconstructivist architects
express a distrust in the universalist and utopian notions embodied in modernist
architecture, instead offering an image of diversity, instability and incoherence.
Architecture is the ultimate test of such a motive, since expressions of disunity
and discord must nonetheless work within something that is functional, and which
justifes the expense and labour. It must be anti-institutional in something that
is institutional from the frst. The oblique lines and unconventional materials
such as metal are all stock-in-trade for high-budget architecture today, when
deconstructivism is now more of an historical by-word, if it hasnt been dropped
from popular parlance altogether. It would seem, however, that the ideas it
enshrines would be relevant to the curators task, since it addresses both disunity
and unity at once, but also seeks to reect the complexities and unevenness of
globalised world views. What is pertinent is that deconstructivist architecture,
which despite its lapse into formulas, is at best a reckoning upon the heterogeneous
and how it can be given a home without that heterogeneity losing its integrity, or
interest.
Toward the end of their (website) rationale, de Zegher and McMaster
explain the roles that their guiding ideas of collaboration and inclusiveness will
take: In seeking conjunctive energies, the collaboration will take place on
many different levels: in co-existence, conversation and juxtaposition but also
in purposeful connectivity. Within this framework of mutuality, recognition and
thoughtfulness, disparate ideassome distantly and some closely relatedwill be
brought together in an exhibition process of composition; much akin to the process
of thought itself.
One balks at the frst phrase conjunctive energies which almost sounds
like a particularly acute eye malady. The rest is suitably obliqueco-existence,
conversation and juxtaposition but also in purposeful connectivitythat applies
to most art. The art object coexists with the viewer; it is a mute, or tacit,
conversation that is conducted at best on a highly sophisticated subliminal level,
and if juxtaposition is not employed in it, then by virtue of the art object being art,
it juxtaposes itself with what is not itself, since the (good) work of art inevitably
incites some form of interest. But it is the phrase purposeful connectivity that
is the most jarringly intriguing. We might recall Kants gnomic characterisation of
the beautiful: purposiveness without a purpose (zweckmssigkeit ohne zweck).
De Zegher and McMaster provide much to ponder and one wonders if there is going
to be the in-your-face ardour of soliciting pamphleteers in a shopping mall on a
Saturday morning. The framework of mutuality, recognition and thoughtfulness
is more rhetorical promise than substantial, but sounds much like a self-help clinic.
Apart from being prolix, and suffused with the good-time air of neo-utopianism,
there are some rather large claims here. The fnal ourish is never fully qualifed,
despite its foray into epistemology. Their positing of the compositional nature of
thought disregards the fundamental fact that the development of intelligence is
through making intelligible distinctions.
While on a philosophical note, it is important to draw into this discussion
one of the most important works on community in recent times, Jean-Luc Nancys
The Inoperative community (La Communaut dsuvr, 1986). He draws a line
between community as a founding principle of humanity and that of communism
per se, which he sees as a debased and simplifed version of that principle. Art
itself (he writes mainly about literature) is one of communitys conditions of
possibility, since its undertaking is about sharing visions and voices, it also exposes
the limits of the communal, which is not the dead-end, but an unrealisable mission
as a totality. The world in words (or paint, or projected onto a screen for that
matter) is always a virtual world whose resolution is in the aesthetic event, which
is one of the few things resistant to ideology. The community that is the fold of
understanding between artist and recipient is distinct from the myth of community,
which is a false conscious that sees a realisable mission in being together. Like all
myths it is an image, which without rationale is mutable, unjustifed and often
arbitrary. Communism, but also any other movement from Woodstock to Nimbin
are examples of this myth.
Apparently the artistic directors of the 18th Biennale of Sydney are
infusing the myth of community into the sense of community, and the communal
effort that is central to artistic communication, or the communication of the
aesthetic as one fnds it in art. For mythic community must always communicate,
and share in a material, visible, and by all accounts verifable way. Such has been
the manner of some of the tropes and strategies that I have outlined above.
Not only is there a more than jaundiced concept of more than a centurys
art, but in what they reject and the lack of criticality in what they embrace
undervalues works that are not as obviously deploying their objective of inclusion.
The double bind, and the wager of art is that in its capacity for it to be ignored
or misunderstood, is also its capacity to touch. In its ineffcacy is also the power
for cataclysmic disruption of emotions, senses and beliefs. Art is incommensurate
with a political banner or a dishcloth commemorating the royal wedding for a
good reason (readymades and ironic counterfeits aside), because its ambiguity
reaches into and has the power to harmonise what in verbalised logic could only be
expressed as contradictions, or as nonsense. Efforts to tamper with this dynamic
often result in bad art, which is another way of saying that bad art comes from
the wager of communication (and hence community and inclusion) so that it never
misses its mark. I am in no way making a judgment of the works in the exhibition,
but I am making a judgment about the abstruse logic that binds them.
Finally to the bedevilled topic of ethnicity in this exhibition. No doubt
the communitarian instinct as espoused by de Zegher and McMaster is one that has
a global reach, which is expected in a biennale. They seem to be saying, we are
inclusive of the whole global community. But, unless this conclusion extrapolates
too far, such inclusion also misses the fact that most Third World countries do not
see themselves as included, but subjected, or some fnd themselves in the fray
of such chaos that they are not given pause for any reection at all. What is also
true is that countries which do not wish to identify wholly with the Euro-American
legacy have mined their own histories and their imaginations to fnd ways of self-
identifcation that are separate, and thus exclusionary, without this exclusion
leading to violence. While this may be a mechanism of community still, it behoves
individual artists to invent alternatives and test these within the marketplace of
ideas and commodities.
It is important to comment on large-scale exhibitions and the ideas that
bind them, especially those for which there is a lot at stake. The contentious
theoretical structure of this Biennale is redolent of the 2004 Biennale, On Reason
and Emotion curated by Isabel Carlos. It is now not enough to say that one can
only hope that the individual works sing out for themselves separate from the
misconceptions of the philosophical framework as has been said of previous
Biennales. It is insuffcient now for the very reason of community. It is through the
penetrating dialogue between artists that new ideas are accelerated. And when this
is done actively, the family relations between artists make their complicated ideas
more accessiblethrough repetition and cross-referencingto a non-specialist
audience. Given the promiscuous rhetoric that has global as an adjective or
a prefx, and given that the world of art is as proportionately overpopulated as
the planet itself, good, courageous and exacting curators with sound moral and
philosophical radars could not be more exigent. Thus generalisations and elusive
reasoning behind this Biennale beg some rather big questions.
Page 94: Judith Wright, A Journey, 2011
Photo courtesy the artist, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane
Page 95: Jin Nu, Exuviate IIWhere have all the children gone?, 2005
Opposite: Blessings Upon the Land of My Love (installation detail Sharjah Biennial), 2011
Photo courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
A PETRI DISH IN THE SUN?
ALL OUR RELATIONS
ALEX GAWRONSKI
The Biennale of Sydneys title All Our Relations indicates at the outset the
type of exhibition it promises to be. The press statement issued by co-curators
Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster begins by trouncing certain core
strategies of the so-called radical arts that upheld principles of separation
negativity and disruption as strategies of change.
1
Against such classical critical
strategies the Biennale of Sydney curators propose instead a vision of art that is
again as their chosen title suggestsrelational, open, networked and
interactive. By now such terminologies have become so de rigueur in the
art world as to have practically passed into contemporary mythology. With
this in mind, proponents of this supposedly new, radically a-critical view of
contemporary culture see an expanded world of free exchanges, of democratised
relations and of a return to benevolently natural principles.
Seemingly unbeknownst to those who habitually argue for this ostensibly
emancipated version of art and culture, is the fact that it dwells at the core
of the overwhelmingly corporatised, exceedingly managed contemporary reality
of global capitalist societies. Rather than an antidote to a life lived nine-to-
fve that is excessively controlled and restrictive, the networked, interactive
and unrelentingly communicative conditions prevalent in art and culture today
most accurately describe the dominant paradigms that drive the corporate
imagination.
Art that once sought to negatively tackle head-on the inequities of
rampantly industrialised societies assumed to be unfailingly democratic, have
been replaced by an art whose relational leanings coincide seamlessly with
a post-Fordist reality, where endless communication and maximum visibility
are mandatory. In this reality the artist as an agent and author of change has
been practically replaced by an audience whose collective desires it expects
contemporary art to meet (rather than question). Moreover, the relational view of
art displaces genuine political struggle with a resurrected version of biopolitics.
Its adherents knowingly or not, opt for an image of transcendent politics, in which
systems of relation are taken to be inherently positive. However, upon closer
inspection, the seless transpersonalism of such a system aligns with a worldview
enslaved by the divisive consequences of the techno-informational impulse.
Curiously, the origins of this vision of a networked, interactive and informational
society stems not from the technocratic 1980s as is regularly imagined, but as
far back as the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, corresponding with the
widespread advent of the use of personal computers developed in Californias
Silicon Valley, the necessarily fraught, agonistic and communal world of
democratic politics began to be challenged. Surprisingly its main opponents
were not as might be expected during the era of the Cold WarCommunistsbut
Western hyper-individualists propagating what would become highly inuential
quasi-theories, in which rampant self-interest was presented not only as positive
but as quintessentially natural.
2
Self-interest, it was argued, was at the root of
any civilised society; it was the rational individual who effectively stood in for a
society once communally imagined. The communalism of society was considered
inherently unpredictable and therefore irredeemably compromised rationally.
Consequently society as it was traditionally conceived was held to be inferior to a
society of atomised, self-interested individuals. It was only the individual acting
out of rational self-interest who could grasp what it meant to be civilised, modern
and paradoxically, connected. The attenuated rationalism of this viewpoint
was unsurprisingly, intimately connected to the birth of global, transnational
capitalism. Individual desires as represented by capital or so the theory went,
could effectively be reduced to predictable mathematical formulae.
3
The economy
of self-interest as represented by the rise of neo-liberalism was seen as the most
logical and therefore best means of uniting rationally self-seeking selves. At the
same time as an ideology, belief in the rationally self-stabilising equilibrium of the
neo-liberal economy was seen to counteract the volatility of political struggle.
Taking root in the USA, that superpowers global dominance soon meant that its
favoured economic system spread to other Western nations and the rest of the
world.
4
As a universalising theory emphasising global interconnection, neo-liberal
economics purveyed a system of extreme rationalism where collective desire
could be safely reduced to testable coordinates that supposedly represented mass
individuals.
While such rationalism might seem natural in the context of the global economy,
its inuence was much more far-reaching. The extent of such reach was evident
when non-corporate and apparently alternative groups, most notably early
environmentalists and experimental scientists turning equally against the dirty
world of standard party politics, began to embrace the basically econometric
notion of rationally self-organising systems. The term ecosystem was coined
at this time and came to represent the rationalist idea of an innate balance
of nature. The botanist and early ecologist Arthur Tansley who popularised this
term believed that the human mind was, like nature, a self-regulating system
that behaved in much the same way as the interior components of a machine
that regulates its predictable functioning.
5
Revealingly, contemporary pioneers of
cybernetic systems also believed that the functioning of computers represented
a technological equivalent to naturally occurring ecosystems.
6
By the 1980s,
cyber-culture had absorbed such inuences offering up repeated visions of
an interfaced, transpersonal network that transcended and superseded mere
democracy. In cyber-space, where identities were fctional, anonymous and uid,
the global political subject was reinvented as a type of willing android whose
primary reality was attuned to the distant screen-based horizon of a fundamentally
molecular view of contemporary reality. The alienated mass (the lumpen
proletariat for Marx) was no longer deemed a worthwhile, let alone believable,
entity. Networked technological interactivity had replaced archaic struggles for
national independence or communal control of the means of production. Now,
the true self although physically alone, was infnitely plugged-in within a limitless
and dematerialised territory in communion with countless other online users.
Communication, recast as the manipulation of abundantly accessible information,
was all of a sudden instantaneous as space simultaneously rendered physically
limited and virtually all encompassing.
Beyond an emphasis on so-called cyber-culture though, which could in
any case be acutely and immediately critical,
7
emerged a broader emphasis on
the blanket conditions of relationality. The term obviously rides on the back of
Nicolas Bourriauds inuential and highly generalising book Relational Aesthetics.
8

However, its wider orientation can clearly be traced back to the post-political
landscape arising out of the universalising utopianism of both early ecological
and cybernetic discourses. Thus, overriding stress on systems and networks of
connection aim to show how; [I]n the arts, as elsewhere, analytical reection has
led to an understanding that human beings are highly dependent upon our often
overlooked relationships with others and with our common word.
9
While such emphasis certainly appears to totally undermine the
centrality of the rationally driven self-serving individualist it nonetheless requires
little analysis to understand how human beings depend on one another. In fact,
such intrinsic interdependence was a basic tenet of Communism, regardless of
what that movement became historically in practice. Vastly different however, is
the hugely generalising and rationalist notion of a common world. Of course, our
world is only common to all insofar as we take a completely naturalist and apolitical
view of it. From such a viewpoint the common world we share is one of ecologies,
objectively interlinked systems and mingling atmospheres that collectively conjure
a molecular image of universal interdependence and equilibrium. Naturally, such
a world is a fundamental construction that effectively rids both art and society
of any connection to the ugly, compromised and contested realities of politics.
That is unless the politics in question are the dominant (non-) politics of barely
adversarial parties whose actions, at least via the inuence of the contemporary
globalising West, are determined by the equally atomised realities of economic
ows. Actually, the worldview the relational model upholds as much as the neo-
liberal economic one, is founded on the fantasy of its capacity for endless correction
and adjustment: the world can be (and needs to be) fxed via entrusting it to a
rational supra-social narrative, be it economic, ecological or both.
That is not to say that the increasing acknowledgement of the individuals
reliance on others is at base cynical. Indeed, it is regularly founded on a strong
ethical conviction that, at its most extreme, can appear quasi-religious in its
fervour. From an art perspective, such belief frequently propels the act of producing
work into necessarily moral territory.
10
This essentially means that a work of art
that seemingly relies more on collaboration, conversation and compassion
11
and
less on individual authorship, is deemed better and more valuable because more
socially purposeful.
12
From such a perspective the production of an artwork is
equivalent to a good deed. The criteria for judging work meanwhile becomes not
so much a question of its capacity to intervene in, question or disturb commonly
held notions about art or life, but its ability to suggest rational and productive
solutions to troubling social issues. The relationship of art to life fostered by this
ultimately populist model is almost entirely literal and transparent; arts value is
positive and productive only in relation to evidence of the good will it evinces. One
of the highly problematic aspects of the overstated relationality of contemporary
art is precisely its disavowal of the textual quality of a work and the fact that as
communication, art will always be opaque and indecipherable to many. Actually,
this opacity is what lends art a forcefulness and inuence thateven if it often
appears the contraryis missing from other predominantly informational media.
The issue of the specifc, non-universalising textual identity of contemporary art,
as it relates to an allegedly common world is doubly complex as it once more
disputes the very commonness of that world. Thus a text work which states An
Artist Who Cannot Speak English is no Artist
13
is more multi-layered than it may
at frst appear. This is because what such a statement ultimately questions is the
very extent of the Western bias of multi-national cultural events like biennales.
Indeed, it is the Western liberal bias that perpetually espouses circumstances of
inclusiveness and democratic values and thereby defnes the conditions by which
global art might be viewed. It could be argued obviously that there are many
other non-Western nations that have their own biennales by now, except that
the biennale model and the inclusiveness it presupposes is a Western invention.
Curiously discounted from such an invention is genuine dissent or more precisely
the indicators of principles of separation, negativity and disruption. Paradoxically
thenin a system calling for commonality and connectionthe freedom of
difference is more or less absolutely denied. This is unless difference can be put
to good use as a sign of Western benevolence and toleration. Of course toleration
is a deeply ambivalent idea, as it would more honestly seek to annul genuine
freedom of expression altogether.
14
More paradoxical still is that this occurs today
according to dictates of relationalityin a climate demanding exacerbated
connectivity. In this dominant and dominating climate maximum communication is
not a privilege but a command.
The overweening emphasis on mass communication as supported by the
outlook for the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, is at very least endemic to contemporary
post-industrial societies. In this respect, the transcendent utopian dreams of
the late 1960s and early 1970s have become a daily reality. As a result, global
distances have dramatically shrunk and people around the world, who would not
have previously known of each others existences, communicate remotely on a
regular basis. The Fordist workscape of rigid hours and dehumanised industrial
labour has given way to uid working hours, changing work environments and
multi-skilled occupations for many. The Fordist dictate that the productive worker
must stay put all day every day has been replaced by a post-Fordist emphasis
on exibility, mobility and change. The isolated work cell has been usurped by
global roaming, virtual and actual. Aligned with such stress on uid mobility are
the everyday practices of the contemporary global art world. Notably, within this
art world the recurrence of biennales, and the mass exchanges they facilitate,
is especially prominent. Not surprisingly, the sheer scale and uidity of these
exchanges is paralleled elsewhere in the rationalising operations of globalised
neo-liberal economies: everywhere capital seeks to establish new markets if only
temporarily, as workers are shipped in from transnationally disparate sites to be
later left to the freedom of their newly attained job exibility.
Needless to say, the freedom of the low-paid itinerant worker is
wholly an illusion barely disguised by neo-liberal market rhetoric. While this
may be obvious to most, what is less obvious is the infringement on personal
and collective freedoms occasioned by the Post-Fordist paradigm. The enforced
demand for perpetual interaction, collaboration and exchange underwritten by the
pervasiveness of networked technologies, gives to the individual and artist a sense
of freedom that is in reality constantly monitored, especially by corporations.
Moreover, such freedom, to take ones work home for example or to not have to
physically go to work at all, means at the same time that there is no escape from
work. The ascendance of so-called social media means similarly that there is no
escape from the impetus to communicate or from interaction with a virtual society
most often comprised primarily of either quasi or total strangers.
15
Intrinsic too
to the endless highlighting of connectivity as a universal transpersonal value is the
extent of self-surveillance it promotes; have you responded to all those Facebook
requests yet? What if you dont respond? Will you be de-friended and if so what
will this mean? Will someone like the message/image/video you posted on your
wall earlier? What if no-one does? Does this mean that your message is invalid,
unredeemably unpopular? The technocratically realised molecularisation of
society aids economic and other rationalising networks by keeping the individual
constantly wondering about their real value in the virtualised system.
In this current climate, communicativeness comes to function as a value
in itself and as with capital, the more of it the better. Gone are the days when
you could squander your time in solitude engaging in the pointless pursuit of
unproductive contemplation. Today, the inescapable focus on the supposedly
universal and unquestionable value of incessant communication means that
all contemplation must in principle (and often in practice) be made instantly
accessible to others. Meanwhile, global corporations with no investment in the
ethical ramifcations of their modes of generating proft, similarly engage social
media to enhance their online profles and productivity whilst simultaneously
using such media to generate and popularise concepts and campaigns.
16
Thus,
the utopia of globally equitable relations emerging from increased opportunities
for far ung interaction dreamed of by certain contemporary writers, artists
and curators and fostered by their unwavering faith in the unassailable value of
collaboration at all costs, turns out to deny the underlying corporatist framework
supporting such emphases. In fact this framework supports less not more freedom,
but in a way that feels like freedom because its means of surveillance are less
obviously intrusive.
17
Concurrently, a society of individually networked selves
believes itself to be empowered in its pursuit of what is frequently just the desire
for narcissistic self-validation. In this way, the online Other exists more frequently
only as far as he or she is able to positively confrm the otherwise uncertain image
the communicator has of him or herself. Rather than being endlessly connective
then, the networked self regularly merely completes the closed circuit of the need
for repetitive affrmation.
Surely one of the reasons why the uidity of social media has become
so popular is because it enables the simultaneous alignment of self and Other,
albeit in the privacy of virtual space.
18
The self is superimposed on the Other
instantaneously, but that Other is always physically absent. Absent too is the
potential for discomfort that the physical presence of the Other can occasion.
Confronting such discomfort is political as it is about testing oneself and being
tested by another who cannot be fully known. In such instances, face-to-face
communicationso readily imagined today to be nothing but the transmission of
informationis conditioned by risk and by an evaluative decision not determined
by prior knowledge: the speaker can never know the others response in advance.
The labyrinthine diffculties that direct communication can occasion recede
alternatively in the trans-global terrain of online interaction. Here both the
computer and the Other start to feel like a corporeal extension of the users
brain as it reaches out to the greater brain of nature. The individual user,
networked across space and time, might even unconsciously begin to imagine that
the collective sum of their connection to dispersed others actually represented
something akin to the process of thought itself.
19
In the context of the Biennale
of Sydney, the inherent biopolitics of this statement begins to emphasise the
individual artist as a willing but will-less atom in a greater system indicative of
a greater, more trustworthybecause more neutral and inclusiveintelligence.
Once more, it is this transpersonal intelligence, derived from biopolitical models
arising in the late 1960s, that defnes a post-political landscape, where generality
is given precedence over the specifcities of genuine political contestation.
The artistic directors of the 2012 Biennale propose their exhibition as
a new gesamstkunstwerk that explicitly returns to narrative structures, the
most dominant of which is the biennale as a vascular and cellular structure and
sinew of a kind of living breathing organism.
20
As we have seen, central to this
organic conception of the exhibition is the relationality of all things and all human
beings. And while renewed emphasis on the interconnectedness of individuals and
groups is not necessarily a problem, what is more deeply problematic however
is the very vagueness of the notion of relationalism. After all, surely all art is
already relational by default: art is only meaningful as far as it relates to broader
concerns and signifers. The attempt to directly socialise the institutions of the
contemporary art world, in order to transform it into an alternative community
where positive values prevail over negative, actually contributes nothing to the
social value of art, while effectively robbing the discourse of art of its positive
capacity for questioning and disruption. The automatic veneration of positive
cooperation over individual instances of rupture and disturbance succeeds most
fully in catering to a populist vision of art, where the smoothing over of critical
culture is regarded as universally good. Moreover, if contemporary art is above
all a discursive situation, the artists who practice and extend it merely conform to
the requirements of their profession.
21
Therefore, the fully institutionalised socialisation of the art world
ends by reframing art primarily as an arena for leisure and access to discursive
information. Relationalism consequently functions most generally as a convenient
and simplistic coverall. By the same token, stress on connectivity as far as it
relates to technologically networked systems like so-called social media, does not
automatically discount the usefulness, convenience or pleasure of such systems.
However, outright adherence to the idea of the inherent sociality of such systems
conceals a historical and philosophical legacy that coincides with a belief in the
benevolent objectivity of economic, ecological and cybernetic systems based on
hyperrational calculation. Therefore, as a proposed organically occurring process,
the 2012 Biennale of Sydney is not really akin to the processes of thought itself,
but instead merely represents a rationalised image of thought. Similarly, an image
of the endless possibilities of connection and collaborationas framed by the
in-fact, non-inclusive hierarchy of the Biennale superstructuredoes not actually
preempt genuine affliation or connection: artists coerced to collaborate, even
if only via constant emphasis, are not necessarily better off for the experience
and neither is their art rendered more purposeful. Collaboration may indeed
open up creative processes to previously unimagined potentials, but it does not
automatically guarantee better or indeed, more socially acute art. Finally, we
have to remind ourselves that art like nature, and like the irrationalism of global
economic systems is Manichean in its volatility and unpredictability; simply being
positive is not what art is best at.
Notes
1
Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, Biennale of Sydney 2012, press statement, www.bos18.com
2
The Russian migr writer Ayn Rand, who eventually ed the mounting fallout of the 1917 Russian
Revolution, became famous in the USA for her two novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged
(1957). In these books Rand outlined her theory of the social primacy of the rationally self-seeking
individual against the social(ist) emphasis on ethical altruism. For Rand, laissez-faire capitalism was
the sole system capable of preserving human rights. Unsurprisingly, Rands novels were especially
inuential in USA advertising and business circles. See Adam Curtis, All Watched Over By Machines
of Loving Grace, BBC Two, London, UK, 2011
3
Systems Theory, although a somewhat nebulous term, nonetheless distinctly relates to notions that
all manner of large-scale phenomena, including human societies, can be accurately studied according
to purely mathematical and statistical criteria. The term in particular applies to the concept of self-
regulating systems, such as the neo-liberal economy, that it was argued would ultimately return to
optimum functioning if left to their own devices without the need for external intervention; ibid.
4
The pivotal neo-liberal economist Alan Greenspan was part of Ayn Rands inuential inner-circle
curiously called The Collective. Greenspan, a Rational Positivist, argued that economies should be
allowed to grow uncontrolled thence their activities could be stabilised via the wholesale application
of predictive computer models. Needless to say, such an approach had and continues to have, dire
consequences for domestic and global economies; ibid.
5
ibid.
6
Most famous among these cybernetic pioneers was Jay Forrester; ibid.
7
Inheritors of the utopian cyber-culture impulse, albeit who focused on critical interventions in virtual
and real-time include master art hacker Vuk Cozic and the net.art generation of artists as well as later
global art/activist collectives like eToys, 0100101110101101.ORG and the S-77CCR Consortium
8
See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon, France: Les presses du rel, 2002
9
Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, press statement, op cit.
10
In such examples, authorial intentionality (or a humble lack thereof) is privileged over a discussion of
the works conceptual signicance as a social and aesthetic form. Paradoxically, this leads to a situation,
in which not only collectives but also individual artists are praised for their authorial renunciation. And
this may explain, to some degree, why socially engaged art has been largely exempt from art criticism:
emphasis is shifted away from the disruptive specicity of a given work and onto a generalized set of
moral precepts. Claire Bishop, The Social Turn, Collaboration and its Discontents in Right About Now,
Art and Theory since the 1990s, Amsterdam,Netherlands: Valiz, 2007: 63-64
11
ibid.
12
ibid.
13
Serbian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinovic, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is no Artist (1992)
14
Consider the action of Russian artist Alexandr Brener, who in collaboration with co-artist Barbara
Schurz, rose from the audience at the opening press conference of Manifesta 3, Ljubljana and
proceeded to recline across the main speakers desks before spray painting Demolish Neoliberalism,
Multiculturalist Art-Sistem Now! across a projected image of the exhibitions logo. A gesture of this
sort connects with Breners previous performances and therefore could be considered art despite its
activist leanings. As such, the gesture could be tolerated by the Manifesta board despite the palpable
distaste they display in documentary evidence of this unexpected public action. See The Manifesta
Decade, Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, Barbara
Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic eds., Roomade, the Netherlands and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass:
London, 2005: 274
15
Ask yourself honestly how many friends you have on Facebook and how many of them you actually
know
16
In this climate too it is the neo-liberal possessive individual, who is now creative, cooperative,
owner of (xed) capital, which is itself inscribed mainly in her/himself, in his/her capacity for adaptation
and discrimination among the possibilities offered by the market. Raul Sanchez Cedillo, Towards New
Political Creations: Movements, Institutions, New Militancy in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray eds., Art and
Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: Mayy, 2009: 233
17
It is an ingenuous form of control, namely the control of peoples actual lives. After all, informalisation
makes it possible to biopolitically catch out the immaterial worker in his capacity to generate productive
ideas. Pascal Gielen in The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism,
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz Antennae series, 2009: 23-24
18
Coinciding with this scenario living labour today is a priori presented as multiplicity, and the
deployment of common cooperative capacities is inseparable from the process of singularisation
of each of its operators; ibid: 229
19
Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, press statement, op cit.
20
ibid.
21
John Kelsey, Escape from Discussion Island in Monika Szewczyk (ed.), Meaning Liam Gillick,
Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press, 2009: 61
Page 98: Euraba Artists and Papermakers, White Baagaay (River), 2000
Photo courtesy the artists
Pages 100-101: Pinaree Sanpitak, Anything can break, 2011-ongoing
Opposite: Jonathan Jones, Untitled (oysters and teacups) (detail), 2012
Pages 104-105: Phillip Hastings, Steadfast, 2009
ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL
JACQueLINe MILLNeR
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to
the fxed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859)
Humanity is an interspecies collaborative project.
Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction

(2011)
1
It is not an overstatement to suggest that all of Western morality has been an
effort to curb, even to deny, our animal nature, writes philosopher Christoph
Cox, adding that the distancing of animals and nature in general from human
beings is what enabled the great classifcatory schemes of the 17th and 18th
centuries.
2
Rene Descartes defnition of humans as distinguished by their
capacity for thought, and the classifcation of all elsenon-human animals, plants
and mineralsas matter, encapsulated the underlying assumptions of Western
philosophy for centuries. Humans were set apart and superior, hence entitled
to instrumentalise matter to their own ends. Charles Darwin dealt this idea a
fundamental blow, with his theory that the diversity of living things stems from
successive branchings starting from a single bacterium-like ancestor that lived
between three and four billion years ago.
3
The theory of natural selection insists
that there is a basic continuity in nature, not just among species but among all
living things. However, as we are all too aware todaywhen in many forums the
euphemism for Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution are granted equal
legitimacyDarwins theory has been much misunderstood and misinterpreted.
British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has dedicated himself to addressing
one central misapprehension: that the diversity and complexity of living things on
Planet Earth is the result of random selection. As Dawkins explains,
Every living creature has ancestors, but only a fraction have
descendants. All inherit the genes of an unbroken sequence
of successful ancestors, none of whom died young and none
of whom failed to reproduce. Genes that program embryos
to develop into adults who can successfully reproduce
automatically survive in the gene pool, at the expense of
genes that fail. This is natural selection at the gene level,
and we notice its consequences at the organism level. There
has to be an ultimate source of new genetic variation, and
it is mutation. Copies of newly mutated genes are reshufed
through the gene pool by sexual reproduction, and selection
removes them from the pool in a way that is non-random
Chance cannot explain life.
4
This misapprehension, according to Dawkins, has done more than anything to open
the door to advocates of intelligent design, who argue that the complexity of
life cannot be the result of random occurrences. But Darwins theory has also
been subject to another serious misreading: namely, that evolution is a process
that works incrementally towards the emergence of ever-better creatures,
the fttest, and that the human inheritance of the world is justifed by our
evolutionary superiority. On the contrary, Darwins theory denied that evolution
is progressive. Rather, natural selection is local and temporary, lacking any long-
term goal. Complex creatures are not better, but represent lifes diversifcation in
the only direction available to it. In this way then, the theory of evolution in effect
eliminated the hierarchy that places humans at the top of the developmental tree.
Yet, despite Darwins radical reconceptualisation, in the modern era
animals have been largely constructed as a fundamental other: base, bestial,
dumb. This insistence on the absolute distinction between human and animal has
necessarily contributed to human beings growing disconnection from nature, and
helped foment that terrible loneliness that comes from humans not feeling at
home on Earth.
5
Human estrangement from Planet earth, climate change and the
actual loss of co-evolved species are some of the phenomena that characterise
what science Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen has termed the Anthropocene, the
current geological epoch when the entire global ecosystem has been altered by
the human species.
6
Questions about the animal/human divide have been at the core of
critiques of modernism. As British theorist Wendy Wheeler argues, postmodernism
ushered in a more holistic perspective, where notions of order, reason and
the body were expanded through a growing understanding of the creative
complexity of the world, and of the creatures amongst whom we move and in
whom we have our beingas do they in us.
7
A key aspect of post-humanismthe
attempt to rethink human existence in the wake of the massive technological and
social changes of late capitalismhas been the assertion that the human future
is intimately and creatively bound up with that of the animal. Such thinking is
powerfully evoked in the post-structuralist critiques of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, which revived two of the defning tenets of Darwins evolutionary theory
we encountered earlier: the non-hierarchical, local and temporary nature of
species development, and the basic continuity among all living things. Through
their notion of becoming animal, Deleuze and Guattari assert that there are
no essential divisions in nature, no absolute differences between minerals,
vegetables, animals and humans. Rather, matter is a vast continuum. A feld of
virtual forces, intensities, thresholds and powers that under particular conditions,
is actualised in the things and bodies we know.
8
In this vast continuum, all
bodies are materially related to all other bodies, their distinctiveness to do
with the particular selection of capacities and powers they actualise.
9
This way of
conceiving of living things is not only consonant with evolutionary theory, but also
with contemporary ecological science which has demonstrated that cross species
kinship is a foundational condition of human life.
According to British art historian Steve Baker, late postmodernismor
what we might call the contemporaryis defned in part by the radical
reconsideration of the animal, as humans confront the terrifying realities
of the Anthropocene epoch, such as climate change and mass extinctions.
The transdisciplinary feld of animal studies has emerged in recent years to think
through these challenges, encompassing the many and varied ways in which animals
and humans interact and intersectfrom bio-mimicry in design, to the ethics of
factory farming, to the therapeutic value of companion animals and the benefts
of biodiversity, and beyond. Animal studies is a feld to which artists continue to
make important contributions, particularly those artists who, like Maria Fernanda
Cardoso and long-time collaborator Ross Rudesch Harley, consciously work at
disciplinary and institutional boundariesbetween art and science, between the
natural history museum, the studio and the academy.
Colombian-born Cardoso came to prominence some years ago with her
quirky performance piece, The Cardoso Flea Circus (1994). She worked intimately
with the insects, rearing, nurturing and training them before orchestrating their
performance of various feats and magnifying them for the audiences delight.
Cardosos fascination with non-human animals as much as with the complexity
of animal-human relations has extended to working with a variety of animal
specimens including butteries, bleached starfsh, preserved frogs, and emus.
She has developed an oeuvre that poetically weaves the Otherness of non-human
animals with topical questions around aesthetics, science and ethics.
But The Flea Circus set off a line of inquiry to which the artist kept returning: she
became fascinated with the microscopic intricacies of insect life that remained
unknown (and perhaps even unknowable) to humans, and intrigued by the questions
raised by her close relationship with these conventionally shunned creatures.
Her practice became a means to think through current theories of evolutionary
biology and to test ideas about cross-species kinship with her latest workthat
includes videos made in collaboration with Harley and features in this years
Biennale of Sydneya unique exploration of these very issues.
Cardosos Museum of Copulatory Organs comprises a tantalising array of
the artists impressions of wonders of the natural world not visible to the naked
eye, namely insect penises. By working with scientists at the Australian Museum
and the University of Sydney, and conducting literature searches, exchanges with
evolutionary biologists, and video research, Cardoso brought together a critical
mass of data on insect sexual reproduction. Using a combination of high and low
tech methodsincluding hand-modelling, bronze casting, glass-blowing, electron
microscope photographs and rapid prototypingCardoso transformed this data
into art, creating sculptures of these tiny organs in all their astounding variety
and wondrous complexity, at a scale that allows the audience to appreciate their
beauty. For the scientists, too, this three-dimensional visualisation is signifcant,
giving them a novel way to understand their objects of study.
The sculptures are accompanied by tiny slide shows of insect sex, and
a video lovingly recorded by Harley and Cardoso of stick insects mating; lovingly,
as the artists raised the creatures in their own home and recorded their coupling
over a long period amid their own domestic routines. Under slender bell jars
or in museum vitrines, these infnitely complex forms attest to the effcacy of
evolutionary processes, that through non-random selection develop the most
specialised, ft-for-purpose designs to ensure the propagation of their species.
Museum of Copulatory Organs attempts to honour the otherness of non-
human animals and to evoke the specifcity of the insect world by questioning,
if not suspending, the anthropocentric assumptions we rely on to make meaning
of animals. Steve Baker suggests that humans have typically wanted things of
animals, wanting them to be meaningful and wanting to control and be consoled
by those meanings. Therefore, the most radical option for contemporary artists
has been to regard the animal as a strange being encountered and experienced,
rather than rendered familiar through interpretation.
10
To understand the
animal as Other in its otherness, so that it remains what it is and how it is,
requires an imaginative human transposition into animal. As Steve Baker puts it,
Transposing oneself into this being means being able to go along with the other
being while remaining other with respect to it.
11
But, how far do animals exist
beyond the realms of human-made systems of knowledge? How much do they
belong to a nature whose properties are unknown and unknowable and exceed
representation? According to the Cardoso, humanitys inability to imaginatively
transpose itself into animal has thoroughly impoverished the scientifc enterprise.
Much scientifc knowledge has been shown to be based in poor science, and much
poor science has resulted from moralising about nature, that is, interpreting the
evidence according to human values. For instance, assumptions about what is
proper sexual behaviour for males and females, and the stereotypes that ossify
around these assumptions, have resulted in some serious blind spots in biology.
Cardoso has been struck by how thoroughly the kingdom of non-human animals
refutes stereotypes about male promiscuity and female chastity. In her research,
she has encountered endless examples of the discriminating sexual selection of
the female, such as insects that have evolved the ability to store and expel sperm,
or have rendered their fertilisation a navigation of dangerous obstacles, in order
to choose the optimal mate.
Erroneous assumptions about sexual selection are partly a result of
unfnished aspects of Darwins work that led him to postulate that the survival
of species was the main aim of evolution. The most recent science points to
the importance of reproduction over survival: the ingenious and aesthetically
sophisticated adaptations that Cardosos work honours are means to ensure the
reproduction of species rather than their survival. Sex is the pointy end of
evolution, its avant-garde, the context in which adaptive change is at its quickest
and most varied, and where intra-species competition is at its fercest.
These evolutionary adaptations driven by sexual selection call attention
to the links between form and communication, one of arts core concerns.
Cardosos project foregrounds the relationship between aesthetics, in particular
beauty, and the evolutionary process. Darwin made two (controversial) fndings
in explaining the role that beauty played within mate choice: he believed that
(with the notable exception of humans) the females did the choosing, and that
animals as well as humans had a taste for the beautiful.
12
The appeal of aesthetic
displays like a peacocks tail or a nightingales song is hardwired into human
and non-human animals alike, according to Darwins theory: we fnd beauty in
virtuoso displays and skilled performance as evidence of competence and status
that have distinct reproductive advantages, and so do other animals.
13
Darwin
also recognised another kind of beauty in nature: ftness of form for purpose.
In On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are fertilised
by Insects (1862), for example, he argued that the orchids complex structures,
far from being evidence of the creative intelligence of the divine artifcer, were
products of natural selection, beautifully adapted to ensure the plants survival.
14
Museum of Copulatory Organs is a cornucopia of beauty, in all Darwinian
senses of the word. It strikes us with wonder at the infnite ingenuity and virtuosity
of nature, but also reminds us of our fundamental kinship and co-evolution with
non-human animals. Cardosos and Harleys lovingly rendered forms and images
help to assuage the terrible loneliness of the Anthropocene era by allowing us to
recognise ourselves as an integral part of nature.
Notes
1
Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction, Charlottesville and London: University of
Virginia Press, 2011: 11
2
Christoph Cox, Of humans, animals and monsters, in Becoming Animal (exhibition catalogue),
MassMOCA/MIT Press, 2005: 19-20
3
Richard Dawkins, Big Ideas: Evolution, New Scientist, Issue 2517, September, 2005: http://www.
noanswersingenesis.org.au/dawkins_evolution.htm
4
ibid.
5
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2001, cited in Deborah Bird Rose: 9
6
Paul Crutzen, cited in Deborah Bird Rose: 9
7
Wendy Wheeler, cited in Steve Baker, What is the postmodern animal? in The Postmodern Animal,
London: Reaktion Books, 2000: 17
8
Cited in Christoph Cox, Of humans, animals and monsters in Becoming Animal: 23
9
ibid.
10
Steve Baker, The Unmeaning of Animals, in The Postmodern Animal: 81
11
ibid: 94
12
Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, exhibition held at Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge, UK, in 2009, on Darwins impact on nineteenth-century art: http://www.
darwinendlessforms.org/exhibition-overview/
13
See philosopher of art Denis Duttons The Art Instinct: Beauty, pleasure and human evolution, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010
14
http://www.darwinendlessforms.org/exhibition-overview/
Opposite: Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Intromitent organs of Tasmanian harvestman modelled after electronic microscope
scans, 2008-09 Photo courtesy the artist, ARC ONE, Melbourne and GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney
BLUE BUTTERFLIES
ON SHADOW SITES 1-11 AND THE WORK OF JANANNE AL-ANI
DUYGU DEMIR
A loving man, who broke my heart; he was so optimistic once.
He was my hero. He was loving and he made me laugh. He was
in love and he made promises he couldnt keep. I am my
fathers daughter in so many ways. I understood his dilemma.
He never joined us. He tried, but did he try hard enough?
Complete disbelief, frustration and deep anger. When politics,
religion, war and cultures clash, it is the ordinary family who
pay the price. He wrote to me of his anguish and loneliness,
and of his memories of us, as though we had all died. He feels
deserted by us and we feel deserted by him. Regrets; my
regrets, your regrets, his regrets. He has been a stranger to
me for many years. There is no special person for me now.
I can live my life more fully with him not near me. I have
freedom from the exiles gloom. He is full of contradictions.
Will he ever understand? Will he ever love me for who I am?
He has broken my heart.
1
In A Loving Man (1996-99), fve female heads in a row against a black background
repeat the above lines. The video starts with just the frst few lines uttered by the
frst character, and as it is repeated by each woman, a new sentence is added, until
the full text is heard after several rounds. The fve women are the artist Jananne
Al-Ani, her mother and her three sisters, lined up from the eldest to the youngest.
The work generates empathy, as most women have had similar diffculties with
men in their lives; these women could be archetypes of any family. It hints at the
way personal and familial memories are remembered always slightly differently
by each member at different times and that they are always fragmented.
The repetition of the text by each performer, sometimes completely seriously, and
sometimes falling out of character, as one of them forgets her lines, or another
starts giggling, also hints at a space between what is scripted and reality. There is
an awkward intentionality in the amateurism of the performers, and the heaviness
of the subject matter is undermined by the constant reminders that this is a
performance, and that we are looking at fction. But the touching story of a man
who couldnt or wouldnt keep his promises also awakens the curiosity of the
viewer.
It is hard to set aside Jananne Al-Anis personal life while looking at
A Loving Man, or other videos such as Veil (1997) or She Said (2000), in which she
works with the same cast of immediate family. Born in 1966, in Kirkuk, Northern
Iraq to an Iraqi father and British-Irish mother, Al-Ani lived in Kirkuk until she was
about fourteen. In the summer of 1980, Al-Ani, her mother and sisters left Iraq
for a holiday in the UK, coincidentally just a few months before the Iran-Iraq War
began that September. They never returned to Iraq.
Al-Anis most recent work, such as the installation described above,
which deals with narrative, voice, ideas around memory and forgetting (instilled
with vague biographical details) is quite different from her previous projects.
She says she used to work in the studio and didnt consider landscape until a
turning point that deeply affected her practice, when a radical shift in the way
that war is representedbeginning with the 1991 Gulf Warreached its peak
during the 2003 Iraq war. A long-term interest for the artist, during the invasion of
Iraq, representation of war was controlled and produced by the American forces
and the imagery was often created through an aerial perspective, disassociating
the war from the physicality of human bodies.
Jananne Al-Ani started flming in the feld and her frst work in response
to the war was The Visita two-part project that contains Muse (2004), a video
shot in the Eastern desert in Jordan. In this video work, the landscape of the
desert, which should be endless, is confned by the framework of the stationary
camera, becoming a very restricted and tight space. Al-Ani says that she
wanted the site depicted to be as close to the Iraqi border as possible. This is
not explicit in the video, but is nonetheless important for the artist.
2
A middle-
aged man in an old-fashioned grey suit paces from one side of this frame to the
other. This is not the idealised desert with soft-edged golden sand dunes; it is an
uninviting, bleak piece of stony land. The passage of time is marked by the growing
shadows the protagonist casts on the desert, but not much happens. The ickering
line of heat on the horizon disappears; we hear some engines, hinting at a nearby
road, but nobody comes; the man is left in a state of unresolved stasis. Muse was
shown together with Echo, in which four women (again the artists mother and
sisters) are talking about a man who entered their lives. The four women are
perhaps discussing the man in Muse, or perhaps he is the absent paternal fgure
referred to in most of Al-Anis workin a persistent state of waiting, confned to a
desolate landscape. He is most probably both.
The Visit is a transitional work, which led Jananne Al-Ani to develop
Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011). While she was flming Muse at
the desert, the artist noticed tidy piles of black stone, which she later discovered
was basalt. She observed that these organised stones hinted at human activity,
but what they formed didnt reveal itself from the perspective she used. She only
The footage resulted in two works. Shadow Sites I (2010) is made exclusively from
footage on 16mm flm. Its focus on extreme vertical perspective does not allow for
seeing anything expansive in the landscape. Compared to Shadow Sites II (2011),
Shadow Sites I is gentler; its soundtrack is composed of ambient sounds recorded
in the landscape and mechanical sounds at the airport. Shadow Sites II is made
of aerial photographs. These high-resolution digital stills are more violent, the
language of photography allows for an exact replication of the sense of locking
onto target. The zooming effect of the camera permits the isolation of certain
forms or locations in the landscape. The soundtrack of this piece is also more
manipulative, more ominous. Similar to Shadow Sites I, Al-Ani uses ambient sounds
collected during the trip to Jordan, including sounds of animals and birds, but in
Shadow Sites II, she combines these sounds with those appropriated from military
recordings; they are indecipherable but certainly reference the idea of modern
warfare. Another work, shot in the same location, and part of the larger body
of work The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People (2010) is a flm
called Excavators, in which ants are moving swiftly, building a nest. Shown on a
very small monitor in contrast to Shadow Sites, it serves as a reminder of the micro
level in tandem with the macro level.
In Shadow Sites I and II, Jananne Al-Anis camera replicates the point of
view of fghter planes, and as in the news broadcasts, there are no people in these
works. The landscape is abstracted and buildings are attened into drawings.
However, unlike mediated representations of war, Al-Anis work hints at human
presence; she depicts life through marks on the ground, made by those who are
no longer there. She employs the representational language that she is critical
of, but does it in such a way that the idea of the unpopulated desert land is
completely subverted. Here, the desert bears the traces of human lifenot only of
the present time, but also of a distant past. The drawings on the ground testify
to the presence of disappeared people from thousands of years or just a few
days ago. This abstracted survey of land becomes a plate for associations, heavily
implicated by the history of the region. The title of the work Shadow Sites is a
term used in archeology; shadow sites are sites that only appear very early in the
morning or late in the evening, because the degree of the sun is only then able to
cast a shadow long enough to make them visible to the eye from a plane.
During a talk at SALT in Istanbul, Jananne Al-Ani told a striking story
that she came across during her research for this project. She found an article on
a forensic anthropologist who was commissioned to investigate how people were
killed in Kosova during the war. The anthropologist and her team started looking for
a precise species of blue butteries in the area. These butteries were attracted
to a particular wildower, and this ower only grew in areas where the soil was
recently disrupted. The team would follow the butteries, fnd the owers that
grow on rich soil, and start digging and would fnd mass graves. The butteries
and the owers, the small signs on the surface of these beautiful landscapes,
which had to be read in the right way, were in fact signs of mass destruction.
The beauty of the form pulled you in, but you knew that it was the indicator of
past violence. Shadow Sites I-II are very similar to these blue butteries in the
way they operate; hinting at stories of disappearance, these beautifully composed
videos are as alluring as they are menacing.
Notes
1
Jananne Al-Ani, A Loving Man (1996-99), 5 channel video installation, 15 minutes
2
From Jananne Al-Anis artist talk at SALT, Istanbul, February 2012
3
ibid.
found out later, while looking at aerial photographs of the area taken by English
archeologists that these formations were part of relatively recently discovered
disappearing archeological sites in Jordan. This discovery, along with Al-Anis
interest in disembodied depictions of warfare through news media, especially after
the Iraq war in 2003, led the artist to start working on a project she titled, The
Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People. The title comes from French
philosopher Paul Virilios notion of the trickery and magic of cinema, referring
to how, from certain perspectives, the body disappears into the landscape, which
Al-Ani connects to the representation of war. She considered this idea in relation
to the Middle Easts history, where people have disappeared in large numbers
during political conict, from the civil war in Lebanon to the Syrian uprising of the
1980s, the Armenian genocide, or Palestine, a land without people for a people
without land (as it was described in early Zionist dictum), where entire villages
were razed to the ground.
Thinking about the idea of the desert, of distance, and of being able
to show the micro as well as the macro level, Al-Ani started researching the
archeological history of the region through photographs. She came across the work
of a German archeologist ernst Herzfeld, whose panoramic photographs were a
source of inspiration. She says they look almost extraterrestrial; the desolation of
the landscape reminded her of images taken on Mars.
3
She was also interested in
the reading of marks, and how some marks require a certain distance in order to
be read. She looked at the Nazca lines in Peru, which are images depicting animals
and symbols that are hundreds of feet wide. The lines in these ancient drawings
are formed by removing the stones from the ground and exposing the sand of the
desert landscape. Her research also involved looking at aerial photos of World
War 1 trench systems on the Western Front, taken by a unit of the American Air
Force as reconnaissance images in 1918. She noted that the distance inherent in
these photographs of heavily shelled grounds makes a site of destruction into an
aesthetic experience. Al-Ani also found out that when air forces became much
bigger players in warfare during World War II, the pilots who ew from Britain to
mainland Europe reported seeing archeological sites that nobody had seen before.
After the War was over, a number of these pilots were used by archeologists to
locate these sites. Al-Ani was interested in the idea that something revelatory, or
maybe even redemptive could come out of conict.
After what the artist calls a painful process of fundraising, Al-Ani was
able to go to the south of Jordan, the Wadi Rum area to flm. She chose a location
with a small airport where there was a ying school and flmed for ten days. She
shot with super-16mm flm, which she had started using with Muse, as well as
taking photographs. She and her crew attached a camera to a strut on the wing of
a small plane; they had a maximum of seven-to-eight minutes per flm before they
had to land and change the flm. Filming and taking still images from a few hundred
feet high, Al-Ani recorded archeological as well as contemporary marks. They
came across crop circlesa form of industrial farming imported from the USA
as well as intensively farmed ancient village settlements. The dry and sparsely
populated land in South Jordan allowed for the preservation of marks from even
thousands of years ago. Al-Ani recorded signs of prehistoric settlements, Roman
forts, Ottoman trenches from World War I, as well as the contemporary marks of
mining, sheep farms, an unauthorised American military zone used for landing and
fuel change, the Hijaz railway line (now used to transport phosphate), foundations
for a housing estate, or signs of infrastructure.
Pages 108-09: Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II (video still, detail), 2011
Above and below: Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II (video stills), 2011
Photos courtesy the artist and Rose Issa Projects, London
SANGUINE IRRIGATION
A LOOK AT THREE SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS BY IMRAN QURESHI
HAIG AIVAZIAN
Shortly after being awarded the Sharjah Biennials Jury Award for his contribution
to the 10th edition of the exhibition in March 2011, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi,
in an interview with the BBC, said; When I gave the proposal for this installation,
the situation was not like this in [the] Arab world.
1
By the time the Biennial was
inaugurated however, it was amidst the frenzy of what many were referring to
as the winds of change sweeping across the Middle East. Those events became
subsequently known as The Arab Spring, and they have since become a more
complicated, more drawn out and much bloodier affair. Indeed, the peaceful
popular uprisings in the Middle east, which started in Tunis and spread like wildfre
to Cairo, Sanaa, Manama, Benghazi and Damascus, were met with increasingly
ruthless crackdowns by the very dictators they sought to topple. In that same
BBC interview, Qureshi claimed that this intensity which was surrounding him as
he began actualising the piece, somehow fed into his process: the fnal result, he
claims was more intense than what I had visualised.
2
The Biennial took place in the so-called Heart of Sharjah which
consists of the Fine Arts Museum, as well as its surrounding Cultural and Heritage
areas. These areas are made up of existing (though at times heavily renovated)
traditional coral reef houses, several of which were built as a succession of rooms,
forming a rectangular frame around a central courtyard. Imran Qureshis Blessings
Upon the Land of My Love was located in the courtyard of one such house: a
repurposed old hospital called Beit Al-Serkal. The oor of the courtyard is made
of interlocking tiles, which have lost some of their reddish hue, bleached from
continued exposure to dust and an often unforgiving sun.
In order to get a fuller sense of the work, the piece is best viewed from
the second oor of the house, where one can look down onto the entire courtyard:
it is almost completely stained with splashes of red paint copiously applied by
Qureshi. There is a concentration of pigment in the centre of the yard surrounding
the grill of a drainage duct, where the colour becomes particularly deep.
Then lighter gestures splash outward and towards the exits. Then again, sporadic
bursts of intensity by a door, close to windows, onto the walls and so on. The stains
immediately and viscerally register as placeholders for blood. The variation of
the thickness and the gestures of the application allow for an imagining of the
potentially horrifc incident that might have taken place just prior to the viewer
walking in. The absence of the bodies whose blood would have so abundantly
stained the ground and flled its crevices, may be explained by the fact that they
might have been removed hastily, dragged out of sight by their feet, stashed away
just prior to the viewers arrival in the space.
The parts where the red is especially vivid do indeed seem to literally
coagulate: they form stagnant puddles frozen in time. The sight of this caked
pigment conjures up thoughts related to vivid senses: the taste of iron in ones
mouth, the smell of oxidation etc. The moment of happening upon the work is a
ash transportation to a different place and a different moment. A familiar event
that we would know either through having lived it ourselves or through having
witnessed it in mediated/mediatised form: the work of a car bomb in the midst of
a convoy, a suicide detonation at a crowded shrine or market place, or some other
indiscriminate and maximum casualty apparatus in action.
In addition to the obvious three-dimensional aspects of Qureshis work
such as the fact that it adheres at once to walls and oor and that one has to walk
through it in order to experience itthe spatial transposition and the condensation
of meanings, associations and feelings, would clearly locate the piece in the realm
of installation rather than in that of drawing. However, this reading is complicated
once we look more closely at the lighter portions of the sanguine paint. Here, as if
rising from the bloody swamps, a delicate oral pattern emerges with white brush
strokes delineating a lotus, petal-like foliage.
Qureshi is most recognised for his miniature paintings on wasli paper. This art form
has undergone a revival in the last decade or so, which has been mainly attributed
to the arts department in the National College of Lahore, where Qureshi teaches.
Artists like himself, his wife Aisha Khalid (also included in the Biennial) along with
others have been at the forefront of this revival, engaging with the traditions of
the form wholeheartedly, investing it with contemporaneity, while considering
the perceived split between traditional and contemporary art practices to be an
arbitrary one.
In fact, in addition to Blessings Upon the Land of My Love, Qureshi also
had a number of small framed works on paper exhibited in the Fine Arts Museum
in Sharjah, from a series entitled Moderate Enlightenment (2006-09). The portraits
depict Muslim men dressed in varied attire, from salwar kameez to jeans and
button-up shirts, standing in front of a number of natural backdrops and engaged
in varying mundane activities. The artist has been making these portraits since
11 September, 2001 in order to address and offer a counterpoint to the vilifcation
of Muslims in the media since the notorious twin tower attacks.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about Qureshis repertoire
is precisely this ability to shift from the miniature to the architectural, from the
framed and contained to the spatial and sprawling, from the fgurative to the
viewer embodying the fgure. The 2006 Singapore Biennale had also included a
number of portraits from the Moderate Enlightenment series, which were hung
in a row on the wooden veneer lining the walls of one of the rooms in the City
Hall. elsewhere, the famed Masjid Sultan housed a large architectural scale
intervention. On the roof of the mosque, Qureshi had zeroed in on the existing
plumbing, which included a network of brightly painted turquoise pipes that ran
horizontally along the outside of the walls. These pipes often started close to
the ground, then climbed up to clear the height of doorways, to then dip back
down slightly before abruptly disappearing into the walls. The artists intervention
started at these perceived extremities of the pipes, where he had painted water
pouring down along the wall and onto the ground. The piece was entitled Wuzu
(2006), or ablution, a simple and poetic gesture, referring to the act of purifying
oneself prior to prayer. The owing liquid was painted in blue, and its splashes are
much more directional than the red splatterings in Sharjah. However, the white
brush strokes that break up the solidity of the color and form owers were also
evidentthe pattern emerging from the water in the Masjid, identical to the one
emerging from the blood in Beit Al Serkal.
How do we then interpret the similarities between two works that point
towards the opposite ends of the spectrum of conceptions of Islam? If Blessings
Upon the Land of My Love is 9-11, then Wuzu is Moderate Enlightenmentshowing
the softer, humbler and more spiritual side of the faith. Indeed, both works have
a site specifcity that goes beyond a simple play with architecture (reddish tiles
drenched in red, blue pipes spewing out blue water): Beit Al Serkal would likely
have seen its fair share of blood from its days as a hospital, whereas ablutions with
water are an act performed and witnessed fve times a day in the Sultan Mosque.
Both of the works are devoid of human fgures, yet they both refer to the body
directly: water goes into the body, while blood is what comes out of it.
Qureshi himself speaks about his installation works in bodily terms.
For the 18th Biennale of Sydney, the artist has been commissioned to make another
site-specifc work on Cockatoo Island in the citys harbour. The piece will be similar
to Blessings Upon the Land of My Love and will be at an old ship repair facility.
In his video for the Biennales Artist Interview Series, Qureshi talks about the
cracks on the oors of the site, and relates them to human veins.
3
In the same
video, he speaks about the painted red liquid on Cockatoo Island, not as splattered
in all directions, or owing from some sort of tap line, but rather as rising to the
surface, starting from the basement of the complex and up to the ground oor.
Here the drainage system that may have kept the residue of the carnage owing
freely in Sharjah, is perhaps clogged by chunks of esh and causes the drains to
overow.
While this shift in the movement, or rather stagnation of the uids in this new
work is not insignifcantsince it allows for a different set of images to emerge
from the workthere is a fundamental question. Two installations, specifc to two
very different sites (Serkal/Cockatoo Island) in two very distant cities (Sharjah/
Sydney) somehow carry a very similar vocabulary. Yet speaking about his process
in Sydney, Qureshi claims: usually, in my site specifc works, I try to create a
dialogue between the architectural space and my own vocabulary or imagery.
4
How then do we reconcile this vocabulary, which remains essentially
unchanged from Lahore, to Sharjah and then to Sydney? What happens to imagery
that emerges from the experience of suicide bombs in Pakistan, which is further
intensifed by Arab uprisings and which then travels on to an abandoned navy
shipyard? Presumably the space, context and timing of the two pieces will cause
the audience for the respective works to react with a drastically different sense
of urgency and set of associations.
If the cracks in the oors of the shipyard are, as Qureshi states, human
veins, then the same could be said about the gaps between the interlocking tiles
in Beit Al Serkal. This violence to which Qureshis work refers (the terrorising and
devastating kind) not only profoundly affects the manner in which those subjected
to it navigate the entire range of their spacesfrom the urban/public realm, to
how we relate to our vehicles, to the very intimacy of our domestic spaces etc.
but is even more deeply destabilising than that. In Qureshis work, blood is an
organic growth, it literally changes the landscape: it is at once what nourishes
the soil to promote vegetation, and the weeds themselves growing in the post
apocalypse. It is at simultaneously the eradication of civilisation and the creation
of history.
This violence is so deeply ingrained within us, that it is our every bodily
mechanism: we ingest it through our pipes, and it overows our sewers. Indeed
the blood would have presumably owed through more than just the cracks of the
bricks on Cockatoo Island, it would have soaked its soil, which after being shaped
by the disappearing prints of the footsteps of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia,
later served as a prison complex for its convicts and a shipbuilding centre for its
maritime industry.
This is how Sharjah and Sydney are one and the same: the site which
the work is specifc to, is in fact Qureshis own body. He is the carrier of the
experience of violence; he embodies it just as he is disembodied by it. He spreads
it from one place to the next like a sprawling disease. Yet he, like the stashed
corpses in Beit-Al-Serkal, is absent from the site. The only bodies remaining in the
work are the viewers who walk in what Qureshi refers to as a sea of blood.
5

Notes
1
Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi wins Sharjah prize, 27 April 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-
middle-east-13051617
2
ibid.
3
Artist Interview Series: Imran Qureshi, 4 April, 2012; http://bos18.com/artists-watch-and-listen
4
ibid.
5
Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi wins Sharjah prize, op cit.
Opposite: Imran Qureshi, Blessings Upon the Land of My Love (detail), 2011
Photo courtesy the artist and Corvi Mora, London
Imran Qureshi, Blessings Upon the Land of My Love (installation view Sharjah Biennial), 2011
Photo courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
SUSPENDED GESTURES
HeLeN HuGHeS
Gabriella and Silvana Mangano are two Melbourne-based artists who have
been working collaboratively since 2001. Their practice primarily comprises
performance-based video, in which a fxed-vantage camera set to auto-record
captures the artists carrying out vaguely mirrored actionssometimes with the
use of sculptural objects that physically connect or frame their unchoreographed
gestures. While Gabriella and Silvana are identical twins, and their physical
likeness is emphasised on screen by their frequently matching outfts and roughly
symmetrical mise-en-scnes, it is the gestures suspended between their bodies
that form the focus, and indeed the point of their work. In their 2008 video work
Absence of evidence, for instance, the artists stand on either side of a wall with
their backs to one another, separated by an architectural division. Without verbal
or visual communication, they take it in turns to extend a long strip of white
paper up above their head and pass it over the dividing wall to the other, who
knowingly reaches up to receive the paper. An external light source is trained on
the surface of the white paper, while the fgures of the artists (clad in black, in a
black room) assume a subordinate focal point. By visually highlighting the product
of their collaborationthe connective gesture of passing the paper between the
two artists, fgured as a white line snaking its way back and forth throughout an
otherwise dark spacethe work is divested of any emphasis on individual identity.
Indeed, there are more complex concerns pertaining to collaboration
in their practice that can help reconfgure the relevance of their twinness away
from biological and biographical fact. Even if the artists were not twins, their
collaborative work would still explicitly reference the notion of doubles or
doppelgangers. It would do so in the very precise sense of the term double as it
is employed by Charles Green in his book The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from
Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001), in which Green argues for the emergence
of a spectral third artistic identity during the process of artistic collaboration
by couples.
1
While acknowledging the fact that collaborative artist couples
often assume an uncanny air of double- or twinness, citing examples like Marina
Abramovi and ulay, or Gilbert & George, Green likens this spectral third party to
a phantom limb. This limb occupies an atomised, interstitial space between the
collaborative couples: the palpable tension enveloping Abramovi and ulay poised
at either end of a bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed directly at Abramovis
heart (Rest Energy, 1980); the immense gravitas with which Gilbert & George
go about their lives as artwork; or, we might extrapolate, the strange sense of
a telepathic communication guiding the hands of Gabriella and Silvana.
2
In such
cases, Green suggests that the action of collaboration itself be[comes] the artists
subject matter: it becomes a double of the collaboratively created third artist,
an auratic and fctive presence or persona into which the collaborative couple
have folded their individual identities.
3
As opposed to the examples of Abramovi
and ulay, and Gilbert & George however, this collaborative, interstitial, third
identity in the Manganos practice is often also literalised on screen: through an
expanded practice of drawing effected through the passing of sculptural objects
between the two artists, as with the white paper in Absence of evidence.
While they now exhibit solely as Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, both
originally had individual drawing practices, graduating with degrees majoring in
the medium from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001 (Gabriella) and 2003
(Silvana). They frst explored the ontology of collaboration in their 2001 video
work Drawing 1. Reecting both artists academic training in the discipline, their
understanding of the mediumor gestureof drawing as an intrinsically open-
ended, direct and largely private process greatly informs their collaborative work.
In Drawing 1, the artists stand facing one another before a large sheet of paper
taped to their studio wall. With one arm extended sideways, they maintain strict
eye contact, while their hands somewhat automatically sketch mirrored forms on
the paper beside them. This action is repeated on a more intimate scale in the
2006 black and white video work if so then, in which the artists again stand
with eyes locked in a mutual gaze, but this time in much closer proximityan
arms widthbracketed on each side by walls, perhaps a corridor. Here, both artists
extend their right arm over the others shoulder in a restrained embrace to sketch
synchronised forms on the walls behind them. The decision to shoot the flm in
black and white also reects their previously separate and always monochromatic
drawing practices, both of which pivoted around the idea of drawing as an index
to an action, rather than the illusory realisation of form. In the examples of
Drawing 1 and if so then, a traditional conception of drawing as mark-making
is layered over a physical and spatial performance of drawing as an expanded
process: both of which are presented here as intrinsically abstract in form and
function.
The basic premise of collaboration is taken as the principal operational
structure for the 2012 Biennale of Sydney. This application of the collaborative
gesture is reected in de Zegher and McMasters chief creative decisionto act as
joint-artistic directorsand has theoretically fltered down to govern each of their
curatorial decisions made thereafter. In their Biennale, de Zegher and McMaster
employ the concept of collaboration as a means for opening art out onto both the
social and art historical worlds: as a way of paying a renewed attention to how
things connect, how we relate to each other and to the world we inhabit.
4
The
curators pinpoint art as creating a space in which to consider the effcacy of these
types of collaborative connections, attributing them with a consonantal value
that runs parallel alongside the world at large. With this virtue in mind, they have
selected a series of artists based on the structures of exchanges, affnities and
empathies via collaboration, conversation and compassion.
5

These structures describe Gabriella and Silvana Manganos
artistic methodologies well; however, their mode of collaboration is decidedly
different to the curatorial model deployed by de Zegher and McMaster. Indeed,
it moves in the opposite direction: centripetally. While de Zegher and McMaster
speak of the principle of collaboration as a lens through which to telescope out
onto the world, Gabriella and Silvana Manganos practice is almost purely formal.
It abstracts and effaces its gestures from the realm of legibility, as well as from
the realm of the social. This was particularly evident in the video work Monument
for Sea (2011), shown as part of their most recent exhibition at Anna Schwartz
Gallery, Melbourne (Shapes for Open Spaces, NovemberDecember 2011), in which
one of the artists stands with her back towards the viewer enacting a series of
cryptic, ritualistic hand gestures towards the ocean before her.
In fact, the two works by Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano that were selected
by de Zegher and McMaster can be seen as chiey exploring the quintessential
binary approach to form: that of line versus colour. While methodologically unifed
in their collaborative, performative approach to an expanded drawing practice,
the selected video works Between near and far (2008-09) and Neon (2010) are
formally opposed to one another. Between near and far is an explicit meditation
on line. It is a three-channel, fxed-angle, eight-and-a-half minute black and white
video created in September, 2007 while Gabriella and Silvana were undertaking
a month-long residency at the Can Serrat International Art Centre in Barcelona.
The work presents a rare foray beyond the scope of the studio to capture the artists
in an expansive, outdoor countryside setting. As is customary, they appear as the
works protagonists. In the central panel, set against a backdrop of rocky cliffs,
the artists weave their way around a grassy plane, passing an entanglement of
black paper streamers back and forth between one another, throwing the mutable
object through the air in a slow zigzagging gesture. They are anked on either side
by the extension of a distinctly horizontal bar composition that is created by the
three-tiered structure of sky, cliff face and grassy foreground. At one point in the
video, the picture plane is vertically bisected and mirroredcausing the fgure of
Silvana to double and the streamers that she waves in the wind to meet perfectly
in the centre of the screen, like a Rorschach blot set into motion. Here, the drawn
line takes both the exible form of the perambulatory, black-clad bodies and the
tangle of paper streamers that traverse, icker and striate the picture plane of
the Spanish backdrop.
The short video work Neon, on the other hand, is an exercise after
Matisseit explores the potential of colour to create form. Made in 2010 for their
Studio 12 exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary, Neon capturesagain from a fxed
point perspective, but this time in full colour videothe two artists dressed in
black, in a completely blacked-out interior, manipulating the shape of a coloured
paper, quilt-like object by holding its edges, shufing outwards, pushing the
object up in the air, then shufing back inwards to meet at the centre. Their faces
remain largely inaccessible to the video cameras lens, obfuscated by the bunched
paper object. Spotlit by a strong external light source, the continuously morphing
sculptural object is the focal point (as with Absence of evidence), while the black-
clad artists bridge the divide between fgure and ground. The video itself is edited
to create an asymmetrical rhythm between the artists and objects movements.
The repeated expansion and contraction of the paper quilt is reected in a strange,
percussive soundtrack comprising sporadic, single drumbeats interspersed with a
series of alternately protracted and staccatoed inhalation- and exhalation-like
sounds.
This emphasis on abstracted physical and spatial gestures links Gabriella
and Silvana Mangano with a number of, interestingly mostly women, mostly
Melbourne-based contemporary artists who are similarly working with the trope
of the body in motion. These artists include Bianca Hester, Alicia Frankovich (now
based in Berlin), Laresa Kosloff, Katie Lee, Alex Martinis Roe (also now based in
Berlin), and some of the earlier work of Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley.
In pursuing concerns pertaining to the representation of the body in motion,
in space, these artists formalongside Gabriella and Silvanaa type of un-self-
determined movement that sees the physical body of the artist posited back
into the centre of the work, revisiting certain strains of west coast American
conceptualism from the 1970s in the process.
Alexie Glass-Kantor picked up on this trend in a 2009 article Extimacy:
A new generation of feminism, in which she explored the landscape of multiple
and conicting feminisms in contemporary Australian art by making reference
to the work of the Manganos, Martinis Roe, Anastasia Klose and several others.
Speaking of this new generation, born under the omnipresent lens of myriad
media formats, Glass-Kantor suggests that its canny manipulation of the gaze has
led to evolved tactical ways to articulate and disseminate [these female artists]
own representation.
6
More tellingly for our purposes, she also notes: What is
interesting about Martinis Roe that is also indicative of her peers is the refned
understanding of the politics of spatial intervention.
7
As Claire Bishop has argued
in her 2005 book Installation Art: A Critical History, the physical negotiation of a
space implicit in the experience of installation art emerged almost half a century
ago alongside the rise of second-wave feminism, the irreconcilably decentred
subject, and the growing trend of institutional critique. [B]y using an entire
space that must be circumnavigated to be seen, Bishop argues, [installation art]
came to provide a direct analogy for the desirability of multiple perspectives on a
single situation.
8
In an analogous fashion, Glass-Kantor pinpoints the intersection
between the female body and spatial politics as a new and highly charged feminist
trope for contemporary art, one in which the mediated and refracted gaze of
the video camera assumes a new documentary importance by simultaneously
distancing, dissolving and reconstructing its authorial subject. (In doing so, it
must be noted, Glass-Kantor presents an infnitely more discerning attempt to
articulate a strand of feminist politics in contemporary Australian art practice than
the more recent exhibition Contemporary Art: Women at the Gallery of Modern Art
in Brisbane, in which Gabriella and Silvana Mangano are also represented.)
In drawing a tentative stylistic perimeter around these various artists practices,
however, it is important to also consider how the Manganos approach to depicting
the body in movement and in space is different to the approaches of their
contemporaries, as well as to ask whether it fts within a strictly feminist agenda
at all. Their somewhat introspective preoccupation with form delineates their
work from a number of the practices listed above: where Bianca Hesters practice
physically engages with bodies and spaces extrinsic to the work (the public),
and Alex Martinis Roes work is stitched intricately into a specifcally feminist,
theoretical, discursive framework, Gabriella and Silvana Manganos videos are
poetic in an excessively private language of abstraction. This notion of privacy
is a quality that they deliberately sought to transpose from their individual two-
dimensional practices to their combined performative work. Noting the economy
of means (limited space, limited materials) required to constitute a drawing
practice, the medium appealed to the artists preferred private method of making
work. In the same breath, it almost wholly stages its excision from the social
realm. When speaking of their frst video work made outside the studio, Between
near and far, both noted that they also unintentionally transposed the physical
architectural perimeter of their studio onto the vast, expansive outdoor setting
in Spain.
9
When reviewing the performance on screen, they realised that the
lines they were tracing in the grassy feld actually adumbrated the architectural
confnes of their studio: a revealing gesture that illuminates the restrained and
private nature of their formal explorations, as well as solidifying its art historical
heritage in west coast American conceptualists like Bruce Nauman.
This abstract, introverted impulse is also, then, what distances
Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano from another important counterpoint to
their work: the highly stylised and formal representations of bodies in motion
that populate Shaun Gladwells video practice. Despite the similarity in subject
matter, in Gladwells work the body in motion is always depicted as indexing a
site (even if it is a generalised, non-sitelike a service station or a streetscape),
as with skateboarding or break-dancing as forms of socio-spatial critique (Storm
Sequence, 2000 or Pataphysical Man, 2005). In Gabriella and Silvana Manganos
private world, site is muted (Drawing 1), eradicated (Absence of evidence, Neon),
or exploited for formal effect (Between near and far, Monument for Sea).
The comparison between Gladwell and the Manganos yields a further
important point of distinction: that of technical realisation. Where the moving
bodies in Gladwells videos are slowed down, cropped and focused in order to
best showcase their balletic beauty (a resolutely hi-f technique that counters the
chaotic, MTV-style with which a skateboarding contest might typically be captured,
for instance), Gabriella and Silvana Manganos approach is comparatively low-f.
In other texts on their work, commentators have likened this approach to the
artists stated interest in Neo-realist Italian cinema. But perhaps the true appeal
of the Warhol-like set upof placing the video camera on a tripod, pressing record,
then walking off (or in, as it were)is linked to the artists efforts to transpose
two essential qualities of drawing from their earlier individual practices into their
collaborative flms: those of immediacy and privacy. By insistently enforcing these
dual qualities in their video works, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano largely
close their work off from the world. This gesture of self-effacement is carried out
not in order to deliberately eschew social relevance, but rather in an attempt
to develop a meaningful space for experimental medium-recursivity in a newly
expanded feld of drawing.
Notes
1
Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001: 179
2
In a recent review of Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Manganos exhibition Shapes for Open Spaces
in Artforum, Green speaks of there being an overwhelming sense of the artist doubled in their video
work. See Charles Green, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Artforum,
Vol. 50, No. 6, February 2012: 248
3
Green: 159, 180 and 155
4
Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations: exhibition
overview, 18th

Biennale of Sydney, http://bos18.com/exhibition-overview; accessed 2 May 2012
5
ibid.
6
Alexie Glass, Extimacy: A new generation of feminism, Art & Australia, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring 2009: 135
7
ibid: 139 (authors italics)
8
Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, London: Tate Publishing, 2005: 35
9
Conversation with the artists, 26 April 2012
Opposite: Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Between near and far (video stills), 2008
Photos courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz, Melbourne
Pages 116-117: Robin Rhode, Arm Chair, 2011
Photo courtesy the artist and White Cube, London
DANCE OF HISTORY
SRIWHANA SPONG LEARNING DUETS
MELANIE OLIVER
When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer,
not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of
her back Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its
pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
1
It seemed that she would be able, through the medium of
dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or
happiness at will, having provided a channel through which
they might ow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer
dragged on.
Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz
2
The body moving through time, place and memory, especially in relation to dance,
has been central to Sriwhana Spongs work for the past few years. Developed for
the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, the flms that comprise her work Learning Duets
capture two performers, Benny Ord and the artist herself, on neighbouring
beaches as they enact a mixture of choreographed dance pieces and improvised
movements in response to the surrounding environment. The starting point for this
work was two texts by the American authors Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Save Me
the Waltz and Tender is the Night, both novels that were based on the couples
memories of the coastal town Antibes in Southern France. Spong transplants the
premise of their stories, as well as the controversial biographical associations, to
a distant and radically different coastlineWaiheke Island in Aucklands Hauraki
Gulfa place that evokes strong personal memories for each of the performers
and locates the work in the familiar context of home. The duets of the title
could refer to the dancers or the two main flms that are in conversation in the
installation; but also to the combination of dance with everyday movements, or the
relationship between the historical source material and its contemporary reading,
as all are aspects of the learning and research process that underpins Learning
Duets. Past and present, foreign and local, text and gesture, are momentarily
aligned through the contemporary bodies in motion, activating the state of being
in-between times, places and cultures, and thereby highlighting the continuous
potential of now. For the past decade, concepts of time and of history have
been ubiquitous in contemporary practice, typically understood as fragmented,
unknowable and incomplete, the last romantic frontier.
3
Similarly, over the
same period historical and personal narratives have been consistent features
in Spongs practice. Early works such as Muttnik (2005) addressed her Aotearoa
New Zealand and Indonesian descent, exploring her estranged relationship to
Balinese heritage as experienced through the exoticising lens of popular culture
and mythology. Using common and found materials to assemble Balinese ritual
forms, Spong obscured their context and location with video.
Shifting focus in 2010 to a particular moment in history, Costume for
a mourner marked a new direction in her practice. For this work, Spong remade
a thick felt costume that Henri Matisse had designed for the Ballets Russes
production Le Chant du Rossignol in 1920, originally choreographed by George
Balanchine. There is no flm documentation of this ballet, only still images and
remnants from the costume wardrobe. Spong invited Benny Ord to improvise the
imagined dance while inhabiting the bulky costume, adapting to the forms that the
structure allowed. The resulting flm, Costume for a mourner, acts as an archival
document as well as contemporary reading, a ghost that slips into the absence of
record and reminds us that by nature, dance is always ephemeral and based on
loss. The original ballet costumesrecently on display at the National Gallery of
Australialook somewhat tired and less refned than might be expected, yet Spong
brings the historical relationship between visual arts and dance to life by remaking
and animating Matisses garment through movement.
Developing out of her experience making Costume for a mourner, the
work Learning Duets continues to explore history with dance but also introduces
another historical narrative thread, this time from modern literature. The frst
and only book written by Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932), and F. Scott
Fitzgeralds more commonly known and last complete novel Tender is the Night
(1934) are both based on the couples experiences and recollections of Antibes.
Spong has spliced together parts of the texts, as she describes: blending both
voices to describe a place that wavers between two different voices, hinting at
differing hues, seasons and temperatures.
4
Overlaying this compilation of text
onto Waiheke Island, the two performers, Ord and Spong, respond to the physical
site and to their individual memories of this place through movement and dance.
Documented as two separate flms, they offer a comparative view on how place is
remembered and the harmony or discord of voices across space and time.
Although the beaches on Waiheke where the flms were shot are publicly
owned land, access to them is private, so they can only be accessed by water.
In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, it is diffcult to ignore the signifcance
of this in terms of the foreshore and seabed debates that foreground indigenous
rights to ownership, though more general notions of this littoral space seem more
relevant here. Regardless of access, the beach setting is a space with particular
qualities and behavioural codes, as the social etiquette described in Tender is the
Night reinforces, and the relationship of public and private land in the work is used
to echo the public and private relationship of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.
Writing in the context of the early twentieth-century, the challenges
commonly experienced by women in creative couples are part of the rumour and
intrigue that surround their work. It is assumed from surviving correspondence
that Scott demanded radical revisions be made to Zeldas manuscript for Save Me
the Waltz before it was published and, while struggling to fnish his own account
set in the same location, Zelda was admitted for psychiatric care. The mixture
of fact and fction is calculated to ruin us both,
5
he wrote, though both novels
contain semi-autobiographical references, and the lives of the Fitzgeralds seem
symbiotically linked to their work.
In addition to the specifc literary references that underpin the work,
Learning Duets is also a continuation of Spongs research into the history of moving
and the relationship between everyday movements and specifc dance forms, in
particular the Western tradition of ballet. Spong possesses a strong knowledge of
dance that stems from many years spent studying ballet in her youth, and she has
recently returned to classes as an adult. The upright posture and ways of moving
that become ingrained habits for dancers are embedded through discipline and
repetition; imposed on the body like a kind of cultural colonisation, lingering in
muscle memory and impacting on all areas of life.
This intersection of history and dance is signifcant and productive, as
both are transient, in constant motion and centre on the body as agent. Akin to
Spong, the Canadian artist Luis Jacob has similarly integrated historical fragments
to generate new narratives and associated this with the history of dance. In his
ongoing Album series of archival projects, Jacob montages images from diverse
sources with formal similarities to generate creative mis-readings. Correspondingly,
his work A Dance for Those of us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, Based on
the Choreography of Franoise Sullivan and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth
(2007) features a performance artist reenacting the eccentric choreography of
Franoise Sullivan, whose 1948 performance of Danse dans la neige was a seminal
event for modern dance in Canada. The parallel between these artists works and
processes reveals how the amalgamation of history and dance is a model that
enables the choreography of images and archival documents, through space and
movement. Accompanying Learning Duets is a reading room that features a range
of other artist publications showing other approaches to a specifc place through
performance, sculptural intervention, flm or photography.
As well as featuring Jacobs installation, documenta 12 (2007) included
signifcant components of dance through the work of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha
Brown. Curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack attempted to revision its history
and signal the critical role for dance in contemporary practiceas subsequent
interest and projects has sustainedand Rainer in particular has inuenced Spong.
For over ffty years, Rainers interdisciplinary approach has traversed art, dance
and flm, and the comparison of her work with Minimal Art is instructive, as it
demonstrates the exceptionally close relationship of visual artists and dance in
the 1960s. The contemporary connection between sculpture, flm and dance is
vastly different, but there is a growing correlation and synergy.
For the installation of Learning Duets a large silk fabric hanging divides
the main space, suggesting a curtain or a backdrop, but really acting as neither.
The gusts of air that are generated as the building breathes gently catch the
fabric, creating subtle movement in this sculptural intervention. The silks are
dyed in everyday liquids, such as coke, tea or coffee, similar to those used in
her earlier ritual assemblage works. Spong has described how beverages can be a
reection of colonial culture, since they are imported and take hold in a place,
like the Earl Grey tea of England or Coca-Cola synonymous with American culture.
6

Some of the silk fabric is also doused in Chanel N
o
5, a classic scentalluding
to a comment in Zelda Fitzgeralds Save Me the Waltzthat is used to convey a
vague observation, since smell is the sense most connected with memory, but
also the least specifc to grasp as a description. Occasionally, lifeless objects
appear in Spongs installations and the stillness, rather than signifying potential,
seems stultifying. Yet with even just the light utter of a breeze, this sculptural
silk divider takes on the ungraspable character of movement and of dance,
intertwining with the historical narrative and contributing to the many meaningful
interpretations this work generates.
Throughout Learning Duets, there is a play on memory, traces and
iterations of the double that exists in the work itself and Spongs process of
consistently evolving projects in conversation with previous work. The dyed silk
fabrics are an evocative, physical trace, as is the medium of flm that documents
the eeting actions of the performers, and the primary narrative that is apparent
in the two flms addresses the notion of memory. However, the installation is also
accompanied by a subsequent work, Beach Study that was informed by the process
of making Learning Duets and is the B-side or epilogue of the project. Beach Study
is Spongs frst flm made using 16mm and the grainy materiality of the medium
echoes the relationship of the bodies to their surrounding physical environment.
Through playing with balance and gravity, the performer attempts to escape the
restrictive movements of dance in favour of everyday actions and shapes that
are more sculptural, forms which deny the bodys memorya distillation of the
learning from Learning Duets.
A slightly earlier work by Spong, Whether standing or sitting or lying or
in some other position in the dark (2011) depicted a dancer marking, which is the
process of taking an old dance piece and transferring it to a new space, in this case
having to work over, under and around a table. It is this act of marking that occurs
across Spongs practice, translating aspects of previous work to new situations,
reframing and adjusting to explore fresh terrain. The two-channel work Lethe-
wards (2010) developed out of Costume for a mourner, and the ideas introduced
then continue to be rolled into and evolved in Learning Duets, and so on. In this
way, a momentum is maintained in her practice, consistent with the focus on
history, dance and movement that is central to her work. Within Learning Duets,
the small projection Beach Study acts as a sort of punctuation mark within the
ongoing conversation; in defning the critical concept at the heart of the work, and
also breaking, providing the turning point towards whatever comes next. These
reections on history are always moving on.
Notes
1
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934), London: Vintage, 2010: 11
2
Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932), Matthew J. Bruccoli, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected
Writings, New York: Macmillan, 1991: 118
3
Guillaume Desanges and Helene Meisel, After Marcel Broodthaers, on Relationism & Lost Articles,
Mousse, Milan, issue 29, June 2011: 182
4
Email correspondence with the artist, 17 April 2012
5
Bruccoli: 3
6
Email correspondence with the artist, ibid.
Opposite: Sriwhana Spong, Costume for a mourner (video still), 2010
Below: Sriwhana Spong, A twitch upon the thread, 2010
Photos courtesy the artist and Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland
PROCESS AND MATERIALITY
KATHY ZARuR
emirati artist Hassan Sharif has seen it all. In 1979, his extraordinary drawing skills
got him a scholarship to study art in england. His patrons were happy to devote
their resources to developing the united Arab emirates frst great artist.
1
After a
year of foundation classes in studio art and art history, Sharif began investigating
more conceptual modes of art making. Upon graduating, he returned to Dubai with
the intention of contributing to the nascent art scene. Though some people were
intrigued by his experiments with chance, statistical equations or the grid, most
had a hard time associating it with what they understood art to be. What could
such a practice do for those who wanted paintings of Emirati landscapes? That was
of no concern to Sharif, for he never intended to paint canvases of falconers
against dramatic sand dunes. His interest lay in developing a practice, which
rejected aesthetics in favour of ideas and created critical engagements that could
impact on the status quo. Sharifs commitment did not come without its sanctions.
His works have been censored and his exhibitions closed.
2
Starting around the
mid-1980s, Sharif was subjected to what Cristiana de Marchi describes as a
long period of censorship and marginalisation in the UAE.
3
Despite this, Sharif
continued producing and exhibiting art. In addition, he put forth tremendous
energy towards building an active cultural environment by teaching classes,
starting art ateliers, hosting exhibitions, writing articles about art and culture and
co-founding the Emirates Fine Arts Society.
4
Sharif stands out among Arab artists of his generation (and many of
younger generations) because he has never been interested in developing an art
practice that explored his cultural identity. For Sharif, such work is propagandistic.
As Catherine David indicates, there will always be Emirati nationals who consider
his work to be unrepresentative of regional artistic production.
5
In contrast,
some have attempted to characterise his work using a strictly Euro-American art
historical language, particularly connecting him to Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus.
Though these legacies are apparent in Sharifs oeuvre, David is right to situate
his practice within a context that moves beyond a simple East/West binary.
The conspicuous materiality and critical eye that characterises his work today
was present in his caricatures long before his exposure to courses in art history.
Sharifs work developed in the context of a new nation that quickly went from
economic sluggishness to a seemingly endless process of urban and infrastructural
development. With this came a tremendous inux of people from all over the
Middle East, South Asia and beyond who contributed to the growth and brought
with them the diverse cultures that characterise the UAE today. Sharifs work is
best understood in the midst of these overlapping contextshis critical tendencies,
isolation from the Emirati art world, and the rapidly transforming nation.
Given these complex and diffcult histories, and having had to fght
long and hard to promote contemporary art practices in a place that mostly
misunderstood him, I expected Sharif to be an extraordinarily resilient and
committed person. We met at the Flying House (the non-proft art space where
he lives and works), with his friends and collaborators Emirati artist Mohammed
Kazem and artist/poet Cristiana de Marchi outside the unmarked building.
6
I was
led through metal gates that typically surround houses in Dubai and immediately
recognised the place from photographs I had seen. The bright courtyard wrapped
around the house perimeter and displayed artworks integrated in creative ways
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim wrapped the trunk of a tree that peers over the wall
to the street in colorful cloth. Rocks wrapped in wire were embedded into the oor
and framed by two white rectangles. A glass display case contained examples from
Sharifs Object series, lending the ordinary an air of museological signifcance.
Crushed tin cans were displayed in the glass-topped stairs that lead into the two-
story building. As we walked from one room to the other, Sharif made sure to
point out works by other Flying House artists, including paintings by Layla Juma.
7

I realised the signifcance of community to Sharif, and it all seemed to culminate
in the Flying House. The unpretentious exhibition space makes manifest the work
Sharif and his friends have contributed towards developing an intellectually and
critically engaged Emirati art scene.
Sharif and I started our conversation in a small corridor-like room, where
photographic and textual documentation of his performances were displayed
in individual frames.
8
We stood for nearly forty minutes discussing Sharifs
preference for prosaic objects, his tendency to incorporate simple actions into
his performances, and his reliance on statistical methods to produce his artworks.
Though I had initially understood his use of numerical equations as a rejection of
subjectivity, I quickly learned that binary terms do not fgure in Sharifs thinking.
His works, he stated, are neither subjective, nor objective. Rather, he derives
form and concept from the spaces and places he occupies, churning them through
complex strategies. The result is a deceptive simplicity that permeates all of his
work. Suspended Objects (2011) is a commanding piece comprised of two parts;
one that hangs from above like a mobile and another that hangs horizontally
against the wall. Both objects are composed of brightly coloured materials such
as foam, masses of string and reective material, all of which are wrapped and
strung together with colourful thread or shiny copper wire.
Like many of Sharifs Objects, Suspended Objects is all about consumptionof
the commodity, that is.
9
The sheer mass of stuff, sometimes bright and shiny and
new, sometimes used and refused, appears to invite consumption, even though
Sharifs manipulations stymie any possibility that they might one day be useful.
But Suspended Objects is about more than an obsession with things. Sharif recently
moved his works from the oor and suspended them, which prompted the need to
connect the otherwise disjointed parts of his Objects. He was moved to explore
the idea of suspension after the economic crisis in Dubai in 2008, when company
profts took a nosedive with the decline of the global economy. Building projects
came to a crashing halt, the evidence of which is still visible in the Emirati skyline,
where skyscraper skeletons and half-built bridges puncture the sky. Sharif likes
these monuments of indeterminacy. Left alone for so long, they have acquired a
dusty desert hue, making it diffcult to decipher whether they are ruins soon to be
demolished or whether the cranes will once again rev their collective engines to
fnish what they started.
Chatting with Sharif in the simple exhibition space, I began to glean the
philosophical import of his thinking and its reection in his production process.
Sharif wraps, twists, stacks, strings and most recently, weaves things. As his
Objects attest, repetition is a key element in his process. Blanket and Wire (1995)
is made of pieces of blanket that Sharif cut, rolled and then secured by wrapping
them with wire. Next he attached each small bound roll to the other, creating
long plait-like pieces of material. Each instance of its exhibition is unique, for
he orchestrates the relationships among the components anew, juxtaposing reds,
yellows, oranges, greens and whites. Sharif works alone, and when he does, he
neither listens to music nor watches television. Without distraction, he engages
in repetitive actions while remaining fully present in the process. Asked about
repetition, he indicates that sameness is not inherent in repetition because each
moment is unique. At the same time, the boundaries that distinguish past from
present and future are morphous. The thoughts that transpire in his process
dissipate just as soon as they appear, and he makes no attempt to memorialise
them in any way, but to continue with his repetition. The objects therefore become
indecipherable records through their embodiment of those eeting moments.
As he indicates, I am moulding my thoughts. I asked Sharif what was inside the
hundreds of wrapped objects, but again, dichotomies dissolve when he describes
his practice. His objects simultaneously lay bare and keep secreted all there is to
know.
For Aluminum and Paper (1998), Sharif wrapped crumpled balls of
newsprint yellowed with time in thin aluminum mesh. Like oversized candies,
hundreds are piled upon each other, the natural feel of the paper contrasting
with the pliable silver of its industrial wrapper. He describes his use of contrasting
features and textures in terms of the erotic, though in the work itself, it manifests
rather subtly. This is perhaps more useful to Sharif, who indicates; It is important
to look at these critical features of the erotic Society ignores them. You have to
stimulate them. You have to use the erotic as a weapon to destroy conventions.
It is a tool for artists to use.
10
In a place like the UAE, where sexuality is a highly
private matter, understated references to the erotic are more useful because they
can go undetected, all the while making their way subconsciously.
Sharifs approach to materialising concept through reference to the
world around him reaches back to his days as a young man. In his early twenties
he began drawing weekly caricatures for a magazine called Akhbar Dubai (Dubai
News). In them, Sharif employed irony and wit to comment on a broad range of
subjects from sports, education and censorship to economics, regional politics
and the changes in the urban and societal fabric prompted by the discovery of
oil in the early 1960s and the subsequent establishment of the nation-State in
1971. Alongside Sharifs sophisticated understanding of iconography and ability to
visually and textually narrate complicated situations with brevity, the caricatures
reveal Sharifs penchant for critique that has continued throughout his oeuvre.
In 1979, Sharif began his formal art education in england, frst
at Warwickshire College in Royal Leamington Spa and then at the Byam Shaw
School of Art in London. There he studied the conceptual art strategies that he
would apply to his socially-based work. Sharif had little exposure to art history
prior to his studies, but when he was frst confronted with Marcel Duchamps
work, the young man was jarred by the idea that an ordinary object could be
considered art. Thus he began cultivating an art practice that moved away from
concern with aesthetics, in order to question its role and function in society.
Sharif incorporated impersonal modes of art making such as the use of statistical
equations, systematic procedures and chance to determine the shape of his early
experimental works, most of which focused on objects and simple actions from
everyday life. A signifcant resource was his english-Arabic dictionary Al Mawrid,
which he continues to use today. In Dictionary (1981), Sharif used the page
number upon which a letter began in order to determine the distance between
the camera and the subject. For example, the letter E began on page 301.
The sum of 3+0+1 being 4, he photographed the page from the dictionary at a distance
of four steps.
11
Such experimentation led to the production of a series called
Semi-System Drawings (1983-85), in which the artist would use equations he
created to determine the shape of his drawings. Movement of a squares side
(1985) is a drawing of a grid comprised of twenty squares, where the sides are
depicted in various positions moving toward the centre of the square.
While he was producing the Semi-System Drawings, Sharif began working
with the genre of performance art, in which fgured his interest in the prosaic
and the systematic.
12
Sharifs decision to undertake performance art in Dubai
is extraordinary, for no-one in the country, let alone the region, was engaging
with such practices. Though the audiences were always quite small and comprised
of family and friends (who also photographed the events), these performances
indicate the extent to which Sharif would go to develop a critically minded artistic
community. Many of his performances incorporated simple actions that were titled
accordingly, such as Jumping No. 2 (Hatta Desert, Dubai, 1983) and Throwing
Stones (Hatta Desert, Dubai, 1983). He defended his performances in very simple
terms: Children jump while playing, men jump from parachutes and people jump
at the beach. In this performance, I jump in the Hatta Desert. Many people jump
in many ways. So why shouldnt I jump in the desert?
13
Again, Sharifs simplicity
is deceiving, for it can lead to an unending interrogation. While in conversation
with the artist, I realised that Sharif must have been made to defend himself over
and over. His detractors often ask him questions like, so if I jump, is it art? He
responds with a challenge: Do it and then well talk about whether or not it is
art.
14
He knows they lack the courage required to take up his challenge, and his
response highlights the audacity required to be an artist.
Upon graduating from Byam Shaw, Sharif returned to Dubai with the
intention of building an art scene. He never compromised his commitment to
conceptual art, eschewing the desire for living room art among those to whom
his work was an enigma. Instead, he looked to his country through the eyes of
someone who had been gone for some time and found himself drawn to the
material-flled markets. Around this time, he started making works that would
become his Object series. Initially, he worked with natural materials, as with
Jute, Cloth and Rope (1985), a heap of circular objects of various thicknesses
and diameters he made by twisting, stuffng, wrapping and tying. But soon Sharif
started appropriating refuse and readymade objects like cardboard boxes that he
would take apart, stack and string together using rope. Cardboard and Coir (2001)
is a twisted mass of cardboard brought together in this way. The texture of the
torn edges contrasts with the carefully printed product names and quantities, a
reference to the circular processes of marketing, branding and consuming. Little
distinguishes Cardboard and Coir from stacks of cardboard left next to shops to be
thrown away, and this is exactly Sharifs point. In fact, another piece, Cardboard,
Newspapers and Glue (2004), was mistaken for garbage and destroyed while
placed on the sidewalk during Sharjah Biennial 7 in 2005.
15
Conceptually, there
could be no better end for one of Sharifs objects, for its fate exactly mimicked
that which Sharif was critiquing.
Despite Sharifs long toil, his resolve is fnally starting to pay off. In
2011, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage hosted a major exhibition,
Hassan Sharif experiments & Objects, 1979-2011. This year, his work was featured
in two solo exhibitionsat the New York gallery Alexander Gray Associates and
Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beiruthis frst outside the uAe. Alongside uruguayan
artist and academic Luis Camnitzer, Sharif was awarded the inaugural John Jones
Art on Paper Award, and is a fnalist for the 1st Annual Alice Awards. This attention
should be gauged with as critical an eye as Sharif casts over most things. After all,
artworks are also commodities and Sharif is well aware of this. I doubt that this
will stop his incessant practice, however. Whats more likely is that, as with Press
Conference No. 1 (2009), hell fnd a way to critique the art market through his
work. A heap of newspapers, folded into thirds and tied up in strips of yellow, red,
purple, blue and green cloth, Press Conference No. 1 refers to the over-active
media machine in the UAE. But by tying up and therefore preventing access to the
newspapers contents, Sharif points to the dangerous potential of superfciality.
Notes
1
The United Arab Emirates became a nation-State in 1971
2
Bakh Bakh (1985) was removed from the 1985 exhibit Sea and Desert, which was organised by the
Ministry of Information in Abu Dhabi. See de Marchi: 306
3
Cristiana de Marchi, Chronology, in Hassan Sharif: Works 1973-2011, Osldern, Germany: Hatje Canz
Verlag, 2011: 306
4
The Emirates Fine Arts Society recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with an exhibition of artworks
produced by its members. With the support of the Sharjah government, in 1984 he instituted the short-
lived Marijah Art Atelier, a workshop in Sharjahs Heritage Area. In 1987, he founded Marsam al Hoor
(Art Atelier) in the Youth Theatre and Arts in Dubai. Supported by the Ministry of Education, the workshop
offers classes (partly taught by Sharif until 1999) in drawing, painting and art history. He contributed to
the initiation of the Sharjah International Art Biennale, (now called Sharjah Biennial), which debuted
in 1993. In the midst of this educational and community-building work, Sharif regularly produces and
exhibits his work locally and internationally and writes about art
5
Catherine David, The Art of Weaving in Hassan Sharif: Works 1973-2011: 13
6
The Flying House is a Dubai non-prot art space founded in 2007. It represents Emirati artists Hassan
Sharif, Hussain Sharif (Hassans brother), Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Layla Juma and Abdul-Rahman
Al Maaini. The Flying House is without signage because it is located in a residentially zoned area
7
Juma is currently the rst woman president of the Emirates Fine Arts Society
8
Sharif has always been careful to document his work with photographs and preserve preparatory
drawings. Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar has collected some of these archival records
9
For a discussion of Sharifs critique of commodity consumption, see Hassan Sharif, Rolling, in Sharjah
Biennial 7, Sharjah, UAE: Sharjah Biennial, 2005: 390
10
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Collector, recycler, game changer, enigma, The Daily Star, 7 April 2012,
accessed on 29 April 2012 at http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Art/2012/Apr-07/169491-collector-
recycler-game-changer-enigma.ashx#axzz1tOf8uVVQ
11
Dictionary is described by Paulina Kolczynska in a highly detailed account of Sharifs history and art
practice. See Paulina Kolczynska, Hassan Sharif: A Rare Bloom in the Desert, in Hassan Sharif: Works
1973-2011: 38
12
The bulk of Sharifs performances took place between 1982-84
13
Quoted in Kolczynska: 46
14
A similar conversation took place in 1985 during Sharifs solo show at the Emirates Fine Arts Society.
Hassan Sharif, interview with the author, Flying House, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 8 April 2012
15
See de Marchi: 310
Page 120: Hassan Sharif, Classic 2, 2008
Opposite: Hassan Sharif, installation view, SADACH pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2009
Above top: Hassan Sharif, Slippers and wire, 2009
Above bottom: Hassan Sharif, Rubber bands & cloth No. 9, 2006
Photos courtesy the artist and The Flying House, Dubai
GREEK PLASTICS
NATASHA CONLAND
Peter Robinsons large-scale sculpture Gravitas Lite commissioned for the 2012
Biennale of Sydney explores a compressed binary, or an oxymoron I cant decide.
The polystyrene chains are light things made suggestively heavy and muscular.
Both the ideas and forms in the work, ping-pong within this simple metaphor
and its unlikely substance, offering spectacularly nothing (they are entirely self-
contained) and everything (a game ft for observational sport).
There has much said in the last six years of Robinsons work with
polystyrene, perhaps more than any other aspect of his already well published
career. Either these works inspire comment, or in the world of art production,
we want to make sense of this new phase of the artists practicehis white-out,
his return to form, his move towards the spectacle, his implicit nihilism. It is all
there in the wordage to date. For sure, the work in turn is also ambitious for its
reception. The scale is large (Gravitas Lite reaching approximately 30x30 metres),
the somewhat glorious white is captivating, and in the artists words, it seeks to
entertain.
1

Despite the obvious spectacle, Gravitas Lite reveals a spirit of deadpan
more clearly than his polystyrene installations to date. These have ranged through
the architectural proportions of Artspace, Auckland, from Ack (2006), through the
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in chain sculptures with Snow Ball Blind Time (2008);
and in monoliths from Polymer Monoliths 1, Artspace, Sydney to Cache (2011), at
the Christchurch Art Gallery. Gravitas Lite also reunites in more defnite terms
the polystyrene monoliths with the gargantuan chain installations, which had
separated themselves off in more recent exhibitions.
There is an attraction to the deadpan through much New Zealand art practice, for
which Robinson may be in part responsible. This attitudinal strainoccurring in his
work as far back as the mid-1990sis marked by a mock seriousness, or express
failure to win (for example, arguments, tricks, the market or audiences). What is
deadpan if not an epic testimony to what could have been, but is not. In this case
perhaps, what could have been was the revolutionary artistic statement of the
1990s, the reappraisal of the canon, and the repositioning of the contemporary
specifcally for Mori. This failed (perhaps in New Zealand at least) because it
never (and still hasnt) successfully shifted the binary of Mori and Pakeha towards
a greater complexity of individual positions.
Robinson however describes the metaphoric binary in Gravitas Lite as
a kitset.
2
It can and should be reftted for different relativities, in which case
its components are interchangeable. The seven different chain lengths can be set
or delimited for a given architectural environment, budget or exhibition context.
It is clear Robinson wants to detach himself from the metaphoric loop (the decision
making, either/or), while inviting the game. Literal detachment is of course an
express possibility from material so weak to the touch. The smallest of chains
easily break during handling, and the expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam gives up
tiny balls from its edges. This vulnerability is part of the seduction of the material
which allows viewers to easily imagine its weakness and dissolvability in contrast
to the perceived strength.
An important early experiment with oppositional force in material and form was
the work Promethean Dreams (2007), from the exhibition of the same name at
Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland. Borrowing quite directly from the myth of
Prometheus, the work depicts what appears to be a stack of large boulders
over which lie tiny hair-like strands of chain. The chain is almost feathery at a
distance with loose willowy ends just touching the oor. These links could in no
way hold Prometheus chained to the rock from whence Zeus imprisoned him, but
from this work develops the large forceful looking structures with the chain hairs
now wrapped among them, and their imposing regularised monoliths. The more
illustrative strands of the story fade into the dynamics of these oppositions in front
of the viewer, who walks in and around them.
The grand extension of this was the solo exhibition Snow Ball Blind Time,
which wrangled with the entirety of the Govett-Brewsters interior exhibition
space. Subsequently, the monoliths stand alone in a series of exhibitions, which
seem on the face of it to stage then erode the theatre of sculptural mass in
relation to the white cube. Following the trajectory of the works development
(and perhaps contrary to popular analysis), it wasnt the artist chained to the
rocks, but the viewer. In other words, Robinson makes the subject of the work the
viewers ability to problem-solve the mass, scale and space around them, escaping
their binds. The problem grows into something like a polystyrene chain maze,
snaring the viewer within the architecture of the rabbit/duck problem.
The chains and monoliths with their geometic regularity, their
conversation with architecture and reductive space, display strongly formal
concerns, while simultaneously decomposing, slackening, loosening the
strictitude of these relationships. His touchstone for these works is the waning
of minimalism, with the late Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Robert
Morris, John McCracken and Barry Le Va.
3
Cubes both architectural and sculptural
are penetrated, scattered or deected into social space, all the while maintaining
a formal backbone and possible solution. Once-removed again from the post-
minimalist generation, Robinson makes the modern his concern by redeploying
this moment of dissolution. The juxtapositions of concrete and inconcrete states,
presence and absence in form and space are made explicit through the simple
effects of the ePS foam. How, for example, does the ultra-white of the substance
fade into the background tone of gallery white when it is used en masse, creating
an eerie dimensionless space around the edges of the work? Equally, its aerated
composition through which light can penetrate, fails to create the illusion of
substance despite its scale reaching over three metres. Moreover, this frankly
synthetic matter fails to be groundedboth chemically and conceptually.
Somehow despite these oppositions, the sublime within these structures
wins out over its supposed foil, rubbish and decay. Decay is only ever a tool for
emphasising strength in these forms. With reference points stretching back to
the monoliths of ancient times and in contemporary terms to artists such as to
David Altmejd, Robinson it seems has put his art historical reference points into a
compression chamber, and they have spat out a series of cast oppositions, amongst
which the interplay of solid and molten states is paramount. In the scene of the
compression chamber, the facilities of the polystyrene are of course ideal for their
capacity in injection moulding, insulation, and acuity with known capabilities for
kit-set componentry.
Polystyrene is a blatantly modern material. Compatible with the
emergence of the late modern period, it gains widespread visibility in the post-
War period of the twentieth-century, and is found today in its original form in
many household appliances. Often misplaced in the analysis of Robinsons work
as both toxic and disposable, in fact at a technical level it is neither. Both the
original polystyrene and EPS foam, which we more typically refer to, are relatively
inert materials. While they are entirely synthetic, they do not give off gas, and are
recyclable, but non-biodegradable. Given the degree to which we are surrounded
by synthetic materials, and the common appearance of synthetic materials in art,
it is interesting to consider why audiences might experience greater toxic shock
in front of these works.
Without suiting-up as an apologist for polystyrene, it is an ever-present
material, that much is true. Anyone who has recently acquired a computer
has purchased nearly half a cubic metre of EPS foam polystyrene alongside it.
While Robinson makes simple visual rhetoric with this mostly recycled form of
the material, at some level the work is also about its own materiality. In the
1920s, German chemist Hermann Staudinger (1881-1965) not only laid down the
foundations of polymer chemistry, but explained the structure of the styrene.
Staudinger recognised the chain-like structure of the substance and proposed a
name change from metastyrene to polystyrene.
4
From that time, the commercial
exploitation of these early polystyrenes took two different paths, one based on
its high electrical resistance, and the other based on its reactivity. The expanded
form was marketed in the USA as styrofoam by Dow Chemicals in the late 1940s,
but it bizarrely came to fame with a comical story of a rescued ship, which was
oated with the aid of tiny foam balls inserted into its hull.
5
In the 1970s and 1980s
environmentalists took an interest in the product for its inability to decompose,
which of course for industry was its advantage in the supply of most household and
insulation materials.
Stripped of its industrial function, and used with the scale and density of Snow Ball
Blind Time and Gravitas Lite, the polystyrene has a shock value which is awesome,
in the eighteenth
-
century use of the word. But it seems we are also experiencing
the shock of today. This is the scene Zizek dramatically enacts for his audiences,
dressed in a high-vis vest in front of a Manhattan rubbish dump, a waste made
ideological and therefore in his terms unseen in its true state.
6
Standing in
front of this whiteness it is possible to call forth a secular state of grace. In the
case of Gravitas Lite, which sets the chains in Building 139 on Cockatoo Island,
within a gargantuan building of industry, the aptitude is magnifed, while the
material is more contrastive to its surrounds. Knowing what he does about the
medium, perhaps the most radical aspect of this work is that Robinson fails to
give his audience an ideological cue. This is neither a mirror in the face of massive
waste, nor a testimony to the spectacular waste within the sphere of arts own
production. There is no persuasive armature from which to view the work, rather
we face a confounding quantity of seemingly glorious synthetics that we must
somehow manage ourselves by adjectival diversion or ethical positioning. So, in
the truest sense, we see ourselves in this raw material.
While it is a pleasing affrmation of the artists coherency that the
chains mimic the chemical structure of the polystyrene, chains have featured
before in his work (in acrylic). This expansion and contraction of the infnite
idea and formhas resonance with a strand of his work which centred around
binary code, and featured most prominantly in his installation Divine Comedy for
the Venice Bienniale in 2001, in which chain links were composed of binary 0s.
The middle of these large 0s, which might otherwise be punched out, were made
into a stack in red acrylic ellipses of an alternative geometry. These would-be
leftovers became the positive space, the sculptural substance in the installation,
and the reference point again for the modernists.
This interest in off-cuts and leftovers surfaced again recently in his
solo-show Structure And Subjectivity (Sue Crockford Gallery) in March, 2012,
the frst since 2006 to avoid carved polystyrene, which may have seemed like an
about-face. Amongst other materials, leftover cubes, strips and sheets from a felt
manufacturer scatter the gallery oor, are stacked and sculptedtheir reference
to Joseph Beuys reordered amongst the variety of geometric interplay. Robinson
also puts himself into the compression chamber, which now spits out felt versions
of Andrew Caderes sculpture in the colours of his paintings and sculpture from the
late 1990s. It is easy, perhaps, to see how Robinson found his way into packaging
material aside from its capacity to kitset. This is an artist who has long had an
interest in dislodging the perceived substance from its vehiclewhether that
be conceptual or materialsee his mock-apocalyptic statement The End of the
Twentieth Century (2000) as a cartoon-town diorama. This isnt to say that he has
an interest in binarising his subjects into ducks and rabbits, rather that he likes to
muddle the riddle of which follows whichthe content or the form.
In April this year British artist Jeremey Deller completed his inatable
bouncy castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege, for the Glasgow International and year
of the London Olympics. This mock tribute to Stonehenge, one of the worlds
most famous archeological sites and sculptural structures, has a similar tone
to Robinsons polystyrene monoliths. Looking for the most expedient means to
bring the experience of these extraordinary mythic structures into the era of
experiential art, they are re-packaged as user-friendly, egalitarian, highly fake
structures for renewing our encounter with mans frst non-functional form. In this
context the chains too read like the most primitive form of early industrial
advancement. For Robinson, it is highly plausible that despite the sublime effect
of the medium, he anticipates that as we stand there, overcome with the effect
of form, we might forget in a slightly disorientated way, that we are looking at
the monolith, and fnd ourselves staring into a mass of expanded polymer. Or vice
versa of course.
Notes
1
Notes from a conversation with the artist, May 2012
2
ibid.
3
These stated inuences come clearly from the artist, and have also been referenced in recent writing
by Robert Leonard, Peter Robinson: Gravitas Lite in Art & Australia Vol. 48 No. 2, Summer 2010: 310-317,
and Allan Smith, Hegel, Negation, and How to Levitate the Minimalist Object, in Peter Robinson: Polymer
Monoliths, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2011: 5-14
4
Friederike Waentig, Plastics In Art: A Study From The Conservation Point Of View, Petersberg: Michael
Imhof Verlag, 2008: 279
5
ibid: 280
6
Slavoj Zizek, in Examined Life: Philosophy Is In The Streets, written and directed by Astra Taylor, 2008
Opposite: Peter Robinson, Snow Ball Blind Time, 2008
Page 126: Khaled Sabsabi, Biripi (video still), 2006
Page 127: Khaled Sabsabi, Nonabel (video still), 2011
Photos courtesy the artist
IT'S ALL RELATIVE
CHRIS MOORE
What are biennales for and what are they being used for? From an
intellectual position, biennales must answer not only the contextual
questions of Why now? and Why here?, but also Why this story?
The replies are not necessarily cohesiveoften incoherent and
contradictoryand depend heavily on local political mores and how
the biennale city identifes itself (offcially and popularly), including how
it wants to be identifed, often revealing the fssures and anxieties of the
city, its paranoiac vanities. The curator swims into these currents, more
or less confdently, attempting to distil certain thematic trends or issues,
sometimes provocatively, and inevitably with compromises, or even
conficts. Drawing on Hal Foster, Claire Bishop notes in her damning
critique of Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics treatise that, the institution
may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the
spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the director-curator becomes
the star.
1
This year there will be a string of important biennials in
East Asia and Australia, including in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Sydney
and the Asia Pacifc Triennial in Brisbane. Meanwhile in Europe, the
13th Documenta will be held in Kassel, Germany, the most important
marker of the state of contemporary art (particularly as the status of
Venice has in recent years waned). This text tries to describe the different
approaches of these art festivals, why some work better
than others and asks what more biennials could do.
Firstly a biennale is entertainment, like a clown or a video
game, dubious and nebulous, intended to be gratifying and hopefully
it is, too. Then there are self-fulflling claims to culture, justifed by their
budget, advertising and visitor numbers, which can sometimes edge
awkwardly close to the avaricious magnate who has bought a Damien
Hirst, Edvard Munch or trashy Murakami simply because his neighbor
has one. And as the cost of a biennale usually requires signifcant State
support, accordingly it becomes a vehicle of State policy. Civic pride is
a panacea for political promotion, albeit preferable to the crack-cocaine
of nationalism. Inevitably it equates at some level with political self-
promotion. Nonetheless it can be benign and constructive, despite
whatever other sentiments may be mixed up in it. With no race to
be won, culture is sometimes a diffcult thing to support, so you take
your chances.
But a biennial or triennial must not only be relevant to a time
and place (and political whim) but to its public and for that there has
to be a narrative: a story. Attempting to select the best of the last two
or three or ten years, is a seemingly simple, neutral and transparent
narrative. It underpins what are for me two of the most consistent art
festivals, Documenta and the Asia Pacifc Triennial of Contemporary
Art. Of course, even these two examples are anything but a diligent
selection of a supposed best of, rather carefully curated confections
but their simple raison detre works. It is clear what they must do before
all else. The survey biennale as a whole, whether Documenta, the APT
or the Whitney Biennial of American Art, provides a moment and place
to take stock of what art has been doing, and not necessarily the loudest
or brashest art.
Yet selecting one biennale over another is largely pointless. A stinker
of an exhibition (for example, the Italian Pavilion at Venice last year)
is pretty easy to spot. Going beyond that is a matter of taste. So while I
liked the last Biennale of Sydney, others can and do rigorously disagree.
That debate be provoked is also central to the purpose of a biennale.
Indeed, in spite of curatorial weakness and compromise, a biennale
can still be vital to an emerging art scene. Certainly this has been the
case with the Shanghai Biennale, which frequently has had to battle
for funding, curatorial talent, curatorial ideas, curatorial space and yet,
despite all its foibles, has become one of the more reliable public art
institutions in China. And Shanghai and its sister biennale in Shenzhen
have encouraged the development of other similar institutions. Last
years Chengdu Biennale, curated by Lu Peng, was initially greeted
with scepticism, but emerged largely triumphant, no doubt partly due to
exceedingly low expectations. While Chengdu is renowned as a nursery
of artistic talent, the cultural baubles that bless Shanghai are less evident
in Chengdu, making the Biennale all the more critical. And sometimes a
biennial or triennial can be transformative. In Brisbane, the APT was the
very thing that made the Queensland Art Gallery meaningful and has
been the momentum behind the museums growth ever since.
Biennales also provide a chance to provoke. David Elliott,
the curator of the last Biennale of Sydney, is renowned for being direct
and wry. His enthusiasm for his work is only matched by his disdain
for pretension, which no doubt upset a few people in the land of the
long white bungalow (scratch the surface of Sydney, you fnd more
surface). By the time this magazine goes to press, Elliott will be opening
the inaugural Kiev Biennale. The title, The Best of Times, The Worst of
Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art alludes to how the
past can be both a prison or a platform for change. The theme resonates
with anyone living in the Russian sphere. At the time of writing, the
former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko is imprisoned for corruption
and on a hunger strike, with the German government threatening a
boycott of the imminent European Cup football tournament, which
Ukraine is co-hosting, unless Timoshenko is released. How clean
Timoshenko is, is debatable but it seems clear that the charge is based
more on revenge than civic righteousness (clean is relative in this part
of the world). But here is Elliottwho speaks fuent Russiantweaking
their Gogolian noses. With a selection of artists from Paul McCarthy to
Folkert de Jong speaking to power and its abuses, it is hardly a frothy
selection. Kiev is a biennale with an acerbic narrative, one that clearly
answers the questions of why here, why now and for whom.
When I asked Elliott recently what reading matter should
accompany a visit to Kiev, he answered Mikhail Bulgakovs Master and
Margarita, the samizdat fantasy satire that predated Latin American
Magic Realism by a few decades. As I write, Kafkas castle towers over
me. Pragues own biennale came and went and no one really noticed.
It included a number of reproductions from the Russian activist art
collective, Voina (War), displayed on the wall below where Stalins statue
once stood, now popular with variable skateboarders and graffti artists
(in Stalins place stands an oversized Political Metronome recalling
Man Rays Indestructible Object of 1923actually destroyed in 1957
by delinquent Dadaists). Voinas posters lack context thoughan image
of an employees corpse hanging between supermarket isles in Moscow
recalls a real-life incident, but in Prague on the side of a street it just
seems obtuse. Meanwhile the tourists surge through the medieval streets,
following the furled umbrella of their leader, headphones tuned in, and
Russian is once again commonly heard; only the speakers are more likely
to wear Milanese fashion than military fatigues. While Kafkas symbol of
the surveyor attempting to reach the castle is almost the primary literary
symbol of Prague (the Golem trumps it), the equivalent in the former
Soviet States is that of Bulgakovs devil, Woland, who turns everything
in atheist Moscow topsy-turvyand it says much about Bulgakovs
satire that he manages to make sociopathic Woland so appealing.
A biennale cannot simply be provocative; there must be some sense
to the provocation.
In China, the equivalent of the samizdat edition are microblogs,
which far from being published in secret escape into the Chinese
blogosphere like gusts of wind, picking up threads and dust the
authorities prefer to remain still. Often it is the lack of control, rather
than the content itself that drives the censorious measures and despite
ever-greater measures aimed at self-control (public security spending in
China far exceeds its vast military budget). And while many choose to
comment anonymously, itself anathema to the prying Party, interestingly
the main microbloggers faunt themselves, whether social critic and
racing-car driver, Hanhan, or Ai Weiwei. So while Chinese artists are as
thrilled as any to participate in their homegrown biennales, and can be
provocative in a certain tonal registerwhether in Chengdu, Guangzhou,
Shenzhen, Shanghai or even at the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA)
in Beijingthey are staid affairs compared with the frestorm of blogging.
Away from home however, Chinese artists have greater freedom to be
subversive and nowhere is more popular for that than the biennale they
most revere: documenta in Kassel.
Ai Weiwei is renowned for having brought one thousand and
one of his countrymen, teachers, students, farmers, even policemen to
Germany for the last Documenta (Fairytale1001 Chinese visitors), at
once challenging trade and immigration policies (and narratives) of
both countries, and for the fact his Template (a sort-of oversized flter-
prayer-wheel of salvaged antique Chinese doors) fell over in a high-
wind, delighting Ai, who said it should remain that way. But this larrikin
approach is not unique. Shi Yong put a banner over the main exhibition
hall that read; Sorry, there will be no documenta in Kassel in 2007.
Ten years earlier Yan Lei, before he was ever invited to Kassel
himself, along with Hong Hao issued scores of fake invitations to
his unsuspecting and later irate colleagues. As Hou Hanrou notes:
Interestingly, it is exactly this untenable position that forces Yan Lei
and his fellow artists to continue to negotiate the non-negotiable, to
search the margin inside the center itself, to turn the common ground
into underground.
2
Yans contribution to the 10th Istanbul Biennial
(2007) was Brain Failure, a Beijing punk rock band (apparently the
Chinese Ambassador quite liked it).
That Cai Guoqiangs frework display at the frst APT fzzed
on opening night in retrospect seems ftting. Even for Cai, sometimes
communicating with the stars is trickier than others, but we can only
look back at that moment wistfully, because there was nothing left to
chance when he organised the frework display for the Beijing Olympics
in 2008, a traditional apotheosis of the artist to the higher echelons of
Middle Kingdom power. Sort of. Artists in China arent that important
(are they anywhere?), more a mild irritation, particularly compared
with the over one hundred thousand offcially recognised public
disturbances (read: riots) that take place in China each year. Why
Beijing allows biennales at all is perplexing, and probably is due to it
being rather less unifed than it likes to acknowledge and a conficting
earnest desire to promote a particular view of itself to the world.
A successful biennale must be orchestrated, but it must also fail a little
bit, because perfect control is just thatthis is the category error of
Chinese government policy. In China, art and its exhibition as subsidised
by the State is often seen as being owned or at least sullied by the State.
We would be advised to note that ourselves. Money can give an artist
freedom, but too much money can weigh art down, regardless who
plays sugar daddy. For this very reason commercial galleries in China
are often seen as refuges, or rather, at least in galleries one has greater
choice over the compromises, whereas in a major State-funded exhibition,
the compromises can cling quite closely. So in China blogs and
commercial galleries usually provide greater scope for experimentation
than biennales.
Do we need biennales or are they just convenient packaging? Every year
something like a biennale occurs in Switzerland when ArtBasel takes
place. Rarely do I recall the fair itself, its myriad booths and dealers, but
the consistently high quality of the curated shows beyond the fairground
resonate long after visiting them, including in recent years Felix Gonzalez
Torres at Fondation Beyeler, Matthew Barney at the Schaulager, and
Henrik Olesen at the Museum for Contemporary Art. This small city
of only 170,000 people is awash in art. It does not need a biennale.
But apparently many cities do. And the curatorial packaging helps
to unify a lot of disparate stuff. The public, at least that portion which
chooses to attend, can indulge in a throng of ideas, and play critic to boot.
For me biennales must have an element of the fea marketyou should
not know exactly what you are going to fnd. There must be the promise
of surprise, of the quiet discovery, satisfying recognition, confusion,
disgust and ennui, sometimes excitement. However, it is unlikely,
whatever the intention, to be a place of potential insurrection. Which
brings us back to banales, because right now, they seem tritely precious
little things compared with everyday hardships around the world, if not
so much in Australia. As the Occupy groups picket art fairs like Frieze in
New York (being hip protection no longer), even biennales seem removed
only by degree from supermarkets: the major biennales are all very well
attended by art dealers, for the collectors as much as the art. Venice has
already descended into an art marketplace in all but namethough
perhaps it always was one, just hiding under quaint national colors.
Interactive performances have become a staple of biennales, partly
because its good theatre, partly because it evidences engagement
with the audience. A performance of cooking and serving Pad Thai in
an upmarket art gallery or museum (the elision is deliberate), even when
cooked by Rirkrit Tiravanija, upsets nothing (similarly Christoph Bchels
Piccadilly Community Centre at Hauser & Wirth gallery last year in
Londonhow real can Mayfair get?).
Engagement with the audience is not everything: context
matters. This time last year Ai Weiwei was in custody in China (he
remains under strict controls even as he challenges the dubious tax
claim brought against him). Now (at the time of writing) a blind, self-
taught lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, has escaped extra judiciary custody,
fnding shelter in the American Embassy. And this has occurred amidst
the greatest political crisis in China since 1989, with the disgraceful
implication of the former party chief of megacity Chongching, Bo Xilai,
in the cover-up of a murder involving his wife (we must also not forget
the rebellious Guangdong village of Wukan that won the right to
hold free elections and then did so). Meanwhile, Europe appears to be
perilously close to social, political and fnancial tumult and America
appears more divided than ever. Even Australia is transfxed with a
trivial political merry-go-round, where paranoia bizarrely overshadows
a booming economy. All these things and umpteen others, narratives
chosen, imposed and exploding, mean that biennales opening around
the world this year are compelled to answer why here, why now and for
whom? Otherwise they are irrelevant. Biennales need art and people but
neither art nor people need biennales. Yet while the biennale model is
frequently capricious and vain, I would not say it is doomed, for in their
inevitable crevices and cracks are precisely the things that make biennales
valuable, if unaccountable: different ways of speaking.
My hope, like many who work in this frequently self-indulgent
sector, is that art will help us to think more creatively and more
critically about what we are doing and why. The most important aspect
of the frst Shanghai Biennale, the only one that has really endured,
was not part of the offcial program but a Salon des Refuss. It was
an exhibition that lasted all of two days before the police shut it down.
It was curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi and it was called Fuck Off.
3
Notes
1
Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October, 2004: 53
2
Hou Hanru, Negotiating the Non-Negotiable: On the Work of Yan Lei, San Francisco Art Institute;
http://www.aspenartmuseum.org/archive_lei_hanru.html
3
The Chinese version was the equivalent of Uncooperative Approach. Ais studio, Fake, is a homonym
for the Chinese pronunciation of the work fuckfa ke
PARALLEL COLLISIONS
IN THE SHADOW OF ALL OUR RELATIONS AND TRAUMATISED ART
REX BuTLER
Parallel Collisions was a magnifcent title to give an exhibition of
contemporary art. Eye-catching, provocative, literally impossible or
self-contradictory, it was an ideal match for the art it was intended to
showcase. And it was a perfect example of contemporary art curating,
which now that it no longer is connoisseurial or about creating taste, no
longer seeks to identify a style or trace the development of an artists
career, no longer is theoretical or attempts to offer a meta-statement
about art, necessarily works in the mode of something like poetic
conceit. The curatorlike the artist today in relation to the work of art
identifes some aspect of the work in question that is at once partial
and all-encompassing, only one of any number of others and what stands
in for everything else. They produce what is effectively a metaphor, to be
assessed in terms of its wit and not truth, its brevity and ease
of comprehension and not its authentic explanatory power.
Of course, any attempt actually to explain such a logical
impossibility can only seem heavy-handed, inappropriate, beside the
point. And so it is with Parallel Collisions. Curators Natasha Bullock and
Alexie Glass-Kantor elaborate in their introductory text to the catalogue
of the exhibition, how ideas emerge, converge and re-form over time.
And the aim of the exhibition, they suggest, is to show how works of art
gradually accumulate their meaning, by which they presumably mean
how concepts and cultural objects that were previously separate
parallelperiodically intersect with each othercollideto produce
new interpretive possibilities. Describing their curatorial method of
juxtaposing contemporary with historical work, they write:
New or recent works are placed in dialogue with the Art
Gallery of South Australias collection of Australian art,
amplifying the conditional nature of the interpretation
of the collection. In a related way, the artists in the
exhibition often employ the resources of the past to
re-imagine the past and the present, or even to project
into the future, creating a rich mosaic of interlocking
temporalities.
1
In one sense here, the curators are merely describing the problem of art-
historical revisionism and more generally the phenomenon of historical
relativism. It is the ideaor even the imagethat the course of time
does not run in a straight line in an unbending determinism, but that the
present diverges from the past, and hence we can only look back at what
has happened from where we are and see it in a different way. We do not
live in a seamless continuum that joins past and present, but history is the
weaving together of many various and conficting forces that emerge at
different times and intersect with each other unexpectedly. As a result, it
is impossible to see the past as it once was, or to put it another way, the
past periodically breaks out into the present, reminding us of a way of
life or thought that is no longer with us. And Parallel Collisions would
speak of this paradoxical condition of history: the fact that at once past
and present come together, collapsing the distance between them, and
that in order for this to be possible the same time must also be shown
to be two times, a distance revealed to lie between even the closest of
moments.
But the question that dogs this exhibitionand it is a question that
bedevils many exhibitions of contemporary artis how to select
particular works on the basis of the stated thematic. How to say that
one work more than another embodies this historical condition when
all works are necessarily subject to it? The exhibition did attempt to
evidence these ideas through a series of what it called incursions, in
which selected contemporary works were hung amongst the historical
works of the Elder Wing of the Gallery, and a redux, in which past and
present works by the same artist were shown both amongst historical
work in the Elder Wing and amongst other contemporary work in the
temporary exhibition galleries downstairs.
Thus upstairs in the Elder Wing we had Rosemary Laings
groundspeed (rose petal) #17 (2001) next to John Glovers A View of
the Artists Garden in Mills Plains (1835), Nicholas Follands Untitled
(Jump up) (2012) next to nautical maps and James Shaws The Admella
Wrecked (1859), Susan Jacobs Snake Drawing (2011-12) next to Bertram
Mackennals Circe (1893) and Marco Fusinatos Parallel Collisions
(2008) next to the work of Dusan and Voitre Marek. In some way,
we were meant to see each time the contemporary artists work as a
commentary on the art-historical original: the foral carpet in Laings
photographs is intended to bring out the artifciality of the exotic fowers
in Glovers garden, the suspended glass profle of Follands installation
the illusion of colonial topography, the sinuous movements of Jacobs
video the sensuous feminine lines of Mackennals sculpture and the
unplayed energy of Fusinatos musical score the unrealised utopianism
of the Adelaide Surrealists.
The curators method was perhaps seen most clearly in
Tom Nicholsons mounting on the walls some thirty-to-forty copies
of H.J. Johnstones Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray,
South Australia (1880), which depicts an Aboriginal family camped at
twilight at a billabong or branch of a river that has reached a dead end.
The work was the frst acquired by the Art Gallery, and for many years
it was the favourite of copyists working there until, legend has it, one
particularly enthusiastic amateur splashed it with white paint. The point
of Nicholsons Salon-style hang of multiple copies of the original was
to make the different versions metaphors for the historically shifting
interpretations of this much-discussed work: from arguably its original
meaning as a well-intentioned depiction of the last Aborigines and
the hope their dying race would one day be bred out to the more
contemporary understanding of the image and its message as racist.
The historical refutationbut, really, it could have in this context only
the status of another interpretationof this seeing of Aborigines as a
racial or cultural dead-end was brought out by hanging on the opposite
wall from the Johnstones another incursion by indigenous artist
Jonathan Jones, in which he conversely got out all of the works from
the Gallery collection that showed the Murray-Darling still fowing,
and analogously all of the descendents of those Aboriginal tribes that
once lived along it as still alive.
The danger of this approach is that it turns all contemporary
works of art into commentaries on the art of the past. And the past for
its part is reduced to being either a refection of the present and thus
valued or that against which the present measures its progress and
thus condemned. However, for all of the apparent objectivity of this
revisionism and the evidence it seeks in the work of art, it is in fact
mostly an opportunity for the modern-day interpreter to show off their
ingenuity, with a whole series of previously peripheral motifs in the
original work of art becoming the occasion for a re-reading of history.
We might see this, for example, in the hanging of Shaun Gladwells
mixed media silhouette of an old sailing ship with mainsail emblazoned
with cassette and crossbones alongside other paintings of ships bought
from junk shops. The best the gallery guide could come up when asked
what was the connection was to suggest that Gladwells ship somehow
referred to the notion of piracy in our new information age and that
showing those other works in the Gallery was going to add to their
value when they were resold by giving them some provenance (the
very opposite, I would have thought, of the levelling of distinctions
in internet piracy).
And when the works appeared by themselves in the so-called
tracking shot of the second part of the exhibition downstairs, they
suddenly appeared fat. Where were the 1970s originals that Ricky
Swallow was surely working off with his bronze castings of cups and
bottles? Where were the Cubist prototypes, say, Dorrit Blacks Music
(1927), or some Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack monotypes from the Gallerys
collection that we might see Daniel Crooks sliced-up videos as updated
versions of? Even Jonathan Jones cut-down, sawn-up and painted
white red gum, untitled (Marriney) (2011), seemed to lack something
without the watercolours of the Murray-Darling upstairs that it saw
itself as the riposte to. (Jones is protesting against the exclusion of
Aborigines in those colonial depictions as emblematised by the dead
trees in their foregrounds and the pushing of the bush in them towards
the background.) The same might be said of Tom Nicholsons charcoal
rendering of Johnstones Evening Shadows, which reverses black for
white, as though we were looking at a photographic negative of the
original. (It is likely in fact that Johnstone did work from a photo while
he executed the painting in London.) Here with all of these worksand
this is strikingly unusual in an exhibition of contemporary art, which is
why it registered as a kind of absenceour relation to the work is simply
aesthetic. Without the accompanying art history that it is understood
as an incursion into, it is as though we were suddenly confronted with
just the work itself.
And, in a way, there was a certain aesthetic argument, or
let us say taste, to be discerned in Parallel Collisions. We might think
here of Tim Silvers disintegrating putty self-portraits and his strange
polyurethane lumps called Traumas, the clay and bubble-wrap maquettes
of Rob McLeish, the Munch-like homunculi of Michelle Ussher, Pat
Brassingtons Belmer-inspired photographs, Philip Brophys splatter
movie transgressions and even Timothy Cooks reductive Tiwi designs.
A few years ago, all of these would have been seen as examples of the
informe, and thus not possible as a style, but such is the all-devouring
nature of contemporary art that it is now readily identifed as an
aesthetic, alongside any number of possible others.
Why didnt the curators argue positively for thisor, indeed,
for anything, apart from the inevitable and ubiquitous phenomenon of
shifts in the meaning of things over time? Perhaps it is, indeed, due to the
art-historical consequences of having a style like the informe or grunge.
The curators are part of a post-theory, post-discursive, post-art-historical
generation, for whom a sign of their youth, their independence, their
break with what comes before is precisely that they dont seem to have
much to say about art. Or that they understand their task as the mere
asking of questions, without really saying which ones and without
attempting to answer any of them.
The curators largely outsourced the writing of the catalogue
and thus the underlying argument of the exhibition to other writers in
what they called an offering. Needless to say, being writers, they wrote
about what they pleased. (There was a poem, a dramatic dialogue
and a short story.) Some of them were terrifcJustin Clemens wrote
the essay the curators should have written, about the fact that there is
never enough time to look back and Anthony Gardner attempts an
ambitious overturning of Imants Tillers well-known essay Locality
Failsand others not so. Although it is not strictly one of the essays,
the exhibition featured a mumblecore collaboration between curator
Robert Cook and artist Max Pam, a blank assemblage of texts, diary
entries and uncomposed snapshots, that is the last thing we need in
a world of 100 million blogs.
The point is that nowhere did the curators put forward any coherent
argument concerning the problem of historiography they pointed to.
They, in their words, incited Walter Benjamin and his famous essay
Theses on the Philosophy of History, but it remained a mere citation.
They said they were inspired by the working method of Paul Anderson
in his flm Magnolia (1999), but from it they appear to have got no more
than a spirit of collaboration and the fact that his storylines result
in honest, human flms that tackle big subjects. They said that the
organisation of the lower level of the Gallery was inspired by the single
continuous tracking-shot of Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark (2002), but
that flm was as much as anything a lament for the destructive forces of
history and the need to keep works of art away from them (the museum
as a kind of ark in which the past can be preserved intact).
The curation of contemporary art is in a crisis. It no longer sees
itself as engaging in taste-making or connoisseurial selection. It no longer
follows formal or stylistic developments or sees itself as undertaking
historical research. It no longer has the confdence to offer theoretical
meta-statements. It no longer, at the other end of taste-making, sees
itself as making retrospective evaluations or canonising particular
artists. As a result, it can resemble a form of interior decoration, either
matching contingent formal features of art works (colour, shape, size)
or engaging in an incessant and fctitious revisionism. And it mostly
begins its conceptualisation by coming up with a title for the exhibition
that cannot be evidenced in and therefore cannot be used to select
works of art: Optimism, Signs of Life, Handle with Care, Before and
After Science etc. This title has the same relationship to the works in the
show as an advertisement has to the products it sells. It operates as a
form of badging, a momentary distinction in the marketplace, a conceit
that makes the art attractive exactly insofar as serves as the excuse to
demonstrate the ingenuity of the curator who came up with it. But
why, with all of the things one could put on a show about todayfrom
contemporary women artists, to colour in the twenty frst-century, to the
relation between sculpture and installation, to the relevance of national
identitywould one choose to curate a show on the topic of parallel
collisions? That is, a show about the curation of the show itself, about the
relationships the curatoror any historical framingnecessarily brings
about in putting works together?
In the exhibitions obsessive accessibility and desire not to be
defnitive, it revealed itself as not even having the confdence in the slow
advance of interpretation it sought to make its subject matter. In seeking
to put aside prejudice, persuasion and State borders to share at every
moment, it precisely attempted to outguess by taking into account
those contingencies of history it says cannot be avoided. Indeed, instead
of truly letting history play itself out and hoping that ones (admittedly
partial) meaning will be heard in the future by actually saying something,
the curators of these contemporary blockbusters operate like a campaign
manager, a product launcher or a flm producer hoping that the show
has a big opening weekend in order that its own reported success
will become the reason why people subsequently come to see it. In the
end, it was only ftting that Parallel Collisions was trumped by one of
the dumbestby which I suppose I mean one of the smartestworks
in the show: Richard Bells mural in the vestibule of the Art Gallery,
Solidarity (2011-12), with its magnifcent one-liner about the greatness
of a man who came second.
Note
1
Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor, The Proposition: Parallel Collisions, Parallel Collisions
12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide
Pages 130-131: Fujiko Nakaya, Cloud Parking in Linz, Cloud installation #11060, 2011
WES HILL
What if, instead of the traumatised person, we were
to stop a minute and think, and see things from the
point of view of the apparently inanimate artwork?
Instead of exploring how we express trauma through
artworks, we might explore how artworks themselves
become traumatisedlosing their orientation, severed
from their experience, severed from the experience of
their environment. For example; in some exhibitions,
for example; in some storage spaces, for example;
on some walls, for example; in some public spaces,
for example; in the minds of some people What
would the traumatised subject think or feel if that
subject were an artwork or a cultural artefact? What
does an object feel when it is attacked or destroyed,
ignored or misunderstood, or even lost and misplaced?
Traumatised artworks appear to be on a standby. They
are silent, withdrawn from visibility and discourse.
1
The above quote is from a lecture delivered in November 2011 by
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste
in Hamburg, Germany. As the artistic director of dOCuMENTA (13),
Christov-Bakargiev discussed her approach to curating the notoriously
sprawling exhibition, and outlined her interest in the theory of trauma,
and her unusual notion of the traumatic artwork. In anthropomorphically
portraying art objects as victims and violated subjects, she provided
audience members with an indication of what to expect from the
upcoming exhibition. Here I will refect on Christov-Bakargievs
notion of the traumatised artwork, which drove her selection of the
dOCuMENTA (13) artists and infuenced her staging of a satellite
exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan. Because it could be argued that it is
impossible to comprehend the world without perceiving phenomena
anthropomorphically, it is important to consider claims of Christov-
Bakargievs anthropomorphism cautiously, as more an attempt to
highlight the creative potential of ascribing an inexpressible emotional
life onto objects.
2
Since the early 1990s, it has been increasingly popular for
curators to declare that their exhibition isnt about anything specifc,
before proceeding to talk about what their exhibition is about, as if they
are then shielded from curatorial responsibility. In a late 2011 interview,
Christov-Bakargiev stated to Karen Wright that dOCuMENTA (13) has
no real theme. The most important point today is for me is to work
without a clearly stated concept.
3
After declaring this non theme
theme, she went on to reveal a clear directive to address issues associated
with political confict and the changed social conditions brought about
by digital technologies. Although we all want to interact with art on our
own terms, curators who deny that their motivations constitute their
exhibitions rationale can often end up producing exhibitions that are
the opposite of what they intendedapparent open-endedness can
look a lot like complacency.
Aligning her conception of traumatised artworks with a political agenda,
Christov-Bakargiev also appeared to refect on her evasive packaging of
dOCuMENTA (13), stating that the historical, technological and social
system is being built around products of the brain in the same way that
it was built around the products of machines in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-centuries, and around products of the land prior to that
In an advanced digital age, the dangerous fact is that companies such
as Google control power and this goes against freedom, so a non-concept
can mean a strike of the intellectuals against this control over their
brains.
4
Whereas Karl Marx sought to de-anthropomorphise and
de-fetishise commodity objects back into things (where social
relationships are not disguised and fetishised things can become
things again), Christov-Bakargiev attempts to undermine the
commodifcation of art by imbuing artworks with a more viable
anthropomorphism; conceiving of them as subjects that do not
respond to our demands.
As embodiments of repression and political struggleChristov-
Bakargievs hypothetical art objects arent dead like traditional museum
objects, but are alive. The implication that museological objects are
somehow alive contrasts with the more old-fashioned notion that they
are things which were once aliveor operational in the worldbut are
now obsolete and ready for cultural contemplation. However, as Michelle
Henning has noted, instilling artworks with life might bridge the gulf
between audience and things in one sense, but it does not necessarily
mean a more intimate, comfortable and straightforward relationship
between audience and displayed object. In fact, things can seem
simultaneously alive and distant, unapproachable, recalcitrant.
5
The English word trauma stems from the Greek word
which means wound or penetration. It is with these
associations that a psychic trauma can be thought of as an event that
penetrates the skin of the wounded persons mind. Labelling these
wounds as traumatic neuroses, the neurologist-turned-psychiatrist
Sigmund Freud claimed that the chief weight in their causation
seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright.
6
References to
anthropomorphism as traumatic are, of course, frequently found in
horror flmsfeaturing in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) as a kind
of trauma of origination. A related theme dominates Stephen Kings
1983 novel Christine, in which Arnie, the lead male character, becomes
obsessed with his newly purchased car Christinean overprotective
cherry red 1957 Plymouth Fury that soon starts killing Arnies friends
and enemies, as if in his defence. Suggesting that we explore how
artworks themselves become traumatised, Christov-Bakargievs
hypothetical artworks dont enact the vengeful girlfriend in Kings
Christine, or the vengeful monster in Shelleys Frankenstein; rather,
they are frightened and inconsolable victims that dont meet the
viewers gazesilent, withdrawn from visibility and discourse.
If trauma is essentially the devastating experience of having
ones world fractured by an intrusive force beyond control, then minority
subjects, who remain outside the realm of the social symbolic, bear the
overwhelming weight of such an intrusive force. Christov-Bakargiev
selected a record number of Australian artists for dOCuMENTA (13),
including works by indigenous artists such as Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri,
Warwick Thornton and Doreen Reid Nakamarra. The traumatic
experiences of the culturally disenfranchised clearly directed Christov-
Bakargievs selection of these artists, as well as many of the other
participants. However, there is an apparent contradiction between
her avowed political directives and her claim that dOCuMENTA (13)
TRAUMATISED ART OBJECTS
CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV'S DOCUMENTA (13)
has no real theme. In an interview that I conducted with her earlier
this year Christov-Bakargiev reiterated how the exhibition will enact
a withdrawal from an obligation to provide concept, knowledge
capitalism, discourse, theory.
7
In aligning this apparent passivity
with those artists whose practices are associated with issues of post-
colonialism and cultural disenfranchisement, there is a possibility
that their works could be construed as retreats from socio-political
representation, condemned to a kind of romantic Otherness.
In considering art objects as traumatised subjects without voices,
and without discourses that can speak for them, Christov-Bakargiev
presents us with a diffculty; foregrounding a structure of undecidability
or unrepresentability in aesthetic engagement. She has stated that her
withdrawal from the production of knowledge is to be substituted
by an engagement with embodiment, and with sensual relations to
materials and matter, as an attempt to question why things matter.
8

Here she posits the political relevance of the selected artists on the one
hand, but on the other hand she foregrounds the silence, the materiality,
the presentness, but also the recalcitrance of art as a traumatised subject.
If something is silent it cannot communicate its signifcance (why it
matters), and Christov-Bakargievs approach itself is marked by this
refusal to explain her exhibitions logica curatorial approach that
remains within the conceptual structure it proposes.
This portrayal of artworks as obfuscatory and paradoxical
phenomenaenacting speechless engagements with materiality even
as they depict complex political and philosophical theoriesis something
that William Kentridges work is closely associated with. His work is
often accompanied by theoretical accounts that also, for me at least,
rarely correspond with ones actual engagement. A participant in
dOCuMENTA (13), the South African-born Kentridge has long been
one of Christov-Bakargievs favourite artists, curating his frst major
retrospective in 1998. Summarising his importance, she has stated
that Kentridge cannot pursue the fction of making South Africa look
whiteyet he cannot speak for the black, nor provide a platform
or voice for the other. He can only explore a zone of uncertainty and
shifting meanings.
9
Despite, or perhaps because of, the so-called
uncertainty of Kentridges work, many writers have tended to
romanticise it. It has been claimed that his work depicts the reality
of human suffering, it marks a new course for contemporary art is
never guilty of male-centeredness, refuses the the fetishised mode of
artistic production and builds a new medium on the technical support
of a common cinematic practice of mass culture.
10
For those who prefer
explicitly hands-on treatments of medium (an aversion to pop culture
also helps), Kentridges work spawns claims of paradox and poignancy
motivated by the desire to reconcile its tactile character and its
imprecise references with its more direct political assertions.
Fascinated by what can and cannot be represented, Christov-
Bakargievs notion of the traumatised art object has much in common
with the perception that Kentridges works can represent complex socio-
philosophical discourses, as well as embodied, meaning-in-materials
aesthetics. Indicative of her background in Arte Povera, Christov-
Bakargiev clearly has affnities with artists who blur past and present
forms, and with artworks that combine political refection with traces of
the artists hand. However, her unwillingness to take responsibility for,
or explicate, her curatorial selections, coupled with her encouragement of
interaction with dOCuMENTA (13) artworks as if they were traumatised
subjects, could be construed as an attempt to provide a protectant against
interpretation, particularly negative judgement.
Proposing artworks and thought as unstable phenomena
that might be distinct from theory or discourse, Christov-Bakargievs
approach recalls Jacques Derridas identifcation of a condition
of undecidability at the very heart of languagea structure of
undecidability in the knot that links the formal dimensions of syntax
and the pragmatical structure of the semantic.
11
It is as if Christov-
Bakargiev is attempting to represent Derridas philosophical presentation
of undecidability as a theme, in an effort to highlight, in the words of
Noah Horwitz, how the instability of the event of institution not only
leads to politicisation, but also to a constitutive crisis of legitimation at
the very heart of the political.
12
In interviews and publicity material, she
pre-sets our experience of dOCuMENTA (13) as unstable experiences
with traumatised subjectsobjects that are affected by a trauma, unable
to be turned into experience or assimilated to a subsequent self-image.
This approach has a clear affnity with post-structuralist discourse, which
exchanged the search for world views in favour of the task of thought.
In Jacques Rancires account of an aesthetic regime, nothing is
unrepresentable.
13
He contrasts this with Jean-Franois Lyotards
representational regime, which Rancire states, puts forward that
one can fnd unrepresentable subject matters, when form and matter
cannot be ftted together in any way. Rancires point is that the loss
of a steady relation between the sensible and the intelligible is not the
loss of the power of relating, it is the multiplication of its forms.
14

He substitutes the category of the unrepresentable with that of dissensus,
a productive openness of aesthetics and politics that consists of the
reconfguring of the sensible by means of a supposition foreign to it.
In answer to the question are some things unrepresentable?,
Rancire states:
[t]here are no longer any inherent limits to
representation The assertion of unrepresentability
claims that some things can only be presented in a
certain type of form, by a type of language appropriate
to their exceptionality. Stricto sensu, this idea is
vacuous. It simply expresses a wish: the paradoxical
desire that in the very regime which abolishes
the representative suitability of forms to subjects,
appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the
exception still exist.
15
Given Documentas history, Christov-Bakargievs traumatised thematic
is ftting, dealing with the issue of unrepresentability that is invoked by
the Holocausta site of trauma in public memory. In the aftermath of
the Nazi regime, the frst Documenta was held in 1955, when Arnold
Bode, professor at the Kassel Werkakademie, started his work in Kassel
with the art historian Werner Hafmann. Working with an ambition to
document and trace the development of the fne arts in our century
in Europe, Kassel was a point of signifcance, not only because it was
located on the newly established border between East and West Germany,
but also because Kassels Fridericianum Museum, in ruins in 1955, was
the frst museum built in Germany, erected between 1769 and 1776.
16

The exhibitions history is therefore closely connected to the
reconstruction of Germanys identity, and with fathoming the
trauma inficted during World War II.
In Images in Spite of All (2008), Georges Didi-Huberman
argued for the importance of images in attempting to imagine the
horrors of the Holocaust, opposing those who overestimate the power
of images, as well as those who dogmatically reject images as a priori
as incapable of conveying historical truth. Basing his case primarily
around four photographs from Auschwitzs Crematorium 5, he stated:
It is no longer possible to speak of Auschwitz in terms of absolutes such
as the unimaginable or the unrepresentable Must we say again
that Auschwitz is unimaginable? Certainly not. We must even say the
opposite: we must say that Auschwitz is only imaginable, that we are
restricted to the image and must therefore attempt an internal critique
so as to deal with this restriction, with this lacunary necessity.
17

Addressing what he saw as the dogma of the unimaginable, Didi-
Huberman claimed that although images, like language, are ontologically
fallible and can present only bits and pieces of the historical reality,
the available fragments of this history are important and necessary,
even where there can be no total image to convey the signifcance of
atrocities.
18
At once inventive and evasive, Christov-Bakargievs curatorial
approach to dOCuMENTA (13) ultimately, and perhaps suitably, leaves a
few questions hanging in the air: can art exhibitions display potentiality
and thought that evades theory, discourse, criticality or a theme?;
What motivates the desire to distinguish between art exhibitions that
are political in nature from those that are about politics? If trauma is
unrepresentable, which language-forms enable the effects of traumatised
objects to be read? Stating in a 2008 lecture that she is more interested in
the politics of the language of art rather than the language of politics, it
might therefore, be important when engaging with dOCuMENTA (13) to
consider which languages of art Christov-Bakargiev values over others,
and why.
19
Page 134: II documenta, 1959, installation view with works of Julio Gonzlez, photographer unkown.
Bequest of Arnold Bode, courtesy of documenta Archiv, Kassel dOCUMENTA (13)
Above: Goshka Macuga, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that is not 1 (detail), 2012
Page 138: Museum Fridericianum, 2012
Photo Nils Klinger dOCUMENTA (13)
Notes
1
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Auf dem Weg zur dOCUMENTA (13), ein Vortrag an der HFBK Hamburg,
lecture presented at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste Hamburg, 24 November 2011
2
Here Im thinking of how Friedrich Nietzsche argued that all forms of knowledge reect the social
conditions under which they are formed and are therefore illusory: T]oday philosophy can only
underline the relative character of all knowledge, its anthropomorphism, as well as the everywhere
sovereign force of illusion. Nietzsche quoted by Batrice Han-Pile, Nietzsches Metaphysics in the
Birth of Tragedy, European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14, 2006: 378
3
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Karen Wright, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the Here and
Now, Under the Inuence, New York: Philips de Pury, 2011: 35
4
Christov-Bakargiev, ibid: 37
5
Michelle Henning, The Life of Things in the Museum Age, in Museums, Media and Cultural Theory,
New York: Open University Press, 2006: 6
6
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1961: 202
7
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Wes Hill, The Place Where Thought and Action Meet, Art &
Australia, Vol.49, No.4, 2012: 76
8
Christov-Bakargiev, ibid: 76
9
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (exhibition catalogue), Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts,
Socit des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998: 7
10
Ida Gianelli, William Kentridge (exhition catalogue), Turin: Castello di Rivoli Museo dArte
Contemporanea, 2003: 9; Elisabeth Van Caelenberge, Visual storytelling: a Progressive Strategy?
The Animated Drawings of William Kentridge, Image and Narrative, Vol. 23, 2008: 77; Benjamin Buchloh,
Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European
Painting, October Vol. 16 (1981): 59; Rosalind Krauss quoted by Annamaria Monteverdi, Cinematography
of the Stone Age: Woyzeck by William Kentridge, DigiMag, Vol. 49, trans. Luisa Bertolatti, 2009
11
Christov-Bakargiev has stated: The fact that Documenta is held every ve years makes it a space for
thought and encourages one to participate in a process of asking questions. But I dont know if thought is
really theory or discourse. Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Hill: 75
12
Noah Horwitz, Derrida and the Aporia of the Political, or the Theologico-Politico Dimension of
Deconstruction, Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 32, 2002: 174-75
13
Jacques Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, New Left Review, Vol. 14, 2002: 149
14
ibid: 149
15
Jacques Rancire, The Future of the Image, London: Verso, 2007: 137
16
Petra von Olschowski, Documenta, Art Dictionary (Hatje Cantz, 2011) http://www.hatjecantz.de/
controller.php?cmd=kunstlexikon&id=14&lang=en (accessed March, 2012)
17
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008: 45
18
Hal Foster has said recently (paraphrasing Alan Sekula): We have passed from the myth that a
photograph is the truth to the myth that it is always a lie. The reality, as usual, is more difcult.
Hal Foster, Mere Licht/More Light, Frieze d/e, Spring issue, 2012: 111
19
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Jodie Dalgleish, The Biennial as a Form of Contradiction:
The 16th Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions: Forms That Turn, Melbourne Art Journal, Issue 4, 2009: 155
LOST TO THE DEMONS
KHADIM ALI AT DOCUMENTA (13)
VIRGINIA WHILES
Now Australian-based artist Khadim Alis concern is about forced
forgetting, the trauma he describes as: not individual but social...
where the collective memory of a society is wounded. His people are
the Hazaras, as Shiite Muslims a minority ethnic group in Afghanistan,
who have been persecuted and massacred for over one hundred and ffty
years up to the current oppression by the Taliban regime. Their capture
of Bamiyan in 1997 foreshadowed the destruction of the ffth-century
sandstone cliff Buddhas in 2001, six months before the attacks of 9/11.
Alis family was forced to fee from Bamiyan to Quetta in
Pakistan, where he was born in 1978. Having spent time in Tehran
studying mural painting and calligraphy, Khadim then studied at the
NCA (National College of Arts) in Lahore, which has the only serious
department of miniature painting in the world. It was here as a student
that he began his series on the destruction of Bamiyan, probably the
only documented art work on this catastrophe. From hardship through
hard work to success in the global art world, Ali now lives and works in
Australia and is due to show at dOCuMENTA (13), a romantic tale which
is contradicted by reality: Our times are not romantic... romance has
nothing to do with miniature work today. I dont have any choice in my
subject matter. The content of his work focuses on the subjection of his
people to the brutality of the Taliban.
Early miniatures on the Bamiyan theme from 2002-03 already
displayed the range of visual vocabulary that would illuminate his
production for the next decade. The main references are to Buddhist
iconography and to weapons of mass destruction: opposing emblems
of passive resistance and active aggression. Alis Buddhas are drawn
with the intimate knowledge of Gandharan Graeco-Buddhist sculptures,
gleaned from his experiences in Bamiyan as well as from the collection
in the Lahore museum. Their graceful proportions are duly honoured,
sometimes alongside a pertinent evocation of Leonardos universal man.
Their features are handsome: eyes closed in contemplation, aquiline
nose and full lips. Their robes are immaculately draped with the ease of
Alexandrian haute couture, all elements that serve as counterparts to the
grim demons of future works. In one painting, the Buddhas torso has
circles like chakras, seemingly threatened by the larger circle of a cannon
wheel, emblem of an overpowering colonial force.
1
The Buddhas central
position is framed by the sombre outline of the cave. Its facade dissolves
into a tea-stained morass punctuated by scars of shelling and protected
by fowering lotuses. A black grenade squats on a lotus petal, like a frog
awaiting its chance. Perhaps it hints at Alis fragile optimism: one that
can only hover in hope through imagination. As a political refugee his
visual discourse is ideologically charged, both with current events and
with references to a cultural heritage of Persian legends, Suf poetry,
Islamic architecture and Buddhist philosophy
Further variations on the Bamiyan series (2002-07) show
pools of blood glowing amidst sombre tones of viridian green and pale
purple against earth brown facades, a pastoral scenography about to
be disrupted by the entry of catastrophe in the form of the Taliban.
Perturbation already occurs through calligraphic texts. Exquisitely
inscribed in dark red, they may seep insidiously into the image,
performing as graffti and possible subversion. Alternatively framed
in boxes, black texts seem to impose order. Although the script is
recognisable as Arabic or Persian, it is meaningless. Gilded words
seduce people into fundamentalism says Ali. The only legible letter
is TOAE the frst letter of the word Taliban, often twisted into
invisibility in the layers of script.
Such layering recalls the prehistoric purpose of palimpsest,
when drawings were overlaid on the same spot to focus attention on its
potential fertility. Ali plays constantly with this technique, as do many
other miniature painters taught at the NCA. The possibilities of gradual
layering of line and colourafforded by the use of fne brushwork and
gouacheserve to build up the dense surfaces on the wasli/handmade
paper. Sometimesas in the Jashn-el-gul-e-surkh series of 2004-06the
layers of calligraphy are wiped out with a gestural fourish alien to Alis
cautious mark-making. This is perhaps a sign of a growing impatience
with order and solicitude. Satire replaces sentiment, anger dominates
nostalgia as the quiet Buddha is overshadowed by the noisy Rustam.
Alis vision illuminates the confict through its formal deconstruction,
as if performing a conceptual autopsy on a decaying corpse. He evokes
the corporeal reality through a refection informed by experience, his
work is both phenomenological and intellectual.
2
The Shahnameh or
Book of Kings is the revered Persian national epic written in the late
tenth-century by the poet Firdausi. Ali has strong memories of his father
and grandfather reading a very special edition, which they had saved
in their exile as refugees to Quetta. The hero of the epic, Rustam, was
portrayed as valiant and virtuous up to the tragedy of slaying his own
son in battle. Ali was shocked by his meeting in Bamiyan with a boy
proud of being called Rostam, yet totally ignorant of the names origins.
On research he discovered that it had been hijacked by the Taliban motif
of Rostam e Parzan (Rustam with Wings): perceived as holy warriors,
religious fanatics, ready to kill for global jihad. As a consequence, Ali
chose to re-appropriate the Talibanised version in order to recount the
horrors of their ongoing permanent war.
His representations owe their inspiration to a fusion of fction
and reality. The chance as a child to gaze at the marvellous illustrations of
the Shahnameh painted by the great sixteenth-century Persian miniaturist
Bihzad and reproduced by hand in the family edition, meant that as the
story was sung to him by his grandfather, Ali could study the pictures
I was lost in a world of fantasy.
In his studies at the NCA he was encouraged to study the
images of the Indian version of the epic: the Padshahnameh/King of the
World.
3
However an earlier album: The Hamzanameh
4
relates more in
style to Alis work. This is on account of its fantastic demonology, where
divs/demons lie in wait for any chance to attack the heroes. It contains
vividly delineated spectacles of the most brutal forms of violence as
a display of political power to teach a lesson to a potential adversary.
5
One example is Rustam slaying the White Div: the Seventh
Course, from a Safavid version of the Shahnameh created in 1576.
The div is hideous in traditional Persian demon style: grey skinned,
black-faced, bulbous eyes and snarling grin, complete with goat ears
and twisted horns. Not only has Ali emphasised the lyrical linear quality
of Persian miniatures throughout his work, he has also adopted their
phantasmagorical imaginaire.
6
Alis Rustam series parodies the Talibans
infated self-righteousness, observed on his travels: I saw demon-like
characters all around in black with beards and sharp features.They are
portrayed as elegant, narcissistic beasts, their heads crowned with horns,
not thorns, since rather than martyrs they are monsters. Grey bearded,
goat-eared, they have several arms to multi-task their elaborate armory.
Haloes aglow, they pose relaxed and assured, framed by soft white wings
promising them eternal life in heaven above. Sometimes cross-legged
in yogic asanas, bells jangling round their necks, bangles, glittering in
gold leaf, they show off the paraphernalia of priesthood. As warlords,
they lean in pasha-like opulence on the traditional velvet cushions of
Mughal emperors, their angular profles treated with the same obsession
for detail. Their frames either swell with pomp or shrink to shadowy
silhouettes. As they sit conferring, their grey skin ripples like elephant
hide, their well-fed folds of belly fat sag over their dhotis. One image has
a Rustam nonchalantly leaning on a fallen Buddha. Another shows them
in several frames lined up in front of a captured Buddha lying muffed
behind: not unlike colonialist photos of Sahibs faunting their hunting
trophies.
In works for DOCuMENTA (13), the Rustam demons have
moved up-market towards corporate homogeneity. With sleek brown
torsos and greying beards they now stand shoulder to shoulder, wings
fuffed up, steely eyes focused on their line-manager. Alis fawless
delineation exaggerates, yet exposes their apparent ease. Its mordant
quality disinters their gruesome motives, masquerading behind a cool
facade of mafosi team spirit.
In an eloquent text, the Iranian scholar Suroosh Irfani explains
the crucial sense of re-visiting the Shahnameh.
7
Its important role as
a symbol of Indo-Persian culture and thus of Muslim identity within
the Indian subcontinent had been effaced in triplicate.
8
The epic poem
inspired miniature painting in the Mughal court ateliers. It is interesting
to refect on the Suf readings of the epic, whereby the heroic actions
of the protagonists are interpreted as symbolic refections of the inner
psyche, very much like Jungian methodology concerning archetypes
of the unconscious. As Irfani writes: Inasmuch as symbols and
archetypes intersect with events and images of everyday life, cultures
have unconscious layers too. Curiously Alis own language around
his approach, not just to the poem but to his actual practice, refects
the importance of the unconscious: Creation is not pre-meditative, it
is not possible if you know the end result... it is about exploring your
inner self... in the studio I never know what I am going to paint
9

Since Ali constantly repeats his iconography, such a denial of conscious
preparatory stages might appear inconsistent, yet the very act of
repetition here is revealing. It serves as a ritual to ward off trauma,
that of identity: I am deeply affected by an identity crisis, I am Hazara,
I have my homeland in Afghanistan yet live in Pakistan as a Shia
amongst Sunni and speaking another language.
Recent pieces which truly disturb are those where the
Buddhas and Rustams begin to meld into each other. This is the stuff
of propaganda, when iconography is manipulated through the subliminal
strategies used in advertising. The effects usually depend on a play
with ambiguity, whereas Ali reveals his tactics. His delicate drawing
becomes a metaphor for possible transformation: lost in their delusions
of grandeur, even the Taliban may metamorphose? As in traditional
miniature painting, the current aim of the practice is to produce
chronicles of contemporary events, but whereas in Mughal times
that meant glorifying the power of the court, todays aim is to
document the struggle for democracy.
Despite such contrasts in aims, the traditional and the
contemporary share an aesthetic: one where beauty plays a crucial role.
The beauty evident in miniature work is ingenuous, idealistic and yet
perfdious. In fact the exquisite surfaces belie an often very disturbing
content, in both traditional and contemporary work. Only a concentrated
reading can pierce the veil of aesthetic ornamentation which serves the
interests of both artist and viewer: that of protecting a certain content
from abuse.
10
Is the viewer of Khadim Alis work duped by its beauty?
In a conversation with the artist, Ruark Lewis, who asks him to explain
how his beautiful drawings work within a context of visual expressions
of pain and struggle, he replies: they are beautiful yes, but I dont think
their content of screams or pain is beautiful... I need to draw the audience
to my haunted vision of dark history.
11
Like the other miniaturists coming out of the NCA training,
Khadim is aware of the need to test traditional aesthetic criteria, but
believes that interest need not exclude aesthetic play, even with beauty.
The series which contradicts this appears in The Haunted
Lotus. Neither gracious Buddhas nor grotesque Rustams narrate these
stark still lifes of dying plants. Sad sunfowers droop over infertile land,
where bloody snakes wreathe the viscera of guts and entrails: The skin
of the sunfower is drawn as animal skin portraying the open wound of
forgotten history... growing on the martyrs land... fertilised with their
blood over the centuries. This is far from the seductive poetry of his
earlier work, there is something desperate transpiring in the frenzied
strokes: a sense of liberty. The drawings were done just after the news
of the assassination in January 2011 of Salman Taseer, the Governor of
the Punjab erased for his democratic actions, a time when Ali turned to
the inspiring poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Surely a time which renewed
his anger about the oppression and losses; We have lived in a state of
mental and physical melancholia... which forced us to live in memories
of the past.
However, this shift may well have been inspired by the parallel
workshops conducted by Ali with children in Bamiyan and in diverse
sites across the world: Japan, Australia and the UK. Entitled The Absent
Kitchen Project, Khadim asked the children to draw pictures of their
daily life. The grim results in Bamiyan were images of warfare, which
were then shown to children elsewhere, who were invited to react.
Ali experimented in combining some of these drawings with his own
workperhaps realising the potential of their imagination to help him
loosen up. The social contract dictates to a child and moulds them from
outside. I see this as something against the nature of our freedom... we
need to experience that freedom of our childhood again, perhaps by
closing our eyes and drawing. All we need is to be free on that paper
which is to say that I am not free. I am thinking and translating all the
time.
12
I wrote years ago that Alis story was that of a journey, wherein
he acted as a passeur, a form of bodhisattva, someone who has been
illuminated, yet who pauses to assist others.
13
Khadim Ali is not just an
extraordinary artist, he is an extraordinary human being whose social
commitment to his people and artistic concern to curate fellow Afghan
artists proves he is still a formidable passeur.
Khadim Ali has been selected to participate in dOCuMENTA (13), Kassel
and the satellite exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Notes
1
This refers to Zamzammah or Kims Gun as featured in Kiplings Kim, a canon, which still points its nose
up The Mall, outside the NCA the National College of Art in Lahore
2
Khadim Ali has made frequent return journeys to Afghanistan and suffered not only harassment, but
has also been wounded
3
The Padshahnameh was an album of fabulous illustrations produced in the karkhana (atelier) of the
Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658)
4
The Hamzanameh was a colossal project of 1400 paintings, often much larger than the usual album
size, which were produced in the karkhana of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1605) under the two
Persian founders of the atelier: Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdul al-Samad
5
Gulam Sheikh, The Making of a Visual Language in Journal of Arts & Ideas, nos. 30-31, Dec 1997, New
Delhi
6
This work was inspired by earlier Bestiaries produced by the Mongol court that were often curiously
expressionist in style. It is interesting to note Khadim Alis exchange with Roger Mc Donald (published
in the catalogue Rustam/Paintings by Khadim Ali, exhibition at Green Cardamom in 2007), where he
recounts that the Hazara people are descendants of a few hundred warriors and settlers of Genghis
Khans Mongolians who chose to stay in the region in the thirteenth-century
7
S. Shahnama Irfani, 2011, The Other Story in The Persian Book of Kings Today (exhibition catalogue),
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University
8
Firstly by the British colonial rejection of the Persian language, secondly by the collusion between
Pakistan, USA and Saudi Arabia against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and thirdly by the Islamicist
ideology of Zia-ul Haqs military regime, opening a space for the extreme fundamentalism of the wahhabi
oriented Talibans (Irfani: op cit)
9
Cited in a radio interview with Mark Franklin for the Blake Prize, 18 September, 2011
10
Virginia Whiles, Aisha Khalid: Artists Books, Hong Kong: Gandhara Art Publications, 2007
11
Interview between Khadim Ali and Ruark Lewis published in The Force of Forgetting, Lismore Regional
Gallery 19 March-23 April 2011. This exhibition of works by Ali Baba Aurang, Sher Ali Hussainy, Sahraa
Karimi and Khadim Ali was curated by Ali himself
12
From interview cited above
13
Virginia Whiles, Art and Polemic in PakistanCultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature
Painting, London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2010: 126-30
Page 139: Khadim Ali, Haunted Lotus, 2012
Page 140: Khadim Ali, from the Rustam series, 2011
Page 141 above: Khadim Ali, from the Rustam series, 2011
Photos courtesy the artist
Page 141 below: Rustam Slaying the White Div. 1576, unknown artist
Below: Khadim Ali, from the Rustam series, 2007
Arts Space Wodonga
1 -23 June
Latrobe Regional Gallery
30 June -25 August
Nicholas MANGAN
Flohetrauling 2008 (detail)
Image courtesy of the artist
and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
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Campbelltown Arts Centre is a cultural facility of Campbelltown City Council and is assisted by
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Production shot - Nell and Babymachine project collaboration. Produced by Campbelltown
Arts Centre for Transmission. Photographer Susannah Wimberley.
TRANSMISSION
CAMPBEL LTOWN ARTS CENT RE
Co-curated by Carrie Miller
and Dr Matthew Hindson
VISUAL ARTISTS MUSICIANS
HEATH FRANCO_____________ANDY RANTZEN
TODD MCMILLAN____________PETER MCNAMARA
VICKY BROWNE_____________DARREN SELTMANN
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REBECCA BAUMANN_________IVAN ZAVADA & BENEDICT CAREY
WHAT_____________________ JULIAN DAY
ARCHIE MOORE_____________STIFF GINS
CARLA CESCON ____________KUSUM NORMOYLE
Transmission
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LAUNCH FRIDAY 8 JUNE, 6PM | EXHIBITION DATES 9 JUNE 5 AUGUST
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Tickets
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