Melbourne is widely known as Australia’s ‘Cultural Capital’, or so we tell ourselves here. What’s indisputable is that four aspects of modern life underpin the identity and experience of this, the most southern major city on Australia’s mainland. These are sport, cars, food, and the arts, arguably in that order.

Melbourne is a rapidly growing city, both in population – currently four million with a projection of five million by 2020 – and in geographic size. Like Sydney, the nation’s largest city at 4.4 million, Melbourne is one of the most suburbanised cities in the world, with a population density of 4,056 people per square mile. To put this into a global perspective Los Angeles, the world’s most famous bloated suburbia, has 7,068. Taking into account some cities with significant art industries we have densities of New York City 26,403, Tokyo 15,148, London 10,596, and Paris 9,648[i].

The ‘Great Australian Dream’, the desire to own a quarter acre slice of suburbia, continues to propel the urban sprawl further and faster. Moreover, Australians are obsessed with cars – our vast land seems to demand it from our people, much like the United States – but Melburnians seem especially so. Graeme Davison, author of Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, has noted that in Melbourne in 1951 only one in ten drove to work, but by 1974 two-thirds commuted by car[ii]. These conditions have, in turn, made roads something of an obsession in Melbourne.

The year is 1999, and amid a seismic shift of privatisation by the Government, Melbourne’s road system entered new, unchartered territory. Sections of Citylink, Melbourne’s first tollway, opened to the public. This controversial road project was eight times larger than any attempted before in Melbourne, and was the result of a Public Private Partnership (PPP) between the Victorian State Government and Transurban. The road linked Melbourne’s international airport to the central city, and was made up of a combination of newly built and existing sections of freeway.

Citylink is important to the emerging story of Melbourne’s freeway art for two reasons: it was the first time large scale ‘sculptural’ structures had been constructed to enhance the aesthetics of a freeway, and it has become the model du jour for developing new major road infrastructure projects to address the dispersal of the city’s population.

For the first time, the Government needed a road to be more than just a method of moving automobiles from one point to another; it needed to make this section of freeway worthy of charging the driver for a road previously travelled gratis. This road needed to stand for something, and that something was progress, modernisation, and the idea of Melbourne as a major international city.

The result was three key monuments to this agenda, all still standing proud today: a series of large red and yellow monoliths, followed by a short bridge enclosed by a steel ‘tube’, leading to the Bolte Bridge, or more importantly in our narrative, two slender grey columns flanking this bridge at its apex, and dwarfing it as they rise a full 90m from the water below.

The single yellow and 39 red monoliths are officially titled Melbourne Gateway, as this is the point where a visitor catching a cab from the airport finally reaches the north of the central city. The structure, like the others previously mentioned, was designed by Denton Corker Marshall Architects (DCM), and is meant to symbolise the city-defining nineteenth century Gold Rush. The massive 70m yellow form – quickly dubbed the ‘Cheese Stick’ by Melburnians – cantilevers over the road at an alarming angle and recalls in hue the watershed controversial public artwork Vault by Ron Robertson-Swann (more on this later). It is by far the most successful of the phalanx, despite the disparaging name and general agreement by much of the intelligentsia that it resembles a fascist salute, a conclusion quickly determined as a reaction and reference to the reigning Victorian State Premier (and Arts Minister) of the day Jeff Kennett and his policies. While this sentiment lingers as a kind of nostalgia, what remains is a dynamic and dramatic form that certainly embodies the ambition to arrest a visitor to Melbourne.

If travelling to the south end of town, or the eastern, southern and western suburbs of Melbourne, we continue on Citylink to Bolte Bridge. Now if anyone doubted the political detractors, surely the thin sliver towers that serve no function but to extravagantly flank the 490m long bridge were proof of the totalitarian impulse of architects and their masters.

Through its sheer audacity, simplicity and ambition the fact remains the Bolte Bridge is an astounding piece of urban design, one that through its sheer audacity, simplicity and ambition elevates itself far closer to status as a work of art. It doesn’t just reference or borrow from the language the architects of Fascist Italy and Stalinist Russia employed to denote the power and ‘inexorable’ progress in their state buildings, it seems to embody it – here clearly is a city’s delicate fingers reaching for, and maybe connected to, the stars. When viewed from the city centre, the twin forms have a void as a backdrop, day or night, serving to create the illusion they are in fact far higher (their 90m is in reality dwarfed by the nearby buildings of the city, the largest of which, Eureka Tower, being over three times their height). And yet for all this monumentality, passing in a car on the bridge you feel you can reach out and touch these sentinels.

While the Gateway is a series of bright primary colours – a sin to most Melburnians and one best consigned to Sydney or, better still, Brisbane – the Bolte is reassuringly monochrome, like the medium-grey suits of Mad Men. Now that’s Melbourne we say to ourselves.

Another tonality quickly becoming inseparable from Melbourne’s visual identity is that of Corten steel, a self-weathering metal that has a deep brown rust finish, echoing the notion of Australia that poet Dorothea MacKellar articulated as the ‘wide brown land’. The iconic building ‘Ngargee’ that houses Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and state contemporary dance company Chunky Move is perhaps the most celebrated of these buildings, designed by Wood Marsh Architects. They have since designed the Australian National Pavilion in the same material for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, furthering this visual connection. Another Corten structure worth celebrating is the wonderful Craigieburn Bypass by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects, a stretch of freeway that links the Hume Highway with the Melbourne Ring Road.

Article continues.

[i] Figures courtesy of Wikipedia.

[ii] Davison, Graeme, Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, Allen & Unwin, 2004.

Featuring work by six major international artists, Jeremy Blake, Ulla von Brandenburg, Bas Jan Ader, Joachim Koester, Mel O’Callaghan and Saskia Olde Wolbers, Dying in Spite of the Miraculous reveals the shadowy outlines that bleed between worlds, where the artist becomes inseparable from their haunting of a site or a story.

all images by Christian Capurro

Co-curated by the Melbourne Festival and Gertrude Contemporary the exhibition explores film’s potential as an allegory for the interplay between real time and the illusory as actors blur their characters with themselves, and sites resonate with accumulated history.

Combining the intrigue of real life events and myths born from trauma and psychosis with ritual and magic, this exhibition presents a restless fusion of the celestial and the real. Bas Jan Ader and Jeremy Blake both disappeared presumed drowned at sea while exploring sadness and psychosis in their work. The myths and superstitions surrounding occultist Aleister Crowley and killers Jean-Claude Romand and Charles Manson are the subject of works by Joachim Koester and Saskia Olde Wolbers. Joachim Koester and Ulla von Brandenburg reveal a curious collection of architectures, from the ghoulishly muraled rooms of Crowley’s magical community in Sicily, to Le Corbusier’s failed utopian experiment Villa Savoye, and Jeremy Blake’s video work summons the spectres of the Winchester Mystery Mansion built by Sarah

Lockwood Pardee, as a gift to the ghosts that haunted her. In all of these works the celestial coexists with the out-take and the certain becomes ethereal.

Working in collaboration with architect Johan Van Schaik Gertrude Contemporary’s two gallery spaces will be transformed into a dematerialising labyrinth, mirroring the way the works blur the distinction between self and subject, and creating an entire viewing environment for each of these works.

Artists:

Jeremy Blake (USA) presented work in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and his solo exhibitions included Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and Schusev Museum of Architecture, Moscow. His work also features as the abstract sequences in the film Punch Drunk Love.

Ulla von Brandenburg (Germany) has exhibited widely including the 2009 Venice Biennale, the 2008 Torino Triennale, Yokohama Triennale and Biennale Jerusalem, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco and Tate Modern, London.

Bas Jan Ader (Netherlands) exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, New York, ‘Prospect ’71’ Düsseldorf, and his solo exhibitions included Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, ARC Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Camden Arts Centre, L

ondon, and Kunsthalle Basel.

Joachim Koester (Denmark), a conceptual artist and a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Art, was a 2008 finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, exhibiting in West and East Europe, North and South America, and Africa, including the 2005 Venice Biennale Danish Pavilion.

Saskia Olde Wolbers (Netherlands) was the winner of the Beck’s Futures award in 2004 and the Bâloise Prize at Basel Art

Fair 2003, exhibitions include 2009 Athens Biennale, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Mel O’Callaghan is an Australian born, Paris and Berlin based artist whose film, video, photographic and sculptural installations have been exhibited in Sydney at Annandale Galleries, Gitte Weise Gallery, Sherman Galleries, Gallery 4A, Asia-Australia Art Centre, and University of Art Gallery of New South Wales, as well as Queensland Art Museum, Galerie

Schleicher+Lange, Paris, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris and Irma Vep Lab, Champagne, France.

Curators: Emily Cormack, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Simon Maidment and Brett Sheehy.

Anton Vidokle has pointed out recently that the notion long held by almost all artists, writers and creative practitioners that they were working towards a progressive social future, has come to an end. This shared project and projected future has been stymied and perverted, in part by the impact of neo-liberalism, the individualisation of identity, and the fragmentation and explosion of community from geography in the information age.

It’s interesting to consider the moving and generous presentation by Ly Daravuth at Spaces of Art in light of this observation. He detailed the activities of Reyum Institute of Contemporary Arts, of which he is Director and co-founder, and the context in which it operates in Cambodia. Having been educated in France, Daravuth returned to his country of birth and began Reyum in 1998 with the late Ingrid Muan, operating in a context he describes as ‘pre-institutional’. It seems they tried to fill every gap they could. They presented work by Cambodian contemporary artists, while also reaching out to the local community, researching and developing ethnographic exhibitions that were surveys of local histories, and the traditional techniques and tools of the Khmer people. Information that was in danger being lost to the post Khmer Rouge community due to a lack of documentation. They addressed this lack too, publishing ambitious catalogues to accompany these projects, and with few books available in Khmer, they began publishing children’s books in the language too. Amazingly they also established a free art school for children in this modest setting, offering a four-year course, which extended to commissions and cultural exchange projects. A notable performance project Daravuth detailed was a four-year collaboration with Japanese choreographers Eiko and Koma which culminated in the participating children touring the work throughout the USA. Reyum equates to a profound undertaking, and many of us were struck by its equally profound, serious and kind natured Director.

In their book ‘On Kindness’ Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue that kindness has been downgraded into a ‘minority motivation’, allowed for in mothers or via a god or gods, and otherwise suspect or a sign of weakness.

I can’t help thinking there’s something in there that relates closely to reimagining the institutions of art. In our contemporary age the agency a community has to enact kindness might be via the institution rather than via a god, more specifically those art institutions (pre– or post-) that embrace societal practices and projects that engage their communities. How though can one embrace criticality and kindness in equal measures? Can the future museum ever be seen in this light?

The embedding of a practice and program within the community, responding to a community, reflecting or critiquing a community from within it, these are all prevalent strategies in contemporary artistic practice. They were concepts touched upon regularly within the context of the conference in a form of shorthand. There were many of us attending whose day-to-day work is negotiating precisely these praxes, and Spaces of Art was punctuated with descriptions of projects and outcomes that similarly traverse these outcrops, and which continue to resurface since those two days in April.

The CityCat Project on the Brisbane River by US artist David Hullfish Bailey, curated and eloquently presented at Spaces of Art by David Pestorius, was a fascinating case in point. CityCat Project consisted of a public ‘performance’ intervention; a re-direction of a ferry route and a subsequent greeting of the vessel and passengers by a group from the local indigenous community from the shoreline, at a place and in a manner conceived by Brisbane based aboriginal activist Sam Watson. The significance of this project was further intensified when it was deemed of such importance to the local Aboriginal community as to become a Dreaming story, to be told and re-told, and potentially to be re-enacted, in the future.

Listening to David Cross present the expansive One Day Sculpture program, and speaking with him between sessions about it, was a little like meeting one’s twin in the street (or perhaps more accurately in the KFC in Hawera, South Taranaki). Conceived by Claire Doherty of Situations, and David representing the Litmus Research Initiative, the program consisted of twenty-four artists and collaborative teams, each commissioned (by twelve organisations) to present a project on a single day, and held over the course of twelve months across New Zealand. This displays precisely the brand of ill-advised ambition I am regularly guilty of, and it was such a pleasure to share the mania of that experience with a kindred spirit like David, while arguing the relative strengths of the many different artistic strategies that the project embraces. Presenting this multiplicity of approach, and assessing the different kinds of impact resulting from each, is key to the complexity and ongoing importance of One Day Sculpture.

The model employed by One Day Sculpture bears a close relationship to a structure of project or program that I raised in my presentation at Spaces of Art, and which I’ve termed the Emergent Project model. This involves setting up a framework that allows multiple institutions to come together to present a wide program of activities (such as exhibitions, performances, events, screening programs, workshops, residencies, publications and symposia in the examples I refer to below), and references the concept of emergence as coined by the philosopher George Henry Lewes. Emergence refers to the way complex systems can arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions or relationships, whereby the whole forms more (or less!) than the sum of its parts. The underlying structure of an Emergent Project like One Day Sculpture, Rapt! or Making Space is further revealed when self-organising entities come together to present a complex shared event, embracing multiplicity, individuality and retaining their unique natures, while avoiding convergence in both artistic programming and ongoing infrastructures. In the context of the ideas raised in this paper, the Emergent Project allows institutions to work outside their normal programming in exploratory ways with their community or to situate their activities within communities they may not normally engage. This has the potential to simultaneously allow for critical distance from the institution’s regular approach to their operations, without the need to ‘outsource’ their content, and to extend their programming at little or no recurrent cost.

At Satellite, our ambition is work with artists to develop and present societal projects and programs imbedded within communities (whether geographic communities or communities of ideas). With luck these activities contribute to the wider effort to reclaim community and art from ‘community artists’ (along with ‘Public Art’ from ‘Public Artists’), where it seems these notions languish within the academies, Government agencies, local councils and other stakeholders in Australia’s cultural infrastructure. No doubt this will be a long process, but we hope these projects may contribute to the discovery and pursuit of a ‘common social project of our times’. Spaces of Art certainly provided fertile ground for seeding many of these ideas.

I see the work as a special stage in perpetual metamorphosis, a model for peoples’ constant action on space as much as in the space that surrounds them. Buildings are fixed entities in the minds of most—the notion of mutable space is virtually taboo—even in one’s own house. People live in their space with a temerity that is frightening[i]

Gordon Matta-Clark is that most rare, but often mythologised, of artists: someone who died young, but despite a foreshortened practice, left in their wake an indelible mark on art and its future practitioners.[ii] There are many photographs, and a handful of videos, of Matta-Clark at work that prima facie perpetuate the myth of the ‘heroic’ artist figure. In his case they include: jack-hammering his way through concrete walls making Conical Intersect (1975), rendered all the more violent by the absence of noise in the still and silent moving images; the artist climbing—without a harness—a flimsy rope ladder hand-made in his German hotel room, that he’d attached to the top of a sheer industrial chimney for Jacob’s Ladder (1977); the artist swinging from the roof of a suburban house in the breeze to complete the cut in Splitting (1974)—again no safety harness. With Matta-Clark the list goes on. But the promise of feats of daring, and lack of temerity, is not Matta-Clark’s legacy (or, at least, only a small part of it) to which works in the exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: Open House surely attest.

Gordon Matta-Clark was born to Spanish Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echuarren and Anne Clark, and although they separated soon after, Matta was an ongoing influence in his son’s life. Like his father, Matta-Clark studied architecture, attending Cornell university, then a key site of investigation and theoretic rigour in the field, from 1962 to 1968. From the beginning Matta-Clark had difficulty with the prevailing architectural winds of the time. He (again, like his father[iii]) respected Le Corbusier[iv] but was critical of the extent to which his theories were prevalent in the united States at the time and the way in which they were interpreted and valorised.

Matta-Clark undertook fine art classes as part of his curriculum, in which he excelled. Though, with a highly influential figure in the Surrealist movement as a father, and the legendary Marcel Duchamp as a god-father, this hardly comes as a surprise. After completing his degree in architecture he spent a further year living in Ithaca, assisting with the seminal Earth Art exhibition of 1969 staged in conjunction the university, assisting artists such as Robert Smithson, Hans Haake, Jan Dibberts, and presciently working with Dennis Oppenheim on his frozen lake piece,[v] cutting into the ice sheet with saws. Soon after he moved back to New york, where he had grown up, and ten years of art-making follow before his death in 1978 of pancreatic cancer, aged 35.

Matta-Clark’s background, his long engagement with architecture at the academy, as well as the formative experience of intervention in the public realm, are all important considerations in the development of his practice. Much of Matta-Clark’s approach to architecture is misunderstood or overlooked: his engagement with the ideas of Le Corbusier and others; the desperate desire to ‘push things forward’; his frustrations at public obsession with the ‘surface’ and ‘function’ of buildings over the intimate and personal experiences of them; at the constant drive to pull down communities and build them new and ‘better’.

Matta-Clark founded the Anarchitecture group with ten others in 1973. At first glance the preoccupations of this group seem at odds with his commitment to community and his near nostalgia for the architecture of the city (as, for many, are his architectural interventions). While these subsequent works can be read in a very sculptural way, the initial ideas Matta-Clark articulated through found imagery in the Anarchitecture group exhibition (1974) centred around buildings failing, falling or being crashed into. Destruction, or at least perversion of function, was central to his proposition then. Most prophetic perhaps is an image of the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, with black X’s etched over each (Matta-Clark was highly critical of the building and its imposing presence in New york’s skyline). Conjoined in our contemporary readings of this work must surely be one of his notes, which simply states:

A RESPONSE TO COSMETIC DESIGN COMPLETION THROUGH REMOVAL COMPLETION THROUGH COLLAPSE COMPLETION THROUGH EMPTINESS[vi]

In many ways Anarchitecture bears some resemblance to aspects of other ‘utopian’ and propositional architectural practices working around this time, Superstudio’s caustic critique comes to mind, as does Yona Friedman’s Ville spatiale (‘the spatial City’), wherein a modular architecture was to be accessible by a city’s residents: one could pull the constituent pieces, which were suspended above in netting, for constructing something whenever it was needed—shelter, a bridge—and then return them to the collective pool for re– use. Anarchitecture was, as Matta-Clark wrote on an art card, ‘about making space without building it’. This idea resonates in more recent times in the practices and projects of artists such as Atelier Bow-Wow who, in their words, find ways to turn ‘public space into social space’,[vii] and is certainly evoked—with a varied range of reference to Matta-Clark—by many artists whose practices have been charactised as belonging to Relational Aesthetics.[viii]

Matta-Clark’s ideas were not about destruction— most of his projects utilised only derelict or condemned structures—they are in fact propositions for buildings and the process of living in and around them. Or, as Matta-Clark simply put it: ‘The pieces I have done that have ‘architectural’ implications are really about non-architecture about something that’s an alternative to…the established architectural vocabulary.’[ix] Many of these projects, including the works in this exhibition, were accompanied by drawings, made with graphite, felt-tip pen and crayons, often in vivid colour and in a rudimentary, childlike style almost as if they were finished in a rush, with half a mind to something else. Viewing them now, they most naturally read as sketches, plans for thinking about and around his sculptural works, researching and theorising, in much the same way Matta-Clark used language and wordplay to extend his thesis.

Sketches, but not plans.[x] Instead they are models, manifestations of energy and movement.[xi] They are starting points for the physicality depicted in these video works— somehow lost within the stillness of the building fragments or collages—which suggest new propositional spaces, improvised from these initial sketches, though performed rather than designed.

I feel my work intimately linked with the process as a form of theatre in which both the working activity and sculptural changes to and within the building are the performance. I also include free interpretation of movement as gesture, both metaphoric, sculptural, and social into my sense of theatre.[xii]

As the works get bolder, larger, less sanctioned, the mythical element of the making starts to grow. Surreptitious activity, creeping into spaces at night, then launching into an aural and architectural assault of mechanical saws meeting plaster and floorboards, pickaxes and jackhammers meeting concrete and brick. As dangerous and exciting as these actions still feel today, they mark a departure from the works presented in Gordon Matta-Clark: Open House, which are more reflective and collaborative, relying on others to complete the circle and the works.

His practice leads in two directions: the purposeful deconstituting[xiii] of taken-for– granted buildings and edifices; and the constituting or reconstituting of spaces without ‘buildings’ to enable new social engagement. The Great American Dream is cracked open, letting in the sunlight, in Splitting. The suburban home becomes a canvas for a temporal, geometric exploration in Bingo Ninths (1974). Interstitial space becomes a site of conviviality in Tree Dance (1971). Re-valued abandoned detritus is transformed into shelter in Open House (1972).

Tree Dance, with its writhing, lounging mass of bodies resembling a pyjama party, is particularly reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s discussion of spaces he termed ‘heterotopias’. Heterotopias are conceived as spaces in opposition to utopian (or non-) space, ‘different space that can contest the space we live in’.[xiv] ‘Disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter’, are the spaces of heterotopias.[xv] Matta– Clark could see other orders when he regarded a tree, or a dumpster, or indeed a building. According to Daniel Defert’s analysis:

[Heterotropias are spatio-temporal] places where I am and yet I am not, as in the mirror or the cemetery, or where I am another, as in the brothel, the vacation resort, or the festival: carnival transformations of ordinary existence, which ritualise splits, thresholds, and deviations, and localise them as well.[xvi]

It is fascinating to reflect on Matta Clark’s later, grander, architectural intervention works though the prism of this last phrase— Day’s End (1975) at Pier 52, Conical Intersect (1975) in Les Halles Paris, The Caribbean Orange (1978)[xvii]—but this impulse, and ability to conceive of another order, clearly underscored his conceiving of even the earlier Splitting and Bingo Ninths works in the exhibition:

…The things we studied always involved such surface formalism that I had never a sense of the ambiguity of a structure, the ambiguity of a place, and that’s the quality I’m interested in generating in what I do. To some degree that’s the aspect I think of as sculptural, a vigorous transformation process that starts to redefine the given. In the case of the Humphrey Street building it was cutting.[xviii]

And, indeed, there are hints that the two seemingly distinct areas of investigation that Gordon Matta-Clark: Open House foregrounds were beginning to find convergence in single rather than separate projects. In his 1976 interview with Donald Wall, Matta-Clark reflects:

A specific project might be to work with an existing neighbourhood youth group and to involve them in converting the all too plentiful abandoned buildings into a social space. In this way, the youth could get both practical information about how buildings are made and, more essentially some first-hand experience with one aspect of the very real possibility of transforming their space.[xix]

The four projects presented in this exhibition exemplify dual trajectories in Matta-Clark’s practice, both of which can be thought of along the lines of intervention or interruption: the first in terms of the existing built environment, and its surfaces, and the second in terms of social flow and interaction. At their heart they both question the function of space and objects, and our assumptions about what pre-exists in our lived space (and this includes a questioning of the art ‘object’ itself within contemporary practice). While clearly these two concerns were beginning to fuse within Matta-Clark’s practice, its open-ended nature (as well as its brevity) has bestowed a potent legacy to subsequent generations of artists who owe much to his vision and spirit.

Simon Maidment 2009

[i] Donald Wall interview, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections’, Arts Magazine, May 1976. Reprinted in Gordon Matta-Clark, Ed. Corinne Diserns, Phaidon, 2003.

[ii] The idea of myth within Matta-Clark’s oeuvre has been the subject of scholarship for some time, and won’t be explicitly dealt with here, except to note the humour within one of his alchemic works. These incorporated organic materials, decaying and growing mould, with quicksilver, steel, and plastics, and, for the piece Museum (1970), a copy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist examination of myth, The Raw and the Cooked.

[iii] Roberto Matta worked as an apprentice to Le Corbusier drafting the drawings for La Ville Raieuse, the project that was to have such an effect on urban planning within the United States. James Attlee writes: ‘As has been frequently reported, he rejected his employer’s ideas, proposing in an article in the surrealist journal Minotaure an apartment with walls “like wet sheets that change shape to fit our psychological fears”, furnished with biomorphic couches that appear in his illustrations to mould to and at the same threaten to swallow the human body’. James Attlee, ‘Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier’, Tate Papers, Spring 2007.

[iv] Donald Wall: ‘Would you cut into or displace a section of a Corbusier building?’ Gordon Matta-Clark: ‘No. I don’t see why that would be desirable. What would be the point? He did the same thing as I am doing now. He took a box and broke it up in ways that were inherently valid then. Right?’ Donald Wall interview, 1976.

[v] Beebe Lake Ice Cut or Accumulation Cut (1969).

[vi] Note card 1146, undated, estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, on deposit at the CCA, Montreal.

[vii] In conversation with the author, 2006.

[viii] None more clearly than Rirkrit Tiravanija’s practice, and his homage exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija & Gordon Matta-Clark, David Zwirner Gallery, New york (2008).

[ix] Liza Béar interview, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building’, 21 May 1974, Avalanche, December 1974. Reprinted in Gordon Matta-Clark, Ed. Corinne Diserns, Phaidon, 2003.

[x] ‘If needed we work to disprove the common belief that all starts with the plan. There are forms without plans—dynamic orders and disorders’. Gordon Matta-Clark, notebook, estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, on deposit at the CCA, Montreal. Reprinted in Attlee, 2007.

[xi] Jochen Volz: ‘[A model is] an abstract representation of a system from the modeller’s viewpoint. It helps to stimulate reality, and in doing so to question and understand that reality…’. Jochen Volz, ‘In the Making’, Fare Mondi, Making Worlds 53rd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale catalogue, Eds. Jochen Volz & Daniel Birnbaum, 2009.

[xii] Donald Wall interview, 1976.

[xiii] The act of constituting is also doubly important—and Matta– Clark, like his god-father, adored nothing more that doubling and double entendre—in that cooking and food was central to many of his projects, most clearly perhaps Food, a restaurant / art project he co-initiated in New york’s Soho in 1971.

[xiv] Michel Foucault, ‘utopie et littérature’ [‘utopia and literature’], broadcast paper, December 7, 1966.

[xv] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, 1970.

[xvi] Daniel Defert, ‘Foucault, Space and the Architects’, Documenta X: Politics/Poetics, Cantz Verlag, 2000.

[xvii] Or Circus.

[xviii] Liza Béar interview, 1974.

[xix] Donald Wall interview, 1976.

The installation featured four works; Open House, Splitting, Bingo Ninths, and Tree Dance, along exploded sketches by Matta-Clark, interpreted as large wall drawings by Tony Garifalakis.

From the accompanying essay:

The four works presented in this exhibition exemplify dual trajectories in Matta-Clark’s practice, both of which can be thought of along the lines of intervention or interruption: the first in terms of the existing built environment, and its surfaces, and the second in terms of social flow and interaction.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Open House

Les choses qui tombent exhibition, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne International Arts Festival October 2009.

Simon Maidment: So Fabien we were just wondering, to begin with; the title of the show and conceptual framework of the show how did you come to it and what is it?

Fabien Giraud: Well I think the first thing we were interested in was a very basic sculptural question, discovering the space debris and space junk; things that are falling back from the space conquest, from the sixties and seventies, back to earth now. Actually Australia is a big place for this falling down of objects. And we found this object, I mean this is a replica of the original object [pointing to sculptures], which is a gas tank and we just like the idea that it is almost like a ready made but just it’s been through two major forces. Obviously it’s an industrial object that was flying in space but then in the end it fell back to earth and went through the force of the atmosphere. Usually objects get pulverized and they [turned into] dust and we don’t see the objects back on earth. But this object went through the atmosphere, was crushed by its entry in the atmosphere and crushed a second time on its colliding to the ground. We just like the idea that it was a sculptural form. The original object reminded us of a Henry Moore kind of shape, very, I don’t know, round or oval gas tank, perfectly shaped.

SM: Almost feminine

FB: Yes, it reminded us very much of Henry Moore’s sculpture, and this modernist era of apprehension of the form.  So yeah that was the basis of this object.

Raphaël Siboni: There is also the idea that usually when NASA wanted to destroy like a satellite or something, they control the re-entry of the object so its been pulverized when it re-enters the atmosphere but this one is like an uncontrolled re-entry. And so thinking of uncontrolled shapes, sculpture was the start of the show.

FG: And I think for us it was important to work with this idea that basically since there is supposed to be the end of history from the nineties, and the whole fantasy, cultural fantasy of the event, not a historical event like an uprising of the people or something, but something that falls from the sky. Something that’s like any kind of Hollywood movie from the last ten or twenty years it has been about. You see its amazing its just asteroid hitting the earth or the earth going upward with a tsumami, and everything is coming from something which it’s not, which is not a force, the forces are just external. The fantasy is that we externalise the forces not on a society level but on a kind of transcendental thing. But without the idea that what happens, what comes back from the sky, it’s not this UFO thing, it’s actually just a gas tank. You know, like that was the big mythical space conquest and it’s now all just falling back

SM: When we spoke at the opening, a little bit, about those forces you mentioned that there was something in there of importance about those forces that were sculpting the object that were no longer the hand of a person.

RS: Yes – because it’s kind of an ambiguous shape because it’s been made by man, a more complex shape created by man but at the same time its when you think of it just like a pure force that shaped the objects’ form. Then also the other idea, when we started working on it, and even in the photos, there was no real way to have an idea of the size of those tanks and no size reference and this made us start thinking about the object as, like when you think of it in the universe which don’t have a sense of what is its size is and so we start making different scales of the same object, trying to replicate it, and at one point trying to provide the same feeling for the people in the exhibition — so that you never know what is the right distance to have between you and the object.  Which is something simple, which you never know. Like if you always have to refind this gap between you and the object.

FG: I guess it is something which runs through the whole show. Like when you walk up to the plinth, it can be empty or have wedges underneath or painted completely differently then I think this whole idea of what is the reference point to an object or what is the reference point to an event itself. It is just the institutional frame of something that gives it its scale, because things have to be scaled to in order to be experienced and so I guess we wanted to link it to this idea that in space there is obviously no reference point because there is no comparison and what happens, you know, when things fall onto the earth and then we experience this comparison. But we wanted to keep it loose by making all of these different scales, and different adjustments, of plinths.

RS: Like the size of the plinth is based on the size of the object so at one point we also thought we could use an empty plinth because when you see the plinth there is no more need for the object because you can have a sense.

SM:  So just on that, you’re referencing that in space, the lack of light means you use a different reference point or reference media or technology to identify an object and find out its shape, laser or RADAR or whatever, because visually you can’t tell its scale if there is nothing else around it to show us by contrast.  An audience member in here is seeing this object crashed in the desert but also potentially on the other side of a planetary system or right up close to them in a vacuum. But there was something within that explanation that I wanted to potentially touch on, which is what you said about the framing of the institution as a reference point for an artwork, as you have done, did you want to extrapolate on that a little bit? How you were thinking specifically about this institution, or the institution of the current space?

FG: Quite recently we have been interested in looking back at the history of institutional critique from the 70’s, and how from a narrative point of view, about all the narratives we bring into this sort of dry gesture of Michael Asher, these people we are quite fascinated with, and we, many works we work on now are going in that direction, so it’s not this institution as Gertrude, but more a very basic question of how, when we experience, what happens, what is the frame, what is the frame of experience today? If we pass the cynical era of the 80’s and 90’s, where old values are put down, I think we’ve passed this era now, it’s how we can re-question the idea of experience, which is not just flat, and which I understand as this cynical era of art…

SM: Well we are entering what Gerard Raunig calls the third phase of institutional critique. I was going to pick up on the lack of cynicism or sarcasm within this works as appropriation and the forces on the Modernist form which are forces that are not your hands but the hands of gravity, the dust hitting it at high forces, but also the use of the what plinth and that Modernist form, but it is light hearted in some sections of this show, it is not done with any sense of cynicism.

RS: I think if we want to sum up, there are many connections between the pieces but also there is this very simple idea that at one point, what is this experience or this event, when someone is facing an object that is art, so with the copper plates we can speak, facing technology that totally obsolete,  it’s just this very relation that we…

FG: We like the idea of thinking about art as a historical nerve. And some nerves die out, like 16^th century nerves, if you think of art like nerves. They die out like a dead nerve that didn’t work anymore. And it goes through the show, this big copper mezzotint that we made which is this 17^th century technique, as a dead nerve, kind of late, something which stored there and which is not…

SM: And also the use of the clear glass in the lens rather than the modern refractive glass, preventing you from having the proper “photographic image”. The interest in an obsolete technology or an obsolete practice is also an adjunct to that with this idea of the artist sort of stopping at some point, and the force of something else completing the work. Really completing the work — the object here or in the case of the video, the lenses no longer refracting — and that abstraction, the end image, isn’t a filter or something you’ve done, rather that it’s something through the process that has been brought on – the other day we talked about the forces of the sun. I wondered whether that was also in your minds as to the choice of materials and the way you finished the black sculptural works.  Given you know which has gotten interest in that you started off looking at ways in which you could potentially make them and the first step was going looking at the RMIT ceramic centre which .…..the ceramics as sculpture as this feeling almost a little, like feeling in the same boat as the a dead nerve that twitches all the time

FG: yeah, yeah, yeah.… with work in the studio for sure…

RS: Also I think this idea with the video and the mezzotint of a dead, I don’t know, what? A dead sensor.  So like, you can think of mezzotint as a continual processing like, it is still ongoing but not so efficient anymore — it just like the camera, it keeps recording something with no output, just pure…

FG: You asked this question about the surface of things, of these objects, I think we wanted to, I don’t know if we succeeded so much in that way, but we wanted at some point that the surface of an object can become the object itself.… its not just like the ceramics being glazed or something, its about the ceramics being shaped by its surface, you know its like because there is so much tar, bitumen and so much latex, but the objects are always about the effect in a way, that the effect can become the surface, effect can become such a material thing, such a dense thing that it becomes a material you know, it’s not just a coat on the surface of things. Then it becomes so thick that some things are actually sculpted in the surface of the object. But maybe we could move onto the video and explain a little bit…

It’s a lens that we brought in California, it is a 35mm lens, quite mythical from the 70’s… basically we did a very simple thing, we just replaced every glass lens inside this object of which there are about 12, and we replaced it with clear glass so its a very simple and regressive act in a way because  I like this idea that for centuries we have been polishing optical lenses to record the vision that our eyes were grasping.

SM: .…to replicate the physical of the eye, the shape of the retina

FG: yes exactly, and the framing of reality obviously, because what happens in the optic (the camera) is that you can have a right angle on it so you can frame.…

RS: it is very simple because the light goes through, it goes through the optical lense as if there is no optic in a way, so at one point when we shot the movie we can see the sunset we have shot in a way, as a machine would see it, it is like a non– human.…

FG: it’s like an optical lens as a prosthesis, we cancelled it by doing this, so when we shot the movie, we can talk about the movie, but its, this film we just went in the desert, here in the middle of Australia and we shot directly into the sunset with very high definition camera, a Red Camera, which is supposed to be the most advanced camera now that you can find on the market, obviously it will be obsolete in one year, three years, but this is the camera and we put this object which is as if we didn’t have a lens, in a way you know like as if the light was going directly onto the very high definition sensor and I think the idea was really how could we record day as just a quantity of light touching the surface of earth if you see the day as this, when day goes by and sunset happens, it goes from white where the sensor is saturated by light to the very dark, obviously this very high sensor lost in the desert facing in the middle of nowhere facing this very old technology of the sun. If we say that the sun is a piece of technology.

RS: this very simple idea of two technologies facing each other in an empty space and how.…

FG: if the sun is a technology.

RS: like there is nothing in between these technologies

FG: I like this, I think we were we were fascinated with this idea of high definition as a contemporary myth of the image — that high definition has potentially no limits, obviously it is a marketing argument that they try to exaggerate so maybe it’s that with mezzotint is the technique to this high definition sensors which I see as a very tactile thing, the sensor’s really feeling its like photons hitting the surface of a thing. We like this idea that in two years they say they are going to bring out a camera which is 25 times HD, so this camera we have is 4 times, this is should be 25 times HD, but then you know like 200 and whatever.

RS: then the shot, the actual footage of the camera there is no video projector that can…

Chris Sharp: That’s strong enough to actually project it.

RS: there is not enough resolution so like the shot of the footage is waiting for the future — like waiting for its support you know.

FG: but not only that, but its waiting for the body to support it, because our brain can receive only so much definition. Scientists can define the eye in terms of definition, in terms of pixel ratio. I mean obviously you cannot see every particle of the world when I look at this wall. Like this idea, I think that when you film in this supposedly very high definition camera where does it stop? Because who are you filming for? Since as humans we cannot perceive it so then you know you are catching something for something or someone that is not there yet.

RS: they started like recently to make prosthesis with nanotechnologies for blind people so now they are working on a system for the eye that is 10 pixel by 10 pixel, so the world for those people is like 10 by 10 so you can have a sense of the space at some point like we could see something in high resolution that our brain can process.

SM: also in terms of the development of contemporary perception, its a well known learnt trait of a couple of generations ago, if you put a single frame cut into a film no one would be able to see it, its like this idea of subliminal mapping of 24 frames per second one of those frames was not enough for people to be able to but now you need a quarter of those frames because everyone has grown up with the technology, its been mutated to develop in this way, photographers say the human eye cannot quite reach 16 bit level of detail tonality but that people using digital imagery and photography regularly have been tested to be able to increase that, the more they kind of practice, until they go blind or whatever. The really interesting thing there also about the time, so this image is something for the future, and it’s something to train or mutate humankind via the Red Camera or other technology, that similarly it then captured something which will, while the rest of the world waits for, to catch up to, to experience, is so many million minutes from when that light was spat out from the sun. So you have the idea the past event, when it was captured or when it was emitted, so there’s that kind of interesting idea about it as well. Time, coming back to that sense of obsolescence or circularity in these works, is really pertinent as well.

CS: I think when you titled the show Les Choses Qui Tombent in the sense of things that fall from the sky and these technologies that fall into destitute and become obsolete. I mean it’s pretty coherent in the sense that a lot of what you’re saying in that the human eye becomes obsolete, to a certain degree until it can catch up with this technology. But human vision as we know it falls into destitute so in that sense it’s.…

FG: Yeah I think as we talked about this dead nerve, you know what I mean by dead nerve? Obviously one man looking at the sky the third century after Christ, and one man looking at the sky now; his vision is a dead nerve, the guy from the third century, because we cannot relate in any way to this idea of a dome, a black dome in which shines some crystals that they used to see. This vision, the way he was looking at the world, fascinated us because we went through the gallery and we went through all these revolutions, that we cannot, still our eyes functioning, our brain functioning but this nerve, this kind of tension with the world is dead and I guess too art’s, I like this idea and we discuss it a lot, you can cross times, you can make nerves reappear, reactivate  them.

RS: There’s also ellipsis connected with this idea, because at the same time it relates to our definition of technologies but also there was this idea as Matthew Brown [Melbourne Artist] told and when he first heard about the movie we made, he thought of this first time when the reptiles go out of the water and they see for the first time and they didn’t have the eye focused and it’s like the first vision…

FG: Wide open to something that they cannot grasp. I love this idea.…

RS: Also I think in terms of the cinematic, removing the lenses it’s also, because so many people keep saying that video is not as good as the film, saying that film is much more like the human eye. So actually the movie we made is like the theory made real – it’s what the camera sees. There is no interpretation between…

SM: It’s a humanisation almost, it’s an attempt to make what replicates the human eye but that is the sun hitting that sensor.

RS: It’s like the truth you know, I mean they say that about cinema, but this is like pure recording of the world as it is, just photons hitting the surface of the sensor.

FG: I think we forget too much that when we invent, technology is not images, we invent sensors, you know, to sense the world. Images are just like some interpretation of this but if we take the camera down to what it is, a sensor, as it was in the chemical analogue world of machines, in the digital it becomes, for me this very sensual thing. Which goes completely opposite to whatever people say about digital being just a recording medium. [laughing]

SM: It’s that interesting thing also, not to steer the conversation here but just as an aside, about the past and the future and what becomes what at different times. The analogy of the space race and the analogy of the cold war being fought on that level and that everything was about the future and it was about the future in an almost Stalinist kind of way, it was all about societal progression, and now it’s completely redundant to the point where you’re highlighting it crashing back to earth and it comes back as art rather than coming back as society future; well then society future is contained – that’s the sculpture of it.

FG: This idea that in the 60’s and 70’s, now our idea of the future is really that everything will be about the immune system, you know, against sickness.…

I think we see our bodies as a potential, or just the earth, as being hit by these things, or earth as rising, the sea rising, the earth collapsing and we are here as a very weak units, and the whole flu thing that’s been going on in the world for one year now, it’s like you can see how much we just became very human – we want to have a shell, we want to have something to protect us on a very sort of biological level and in the 60’s and 70’s with space conquest, and it’s quite interesting that actually now people are thinking again of going to the moon, but they don’t know how anymore. There’s this whole debate, but we can’t do it anymore. In the 60’s and 70’s eventually this whole thing, this idea of going outward, going to the exterior was a very deep thing as it is not today, now the exterior is coming from all over, from the biology itself, from our inner degeneration of cells, and that’s why I think the space conquest is not interesting and it’s just regressive.

SM: In terms of not much what we talked about here, just take us through the mezzotint.

FG: The mezzotint, it’s very easy to explain as this obsolete technique that we were interested in, this mezzotint that is a technique that is used to make, as you know, very black monochrome and very rich backgrounds in engraving, and we wanted to do this thing, this object, which is nearly an object which is not really a drawing or painting because it’s never to be printed, and it is not really a sculptural thing but it is just a subliminal thing, something that stands there, it is inked, and the ink never dries. The ink is always ready to be printed… this print ink is very sticky, and this objects stand there, as we titled the show, yet to be written, yet to be told, and it’s there as… I don’t like the world ‘potential’, but as an open monument, or form… an open something!

SM: So it stands in for the art, it becomes the art aura, like the aura… when you look at a piece of art it is contained ‘here’, and not having the drawing or the print, this becomes the aura, it has potential, it is not real art, but it is real art, because everything is already there

FG: Yeah I see it as an interpretation…

SM: …an interpretation of what’s going to happen, in that what is printed, or what it goes onto is left up to the viewer? It goes back to… not unfinished, but again, the incomplete…

FG: For me, it’s not really incomplete, I think one thing that fascinates me in  our culture is the use of glue. Glue is a very fascinating thing because it is not a material in itself– you know, I use glue as a material because glue is made for gluing objects. But you know, I think it was Neil Bohr, or some very applauded physicist that said someone came to visit him and asked ‘What are you studying now?’ and he replied ‘Glue, because glue is the most fascinating thing’. And actually when they do studies on glue, they say they still don’t know actually what it is, but on a very basic level glue, is like when you take an object, you break it– if it’s a vase for example, the glue is a synthetic molecular chain, because the molecules have been broken in the object, and it is a synthetic bridge for them, between these two molecule chains in the object. And what is interesting is this idea of affinity, because glue will not glue all things together, there needs to be affinity on a molecular level between two objects, and the glue is making this affinity. You know what I mean?

SM: I do

FG: So it’s kind of a fascination with this idea that maybe an object, a really interesting object, or situation, should be like glue. Maybe this thing that is always open– because glue itself is like an open bridge, a bridge leading to nowhere.

SM: So this became the bridge between your conceptual idea and the illustration of it, potential illustration through something and then the final material almost deadened, and this is the synthetic molecular chain between those.

FG: You could think of it that way… I just think of it as glue

[laugher]

RS: There is no real difference between the idea of the work and the work itself, like, I don’t think of the work as an illustration of our idea. I think they are on the same level, both the work and the idea, because you can put ideas (and works) together in a controlled way. And so we don’t want to translate ideas that shapes the work with those different systems, on the sale level.

FG: I think, that when you talk in this language, it is very different. Well, not very different, but just this idea of inscription. Starting an image with this inscription in the mezzotint, that you can find a secondary, ‘ultra’ image in the small projection that’s there. You have this relationship supported by the wall. Then we wanted to have an element that was just the raw copper that we brought to use in this project; we wanted to leave it as we had gotten it. But this thing was big chunks of copper coming from a mine in China, so getting it into Australia and into a factory! [Laughs] In the end, in the process of the transportation, there were some marks on the surface – accidents in transportation. So we just decided to ink the whole surface of the copper. As if it had to be printed.

RS: But as I was doing the etching, I preferred the act of etching to the actual outcome of the etching – the process was important, not the result.  And in a way, just by the act of inking it, transformed this hard material object into nearly an image.  A normal copper plate, just with this very slight modification.

SM: Its that very modification that becomes the drawing of the transition into different states and transportation here. Which is again, like all of these three, the potential future of our understanding of it. In the same way we cannot fully technologically or physiologically present or receive the video work, in a way that fully grasps definition. These are also sitting here in a way that, they are sitting here with the potential of future critique. The framework also allows for exponential improvement.

RS: I think what is important between these three is, cause at the very beginning, this was just the idea to reduce drawing to a pure idea. To reduce drawing as the ultimate expression of the self. Layers and layers of gesture; so this one was see a gesture that is not related to a self. It’s just like pure transportation; its pure act.

FG: There is no gesture actually.

RS: It’s just traces of an event. Just like transportation.

CS: What’s the significance of the size?

R: It’s just a standard size; the pallets for the pieces as well as the trucks involved in transportation all have a standard size.

END

Published in cac interviu, issue 9–10 / 2008 spring – summer.

Danius Kesminas is an Australian-Lithuanian artist who regularly uses musical forms as a process for engaging his concerns, including the visual arts industry, critiquing its reverence, seriousness and earnestness. To this end, the musicality within Kesminas’ practice is a tactic for collaboration into uncharted territories, rather than an endpoint in itself. His practice, often intentionally provocative, gives rise to discussion around authorship and cultural mythologies.

We held an informal discussion with Kesminas at West Space (4 April 2008), a contemporary art organisation in Melbourne we are both involved with, to tease out some of his strategies. Among the projects we discussed was Slave Pianos, a group consisting of two contemporary artists (of which Kesminas is one) and two composers/musicians, who create ambitious events combining installation, music and performance. Their subject matter is usually art figures and movements in recent (20th Century) art history. Kesminas also initiated an art project and band in Yogyakata with 7 Indonesian musicians in 2006. Their name Punkasila references both the cultural movement of Punk, and Pancasila, the official philosophical doctrine of the Indonesian state, as espoused by President Soekarno in 1945. This art-performance-installation-band is a high energy, anarchic hybrid that manifests in a unique blend of traditional Indonesian crafts, homemade military band outfits, machine gun guitars, and post-disaster rock with lyrics that give voice to the cacophony of acronyms constituting the Indonesian body politic. Kesminas is also a founder of the art/music group The Histrionics, which melds the musicality of a banal pub-rock covers band with refashioned lyrics critiquing the cannons of twentieth century art history.

Mark Feary and Simon Maidment, 2008

Simon Maidment: By way of introduction to your practice Danius, I’d like to begin with the provocations and interventions that you’ve undertaken, often with artists or the art world as their focus or subject. It seems to me these provocations have evolved a good deal, and are taking a particular form recently in the international collaborations you’ve initiated in Indonesia, China and Cambodia. To give some context for that development though, perhaps you’d like to start by giving us an example of a local intervention that you’ve done here in Australia.

Danius Kesminas: Well, one of those was the whole Domenico de Clario episode. [de Clario is a Melbourne-based contemporary artist] It was about 1998 when Maudie Palmer curated an exhibition called ‘Remanence’ at the old Magistrates’ Court, with Dom, Marina Ambramovic, Daniel Buren, Cai Guo-Qiang, Dennis Oppenheim, Imants Tillers and others for the Melbourne

Festival. Dom’s show was a grand piano and accoutrements in one of the courtrooms with tiered seating, and he would perform between 12 noon – 7pm, daily for 2 weeks. Well, Michael Stevenson [a New Zealand born artist, also a member of Slave Pianos] and I, we were onto it, we thought let’s secretly record it, and make pirate copies, bootleg it! It was so easy to do, because guess what, Dom’s blindfolded! He can’t see anything! We were on shifts, I’m on one day and Michael’s on the next day. A big part of Dom’s practice is endurance, but get this, he’s not there at 12… I’m there at 12, Michael’s there at 12, there’s no Dom! Well he walks in with his café latte about 1:30, and I’m having to [jumps under table] get down hiding under the seats! [laughs] Anyway, we recorded 7 different days onto cassette and packaged it as ‘Domenico de Clario; Live at the Former Magistrates’ Court’, and made an elaborately produced box set, like we’ve done with Slave Pianos, and we made it available for sale at Readings Book Store in Carlton! And we put this ridiculous price on, like $100, so you know no one’s going to buy it, but it’s on display! Anyway, I just let it go, went overseas to do some project, and the next thing you know, my old man’s ringing up, saying, ‘Danius, there’s a letter here from a solicitor’. So I’m being sued…

Mark Feary: And you can’t read it because it was written by a blindfolded solicitor.

DK: It was a shock, because you’d expect someone to call and say ‘What are you doing dickhead? Knock it off’. The letter demanded the return of the tapes and an order to sign a statutory declaration. So I drafted a response using references from ‘Peripheral Vision’ by Charles Green [Australian art theorist and critic], which has a large section on de Clario. I took the text, substituted my name for Dom, and just twisted it a little bit, to explain what I was doing — because that’s partly what Dom’s about, appropriational strategies — and I sent it to his lawyer, saying actually, what I’m doing is an artwork! But I didn’t say where I’d derived the text.

MF: And then you got another letter, from Charles Green’s solicitor…

DK: [laughs] Well, I was saying, I’m just doing what Dom does. It’s ridiculous, if you actually apply that stuff, and test it, he wants to sue you… Anyway, they demanded the return of the master tapes, and I really didn’t want to, but I had to do something. So I unscrewed the casings of the cassettes, took out the magnetic tape — seriously, there was miles of tape — and just shoved it into a padded bag, just the tape, all tangled and completely unusable, and kept the cases… because that’s my property, I’ll keep the casings and you can have the tape. Can you imagine the lawyers opening this package? They’d be going ‘what the fuck is this? Oh Dom, this must be yours!’ Didn’t hear a peep…

MF: Have you seen Dom again?

DK: Yeah, there’s a postscript to the story, because later he moved to Western Australia, heading up one of the art schools there. And we did a gig there, The Histrionics, at PICA [the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art], and he was in the audience… And he was friendly, he obviously thought, ’oh shit, maybe I should… just be… your friend?!’

MF: Thinking ‘that way this will never happen to me again’!

DK: And I’m thinking, good, whatever, I’m your friend too, it’s not about being your enemy! I don’t know, all that world is just so stupidly wound up.

MF: Precious?

DK: Yeah, precious in a way, and that’s exactly what The Histrionics are particularly allergic to, preciousness, to pretentiousness, to all that kind of posturing. That’s why I love going to Indo [Indonesia – where Kesminas formed a band called Punkasila in Yogyakarta], you know because… well there just isn’t any of that. Pure economics prevent, preclude, any of that indulgence, and the stakes are a great deal higher, the very notion of making art is pretty fucking profound. It’s not some privileged indulgence. You go over there and all my little Dom de Clario stunts, all my Histrionics gags, well, they don’t mean anything. They don’t! You just feel like a dickhead, it’s a kind of crisis, you’ve got to rethink everything. And in the end all my work is about engagement, it’s about communication. Well, when you go over there, it just doesn’t hold water, to them it’s meaningless.

SM: Because it has been a trend with both The Histrionics and Slave Pianos that you use those music forms, whether it’s rock or the composed orchestral, operatic works, as a foil to interrogate art and art history…

DK: I’m glad you both appreciate the connection between those projects, because many people are completely confused by the fact that they’re utilising different musical genres, so they think they’re not related, but they are and obviously so. The Histrionics is often misunderstood as being a negative project. There is an element of parody there, but there’s a great deal which is homage, bloody oath! How else could you be so obsessed about doing all this stuff! [waves at the Slave Pianos transcriptions and Histrionics lyric sheets with their pages of footnotes]

MF: Well, that’s what we were discussing this morning, how not just with The Histrionics, but with the other projects as well, there’s that homage, while at the same time there’s an attempt to kind of break down the influence that work has over you…

DK: Yeah, it’s not about killing the father, but it’s not about being an orphan either! [laughs] That seems self-evident… you know what it is? It’s ‘value adding’… [laughs]

SM: And you’ve turned your attention to a whole range of artists through the Slave Pianos project, tell us more about that undertaking.

DK: The whole Slave Pianos thing started in establishing a vast, but always expanding, archive of visual artists’ sound works. There’s always been this trajectory with artists making music. Some of this material is really obscure, I mean, basically it all is, a lot of it is on vinyl and cassette, so finding this stuff can be difficult, you’ve really got to dig deep, forensically. Except we’re not really fans, we don’t listen to it recreationally! [laughs] That’s for sure, it’s not for recreational purposes! So we take this sound, or noise, or even just the audio track of a video piece, and we transcribe it as musical notation, and prepare it for an automated piano performance.

SM: So anyone can ‘learn to be the artist’, become the artist through the learning the sheet music, like all those guitar magazines!

DK: Exactly.

SM: Tell us about what’s involved in the transcription of a piece.

DK: The process was devised by the two musicians in Slave Pianos, Neil Kelly and Rohan Drape. Rohan’s written a computer program to import any sound source and generate musical notation. He then tweaks it to make it musically coherent. It’s just notes, but he’ll shape it while listening back to the original. So it’s always faithful to the source.

Why the piano? Number one, it’s a play on Peter Tyndall’s ‘Slave Guitars’. And the piano, because there’s a vast history of artists using the piano right back through the century. I mean the violin is a far older instrument, and the guitar probably is too, but the piano, is like a crucible of… seriousness.

MF: It’s such a class-based symbol of refinement, rather than the guitar, which is associated far more with a rebellion against those kinds of systems.

DK: That’s the point, what we are doing with Slave Pianos is playing with the avant garde, and returning it to the conservatorium. It’s a supremely radical gesture, right, but couched in this really kind of conservative academic process. That’s what really disturbs some artists.

SM: How did Punkasila come about?

DK: Well, I got an Asialink [Australian cultural funding organisation] four month studio residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. By the way, there’s no actual studio! [laughs] And our notion of contemporary art doesn’t really exist! There’s a lot of activity there, fucking hell, it’s flourishing! But it’s not about the art world, it’s the opposite to the preciousness we were talking about before. And these guys are doing stuff in a way that’s not about ambition, or career, it’s just pure. I’ve never seen anything like it, I was blown away. For the first few weeks, I was just soaking up the depth of the culture, the people, the food, all that. And I wanted to respond, to make something, to do something. But every stupid idea I’d come up with, I’d just look out the window and go well [snorts] I’m just a fool, I give up, because look at that, that’s just amazing. Like I say, it was sort of a crisis, it wasn’t that I was depressed, I was inspired but it was just a questioning of well, all my tricks are meaningless here? So I had this translator guy, and he would take me out every night to see bands, because there’s a really vibrant music scene over there. I was thinking ‘how good are these guys! Imagine what you could do with them!’. Also I didn’t know anything about Indonesia, pretty much still don’t, but I was reading a book by Damien Kingsbury, ‘The Politics of Indonesia’, really intensively, and checking this other stuff out in parallel. As I’m reading I’m constantly referring back to the index, because every page is just imbedded with acronyms, and it’s like 400 odd pages. And by the time I’d gotten to page 399, I’ve gone ‘eureka!’ – acronyms, a project about acronyms. Well, how do I do that? Then I thought about these artist guys playing in bands… Basically I just approached the dudes and said hey, let’s form a band, and I handpicked everyone, I said I want Hahan from that band, I want Rudy Atjeh from that band, I want Iyok from that group, Janu from that band. It was like an Indonesian super group! It was all friendly, they all knew one another, and support each other, and their default setting, like mine, is just to say ‘yes – we’ll do that, I’m into that’. I’m like twenty years older than them, and I’m white, non-muslim and the co-lead singer – that’s hilarious! [laughs] And then I said, look, this is the concept — acronym wars! And they’re going ‘well, that’s a good concept, whatever that is… What’s the music?’. Ah, that’s a good point… So we went into the studio, and I just stole a bunch of stuff to first get it going, I pulled out a Black Sabbath riff, a Lobby Lloyd riff, which is like [sarcastically] ‘I’m educating them in Oz Rock’ [laughs]. And they’re going ‘What?’ but once they cracked the code, they were like ‘we can write this’ and off they went, it was great. And so then I was like — let’s

make batik [traditional Indonesian screenprinting] camouflage costumes, let’s make machine gun guitars! Well, when they got the idea, they went crazy on it!

SM: Tell us a little bit about the reaction to the project.

DK: Well when Asialink found out of what we were doing, they wrote me a letter saying, ‘you’re outta here!’. Not quite, but they were concerned. Then Geoff Thompson, who’s an Australian journalist based in Jakarta working for the Foreign Correspondent program on ABC Television, also got wind of it. Because we did cause quite a stir… I’m making it out to be a bed of roses, but in actual fact, we could not get the CD pressed in Indonesia, no way. All the song titles are Indonesian acronyms, and they’re all military, political, bureaucratic and cultural institutions. Well the pressing plants have just gone ‘ooh we don’t want to know anything about this!’, I’m saying ‘no, no, no, wait, you don’t understand’. Nope, they wouldn’t do it, I could not get it pressed in Indonesia. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is real currency, it is still kind of volatile. And even on the Foreign Correspondent TV dispatch on Punkasila, Wimo, the keyboard player, says ‘if we play this music in the wrong place, at the wrong time, to the wrong people, we would be killed… but you know… we don’t do that!’.

MF: Did it feel like that though?

DK: No, no, because I trusted the boys and they know the limits. I’m there encouraging and provoking them, and whatever, but never to the extent where I put these guys under any pressure or danger.

SM: It strikes me that both Punkasila and The Happy Endings [a Shanghai based all-girl noise band formed by Kesminas], gives voice to these concerns that the people in these places can’t themselves be seen to give voice to…

DK: Yes! I take the heat and suddenly they’re empowered, because right now in Indonesia it’s a post-reformasi [post-reformation], post-Soeharto environment, and there is a new moment of optimism. But the military is still very influential – you don’t want to get involved with them. When we started playing gigs, people thought it was hilarious, they’d call out to me, ‘bule!’ which means ‘handsome person’ but it can also mean ‘foreign fuckwit’. [laughs] My assistant once labelled me ‘manic white trash lost in the third world with a bunch of ideas’.

Young hunks

Cyberpunks

And sweet things

Trying hard to change your luck

Baby thugs

Bad spuds

And mean things

Living for today or maybe even yesterday

Look around

Shaky ground

Do the right thing

In this world you’re just a guest

Do it now

‘Devo Has Feelings Too’, Smooth Noodle Maps, Enigma Records, 1990.[i]

Evolutionary theories garner attention from numerous opposing perspectives, be they from scientists who construe them as a logical understanding of heretic development, or the religious right who vehemently refute them. Central to both positions is the adherence or dismissal of a higher organising mechanism, most notably, a god. To maintain a position that incorporates a Darwinian based principle of evolution, in that species develop over time to more ably adapt to their environment, dismisses the creationists’ belief that we are now, as god created us then, at least in so far as our physical manifestation is concerned. Thus one side maintains we are the product of an almighty miracle that is scientifically impossible to qualify, or the product of a long evolutionary process of adapting to our changing environment. Of magic or ape.

Following a presentation explaining his theories pertaining to black holes, the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking was asked in a pre-prepared question how he reconciles his scientific theories with his religious beliefs. The response by the oddly American accented gentleman from Oxford was succinctly: ‘That is why I am not a Christian.’[ii]

The Emerging Church or Emergent Church movement is a recent religious movement of the late 20th and early 21st century. Its agenda is to cater to disillusioned Christians of the post modern world, modernising the faith so that it may attract a more youthful congregation or those disenchanted with the stasis and institutionalism of traditional Christian denominations. Dr. R. Todd Magnum, Associate Professor of Theology and Dean of Faculty at Biblical Seminary notes: ‘Emergents’ seem to share one common trait: disillusionment with the organized, institutional church as it has existed through the 20th century (whether fundamentalist, liberal, megachurch, or tall-steeple liturgical).[iii]

In this context, the term emergent is used as a source of opposition to the current structures of power and influence, rather than as defining an early stage of trajectory towards becoming integrated within such institution. To filter the usage of emerging within contemporary art through this reading places an emerging artist as one opposed to the established structures, institutions and perceptions of importance rather than artists in the infancy of their artistic practice.

Theories of emergence, as used in disciplines such as systems theory and epistemology, also describe the way emergent behaviours are often formed when individuals interact as a collective. Though to notice them as they start to appear, ‘the emergent behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to be self-supporting.’[iv] As a collection of younger artists, those presenting works as part of this project, this temporary isolation, conflate the idea of ‘emerging’ as a defining term through the regressive influences permeating their practices. Progress seems redundant as a linear development, as the works favour antiquated technologies, historical positioning and psychological primitivism. Modern technologies are cast aside as both means of production and implication on the subject matter within the works. Their concerns are located with various historical contexts, not always determinedly specific, as a departure from a pointed contemporaniety towards something verging on more eternal and universal concerns. This blurs both a sense of now and a sense of then to envisage a future affected by multiple and possibly conflicting narratives of temporal development.

Not only is historical temporality reorganised within some of these works, but also the perspective of how narrative is established and executed in a physical and conceptual form. Some of the shamanistic and conspiratorial agendas at play here use outmoded and redundant methodologies to decipher current concerns. As if deeming the failings of our current existence are the result of adopting the wrong evolution of thinking processes and the mistaken direction with which our societies are developing, The propositions here are not necessarily resolved nor definitive, but studies of how we may have diverted from a tangible concept of evolution, or indeed whether to evolve is a positive outcome in any sense. A series of regressive experiments in altering our course, or at least, confusing our assuredness of forward, of progress, of development, of future.

The works engage with alternative art historical cannons and methods of understanding, as if alluding to entirely different referents and value systems. Excavated histories to indicate different trajectories that differ to our understanding of logical development. Thus, the idea of the ‘emerging’ becomes something entirely different to its parlance within contemporary art, as youth metamorphosing into something presumably held to be more fully fledged. This would suggest a natural course that is predefined in its hierarchy and the direction in which art exemplifies a progressive development of conceptual and physical thinking and manufacturing. As each step seems a logical predecessor towards the next, what can we make of gestures that encourage us to walk backwards, or in an entirely different direction, or to simply not walk at all? If this could be considered a process of devolution, or at least a stasis of evolution through non compliance, then where to from here? Or perhaps a multiplicity of evolutions can exist simultaneously, as certain elements progress in one way while others progress in opposing ways, creating a symbiotic relationship between evolution and devolution in a perpetual oscillation that can only be interpreted as change, rather than ever regarded as development.

Mark Feary & Simon Maidment, 2008.

[i] In 1973, Devo played their first gig – as a sextet. This line up performed only once.

[ii] Stephen Hawking presentation, The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Cheltenham, England, 7 October, 2007.

[iii] Q & A with Todd Mangum (6 October, 2007). Catalyst for Missional Leadership at Biblical Seminary, www.c4ml.com

[iv] www.wikipedia.org

A West Space Project curated by Mark Feary & Simon Maidment

25 July – 2 August 2008, West Space, Melbourne. 8 August — 28 August at University of Southern Queensland Gallery, Toowoomba

Collapsing ideas of progress as a necessary outcome of evolution, this project presents new and recent works by a selection of young Melbourne artists whose works reconsider myths, paganism and anthropology. Incorporating sculpture, video, drawing and installation The Devolution Project considers regressive tendencies within the context of emerging art practices.

The Devolution Project features new and recent works by Sherry McLane Alejos, Belle Bassin, Jon Orth, Alasdair McLuckie, Natalie Ryan and Kellie Wells.

The individual projects are located within various historical contexts, not always determinedly specific. They mark a departure from a pointed contemporaneity towards concerns that are more eternal or universal.

The featured artists are all recent art graduates from art institutions in Melbourne, with the majority presenting major solo projects at West Space throughout 2008. The Devolution Project presents a snapshot of artistic practices currently emerging out of Melbourne and a platform for analogous practices to be presented together.

The Devolution Project was a West Space Project curated by Mark Feary and Simon Maidment that will be presented at West Space, Melbourne from 25 July – 2 August followed by the University of Southern Queensland Gallery, Toowoomba from 8 August — 28 August.

Link to project at West Space.