Affiliated Text

Notes to a Future Feminist Archive, Affiliated Text exhibition # 1, installation shot. Photo credit: Felicity Jenkins

Affiliated Text is a year-long gallery project exploring visual representations of language. Incorporating intertextual, semiotic, linguistic and graphic approaches, monthly exhibitions will examine the cultural and political sphere of language.

Curated by artists Lynne Barwick and Bronia Iwanczak, works on show will include visual art, typography, artist books, concrete poetry and printed matter. The program of exhibitions and associated events commences in March 2015 at 33 Roslyn St, Kings Cross.

www.affiliatedtext.com

Notes to a Future Feminist Archive, Affiliated Text exhibition # 1, installation shot. Photo credit: Felicity Jenkins

Many thanks to Gavin Harris at Cross Art + Books for generously hosting the project. www.crossbooks.com.au

Nick Strike's 'October'

Nick Strike, October, installation detail, 2013. Photo by Iakovos Amperidis.

 
Nick Strike’s art practice is deeply embedded in the concerns of 20^th century modernity: in the development of cinema and ideas of the unconscious, and the accompanying shift in representation from still life to sequential imagery. His work alludes to the psychoanalytic implications of images as well as the mechanics of vision.

In his engagement with the technologies of vision, Strike has often made work that incorporates tools such as projectors, lenses, magnifying glasses and light. He has used these devices – for focusing, distorting and concentrating vision – to excavate the history of image making. His stereoscopic collages, paintings, altered found photographs and film footage, portray the slippages of images, the way they mutate and stem from each other. Strike’s images come with their histories streaming behind them.

Nick Strike’s October includes watercolours, sculpture, found anonymous film, as well as an extracted loop from Sergei Eisenstein’s film of the Russian Revolution, October: Ten Days That Shook The World. The installation uses film as artifact, found object, as text, as reference, as metaphor and as cultural trope. It is characteristic of Strike’s work that the associations invoked by each of his elements are as thoroughly mined as this.

* * *
As you ascend the stairs to the gallery, you note a small monitor propped on the landing. The screen plays a loop of black and white, 1940s footage of a line of divers mounting a staircase, towards a diving board. Your steps replicate theirs. It’s an indication that you are entering a cinematic space.

At the top of the stairs, a framed watercolour depicts a modified scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, where a man and woman, both of whom have assumed fraudulent identities, approach each other in a forest of tall thin-trunked trees. In the background is Mount Rushmore, with its monumental sculptures of the four founding fathers of the United States carved into the cliff face. They represent the symbolic, monitoring eyes of the Law (you have entered psychoanalytic territory). But blocking the presidential view is the dense black monolith that reoccurs throughout Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which now stands between them and the couple.

You then enter the darkened gallery through a doorframe bisected by a pendulum-like clear perspex rod encasing a length of 16mm film footage. Placed on the floor, at its base, is a vintage, black and white photograph of two anonymous couples, each oblivious to the other, hugging in a forest of similarly thin-trunked, tall trees.
 
If you look straight ahead, the first thing you see is a sequential series of another seven, sombrely-toned watercolours. They are hung at an unusually low level: closer to your gut than your eye.  It’s Hitchcock’s couple again. They continue their advance toward each other, though the forest; then they have fallen into an embrace at the foot of Kubrick’s monolith, which has been rotating horizontally behind them throughout the storyboard sequence. In the final image the couple disappear, seemingly taken into the earth on which they have lain together.

Look to your left and you see the door to the gallery has been dislocated from the doorway and wedged at a 45-degree angle into the corner of the room. Some viewers will notice formal echoes here, both to the monolith, and to Richard Serra’s sculpture Strike (and from here to the artist’s surname). On one side of the relocated door is another small screen, on which the opening scene of Eisenstein’s 1928 film October, plays in a loop. You see the famous re-enactment of the sculpture of the Tsar being fastened by ropes and violently yanked from its pedestal. On each side of the glass-windowed door, which is lettered with the word ‘October’, is a strip of 16mm film footage mounted in perspex and fastened to the door with scaffolding clips.

On the opposite wall, at the far end of the gallery, is a large projection. It’s the same divers you first saw on the staircase. They are now plunging into the pool from the high board. But you can’t exactly see them: though their surroundings are clear, the bodies have been obscured. A section of each of film cell has been painstakingly burnt by the sun through the artist’s magnifying glass. In the place of each diver’s body is a pulsing, abstracted ripple of melted celluloid. Again and again you watch the resulting mass of swirling, psychedelic colour splash into the black and white water.

Turn to your right and you see a sculpture. An inflated, foil wine bladder has two images attached. Adhered to the reflective silver surface is a photographic still of Kubrick’s 2001, astronaut-hero, David Bowman.  He’s staring straight ahead with a wide-eyed expression. Directly in front, in his line of sight, a copper wire fixes in place a 35mm slide of one of Giorgio Morandi’s still life painting of vessels.

The adjacent sculpture is another strip of film. This time it’s of leader footage, clamped in place, once again, by perspex and scaffolding clips. At its base, mounted on the wall, is a photocopy of the first pages of Rosalind E. Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture. She describes the opening scene of Eisenstein’s October that you saw when you entered the gallery – the toppling of the Tsar’s statue, signifying the dismantling of pre-modern authority and ideology.

There is one final sculpture on the adjoining wall. Eight extension cords (and here you might notice that October signifies the number eight in Latin, and that there are eight watercolours in the storyboard sequence) hang suspended in a line along a short wall. The copper earth wire of each cord has been cut and pokes through a small incision. A chunk of coal dangles from each wire. If you follow the sightline of the row of cords, you see that are precisely perpendicular to the storyboard sequence across the room at the exact point where the monolith has pivoted to its narrowest profile. And here we have another key to the expansive web of references that Nick Strike’s art is made up of. Because in Strike’s associative schema, the extension cords reference (among other things) the ropes that pull down the Tsar’s statue; the lumps of coal represent Kubrick’s monolith in shards, and every element of the installation is similarly linked to every other in a delirious, endless loop of analogies derived from Strike’s reading, viewing and making.

* * *
In a purposeful confusion of names and references, Strike co-opts Eisenstein’s October as both a title and a thematic device. In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss mistakes the Tsar Alexander III’s sculpture for that of his son’s and Strike responds to this error with his own cinematic subplot of names. He has chosen to exhibit this body of work as an unidentified artist in the spirit of 55 Sydenham’s initial premise that viewers would not be told the artist’s name in advance. The play with names continues through the installation – identities are alternatively mistaken, assumed, forgotten, or anonymous. Subjectivity is tenuous: the effigy of the Tsar tumbles to the ground, the divers dissolve even before they hit the water, the couple merge together and then into the earth.

Much of Nick Strike’s recent work has derived from the use of films that feature works of sculpture as props or as part of the film set. North By Northwest, 2001 and October all feature monumental sculptures as key plot indicators. Strike interferes with the films’ narratives as a way of interfering with broader narrative authority and ideological intent. He inserts blockages – physical, perceptual and conceptual obstacles – to disrupt the possibility of coherent vision: the stray monolith shelters the embracing couple from observation, but is also seen broken down into fragments. The divers’ bodies are masked from the audience’s view by light – the medium through which their presence is made visible. Strike’s quotations from auteur film, art theory and psychoanalytic theory are also destabilised by the use he makes of them. Krauss’s error undermines the weight of her text; the monolith, in its numerous repurposing, symbolically escapes the authority of Kubrick’s film, as do Hitchcock’s couple. In Strike’s work the associations created by montage take the place of ideology. They alter and collapse the existing and sanctioned readings of the cultural monuments he selects.

Strike’s found imagery is vintage and that lends his work a nostalgic air. The Tsar, the divers, the merging couple, even the medium of film stock are all on the verge of, or in the act of, disappearing. But Strike’s reference to historical time isn’t a revelling in loss, but a repositioning of contemporary art’s relationship to its past. Rosalind Krauss in Under Blue Cup argues the case for art that maintains a relationship with historical mediums and the white cube of gallery space. She describes post-medium art as aesthetically meaningless; instead of abandoning the conventions of gallery and medium, artists should kick off against the white cube as if from the side of a pool. Krauss’s argument is for the importance of memory to art if it is to retain its specificity and autonomy. Strike’s work is propelled by exactly this type of active remembering and engagement with the cultural monuments, and anti-monuments, of modernity. His art incorporates and rewrites his own previous work as well as the texts and films that resonate with his aesthetic.

In October, Strike makes use of a number of cinematic conventions: time, light, character, narrative and movement. He screens, projects and loops film; renders film into static sculptures and mimics film stills in painted storyboard sequences. His work enacts a tension between still and moving images: either of which is liable to become the other at any given point. After the opening night, the installation was altered. As if editing a scene from a film, the artist removed the foil bladder piece from view. It may, or may not, be replaced by additional work over the duration of the exhibition. Strike disrupts even his own narratives. His installation is a focusing device, a lens through which a montage of interconnected images and ideas pass in a given period of time. Like recalled memories they are unlikely to be seen in exactly the same arrangement again.

Lynne Barwick, October 2013

October, Nick Strike, 55 Sydenham Rd, Sydney, 11-20th October 2013

List of some of Strike’s additional references for October
Victor Shlovsky’s Knight's Move
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo
Chris Marker’s La Jette
Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or
Svetlana Boym’s Nostalgia for the Future
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye
Roland Barthes’s The Third Meaning
Victor Burgin’s The Remembered Film
Lacan’s symbol for the "split" or "barred" subject
Freud’s Primal Scene

India Zegan's Museum of Fathers

India Zegan, Museum of Fathers: Deals # 4-16 (inverted knuckle busters), 2012-2013. Epoxy resin, resin, builders' bog, wood filler, polymer clay, and water-damaged, recycled chipboard.

‘[G]ambling can take possession not only of the future – in the form of feverish expectation – but also of the past… I sometimes believe that most gamblers are the stepchildren of love, whether of parental or sexual love, and that here at the gambling tables they are looking for fate to provide them with an adoption that ennobles them more than the origins that repudiated them.’ [i]

India Zegan has been creating her Museum of Fathers for the past two decades.  Her exhibits include her sculpture, installations and performance pieces, as well as documentary evidence. In a dialogue with conceptual art these works draw on autobiography, gender theory and literary narratives of masculinity and fatherhood.

Zegan’s employment in art institutions informs her practice and the scope of her ambition for her private museum. Her works are often mis-en-scènes for both museums and domestic settings. And they are titled in a mix of the conventions of collection registration and of family law documents. Her studio consists of a workshop and a mutable gallery of exhibiting spaces. In a series of conversations, personal and public, the walls and display units are reconfigured with each new installation.

Zegan is the product of three Eastern European parents who immigrated to an insular and uncomprehending Australia after their respective internments in World War 2 camps. The two men who served as Zegan’s fathers were both gamblers. Neither was able to sustain family obligations. One was a boxer and the other was a punting addict. Zegan had several stints in Children’s Homes and was fortunate to escape the forced adoptions still taking place at the time. In the tradition of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Gregor Schneider who return obsessively to their formative sites and relationships, Zegan’s themes are renewed with each manifestation.

The French romantic painter Gericault is a key influence on this body of work. Of particular interest to Zegan is his Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1822), one of five pictures commissioned to illustrate social and mental deterioration. For Zegan this portrait of an unkempt and disenfranchised man is a representation of the unsayable: of the truths we ignore or speak about in whispers. Another of Gericault’s works, Horses Hindquarters (c.1814-15), is an oil painting of the rumps of twenty-four horses. In Zegan’s reading there are connotations for the unpalatable facts of lineage, and an insistence that we stare down our histories to make visible what has been absent.

From the exterior of Zegan’s studio, viewers can look into a small showcase in which thirteen objects are laid out in the precise manner of museum display. Made up of a variety of builders’ fillers, Inverted Knuckle Busters: Deal Series #4-16, are individual, sculptural imprints of hand-grips. These moulds of the interior of the artist’s fist, also refer to the positions a boxer’s hand assumes in preparation for the sport. The materials evoke the domestic plugging of gaps, but the strangeness of the resulting forms suggest that our most intimate and familiar gestures might carry, and record, more than we can know.

The Deal works consider games of chance and the cards the gambler is given to wager with. Zegan is drawing parallels between her fathers’ betting and her own variety: the precarious finances, and the compromised paid careers and status, which artists stake, with their passion, against possible futures. Previous works in this series have included everyday objects sourced from the deceased estate of the artist’s estranged, biological father. These former possessions, now exhibits in the Museum of Fathers, are mementoes of past gambles. Together the Deal Series make up an investigation of ideas of inheritance.

Zegan’s research into the bequeathal of trauma is evident in works like the installation Playing Field, in which personal identity and responsibility is displaced into that of a gendered group. The bulging, stuffed Y-fronts are satirical portraits: sculptural caricatures of subjects who remain anonymous. In an accompanying performance, Raspberry Slurpee, Zegan assumes the guise of a toppled ‘corner doll’ in the installation space. Also known as ‘sorry dolls’, these are faceless, toddler-sized dummies, dressed in children’s clothes for the purpose of home ornamentation. Designed to lean shame-faced into corners, they too are effigies of unidentified scapegoats.

Hilarious, pathetic and creepy, the over-sized mannequin features in another performance: No More Bing Crosby Christmas. This is set in a second installation, H, which is only visible through the drain-hole of a sink mounted in an external studio wall. Inside is a corridor with a broken, haphazardly decorated Christmas tree, rotating on its side. The artist as sorry doll monopolises the viewing peephole for the duration of the performance, and the audience is only able to speculate as to what is being seen. This is the tragicomic territory of an especially warped family romance. And it is on this fraught and shifting ground of solemnity and tongue-in-cheek, of pathos and humour, that Zegan has constructed her Museum of Fathers.

Lynne Barwick, 2013

Salmagundi Studios, Marrickville Open Studio Trail, March 9-10, 2013

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[i] Walter Benjamin, ‘In parallel with my actual diary’ from Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Vol2, Part 2, 1931-1934, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999

Sara Givins's 'Vanish'

Sara Givins, In Search of Percival Redwood, 2010. Vinyl, pine ply wood, light. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Joy Lai

It’s in my blood…The malady I suffer from has been with me since childhood, and no one but God and myself knows the fearful horror I have had to face the consequences of my crime.[1]

Those words are from the confessions of Amy Bock, a con-woman known as ‘The Masquerader.’ Bock committed numerous petty thefts and frauds in New Zealand in the early 20^th Century. Her crimes included disguising herself as a man, whom she named Percival Redwood, and marrying an unwitting heiress.[2] It’s a story of multiple deceptions of identity, gender and sexuality. And it straddles the contested boundaries of fiction, non-fiction and autobiography with which contemporary culture is currently preoccupied. 

However fascinating the subject, Sara Givins isn’t trying to tell us the tale of Amy Bock’s misadventures or the way her unstable self prefigured postmodern treatments of identity. Givins’ target is the slippages of communication that the story demonstrates, the misrepresentations, ambiguities and misunderstandings, and the claims of language to tell us much of anything we can hold onto.

Givins’ installation In Search of Percival Redwood (2010) takes Bock’s confession and treats it like a found object. She has enlarged, mutated and abstracted the text, rendering it illegible. Brightly coloured opaque vinyl is applied to the window that makes up the front and side of Firsftdraft Gallery. It is a veiling device that entices and prevents clear vision. The pattern is made up of cut-away letter shapes stretching out from a series of vanishing points like hyped up cartoon graphics. Inside the gallery, a sculptural form is echoed and repeated four times in different sizes and permutations. Reminiscent of kit homes and of magicians’ boxes, they are constructed from mirrored triangles of marine ply, masked with the same adhesive vinyl from which more of Givins’ distorted font has been sliced. Givins has deliberately not used a code or a system to generate her hieroglyphs. Each letter has been individually morphed and sweetly cut out by hand. The resulting characters are reflected onto the floor and walls of the room. Some appear almost familiar, like skewed gender symbols, arrows or punctuation marks. But they can only hint and allude to meaning. And the projection of shadows reconfigures with each slight shift of natural light.

Givins suggests that language warps through context, reflection and memory into abstraction. That as soon as we have read, or heard or spoken words, they start to disintegrate and reform as abstracted impressions. And this is what Givins makes material in this installation, with the changes of scale, the mirrored surfaces and the flickering play of light.

Amy Bock’s words have been reconstituted as a delirious, sensory experience. The audience is enclosed by the text, their image captured in mirrors and reflected back as ciphers. Givins’ use of kaleidoscopic colour startles, and then disarms. The work implies that language is a space we inhabit with our bodies, and that it is one of pleasurable disarray.

Givins’ ongoing influences are as much from the worlds of literature, from concrete poetry and storytelling, as they are from the immersive installations of visual arts. Edibleland (2005) at The Physics Room consisted of adhesive vinyl silhouettes and text that spread out over the walls and the ceiling, a fictitious creation narrative of the founding of the Canterbury region of New Zealand. This work also made merry with colour and playfulness. The graphics and the text had the appearance of a child’s fairytale but the rampant desire depicted inferred that Givins’ seduction of the viewer was intended to disturb. In her own version of a confidence game, she misled her audience for their own good, so that they might not be fooled again.

Another of Givins’ works, Swarm 11:9 (2007), was based on the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, in which God punished humanity by creating multiple languages and nations, thus removing people’s ability to understand one other. Givins did not use text to represent this cataclysmic loss of comprehension. The installation took the unsettling form of 119 wooden cutouts of insects in massed flight around the gallery walls. These earlier artworks point to Givins’ ongoing interest in the function of language in myth making and grand operatic narratives. It’s the promise of language and its failures that inform her visual practice.

In all of Givins’ work, language mutates between its potential to disclose and to withhold. In Search of Percival Redwood makes use of both tendencies. Masking the window of the gallery has created peepholes for passers-by. The indecipherable text that reverberates through the gallery is a slow disrobing, teasing the audience and distracting them from the quest. Percival Redwood is an illusion of language. Strip back the veils and there is nothing left to see.

What Givins’ search results in is the suggestion that what is lost or hidden in attempts to communicate is as tangible as what remains. 

Lynne Barwick

Firstdraft Gallery, 2010

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[1] http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=OW19090728.2.336&l=mi&e=-------10--1----0-all (Accessed May 01, 2010

[2] http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/trials-notable/12 (Accessed May 01, 2010)

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, 'Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why'

image courtesy Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and Gallery Barry Keldoulis

 
 Children’s building blocks are not the obvious choice to depict a disaster that was heralded by a confusion of vapour trails on the television, but they are surprisingly apt. Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro have used LEGO bricks to reconstruct images of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion. The nine works are shallow relief wall sculptures. Each one documents an instant from the spectacular few seconds in which the shuttle broke up. The artists have borrowed the exhibition title Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why from Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who perished along with the six astronauts. It was the name of a lesson McAuliffe had written and intended teaching to school children from space. While this could augur a hefty dose of irony, the works have a visual complexity that suggests a more considered approach. The vibrant, pixel patterning of the plastic bricks destabilizes the viewers’ eye which trips over the glossy, uneven surfaces. It’s convincing, yet unfamiliar topography. The commonplace nature of LEGO emphasises the remoteness of the catastrophe and amplifies the quality of sublime conveyed by the original NASA footage.

These new works prompt correlations with the artists’ sculptures and installations that have focused on temporary, mobile or defunct housing. A key early work, The Cordial Home Project (2003) involved the dismantling of an entire weatherboard house to its constituent materials, and the reassembling of the components into a neat, minimalist, rectangular stack in the gallery space. It was an ambitious work and one that announced artists who had emerged with a fully formed theme. They have since elaborated their territory with a multitude of carefully-honed variations. The artists’ working life has been marked by numerous international residencies and a succession of transitory homes, and they have most often made art from found objects and the living environments to hand. In Germany, an old caravan was flattened, cut to size and stacked in precise piles on four shipping pallets. In another work, the residual contents of an abandoned artists’ warehouse were roped together in a glorious, teetering pile. People are absent from the works except as former inhabitants and previous owners of objects. The artists imply that the discards of our consumption define us.

Most critical responses to Healy & Cordeiro’s work have focused on affinities with the architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and the domestic casts of Rachel Whiteread. But their work belongs just as much to the world of measurement and precision, to archives and databases, to Christian Boltanski and the enumeration of loss. Healy & Cordeiro constructed their exhibition Life Span (2009), with 175, 218 videotapes arranged in a nifty monolith. To watch the tapes beginning to end say the artists, would take 60.1 years, the average life span in 1976 when VHS technology was released. Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why consists of similarly sombre works that disguise their underlying message (Remember that you must die) under the comforting cover of gentle wit and pleasing distractions. One of the Challenger works, T+85_blue (2010), recasts the blackness of space as a vivid blue sky, while the billowing smoke plume of the collapsing shuttle has a jaunty, pinkish hue. The other works are also luridly coloured and instantly accessible. In a practice that has concentrated on both minor and catastrophic attrition, on the extraneous goods of homes and lives, Healy & Cordeiro have consistently produced well conceived and resolved, high-end art. There is a calculated tension in their work between the degraded substances they select to work with and the polish of the art processes they apply. Fragments are put back together; the neglected and the ruined are given a new context and purpose, made whole again. However, the works themselves suggest that this regeneration is a temporary state. The construction methods are impermanent and the artists’ work can be easily undone. Healy & Cordeiro have extended their investigation of shelter from the suburbs of Sydney to outer space, from the mobile home to the grave. Everywhere they turn, the casings that contain us are disintegrating.

Lynne Barwick, 2010 
'Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why' was at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, 6 May - 26 June 2010