From Pillar to Post
The exhibition ‘Pillar to Post’ considered the spaces of Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) galleries from a variety of physical, material and conceptual perspectives. In particular, the exhibition addressed the unique physical peculiarities of SCA’s ageing colonial-era architecture. It also alluded literally to those base architectural elements that support the exhibition spaces themselves. The exhibition title read also as comparison, a grappling with similarities and differences. What is the difference between a pillar and post? Is it primarily a contextual question or is the difference inherent and fundamental? More broadly, ‘Pillar to Post’ deliberately juxtaposed a disparity of contrasting and complimentary intergenerational artistic approaches. The viewer was led to weigh-up the extent of resonances and rupture among and between exhibited works. The phrase ‘from pillar to post’ additionally suggested the degree to which contemporary life is evermore at the whim of external forces that may continually propel us from one space to another. Depending on our circumstances we willingly or otherwise, move more frequently than ever from one place to another, from one situation to another. Notwithstanding the gravity of these sorts of considerations, many of the artists in this show deployed humour as a response to current realities. That humour was critical, satirical, absurd, awry, self-referential, abstract and figurative. It could be unerringly subtle to the point of invisibility, the possibility of missing the work entirely offering yet another source of potential humour. Some artists in the exhibition grappled with the specific spatial conditions that frame art and its institutions rendering them comprehensible in the first place. Yet others considered space primarily as metaphoric and textual, a container formed of words as much as mortar. Still other artists brought to light the fact that architecture and the architecture of institutions evince their own atmospheres, atmospheres dependent on ambient effects that have nothing at all to do with the expediencies of ‘productive’ work.
Artists responding directly to the architectural possibilities of the exhibition spaces included Rose Nolan, Mitchel Cumming and Biljana Jancic. Nolan, well known for her structural use of text presented A Big Word – DISJUNCTURE. The word itself spanned the main gallery where it was interrupted midway by one of the gallery windows. This rupture made the word difficult to read at a glance. Indeed, the boldness of Nolan’s approach intentionally incorporated a wilful camouflaging of text-as- content. The alternating red-and- white lettering appeared equally as a contemporary deconstruction of historical Constructivist tendencies. While the letters were legible, they appeared simultaneously as abstract architectonic fragments: the ‘writing on the wall’ is always constructive of the place where it is written.
Mitchel Cumming adopted a very different approach though one related in its essentially deconstructive tendencies. The artist had noticed over a lengthy period how discarded blocks of sandstone had been habitually used to prop open various doors around the SCA campus. The ubiquity of this practice went largely unnoticed as there was nothing ostensibly ‘special’ to commend these castaway chunks. Cumming ground down a number of these makeshift door-jambs and mixed the resulting sand with the gallery wall paint. This he applied to the corner of the space. The effect was subtle to the point of intentional invisibility. Close-up though the significantly altered texture of the otherwise smooth wall surfaces became clearly apparent, vaguely aggressive even. Cumming completed the gesture by sawing-off the opposing corners of the partitions, using the wedges obtained to prop open the main gallery doors. Conceptually underlying the work was a reference to the seminal 1957 Situationist publication Mémoires, for which Situationist founder Guy Debord supplied the text and fellow traveller Asger Jorn the design, which famously included a sandpaper cover. Cumming however here acknowledged in the work’s title, Cutting Corners/ Structures Portantes (for V. O. Permild), the book’s manufacturer whose labours have habitually been overlooked. Fittingly, Cumming’s piece incorporated, then crucially reversed, an ingrained but largely unseen habit peculiar to the institution. His literal ‘breaking rocks’ to produce the work, additionally and wittily underscored the background labours of art and of the underlying pressures of the institution.
Biljana Jancic’s Transplant was similarly subtle in its conscious foregrounding of background occurrences. On video, Jancic recorded then overlaid atmospheric effects of light filtering through the SCA galleries over the span of a day. She re-projected the slowly shifting light patternsinto a dark adjacent space, literally transplanting the specificities of one site into another. Casually viewed (out of the corner of one’s eye for example) the projected light appeared a natural phenomenon. However, if we went on to question this poetic and deliberately anti-spectacular effect we soon became aware that the environmental transformation of the site by light could never have been produced in the otherwise windowless and enclosed space where it was shown. Jancic’s work drew the gallery architecture itself into a questioning dialogue about what constitutes our experience of the often disregarded atmospheres of institutional space.
The quasi-ghostly aspects of these examples, the fact they implied an otherness inhabiting spaces notable for their readily apparent historicity, was continued in the works of other artists. Arguably most ghostly of all was the 3-channel video installation, the Apartment Trilogy, by Elise Harmsen. Technically, Harmsen’s contribution was composed of three separate works, Tout va bien and A False Step (2017) and she moved it, it used to be there (2018). These silent black & white videos each appropriated scenes from Roman Polanski films. Tout va bien overlayed scenes from Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) with the artists own re-enactment of them filmed in her own apartment. In A false step, Harmsen used rear-projection images of past family homes lifted from contemporary real estate ads and superimposed them with clips from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) which appeared and disappeared intermittently. In she moved it, it used to be there, the artist’s shadow ghosts Polanski as protagonist of the film The Tenant (1976). The three videos projected onto different walls within the same confined space magnified the overall sense of interiority and claustrophobia already evident in Polanski’s movies. Furthermore, by making herself and her histories the subject of another (male) artist’s narrative, Harmsen both subverted the masculine psychology of Polanski’s originals while simultaneously paying homage to them.
Scott Donovan’s Decline was another work that evinced a sense of historicised claustrophobia. Possibly less ‘personal’ than Harmsen’s, Donovan’s work nonetheless suggested a unique psychological interiority achieved via the juxtaposition of potent images. Staring from one wall of Donovan’s image- orientated installation, was a grim monochromatic portrait of Jan Carl Raspe a member of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) comprised of patients from the Psychiatric- Neurological Clinic of Heidelberg University. Indirectly funded by the Faculty of Medicine, the SPK were in fact part of Germany’s infamous ultra-leftist terrorist organisation the Red Army Faction (RAF) active during the 1970’s. Raspe’s grizzled visage, defeated and menacing at once, fixed the viewer in a kind of visual deadlock. Photographed after his capture by German police, Raspe’s defiant but equally hopeless glare invited us, the viewer, to identify with him and, by association, his political proclivities. Nearby, a black & white photographic image of a swelling wave conjured the impending ruin so beloved of the German Romantics. Yet this was an image both emotive and matter of fact. Nearby, strewn on the floor along one length of wall, lay a series of used blister packs once containing painkillers. En-masse, the audience was left to wryly ponder the extent of pain requiring killing. Most obviously one was be tempted to associate this pain, physical and metaphoric, with the figure of the apprehended terrorist. Nonetheless there was dry humour also associated with the idea of consuming painkillers in the wake of an oncoming tidal wave. Or maybe the pain was wholly the artist’s in contemplating the bungled opportunities of the historic Left in relation to the far-Right radicalism that has become accepted orthodoxy today? Collectively, Raspe’s portrait, the rising wave and the scattered medicinal waste, implied an ominous sense of isolated incarceration. A gaol- like claustrophobia was deflected onto the space of the white-walled gallery, once a mental institution.
Related to Donovan’s in their overall coolness was the trio of works by Maggie Brink. On one wall Brink exhibited a painting of a pair of almost identical icebergs floating uncannily in synthetic repetition. Another painting in muted green-greys depicted familiar graffiti casually carved into wet cement that read ‘Fuck School’. While the humour inherent to this work was undeniable, there was a weird formality in repeating the artless curb-side scrawl as ‘Fine Art’, painstakingly rendering a casually tossed-off jibe. The sheer predictability and familiarity of this ‘rebellious’ phrase faithfully rendered in oil, formalised it further making the assertion practically meaningless. A drawing horse, familiar to anyone who has been institutionally instructed in the art of drawing or painting from life, separated the two paintings. Here, the severely approximate ‘horseness’ of the artificial horse was emphasised through an attached makeshift tail and crudely improvised canvas saddle: the art student trained to portray life dreams of real-life escape and the chance to ‘ride off into the sunset’.
Shane Haseman’s series of muted colour photographs similarly redeployed found photographic material. Yet the impulse behind Haseman’s work was one dictated by erasure rather than replication. At first Haseman’s (very painterly) photographs appeared simply a series of handsomely framed monochromes. On closer inspection however it became clear that these otherwise blank works were the outcome of digital photographic manipulation. Particularly evident up-close was the repeated use of the Photoshop ‘stamp tool’. The titles of Haseman’s work likewise hinted at a more complex origin. In reality, and speaking to traditions of fine art connoisseurship, the artist had détourned reproductions of 18th C French Faience pottery (a type of fine tin-glazed ceramics that subsequently fell out of fashion upon the emergence of Wegdewood porcelain and Jasperware). Traditionally, the connoisseur’s task is collecting aligned with the pursuit of knowledge determined by notions of taste and fashion. Here, alternatively, the sheer historical distance of Haseman’s targeted fetish from the concerns of contemporary art, was itself a form of eradication: discourses of ‘the contemporary’ function in any case to remove traces of all that is deemed irrelevant and fundamentally done away with. Haseman’s gesture likewise questioned the assumed cultural elevation of connoisseurship (whether of fine-art objects or contemporary art) according to its proximity to the base capitalist accumulation of luxury items. The connoisseur will always claim their taste is beyond the market. The high prices they pay to uphold such a myth ironically obscures this paradox. Removing the image of the feted object of desire is akin to artificially accelerated historical processes. What is valued one moment disappears before our eyes the next. The antiqued aesthetic that incidentally arose from Haseman’s series spoke beautifully to the physical context of the aging spaces of the SCA galleries with their scuffed patinas and peeling paint.
Nearby and loosely aligned, Hany Armanious’ work Coin, as befits the title, also grappled with contemporary ambiguities of value. Leaning against a gallery wall was a separate standing section of wall partition. Leaning against this was what appeared to be a piece of cardboard curved over by moisture and perforated by identically scaled holes. Uncannily affixed to the upright wall section was a humble water- cracker. The biscuit, again considering the work’s title, was like a coin but obviously could never be used like one, its relationship formally and absurdly analogous only. This sense of approximation was magnified once we realised everything in this ensemble was actually cast in fine art materials; the biscuit and wall segment were of pigmented resin, the cardboard was solid bronze. Nothing was as it appeared. The initial poverty of the display was overcome by the artful veracity of its remanufacture. Value multiplied through recognising that what we saw was precisely not just ‘any old thing’.
In their own ways, many of the works mentioned above prefigured the space of the gallery as having been somehow vacated. Each differently functioned as a record of an event that had already occurred. Contrastingly, other artists in the exhibition were more concerned with figurative presence. As is the case in many of his previous works, Ronnie Van Hout once again placed himself at the centre of the piece he presented for this exhibition, a 40 minute video titled How to Sculpt. It would be wrong to imagine though that Van Hout was simply playing ‘himself’ in this work (or others like it) or that the video was merely an excuse for narcissistic self- revelation of the artist ‘hard at work’. Rather, Van Hout took as his starting point the generic pervasiveness of Youtube instructional videos. As most people are aware, such videos tend mainly to be hosted by amateurs armed with extremely varying degrees of expertise. In How to Sculpt, Van Hout played the role of amateur artist demonstrating to the viewer (as the work’s title dryly suggested), ‘how to sculpt’. Bypassing High Art expectations, Van Hout’s online artist had in this instance, opted for mashed potato as his medium of choice. Mumbling incessantly over his actions, Van Hout presented a relentlessly casual monologue that varied between the disclosure of self-evident banalities and verbal indications of outright delusion. At one point the artist describes how potatoes contain within them other unborn potatoes, at another he states how the Chinese plan to cultivate potatoes in space and furthermore that potatoes are ‘high up on the spectrum of vegetable intelligence’. Later, the work takes a cosmic turn as the scene shifts from lowly studio setting to the portrayal of an iconic lone potato slowly rotating against the backdrop of a starry sky to the strains of transcendental music. Somewhat akin in spirt to certain works by American contemporary artist Paul McCarthy, Van Hout’s ‘messy nonsense’, remained on the other hand wholly within the domain of the domestically prosaic. Certainly, the desire to escape the tedium of everyday routine has provoked the ‘talents’ of any number of obsessional hobbyists only too-keen to publicly expound their singular knowledge.
Figure-focused too were Jelena Telecki’s duo of paintings attached directly to two of the SCA gallery’s arched columns. These thematically pursued the figurative connotations of architecture yet from an especially ironic perspective. On the left, Telecki showed an image of a stocky male with conspicuously luxuriant hair wearing nothing but socks. In the painting, the figure stands heroically erect against a white classical pillar. The work’s companion piece portrayed another naked man, thin with long lank hair, standing with legs delicately crossed playing a flute. Like his counterpart, he wears nothing but socks. Entitled respectively Big Pillar and Allegory
of an Institution, these works grated absurdly against the phallocentric pretensions of institutionalised power. From a certain viewpoint, these masculine figures could have been seen to represent classical virtues of ‘strength’ and ‘creativity’ respectively. That is, if it weren’t for the fact that both appeared simultaneously ludicrous and vulnerable: the foundations upon which architecture expresses its domination over subjects is always shaky, always questionable.
Overtly concerned with figuration Justene Williams’ Project Dead Empathy – the fear of tiny holes continued the artist’s recent use of store-bought (and found) mannequins. Hardly human, these standardised representations of ‘ideal’ human proportion, were in this case recomposed to accommodate monstrously elongated limbs and other interchangeable appendages. These further conjured various automotive parts, a reading promoted by the artist’s use of vividly hued auto-enamel paint. In one sense, Williams’ choice of colours made her work inherently painterly, as did the overall frontality of its composition. Less painterly and more expressly architectonic though, was the way Williams’ figures were rudely and emphatically inserted through a half-collapsed industrial shelving unit. Limbs jutting out on all sides, lying on shards of broken-up fibreglass covered in barnacles, the figures in Project Dead Empathy – the fear of tiny holes portrayed an overwhelming sense of disillusion. The graphic luminescence of the work betrayed darker undertones. Lying spread-eagled, alone or in amorous embrace, each figure in this horizontally arranged composition wore VR goggles. The viewer was left to ponder the paradox of synthetic humans contemplating an even more synthetic virtual reality. Unless of course, the reality in which they were immersed was in fact the reality of our own human world, including the world of contemporary art.
An explicitly figurative focus was equally tantamount in Sean Kerr’s real-time video, Lost. Kerr’s artificially rendered world depicted a single naked male, an AI avatar, engaged in a series of apparently meaningless routines, intermittently running, dancing, walking and aimlessly standing. The artificially embodied figure was truly anonymous, a cipher rudimentarily, though painstakingly, composed of mere body parts. He appeared lost on a featureless, unending plateau of steel lattice concomitant in its synthetic appearance. There was something classically existential about the predicament of Kerr’s character: what to do in an infinitely smooth space emptied entirely of content? Indeed, the only point of focus apparent in the work arose in the guise of an elongated purple monolith. The virtually rendered cylindrical object, somewhat reminiscent of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – a Space Odyssey but by no means as self- consciously eerie, flashed in time to the strains of a tinny instrumental synth version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control. At one moment a computerised voice we assume is the figure’s, dully (and hilariously) recites Ian Curtis’ angst ridden lyrics. At other times, the figure dances frenetically to the same song only to then suddenly run off in the opposite direction. In the end, Kerr’s Lost literally evoked the ‘Pillar to Post’ title, both by way of the inclusion of the phallic illuminated pillar-like object and via the character’s furtive scurrying from one (non-) place to another. Kerr equally appeared to be parodying the many incidences of slavish devotion to digital 3-D rendering increasingly common in contemporary art. He proposed instead a scenario which, rather than knowingly surreal and ‘outrageously’ ‘weird’, was intentionally pointless and ‘stupid’. At the same time, Kerr introduced to the work references to local New Zealand art mythology: Lost begins with a stuttered series of computer-voiced expletives directing the audience to ‘get-lost’ and ‘get the fuck out’. These paraphrased an early performance work by artist Peter Roach enacted at ELAM Art School Auckland, the school where Kerr lectures. Roach it seems was expelled for the work. Contrastingly, Kerr’s ludicrously offensive actor is perpetually lost within the institutional confines of his own virtual conjuring.
My own work for this exhibition, A-Head, depicted at the end of a nine metre length of industrial air conditioning duct, an anonymous head alternatingly facing on-coming and passing city traffic. The title obviously played on the subject of the video, a head simply watching. Of course ‘the head’ is a traditional object of sculpture. At the same time the title suggested the notion of art as a privileged means of penetrating to the future, to another, better, time. Here though the future was as noisy and banally repetitious as daily life can be. It is typical for art to seek representations of the fantastic and formally ‘exceptional’. Often however such focus diverts attention from the typical material and routine aspectsof everyday existence: presenting the ‘amazing’ does not make life amazing, especially if primary access to it is determined by capitalist exchange.
To possess a contemporary image of utopic freedom is to render its emergence in real-life merely symbolic, an object of possession. A sense of dystopia permeated many works in this exhibition and fittingly so. Contemporary life it seems is ever more bounded by managerial imperatives. The drive to extend the Self via knowledge and experience is today frequently reformulated as a series of calculable and monetised ‘outcomes’. The collective spatial interplay of works in ‘Pillar to Post’, created a broader sense of possibilities just as all notions of futurity are essentially spatial. The spatial and thematic dialogues established through the exhibition served to produce a greater ‘outcome’, more than a sum of separate parts. Frequent recourse to humour and absurdity only emphasised that much of what passes for reasonable and rational in our era is, from another perspective, ludicrous and unnecessary. Although horribly overused, the neologism ‘Kafakesque’, still resonates strongly with contemporary experience. Who knows, continuing to draw attention to this contemporary scenario via installed example might be a means of promoting alternative constellations of a less bounded future?
Alex Gawronski
Catalogue essay for PILLAR TO POST, 2019, Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), Rozelle, the University of Sydney, Australia.
Artists: Hany Armanious, Maggie Brink, Mitchel Cumming, Scott Donovan, Alex Gawronski, Elise Harmsen, Shane Haseman, Biljana Jancic, Sean Kerr, Rose Nolan, Jelena Telecki, Ronnie Van Hout, Justene Williams
Curated by Alex Gawronski
*This exhibition is Part I of a two part project the second being, TRANSPLANT, 2021.