A Confrontation With Falling

Twenty Minutes


Twenty minutes before
I have to be somewhere
I open the window, open
a beer, smoke a cigarette,
think these thoughts.

The rain has stopped
light grates on the top’s
of things. This is happening,
this is happiness I think

all twenty minutes of it,
or ten, at least, or maybe
not even that, maybe just
the moment it takes
to think it.



If it is True

If it is true and if
for an hour
all things were possible and
in this hypothetical world
rain bent towards us, trucks
rocked us, the highways
turned us round
so that we drove for hours the other way –
light of lights on us
if all this is true
if by chance it came upon us
light of the lights of far suburbs
if that was real



The Barest World

the barest world is enough I’ve heard it said
just one old man driving along the highway
the white cabin of his mind, its purr and loneliness.

The barest world
the rain falling into my espresso
is not enough, ever, I know:
in mist the white sky
the white southern ocean
beyond this heavenly
apartment block.

Image courtesy of Matthew Monteith

“I am a citizen of the world” Socrates claimed. This notion, pursued subsequently both by the Cynics and the Stoics has come to define a certain attitude towards difference, best described by the political philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Being a citizen of the world, nevertheless poses certain difficulties. In what ways can we travel through the world for instance, and how do we experience and react to real difference? Can this experience, moreover, be an aesthetic as well as an ethical one? The French author Victor Segalen gave much thought to these questions in his posthumously published, but unfinished Essay on Exoticism: an aesthetics of diversity.

Exoticism is diametrically opposed to nationalism, as Tzvetan Todorov has shown. Where nationalism seeks to praise that which is known and familiar, that which is not the other, exoticism performs the opposite process by praising what is unfamiliar simply by virtue of its difference. In both cases there is a relative value judgement, here is better than there, or vice versa. Whatever the case may be for nationalism, there is a paradox at the heart of exoticism, because exoticism is a value judgement based on ignorance. Knowledge is fundamentally incompatible with exoticism since whatever is known and familiar cannot, by definition, be exotic. And yet, as Todorov makes clear, the absence of knowledge is irreconcilable with the admiration of others – we cannot rightfully admire something we don’t know anything about.


Nevertheless, exoticism, as a form of self-criticism has offered numerous writers a means of critiquing their own society. Todorov traces this tendency as far back as Homer, to Book 13 of the Iliad. At that time the most remote population known to the Greeks was the Abii, who, Homer proclaimed, are “the most righteous of men”. “At the bounds of the earth”, Homer writes, “life is easiest.” In Greece, the implication runs, men are greedy or cruel and life is hard.

During the 16th century, European naval exploration, and the European discovery of the Americas in particular, provided writers with a ready-made image of the other onto which they could project the enduring ideal of an imaginary Golden Age. Amerigo Vespuci’s description of indigenous North Americans , in which he outlined a peaceful and sexually liberated society without laws or rulers or temples or private property, offered a startling counterpoint to European society. It was descriptions such as Vespuci’s that established a model for the subsequent notion of the noble savage, and upon which Montaigne’s portrait of ‘cannibals’, in its turn, was based. “This is a nation”, Montaigne wrote:

... in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon – unheard of.

Despite the radicality of this passage for 16th century France, such a description nevertheless operates by virtue of a particularly reductive or negative sort of reasoning. The exotic exists here only by virtue of what it is not. There is a fundamental absence in this picture – an absence which seems essential to any portrait of the exotic and which is perhaps both an ignorance and a lack of interest in the reality or life of the object beyond its symbolic value. Similarly, the early photographic portraits of indigenous people, such as those taken by Edward Curtis of American Indians, or Antoine Fauchery’s photographs of Australian aboriginals, describe an essential absence, a posed and de-contextualised Noble Savage. This de-contextualization was abetted, at least in part, by the long exposure times then required of still photography. As the critic and essayist Elliot Weinberger has explained, early photographic portraits during 19th Century required that the subject remain posed in isolation. The resultant images speak of difference perhaps, of curiosity or desire or a particularly truncated form of strangeness, but not of lived reality.

By the end of the 19th century, the exotic places that Montaigne could only imagine were becoming increasingly accessible for European travel, trade and tourism. Even men with as little money as Paul Gauguin had in 1891, could find their way onto ships headed for various colonial out-posts in the South Pacific. For Gauguin, European society represented "everything that is artificial and conventional." 19th century exoticism can be seen therefore, in the context of both Marx and Nietzsche, as a response to precisely this feeling of lost authenticity; a response to the loss, in other words, of clear or immutable value in the face of the relativising power of capitalism. According to Harry Harootunian “exoticism must be seen as an attempt to redress the imbalance between quantity and quality.” As the market increasingly determined what and to what degree things had value, the desire grew for a time and a place where those seemingly eternal values – the good, the beautiful, the natural, still prevailed. For Harootunian furthermore, 19th Century exoticism fulfilled a further psychological role, performing a crucial displacement by inventing a tropical, distant and relatively harmless other, to replace Modernity’s conflicted relationship with its true other: the industrial worker.



Victor Segalen

In 1904, Victor Segalen, a twenty six year old French doctor, author and critic, began writing a series of notes towards a possible essay on Exoticism. Segalen, whose article Gauguin dans son dernier décor had been published earlier the same year, was certainly entranced by the exotic experience he recognised both in Gauguin’s paintings, and in Tahiti itself, where he visited Gauguin’s hut and interviewed those who knew him. Segalen aspired to the exotic, but he came to despise the popular, and to his eyes, debased iteration of the term – its colonial presumptions and its exclusively tropical connotations. “Clear the field first of all.” he wrote in a note to himself, in 1908:

Throw overboard everything misused or rancid contained in the word exoticism. Strip it of all its cheap finery: palm tree and camels; tropical helmets; black skins and yellow sun; and at the same time get rid of all those who used it with inane loquaciousness … my study will not be about programs offered by travels agents like Cook, nor about hurried and verbose travellers … what a herculean task this nauseating sweeping out will be!

But Segalen never finished his notes, and had barely begun the essay itself, when his body was recovered in the woods, near his hometown of Brest, in 1921. The likely cause of death was a haemorrhage caused by a deep cut near his ankle. Between his first and last entries, eighteen years had passed.

In his posthumously published Essay on Exoticism Segalen sought to separate exoticism from the practices of an earlier generation of colonial travel writers, a cast of tourists he called the Pseudo-Exotes, or “the Panderers of the Sensation of Diversity. Moreover though, Segalen’s task was to sever exoticism not only from its tropical fixation (there’s not much arctic exoticism, he noted, but also, more importantly from its geographical, specifically colonial definition. Exoticism, he thought, must be about time as well as place, about the past and the future, about the exoticism of living in this epoch and not another, an exoticism that offered “an escape from the contemptible and petty present.” Similarly, an essay on exoticism should include the exoticism of nature and animals, of men and women, of aliens and other worlds. For Segalen, Exoticism should be understood as “nothing other than the notion of difference, the perception of Diversity, the knowledge that something is other than one self.”

Most importantly though, Segalen understood exoticism as an aesthetic experience; the aesthetics of difference. “Exoticism’s power”, he wrote, is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise.” This experience was something that could be willed, it was an artistic predisposition that belonged, in the Nietzschean sense, to the great artist. To this artist, the artist as traveller, Segalen gave the title Exote. By sheer force of personality, in other words, the Exote is that individual who revels in the “eternal incomprehension” of difference. Exoticism, Segalen wrote, “is therefore not the kaleidoscopic vision of the tourist, or the mediocre spectator, but the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savor.” The true Exote, accordingly is “the conscious being … who finds himself face to face with his own self”, which is to say, the Exote is the artists who recognises, in the other, his own otherness, even from himself. “In conceiving of himself” Segalen’s final note reads, the thinking being “can conceive himself only as something other than he is. And he rejoices in his diversity. In this sense, Segalen foreshadowed the surrealist project which sought to promote and create the shock of difference, the marvellous in the everyday – an ambition exemplified by Leautremont’s famous dictum: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

While Segalen attempted to sever exoticism from its colonial impulses, and from the processes of industrial capitalism, which threatened to absorb or destroy difference itself, his notion of exoticism as an aesthetics of diversity nevertheless remained rigidly amoral. In fact, Segalen proposed a chapter entitled The Exoticism of Moralities, in which he intended to celebrate “the moral shocks” and “the great dramas and beautiful agonies of races.” The great cosmopolitan ideal of multiculturalism, in which numerous cultures live harmoniously together, was anathema to Segalen’s exoticism. Instead he favoured disharmony, inequality and incomprehensibility, the “impenetrability of races” and “the treason of languages”. Furthermore, Segalen distrusted democracy and espoused an “absolute condemnation of feminism” which he considered “a kind of monstrous social inversion”. “Let us proceed from the admission of impenetrability”, he wrote. “Let us not flatter ourselves for assimilating the customs, races, nations, and others who differ from us. On the contrary let us rejoice in our inability to ever do so”.

True to the spirit of the times, Segalen’s exoticism remains trapped by its own extremism, one verging at times on paranoia. He equates difference with sensation, and sensation as the purpose of life itself, and yet, as Todorov has pointed out, it is perfectly reasonable to enjoy and promote difference, without resorting to a philosophy that privileges this difference above all else, including universal equality. Furthermore, by broadening exoticism to describe the experience of all difference, even the difference of minute variation, the term itself threatens to become meaningless.

Despite its contradictions and its many ethically problematic assertions, Segalen’s “Essay on Exoticism”, as his translator Yaël Rachel Schlick has rightly pointed out, nevertheless retains a distinctive and important place in the ongoing dialogue around ideas of globalization, post-colonialism and difference. Todorov, singled out Segalen as the person in the first half of the twentieth century, who “gave more intense thought to the experience of exoticism than anyone else in France”. Indeed Segalen’s notion of the Exote has come to occupy an important place in Todorov’s thinking. As a conclusion to his chapter on Exoticism in his On Human Diversity, Todorov outlines ten portraits or types of travellers: the assimilator, exemplified by the missionary; the profiteer or businessman; the tourist who prefers monuments to people; the impressionist – a type of “perfected tourist who nevertheless remains “the sole subject of his experience”; the assimilated or immigrant; the exile – an immigrant who avoids assimilation; the allegorist, who like Montaigne’s example above, speaks of foreign people in order, merely, to describe his own; the disenchanted who believes that everything worthwhile can be found at home or, by extrapolation, within oneself; the philosopher – a sort of hypothetical subject position in which there is both a lesson to be learned and, simultaneously, a lesson to teach, and the exote, after Segalen, a type of traveller characterised by his or her fragile lucidity, by the “precarious balancing act between distance and identification”.

And yet I wonder if there is not something Todorov overlooks in his critique of exoticism, something Segalen himself circles around and approaches but almost loses sight of in his attempt to turn diversity into an abstract universal principle. Why, I wonder does Segalen persist in using the word exoticism, when surely “difference” or “diversity” would have done just as well. In October, 1911, whilst travelling in China, Segalen asked himself the same question. The word exoticism, he wrote:

is now so bloated that it’s about to explode, to burst, to empty its contents. It would have been wiser to avoid such a dangerous term – a term charged and yet so ambiguous – and to forge another in order to reroute or break with these lesser meanings. But I preferred to take the risk and keep this term, which still seemed good and solid to me despite the bad uses to which it had been put. After giving it a thorough delousing, I wanted to try and restore to it – along with its initial value – all the primacy it once possessed. … Exoticism. It should be understood that I mean only one thing, but something immense by this term: the feeling which Diversity stirs in us."

But what precisely does the word exoticism confer, which the word diversity alone cannot? The answer to this question I think, lies in exoticism’s particular, constitutive absence. It is the absence of knowledge after all, which turns something merely different into something exotic, just as it the absence of context which renders Antoine Fauchery’s photographs of Australian aboriginals exotic. And yet it is precisely this absence which grants exoticism its power, its primacy, and, as we will see, its mystery.

On the one hand, an absence of knowledge can pertain to simple ignorance, to laziness or inattention. In another way however, at a cosmic level, absence of knowledge is a defining human characteristic – an essential, unavoidable and potentially creative position, a precondition in other words, for curiosity, religion and art and the site, precisely, where possibility exists. Segalen’s exticism gives us a way by which we can begin to distinguish between these two types of absence. It is the Exote, as Weinberger insists, who “transforms the merely strange into mystery” . Absence of knowledge as mystery, in other words, is the point from which the imagination is unfurled.

In June 1911, Segalen lamented the discovery of a round earth. “On a spherical world” he wrote, “to leave one point is already to begin to draw closer to it!… This is where tourism began! From the moment man realized the world was a sphere.” Elsewhere he makes another, exclamatory, somewhat aphoristic note to himself: “Where are the distances? Where is the mystery?” In Shanghai, 1917 he returned to this idea: “the first voyage around the world must have been the most disenchanting”, he writes. “Luckily, Megallan died before his return. (…) There was no longer any utter Remoteness in the World.” The heart of Segalen’s exoticism, it seems to me, is not diversity or difference per se, but rather the experience of the unknown, an aesthetics of mystery. Understood as such, mystery is an absence that points beyond itself. In this sense, Segalen’s exoticism is not simply the confrontation with incompatible realities, but the point at which the human imagination meets this incompatibility.

It is worth recalling Todorov’s first example of exoticism. For Homer, The Abii symbolise, surely, not only an imaginary counterpoint against which he could judge his own society but also an idea about distance and knowledge, about the limits of the world, about the people who stand at the very brink of the boundless, the otherwise unimaginable. To invoke the Abii, is to begin to imagine what exists beyond the Abii.

At an aesthetic level then, Segalen’s exoticism points towards an absence that lies beyond the limits of one’s own world. In a world as thoroughly mapped as the one we inhabit today, an aesthetic approach to Cosmopolitanism might ask, indeed: where are those distances, where is the mystery?

Innovators 2
@
Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts

Saturday, 30 June 2012 - Sunday, 29 July 2012

Maryanne Coutts: Asylum. Watercolour on Paper.
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Hermione Merry and Henriette Kassay-Schuster don’t really look the same at all. They have different coloured hair, different accents, different ways of articulating their ideas, and yet I had the uncanny feeling, when I met them in Carlton the other week, that I was talking to Siamese twins. This is worth mentioning not only because their installation HH is a kind of theatrical self-portrait, but also because it’s concerned, at a fundamental level, with the idea of the double, the doppelgänger.

HH is an extension of a previous work in which the artists filmed themselves listening to a fractured and reassembled recording of D.M. Thomas’ controversial novel The White Hotel, a book that charts the violently sexual fantasies of a young Jewish woman in the years preceding World War II. In this footage, projected in HH onto a strange, smoking pyramid in the middle of the gallery space, we watch the involuntarily responses of the two artists; the minute, twitching movements of their faces as they register in their own, otherwise inaccessible way, the shock of the text. We can think of this footage as a type of unconscious, double-self-portrait, an attempt to register those involuntary, internal, private reactions. And yet these projections are not so straight-forward. The two faces, seen upside down, merge into one another. They shift and bend in the smoke, they change as we move around them and they pass through the walls of the pyramid into the space beyond. Nothing seems stable in this work. Are we looking at two real women or at many versions of a single, imaginary character?

The rather uncertain connection between public and private ideas of self is crucial to Merry and Kassay-Schuster’s work. We hear for instance, the sound of their voices intoning, repeatedly, their own names. These utterances work in at least three ways. Our names, after all, are a type of portrait or mask with an indeterminate relationship to our own identity. Similarly, to hear our own voice is to register the excruciating unreality of our own sense of self. Finally, to say one word again and again is to drive language to the point where it breaks down, the point where it becomes something else: incantation, or delirium perhaps, or dream.

Kat Clarke’s work is likewise concerned with this tension between public and private notions of self. In Clarke’s videos we see people responding to a series of questions, and yet we’re not sure exactly what those questions are. We see the dull corners of their rooms, their home furnishings, the inelegant, utilitarian shapes of their furniture and bathroom cabinets. We watch them twist awkwardly or we hear them struggle to articulate something. They seem both restrained and impelled by a set of criteria that remains hidden from us. What are they trying to tell us? What are they trying not to tell us? What are the rules of this weird game? There is something tragic to these portraits, something almost horrific watching these people who are suddenly aware of themselves as beings. I want to cry and laugh at the same time.

In her recent work, Clarke has taken, as a site of investigation, the share-house – that space not quite our own, in which, poised between dependence and self-sufficiency, the most intimate parts of our lives are shared with near strangers. In a previous work, Clarke put herself through a series of share-house interviews, those vaguely traumatic encounters in which we confront, not only a panel of polite, interrogatory strangers, but also our own self, or – more accurately – the self-we-sell-our-self-as. In the present exhibition, Clarke has turned the camera toward other people. Is this an interrogation or a kind of perverted therapy? And who does it serve? I think of that wonderful scene in I Heart Huckabee’s, where Jude Law’s traumatised character keeps repeating: “How am I not myself? How am I not myself?”

Clarke’s interest lies in the exposition of these hidden selves, in the unarticulated spaces between these selves and in those seemingly arbitrary and discreet characteristics – desires, secrets, petty irritations or the choices we make at IKEA for example – which combine to form these selves. Alongside the videos, curiously, she has installed an agglomeration of heavy, steel frames; minimalist forms around which the audience is forced to navigate. I’m struck by how jarring they are in comparison to the intangibility of these videos, how definitive and unanswering beside these fleeting half-thoughts, these almost arbitrary images and these words that simply disappear. They are like architectural skeletons or rooms that have not yet been possessed by our uncertainty, meaningless forms that are somehow waiting to be filled.

Bonnie Lane’s video work explores precisely this uncertain territory between meaning and its opposite. In one room we see a series of projections in which the ritual of packing and unpacking is repeated ad nauseam. In those ordinary moments between departure and arrival, the tedious and the exhilarating exist side by side – the promise of the unknown interlaced, more often than not, with the achingly familiar. It is perhaps telling as well, that Lane is currently occupying an artist’s residency in Los Angeles. In the Age of Terror, (if that’s what we still call it) there is also something threatening (and threatened) about these videos, a distinct element of surveillance or paranoia or voyeurism awaiting revelation. But what do we hope to find among these ordinary, intimate belongings?

In another room we see a series of observed vignettes collected during Lane’s various travels around the world: simple, everyday moments filmed in New York, North Melbourne, Berlin, New Mexico, Utah and Los Angeles, but which could just as easily be from anywhere. A man lies sprawled on a bed for example, asleep amid the ordinary, domestic chaos of his room. We can just make out his breathing, the almost indiscernible rise and fall of his body, but nothing else moves except the fan on the ceiling above him. In another video, two shoes hanging from a telephone wire twist in the wind. These moments are almost nothing, just ordinary, random movements, like any other. And yet, seen like this, they seem to breathe with significance. In my favourite video of all, a hot-air balloon rises ever so slowly above the rooftops of a city. Perhaps it happens every day, who knows, but when I watched it, my heart leapt into my mouth. As it gradually turns in the blue sky, we are able to read, written across this improbable contraption: DIE. Then: WE. Then the full German sentence: Die Welt. The world.

There is a very thin line between everything and nothing, I realize. This is also the space from which Maryanne Coutts’ Throng arises. In particular, Coutts’ work confronts our paradoxical relationship to the media image, to those scenes of immense tragedy, which are inevitably rendered ubiquitous and unreal. “That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper" Proust once wrote; "thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe … are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat.”

Coutts’ remarkable 180-piece watercolour painting depicts a boat on fire off the coast of Australia. We understand at once where this image comes from and that the people in this picture are asylum seekers. At the same time, therefore, it is an image, which is both abstract and specific, referring both to a real event and also to a wider, geopolitical situation. And yet Coutts asks us to look at this image in a way that is different from the way we might look an image in a newspaper or on the internet. To begin with, we are looking at a painting. A painting cannot pretend to be reality. Furthermore, we are asked to see this image as an accumulation of specific detail, as a system of information. The elements of the picture, like pixels, are here made apparent. But why is this important? And to what does this picture aspire, if not reality?

John Berger has suggested that every good painting attempts to create a tunnel between the artist and the object being studied. The relationship that is enabled by this passage, he argues, is a reciprocal one. In other words, every object, be it a tree, or a fish, or a photograph of something else, actually wants to be seen. Just as Magritte’s pipe was not an actual pipe, equally, Coutts’ painting is not a painting of a sinking boat, but rather a painting of a photograph of a sinking boat. In a world of three billion people, amid the 24 hour throng of trivia and suffering we call the media, perhaps it is enough that every now and again, one of these news images is accorded the dignity of actually being seen for what it is.

The relationship between painting and technology is also a useful way of understanding Lachlan Petras’ work. Next door, in the smallest room of the gallery, Petras has installed a rotating wheel fitted at three points with video screens. The screens play footage obtained from The Singapore Aeromedical Centre, in which we see high-performance aircraft pilots subjected to Human Centrifuge Testing, a collaborative simulation used to gauge responses to the effects of extreme acceleration.

Petras makes objects or groups of objects that I hesitate to call installations. They are more self-contained than that. Left to my own devices I might have called them scenarios; scenarios which, at one level, extend and interrogate the idea of painting. These scenarios ask us to bare witness to something he describes as “painting’s battle with the machine”. Petras calls these scenarios “The Site”, which is a better term, calling to mind, as it does, The Zone, from Tarkovsky famous 1979 film, Stalker.

In Petras’ art, the Site is a test space, a self-contained area for experimentation and play; think for instance of a doll’s house or, indeed, an art gallery. But the Site is also a zone of action where strict formulas or propositions are enacted in the real world – where abstract principles are asked to become material realities: a laboratory for example, or a nuclear test site. Chief among such Sites is the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, where protons are made to collide with one another at enormous speeds. And it’s here, in the search for something nicknamed the God Particle, at the point where general relativity meets quantum mechanics, that knowledge begins to break down altogether. Petras’ tiny paintings depict this moment, the violence of enormous force working on miraculously infinitesimal matter, the point where form begins to gives way. It’s no coincidence that these images are the size of icon paintings; that’s what they are.

The work of Chris Jones is similarly preoccupied, I think, with the nature of the Site. But whereas Petras seeks to contain these spaces of heightened intensity within strict boundaries, Jones’ very irreverent art tends to defy such limitations: it leaks out in all directions, it migrates between mediums and genres and locations, and it spreads like a virus or a rumour.

In 2010, when Jones won the $10,000, Duke Art Prize, he unleashed upon himself a storm of such hysterical criticism that he may as well have dumped a severed dog’s head on the gallery steps instead. The winning piece, a text-painting that worked like a misread newspaper headline: THE LIVER IS THE BUCKET KICKED THE RABBIT wasn’t just incomprehensible, it wasn’t really visual art either apparently. What’s more, it was a bad example for children. And these were just his fellow artists talking – the hate mail had other things to say. And yet this controversy was precisely the sort of thing Jones’ work feeds off. All of a sudden an artwork, concerned in part with the declaratory absurdity of the newspaper, was being reproduced – in newspapers.

For the Innovators exhibition, Jones has suspended a banner across the front of the Linden building: Happy Birthday Coach Oppewall. In order to ask what this work means (if such a thing is ever possible) it’s necessary to ask where it operates. What is the site of the work? What is its relationship to the gallery in other words and to the street the gallery looks out on? Consequently, what is its relationship to an audience – to those in cars, or those walking past, at night perhaps, alone or together or drunk? Furthermore, if someone was to seek out the significance of this phrase (certainty not a difficult task in itself), where is the artwork then? Jones’ art has a particular ability to double back on itself and to actually produce its own space the way a labyrinth or a type of infinity can be cheaply made between two mirrors.

It was about three a.m. when my mother called from the hospital. I was asleep in my parent’s bed. She spoke very calmly and said that he had died. My first thought was that I should go back to sleep for a few hours, but my mother told me no, that now was the time to come. I got up and woke my sisters one by one and said: “Dad just died”, twice, softly and then we drove together through the empty streets.

My mother was sitting beside his body, stroking his cheek with the back of her hand. She had lit candles. That she had thought to bring them surprised me and the shadows of flowers loomed and bristled in the firelight as we moved around the bed. A set of rosary beads lay beside a vase and the machines that had kept him alive had been switched off and pushed into the corner of the room. His mouth had fallen open and would not be closed and his lower teeth seemed odd and small. They reminded me of the teeth of a fish. And I remembered that my father had cooked a fish on my parents first date. Here is a man who can cook, my mother had thought, and was fooled because he never, really cooked again. But as I looked at my father lying there, at his soft, cold skin, at the tattoos on his arms that had lasted forever, the wolf and the skull, I felt grateful to that fish that had given itself up in the service of that dinner, that had helped my mother to believe in him. That I owed my whole life to a fish didn’t, at the time, seem absurd.

At the moment of death, according to the Tibetan tradition, the life-force is thrown backwards, and the intermediate state, The Bardo, dawns and continues to dawn for a period roughly equivalent to the time it takes to eat a meal. Then, the one who is guiding the death stands face-to-face with the one who is dying and says: “O nobly-born so-and-so, listen. Now you are experiencing the radiance of the clear light of reality. Recognise it.” It is a light that can be heard, a “liberation by hearing.” And yet, such spiritual efficiency is so rare that the dying person is more often than not unequal to the task. They cannot bear to remain in the presence of the Clear Light or they cannot hear what they need to hear or they hear it perhaps, but they do not understand the language. In this case, they are condemned to descend lower and lower through the various afterlives until they are reborn into the cycle of suffering. And if a blind turtle was to swim in an ocean, rising to the surface for air only once every hundred years, the chances of this dying person being reborn as a human, would be roughly equivalent to the chances of that turtle putting its head through a small golden ring that happened to be floating somewhere on the surface of the water.

From Night with Horses

I have this feeling
tell me if I'm wrong
that I am special and
will outwit death.
It's tommorow already.
I can hear the sound
of two electrical applicances.
Very soon I will be asleep
thinking about things
that do not make any sense.
And then you and I
will walk again and my father
will be alive and then
we will not
do that again and he
won't be.

It rains on the city of Melbourne - more like mist than rain and more like a town than a city. The tallest buildings have been halved by cloud and the trams come out of the distance with their shoulders hunched, spurting water and sparking - it seems like a dangerous combination, and surely more Melbournians die of electrocution than we are told about. Perhaps their corpses are thrown into the brown river that sluggishly divides the city in half, that is almost impossible to cross sometimes, and which may or may not be full of crocodiles. In the gardens, bright and strangely green in the rain, the last yellow leaves are like light bulbs, strung up and abandoned after some peculiar, local celebration. Surely it had something to do with football. Everything here has something to do with football - its what's gives this otherwise very reserved, this very private city its strain of anarchy. Last night I watched the end of the match in a pub that seemed to breathe in and out with the fluctuations of the game - filling and emptying and finally filling again for the last 20 minutes of abandonment and desperation during which time grown men threw themselves at one another on the small and silent television above the door and we all yelled. A large, exotic flower on the bar kept knocking me on the head. The rain outside caught in the headlights of the cars going up and down Brunswick st. and a line half a mile long formed mysteriously at a place across the road where the only indication of entertainment or advantage was a large sign saying Hamburgers.

There are bats here, who live upside down in palm trees and large rats called possums who are not afraid of anything and die in great numbers of, in fact - electrocution - as they leap from one wet power line to the other. The air smells of rain and smoke. I don't think it will ever stop raining and i am happy for that, even if it means parts of Melbourne are to be washed away. I want the churches to come sailing past, or the terrace houses of Carlton to get caught in the reads at the bank of the river, like muck. I would like to set fire to a street of rose bushes.

One last thing: yesterday, or perhaps the day before someone called me by accident from a number I didn't recognize. I heard them moving around from inside their pocket I suppose. They were listening to a violin concerto. I don't know much about these things, but it was very beautiful and so I put the phone on loudspeaker and set it on the table while I ate my Vietnamese noodle soup. Eventually they turned the music off and moved about for a bit and then left the house. I heard them walking down the streets. I couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman, but then I heard them open another door, climb the stairs and enter another room. If they had of seen the call in progress and spoken, I don't know what I would have done. I would have hung up, I suppose, like someone who is caught out, like a teenager. After fifteen minutes they hung up without saying anything. I have been thinking since then, of putting a record on, The Koln Concert perhaps, of calling them back and leaving my phone on the table. Or of setting fire to something in the rain, and letting them hear it burn.

for k.

Morning. Us fallen
or rising. Either way.
Rain pours
into the building site
below my window
into the clay
beneath the city
filling the world
with unspoken
happiness.
I have forgotten
almost everything
that happened
last night.
It is peaceful.
I love the traffic and
the grey polluted sunrise
and the screaming
teams of crows
that gather and part
on the mountains
or the chimneys.
I love you too -
does this make sense?
You are breathing
somewhere.

Scream of bird or cat or
rusted gate: a single note
opening in the night, in the rain
opening and unreplied to.
Wind and wind,

for Hammo and Anja

Sunrise and Sunset (Detail) 2011 By Sharon Billinge

When I first met Mark Wingrave in his studio in Brunswick, he used a phrase that I’ve since come to consider as a talisman and as a key, not only to his own work, but also to the work of the other six artists in this exhibition. We were speaking of the Russian poet Elena Shvarts, whose wonderful and mysterious poem I Was Born With An Unlined Palm, is central to Wingrave’s present exhibition. In poetry, he noted, as in the process of translation itself, there is an experience of “meaning in delay”. We begin to decipher, to look or to read, and for however brief a moment, there is an interval – a space of not-knowing. Wingrave’s recent work deals explicitly with this space of not-knowing and in particular with the correspondences and the disjunctions between two, often incompatible, practices; poetry and painting.

The title of Wingrave’s exhibition, Unparallel describes a paradox. Poetry and painting, text and image: these are languages or mediums that run parallel to one another; they share affinities and longings perhaps, they move in the same direction and yet, for the most part, they do not touch. What does it mean then to become unparallel? In Wingrave’s work, communication between these two languages becomes possible but only by means of translation – an imperfect process of approximation and intuition in which meaning is not only delayed but is also lost, transformed and re-imagined. Wingrave’s paintings, which draw upon traditions of Russian and concrete poetry, Cyrillic typography, and abstract and optical art, are, in once sense, like diagrams of that space of delay.

There is an element of destruction to this process, I realise. It’s as if Wingrave is taking apart these two languages piece by piece, as one might dismantle an engine. Reduced to their essential elements they begin to resemble one another: the shapes of letters become enigmatic again, optical, while the bare arrangements of pattern and colour exist, almost like language, on the edge of sound. “To find out what something is,” Wingrave says, “you sometimes need to destroy it.”

The tendency towards destruction is also a feature of the sculptural work of Michael Bullock. For Enlightenment Figures Bullock has painstakingly recreated (and slowly destroyed) Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famous bust of Voltaire. The original was modelled in 1778, shortly before Voltaire’s death and was obviously intended to recall the portraits of Classical Roman dignitaries. Bullock’s version however is modelled not from life but rather from a reproduction of the sculpture that he found in Saigon, where it was being used as a drawing aid in an art school.

Bullock’s process involved carefully mapping the structure of the Vietnamese ‘original’, dividing the three-dimensional skull into discreet, two-dimensional components, up-scaling these components and then reassembling them in paper and glue. Finally, this dinted and distinctly unmonumental paper sculpture was cast in plaster. Plaster, Bullock told me, is particularly good at “holding light”.

Sculpture, by its nature, has always dealt with the play of opposites: light and shadow, positive and negative space, destruction and creation, presence and absence, and the oscillation or the transposition between the hard and the soft, the enduring in other words, and the ephemeral.

Looking at Michael Bullock’s particularly melancholy sculptures, it’s worth considering this play of opposites not just in relation to material, but also in relation to the East and the West. What is Voltaire’s enlightened skull doing in Saigon you have to wonder? What does it mean, this mass-produced, colonial relic, in the context of globalised, Vietnamese culture? Bullock’s work deals specifically with the traffic of such objects and with the migration of the ideas, which these objects represent. In an age or technological reproduction he is concerned, not so much with repetition and sameness, but rather with the unavoidable production of difference, however small, and with the unpredictability of cultural exchange. As Europe crumbles, I realise, Bullock’s sculptures acquire an uneasy quality, an element of the prophetic.

In Trace#2, Julie Shiels’ sculptures and shadow-works contend similarly with questions of mass production and cultural exchange, evoking equally dystopian possibilities. Shiels has cast the three-dimensional spaces left behind by the discarded plastic packaging of various consumer items. The two dimensional shapes of these absences stretch across the wall like the shadows that rise up in the light from passing traffic. In these looming forms I recognise the silhouette of a great pendulum or the ominous globe of a CCTV camera and in the arrangement of these uneasy, sculptural castings, there’s the semblance of a hieroglyphic text, a coded script in the process of being written, a language composed entirely of absences.

Viewed individually, I wonder how to think about these glittering objects. They are like jewels or jewellery. The light catches in them. Are we supposed to desire them, as we once might have desired the objects to which they refer? Have we been fooled again into wanting more stuff? Or is there something also slightly repulsive about them, something pubic to the black string imbedded inside them, or, in their oiliness, something like the blood that flows back into the canister of the syringe? Could this somehow be the point: that the objects that fill our lives are both harmless in themselves and menacing in their proliferation? I gaze down at my iphone, as I write this.

They are at once ghostly, surreal, futuristic, desirable and disquietingly sexual, these sculptures. And yet at a critical level they betray the dimensions of loss and waste, the expenditure of energy, the human resourcefulness and the utopian desires that lie beneath the historical process of social change and progress that we are living through, that we are each, inadvertently, writing.

Approaching the work of Marc Freeman and Phil Edwards, I think, similarly, about the artist as a producer of objects, in a world overwhelmed with objects. For Action Stations, Freeman and Edwards are working in collaboration for the first time together, a process of discussion and experimentation that’s central to the show, and which they seem quite good at already. They bickered amicably, and corrected each other’s sentences when I went to meet them in Freeman’s studio the other week. Unlike most artists, Edwards pointed out, it’s musicians who really know how to collaborate, and it’s this musical model, which informs the playfulness of their work together, diffusing the primacy of the singular, unimpeachable artistic self.

The artist’s job is to make art. What does this mean? What constitutes an art object? When is a piece of art finished and, in the realm of abstraction particularly, what constitutes its success or failure? “I’ve thrown away my artworks twice,” Edwards told me, “and both times I threw out the wrong ones.”

Action Stations is a sort of riff, I think, on the nature of these questions, the title deliberately evoking a process rather than a finished set of objects, a state of being-ready-for-something-to-happen. It’s also an experiment with the idea of an exhibition, an experiment steeped in a particular history of art that encompasses the Abstract Expressionists, passes through Rauschenberg’s “crazy movement”, his genius for recycling, and enters the 21st century via Pop. Despite what some people think, Freeman says, these questions never went away: questions of arts’ relationship to its own past; issues of light, colour, gesture, movement, beauty and ugliness; arts’ relationship to space, to the gallery and to the objects of the outside world.

There’s not much point talking about the individual works in this particular exhibition, because as I write this, neither I, nor the artists themselves know what they’ll be. “We’ll make and make and make”, they told me, “and then we’ll edit and edit and edit”. This is the state of not-knowing, that I mentioned above. “Things that are unresolved contain questions,” Edwards told me. “Things that are finished become dead.”

And yet, sometimes, dead things are not finished. Looking at Betra Fraval’s blackened, uprooted tree, at her charred heart, we are invited to think of death precisely as a state of becoming, as a process of transition. The title of Fraval’s exhibition “The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter, is taken from of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and from the first section in particular, The Burial of the Dead. For Eliot, the burial evokes not only a funeral, but also a kind rebirth, an awareness of the way death and destruction are only part of the cycle of nature: “The corpse you planted last year in your garden”, he asks, “has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

For Fraval, nature is both threatening and threatened. I think of forests, for instance, as the source of myth and nightmare and of forests turned to wasteland, to fields of woodchip or ash. And I think of the bushfires from which some of these very materials were salvaged: how do we distinguish between the nature that destroys on the one hand, and that which is itself destroyed? In Fraval’s delicately eerie paintings similarly, nature seems to exist both as family and as stranger, as something to which we belong but which, at another level, remains (or has become), profoundly other, accessible by means of a sort of magical thinking we have grown unaccustomed to.

Looking at these deer that have come to edge of the forest, I am reminded of the “unspeaking companionship” which John Berger described in his essay Why Look at Animals? (1977). According to Berger, animals first entered our imagination “as messengers and promises. With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” These deer, Fraval told me, were drawn from one of the first night-time photographs taken of animals in the wild. It is a remarkable source-image, capturing, hauntingly, the doomed but briefly magical encounter between nature and technological modernity. It is an appearance that is, at the same time, the prelude to a disappearance.

Fraval’s paintings feel to me like memories, like the ghostly semblance of an image that remains after I have closed my eyes, a natural photographic imprint on the inside of my eyelids. Is that space distinct from my minds eye, from my imagination?

The oscillation between presence and absence is also a fundamental aspect of Sharon Billinge’s work. Billinge’s exquisite wall paintings are made, more often than not, to disappear, to be vandalised by the audience for instance, or, in the case of Sunset, to be painted-over and lost when the show is finished. What does this fact, I wonder, reveal about the way she conceives of her own work?

Billinge’s paintings, prints, and installations deal firstly with the nature of time. On the one hand, the murals-to-be-destroyed succeed in speeding time up, by reducing the life-span of the work to the point where it becomes terminal, or in other words, to the point whereby its existence is defined by its immanent demise. Similarly, Billinge has established a distinctly performative aspect to her practice that requires her to literally race against time. She gave herself four days to start and finish Sunset. “I am addicted to the tightrope,” she says.

Conversely, Billinge is also interested in slowing time down. Elsewhere she has made a series of startling mono-print portraits of a young girl in the various stages of blinking. And in Sunset, Billinge has chosen to depict an extended, (slowly changing) moment of light, an event defined both by it repetition, its ordinariness and by its brevity, its preciousness. On an airplane sometimes, a sunset can last for hours. How does this altered time scale affect our relationship to beauty? Similarly, Billinge’s painting extends the act of perception. Sunset ultimately pauses a moment in time, but not in the same way as a photograph does, since a painting, as a work of craft, is constituted by time itself, by the many hours that have been spent in its creation.

Billinge’s process also reveals an ambivalent relationship to the art object, its preciousness, its value as commodity, its potential for endurance, as well as to the tradition of beauty. Her allegiance is to the process itself, she says, to the physical and emotional act of perception rather than to the finished object. And yet her work cannot help but be beautiful. She paints a sunset – by definition a scene of almost clichéd loveliness – but then she allows it to be broken by the architecture of the building, by the dull fact of a doorway. She has inherited and perfected a tradition of realism and yet she pushes herself toward abstraction, she puts herself under pressure, she rushes things or she exhibits her scattered paintings on the floor like junk. And for Sunset, she has worked from digitally manipulated photographs in order to distance herself from that same realism she has worked so hard to master. Thinking of Billinge’s process in the context of the other Innovators, I wonder if it’s necessary to somehow destroy meaning in order to continue to make it.

Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts

26 Acland St, St Kilda.
Saturday, 31 March 2012 - Sunday, 6 May 2012