ITERATION: AGAIN (and again and again ...)

Iteration: Again is a series of thirteen commissioned public art works taking place across Tasmania over the four weeks from 18 September to 15 October. The whole shebang is produced by CAST, with curatorial overview by New Zealander David Cross. A swag of local and international artists have  been brought together by seven further curators to create events and placements around Hobart, Launceston and a number of points in between.

At a curatorial conversation at Sawtooth ARI, Launceston, on 22 September, Cross outlined the project, identifying his interest in commissioned temporary public art. The curatorial brief was based around playing with ideas of duration and time, with thinking about public art through the framework of time in particular ways. Stories, chapters, iterations, cycles came into play, along with the opportunity to include performative, live dimensions to the work. Each work was to be remade, re-iterated, displaced and revived in a series of audience engagements over the term of the project. This allowed for an audience to engage with, and to follow, a work over a number of iterations - typically four 'moments' over the duration of a project, with a significant multi-faceted works creating a series of overlapping termporal frameworks. The specificities of places and their histories were crucial for the curators, with an emphasis on research.

Launceston theatre-based outfit Voice Theatre Lab, led by Robert Lewis, came up with their contribution to the project with Two Houses, curated by Damien Quilliam, Curator of Contemporary Art at the QVMAG. The scene was Civic Square, Launceston, between the brutalist centre of bureaucracy, Henty House, and the centre of early colonial commerce, Macquarie House.

 

The action developed through five performances (two to go at time of writing) references the tale of the two houses of Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets. With Voice Theatre Lab's emphasis on the coalition of movement and sound built around both Buto and Western voice practices, the slow mesmerising action is well-supported by oddly affective non-verbal sound pushing many of the emotional buttons.

  

Rob Lewis, Laura Bishop, Chris Jackson and Shannyn Foon bridge the gap with all the tension the symbolic red tape allows. A sound installation emanating from Macquarie House inhabits the space between the Friday 5.00pm performances.

Two Houses - Voice Theatre Lab

Civic  Square, Launceston
17/9 (noon), 23/9, 30/9, 7/10, 14/10 2011 (5.00pm)

MORE PINEAPPLE, PLEASE

A booklet on the pineapple, specifically in Queensland and in cooking, published somewhere between 1928 and 1940. Good use, in the cover illustration, of the iconic Glass House Mountains to cradle the cornucopia of pineapple; sliced, crushed, reclining decorously. The romance of the pineapple, indeed ...

A question as an aside to the use of the Glass House Mountains in this manner: is there a particular genre of images, largely the stuff of tourist marketing and tourists' snapshots, that is unconscious of any of the varied metaphors the placement of subject against this backdrop may suggest? An example that comes to mind is a photograph by Russell Drysdale of his second wife, Maisie, the image now held in the National Gallery of Victoria. (NGV 1964) Truly a touristic sublime.

TROVE

I've been playing around in Trove, the National Library on-line document "place",  a site of books and newspapers and images, from all over Australia, now delightfully accessible without having to battle brittle microfilm in creaky machines in the library itself. It is an addictive site, an archaeology dig in which you can assemble lists and tags. Totally engrossing for the researcher/editor, particularly so for a proscrastinator, it is possible to spend hours correcting transcriptions from blurred and wrinkled newspapers from across the country. As you correct, you are lulled into the language of the time and place and the idiom of the press: early 20th century  court reports from Cairns and coastal shipping from Cooktown, the "social pages" of post WW2 Sydney.
Today I found in Trove a site I had been looking for in other, more traditional, places (the dreaded microfilm, bound copies of newspapers, card indexes, people's memories and so on) for some time. I had been told that I had the wrong city: all I knew was that the place was named "Eltham" and most of those I spoke too pointed me gently towards Melbourne. But there it was, on the web, a guest house in Hobart, Tasmania, c.1910, run by a woman who once gave a gun to a gentleman astronomer on his way to Port Davey... but that's another story. For me, this place is now real, even though Google Street View has proved its 41 rooms, tennis courts and extensive gardens have given way to a parking lot and a block of offices.
Trove can be found at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/

MAPS WITH A MEMORY (OR TWO)

Maps both topographic and cadastral have always held a fascination for their layering of representations of physical forms with the immateriality of social and political experience. Rather than stemming the flow of memory, or correcting its creative excesses, maps open up longer histories, alternative narratives, secret files.  Parish maps and first grants, road alienations, accretions and erosions, rights of way, subdivisions that existed only on paper, streets that ignored the boggy or precipitous nature of the landscape they appeared to cross, were the things of cadastre. Combined with aerial photography, the satellite data from SPOT and Landsat, and now the voyeuristic probing of Google, mapping generates pasts and futures for otherwise familiar –and sometimes familial – places. As Jay Arthur has written:

A map marks a relationship between the cartographic and a landscape that includes intention, memory, experience, imagination, emotion and the influence of other relationships. To map a place is to be able to hold the place in the mind.

Here naming commemorates past ownerships, formalises old relationships, signifies influence and community standing. Cadastre - the overlaying law of word, line and symbol provides '...an intersection of language and place'.

It is, of course, possible to read the landscape itself (or, as happens here, the landscape as imaged) - in which case each reader extracts the communicating language of their own discourse from what stretches in front of them or lies beneath them: the body of the land: 

Arthur, Jay 2003, The default country: a lexical cartography of twentieth century Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2