WORDS FOR IRENE BRIANT

OPENING REMARKS AT IRENE BRIANT'S COLLECTED PIECES, BETT GALLERY, HOBART, 19 APRIL 2013

A series of moments:
In Fullers Bookshop, the Hobart one, the day before I am to meet Irene Briant and view the work in progress for this exhibition;
Bookshelves - books shelved under 'Art', 'Architecture', 'Design'. I notice a number of books dealing with objects, collecting, finding, assembling - clearly a trend, perhaps 'post-archive;;
I pick up Orhan Pamuk's The innocence of objects. As an object it is, itself, beautiful. But I must resist the purchase ... it is impossible to own every book with'object' (noun, singular or plural) in the title.
I leave the shop.
Irene's dining room, the next day. We speculate, somewhat ruefully, on keep ahead, rather than simply abreast, of trends such as 'objects'. I mention Pamuk's book.
In the short essay I have written to accompany this exhibition I start with the next 'moment'Bett Gallery
Irene produces, not a rabbit from a hat but within the same applomb, a copy of Pamuk's The innocence of objects, and puts it on the table.

With that gesture, when I look at these works, these Collected pieces, I can now only do so through some reference to Pamuk's earlier, related, novel, The Museum of Innocence. [I may need to explain here that Orhan Pamuk has created, in Istanbul, the Museum of Innocence, which makes material the narrative of a novel of the same name, which tells of the collecting of pieces for this museum, those which are catalogued in a second book, The innocence of objects. This complexity of dealing with the parallel realms of the museum and its external realities, the fictions that can be established in the assembling of objects from everyday life is something I find often here, in these collected pieces]

Each object, each assemblage, is a series of moments. What I want to do now is present a few extracts from Pamuk's novel (short extracts, given the book is over 700 pages!). What I require [from the listener/reader] is that you consider Pamuk's words in their relationship to Irene Briant's own beautiful narratives.

So, to begin again, another series of moments:
My life has taught me that remembering Time -- that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present -- is for most of us a rather painful business. When  we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments ... the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realisation that this line per se has no real meaning -- a snese that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore -- we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the"present" can bring us enough happiness to last a century.  (Pamuk, p.397)

In the light of the moon, each and every thing tucked into the shadows, as if part of the empty space, seemed to point to an indivisible moment, akin to Aristotle's indivisible atoms. I realised then that just as the line joining together Aristotle's moments was Time, so, too the line joining together these objects would be a storyu. In other words, a writer might undertake to write the catalog in the same form he might write a novel. (Pamuk pp.704-5)

After all, isn't the purpose of a novel, or a museum, for that  matter, to relate our memories with such sincerityas to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?  (Pamuk p.463)

 It is difficult not to reduce this consideration of objects into textual moments or aphorisms: thus eah element must be taken in, with care. Pamuk again:
The past is preserved within objects as souls are kept in their earthen bodies, and in that awareness I found a consolding beauty that bound me to life. (Pamuk p.686)

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory ... (Pamuk p.445)

And just when you are lulled into the pre-transcendent warmth of museumification, you get this:
Everything that was expressed, everything that was to be understood, though, was deeply rooted in an ambiguity we found entrancing. (Pamuk p.477)

All of a sudden, it's obsessive, addictive, perhaps (given the content of the novel) sexually intriguing. And then an expression almost melancholic:
I realised that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.  (Pamuk p.415)

A little moment of self-indulgence, perhaps: Pamuk - or his protagonist, Kemal- are capable of that.

I think again about the place of the artist for How do we move from the individual object to the collection as a totality? Indeed, Pamuk requests that:
All the objects in my museum -- and with them, my entire story -- can be seen a the same time from any perspective, [so] visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time. (Pamuk pp.712-13)

A final moment, the conclusion of these words, and of the catalog essay:
'Irene Briant's Collected pieces is about objects rather than illusions. Each moment is caught in an arrangement that obeys a temporal rule, where a concern for placement precedes an intuitive sequencing of each narrative. Like time, each piece has its own texture, dimensions, extraordinariness .. and we want to hold it in our hands.'

SWERVE

From 31 August to 7 October 2012, at Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason get together as Art3, to present Swerve, an extravaganza of re-purposed objects relating to the most function areas of the domestic interior. Lots of plumbing here! The installation was also a wonderful survey of the art of the print, or perhaps just work transferred to other surfaces, some unexpected (such as shower curtains) and others more usual (tiles) - although the latter were not quite what you would find in most suburban homes. Launching the show was great fun, watching the audience navigate the domestic encumbrances to act like gallery goers. My opening remarks follow:

Untitled, photograph by Art 3, for Swerve, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

I have for a long time been attracted to the work of Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason, the work that they produce as individuals. I enjoy the allure of line and tactility of surface, and the chance to appreciate rather a lot of suspicious grungy objects. Somewhere between the methodical and the madness, I can find much to engage with. But in putting these three, Art3, together in one space the few similarities of practice seem to be accentuated, just as the disjunctions mess with your head. At first meeting, it’s actually quite confronting.

However, I realised when I saw an earlier outing by this collaboration, Space Antics, at Burnie Regional Gallery in 2011, that what disturbs me most about the project is the pervasive reference to the domestic. This is not my natural sphere of action, so when I made my usual dive into the dictionary of etymology for ‘swerve’ and found that it comes from the Old English sweorfan, to rub or to scour, it simply confirmed a lot of my suspicions about the project’s attachment to the kitchen or bathroom sink. I was only mildly comforted when Sue Henderson told me yesterday that the work ‘exploded the domestic back onto the walls’. Good spot for it, I thought, wondering whether the walls would now need a scour or a rub as well.

But, on reflection, it seems that this collaboration is all about a certain sort of activity experienced many ways. It is about action that is both deliberately performative – in that each element’s very materialising is a signification of its swerve – and it’s also the imposed yet serendipitous interaction that results from others’ physical interventions into the gallery space. You, as audience, are also participants, continually rematerialising, or performing, the work. Just in arranging yourselves for these formalities you will have realised that these objects – the carcases and panels; the discontiguous elements of other, imagined, ongoing domestic spaces – are also performers. So it is that the meaning of each performative act can be found in the coinciding of any object-as-carcase and how that object is enacted.

For all its disparate parts, this collaboration between three artists, and between you (the audience) and the outcomes of that collaboration, also relies on a cohesive context, its situatedness. Without this clarity, this whimsical locative referent, the continual repetition of the performative act would be groundless. That this site has been materialised by three individuals, and with its expected – indeed inevitable  – making and remaking during the course of the exhibition, is what gives the project’s performative nature a fractured and disconcerting edge. It is domestic, yet you are not ‘at home’. (It is truly umheimlich). The trace of continual process indicates the expected lines of sight, those directional gestures, and syncopated patternings yet these connections are continually blurred, bothered, and broken by mirrorings, by leaps in scale, by fluttering surfaces and strangely unfinished structures. Wallpaper and drawer liners, overtly asserting respectability, instead hint loudly at another life beneath their decorative surfaces. Three languages declaim, repetitively and almost simultaneously, the coordinates of each element. You try to follow directions but encounter static … really, it’s better just to relax and listen to yourself.

While the battle between dodgy green formica and white-tile-terrorism is a pervasive presence, and the discovery of mould, watermarks, and some very suss stains hint at various domestic failures, this space has its own purity. It has its own momentum and its own system of values, within the bounds of its activity. In this it refers – admittedly obliquely – to another vernacular, where swerve, as noun, can refer to an intoxication, a toxicity, often from illicit substances; to getting into a rhythm, to taking a positive direction and, inevitably, to sex. I’m not sure about that link but it’s probably something to do with plumbing, or maybe those stains.

But it does take me more logically to Judith Butler who wrote, two decades ago now, in Bodies that matter\; the discursive limits of sex that:

Performativity is not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the convention of which it is a repetition.

Here, Sue Henderson, David Marsden and Penny Mason, provide within the bounds of a gallery, multiple iterative acts that emerge from the norm as visually playful, spacially disruptive and cognitively critical.  Swerve is all that a performative should be, and I take great pleasure in declaring the exhibition open – and that, too, is a performative.