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.

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)

JUNCTION 2010

The Regional Arts Australia biennial national conference, Junction 2010, took place in Launceston, Tasmania, 26-29 August 2010. With the themes of Footprints, Threads, Resilience, Momentum, the conference aimed to bring together ‘artists, art workers, volunteers, policy makers and those passionate to learn how the arts connect communities to a vibrant future…’, as the Junction organisers put it.

Princess Theatre stage for keynote speakers 2010
Tea-towel upholstered chairs by Sue Hall

The demographic of the regional arts  – including artists but heavy on facilitation and governance – reflected the ‘deficit thinking’ identified by Kieran Finnane in an article for Art Monthly Australia (#231, July 2010), reflecting on the previous RAA conference, Alice Springs 2008, and a provocation to the Launceston event.  Finnane identifies the framing of the RAA conference through ‘social amelioration … with the majority of the work under consideration being community arts projects’. This, Finnane argues, presents the view of regional life always being in deficit, and the apparently easy conflation of regional arts with community arts, which ‘sells short the variety, depth and dynamism of art, artists and audiences in non-metropolitan Australia.’ There is no denying by Kinnane that there is excellence in arts practice in the regions: there are plenty of examples from Tasmania alone of regionally-based artists who work on a national and international level – Philip Wolfhagen, Troy Ruffels, Kit Hiller, Raymond Arnold, to name just a very few.

Sonja Hindrum (and many volunteers) Pleiades, felted balls
Civic Square, Launceston, 2010

At Junction 2010 the program almost certainly shared many similarities with that of Alice Springs (which I did not attend). The keynotes, however, were decidedly global in outlook. In the presentations by Francois Matarosso and Ernesto Sirolli the most local, community-based projects were conceived and presented within the context of being a part of a web of communities within regions which all held an equal place in their contribution to a globalised environment. Even Jane Bennett viewed her dairy farm and cheese business in blip-on-the-map Elizabeth Town and its venture into arts entrepreneurship through global connections, rather than the restricting  comparisons of a deficit frame. At a secondary level, this globalism was couched in terms of collaborations, a key defining element of contemporaneity (perhaps too often read as only manifested in an urban context) in arts practice.

Community art? Knitting swathed columns on Launceston Town Hall 2010

The Junction Arts Festival associated with the conference was where you found the artists – hundreds of them, and many, perhaps the majority, not participating in the conference itself. Out on the streets the buzz was palpable, indeed it was more of a throb if you ventured to the Junc Room – a circus tent erected in Civic Square – for a night of music and performance and quite a few wines. This evident split between practicing artists (emerging, established, amateur) and arts business (the policy makes and facilitators) may be worth considering by arts organisations in managing any future deficit thinking.

Civic Square, with Junc Room (the big tent), Wild Willow Cafe, Cart de Clarendon (with teapot)
Ross Byers (creator of the Cart) on right, talking to Sonja Hindrum (Pleiades)

Kinnance was reflecting on a conference held two years ago, and there have been shifts in broader government policy since then which are beginning to impact on the regional (and metropolitan) arts. The most pervasive of these is ‘social inclusion’, which will almost certainly seem a continuation of the deficit thinking Kinnane identifies, if with a shift in focus and the imposition of a more directed metropolitan-framed funding model impacting on its implementation. Ironically perhaps, the rhetoric of social inclusion enforces deficit thinking in the arts, by enshrining the arts as solutions to problems of social exclusion in health, law and order, town planning, environmental amenity – the list is endless. When in deficit, or identified as excluded, roll out an art project. It will be fascinating to see how the next conference, in Goolwa 2012, addresses the imposition of deficit (through the rhetoric of social inclusion) and the practice of community through the identification and, occasionally, enforcing of identity through exclusion.

(Disclaimer: I was involved with Junction 2010 at a committee level – but with no input on program content – and as a full-fee-paying delegate).

MADE (Mature Age Dance Experience) performing PANE

Jessups Retrovision window, Charles Street, Launceston 2010

Engaged audience for PANE
MADE performing in Jessups Retravision window, Launceston 2010

And on the final day, with the weather clearing to spread some late winter sunshine:

Four views of The Zero Project, Kings Park, Launceston 2010
Eko Prowato (Indonesia) in collaboration with Ralf Haertel (Tasmania)
Created with zero material budget.



Kings Park, Launceston, Tasmania, August 2010