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Critical Annotation

A significant shift in my thinking about art making has resulted in an equivalent shift in the precedents informing this dossier. I made a decision to (save then) delete practically all my previous dossier entries; only a few have survived the brutal culling.

Last semester I was preoccupied with the vastness of intersectional feminism and struggled to find a conceptual angle. I noticed that being heavily driven by broad critical social theory resulted in a tendency of making overly didactic art. I was encountering what Justin Clemens describes as the fraught relationship of paradox between the socially critical artwork and its exposure to the public realm. Clemens’s writing is a key precedent in the development of my practice, and I often revisit and ponder Preface.

I employed several strategies to offset tendencies of didacticism, the first of which was to impose a rule of making work using only ‘non-art’ materials. I banned myself using paint, canvas, board, collage, pencil, felt-tip pen, crayon, paper, ink, clay and any kind of framing. As such, a key precedent for this dossier has been selecting and collating artists who use materials other than the aforementioned and more specifically who use materials of the everyday (Lou Hubbard, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Zimoun and Erwin Wurm).

The second strategy I employed is reduction. This came about intuitively as I became adversely affected by the aesthetic noise of my previous work. I felt compelled to reduce colour to greyscale and rid myself of the overly coded representational imagery I’d been using. I felt constricted and wanted the space to breathe. I want my practice to find its own poetry and elegance and reduction has proved to be a useful strategy. The process of saving and deleting previous dossier entries is an intentional act of reduction. Aesthetics of minimalism have become a precedent as I seek out artists using reduction (Francis Alÿs, Ed Ruscha and Brent Harris). In order to contextualise my employment of reduction, I have selected theorists and artists within the community of precarious art practices or ‘invisible’ art (Anna Dezeuze, Erwin Wurm, Francis Alÿs and Martin Creed), art that calls into question the role of artist as creator (Steven Rhall, Sol Le Witt), and art activated by audience participation (Franz Erhard Walther, Erwin Wurm, David Cross, Dan Graham).

The notion of critical connection and communication as the locus of social change is a primary precedent for my making and research concerns this semester. Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power are key texts. This research has informed my selection of artists concerned with audience interaction, participation and behaviour (Steven Rhall, David Cross and Erwin Wurm) as well as further research into social scripts or stories and the function of language and/or text in art (Agatha Gothe-Snape). As I synthesise seemingly disparate themes of my practice, I have a particular interest in researching artists who embed emotionality into a minimal aesthetic or onto everyday objects (Brent Harris, Agatha Goethe-Snape and Lou Hubbard). This is reflective of the way in which my work, while using a minimal aesthetic or a strategy of reduction, is concerned with messy, ‘hot’, emotional humans, which is reflexively informed by feminism (Adrienne Maree Brown, Audre Lorde) and my professional experience as a social worker.

Humour, play and curiosity are defining characteristics of my practice. I have been researching the function of humour in art. The type of humour I have selected tends to be related to the unexpected and which functions as an entry point (Francis Alÿs, Steven Rhall, Erwin Wurm and Lou Hubbard).

New precedents in this dossier are practices of performance and movement. As I have progressed through the MFA program, there have been latent themes of performativity in my work. I am beginning to research artists using humour and physicality (Donald O’Connor) and who use movement, gesture and choreography to transgress social norms and rules of behaviour (Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sonia Khurana, Judith Butler).

7 (a). Agatha Gothe-Snape, Rhetorical Chorus. 2015. Preparatory Powerpoint slides

See entry 7.

25: Sonia Khurana, Logic of Birds. 2006. Still from single channel video, loop.

I noticed, very belatedly, that my dossier was almost entirely Western European in its content. Particularly as I begin researching the body and performance it is important that I am critically thinking about whose ‘body’ is the body I talk about when I use such a concept, as Griselda Pollock asks in her essay for e-flux (Journal #92, June 2018) named Action, Activism, and Art and/as Thought: A Dialogue with the Artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the Political Theory of Hannah Arendt, is it not already performing an implicit, still-colonial racism? (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/204726/action-activism-and-art-and-as-thought-a-dialogue-with-the-artworking-of-sonia-khurana-and-sutapa-biswas-and-the-political-theory-of-hannah-arendt/, accessed 28/5/19).

The Logic of Birds is the first iteration of Sonia Khurana’s long-term performance project relating to the act of lying down. This act is a simple gesture loaded with social, cultural and psychological meaning and it has been included in this dossier as it relates to my interest in gesture and performance that seeks to transgress social norms. There are other threads through this work relating to my wider research into critical connections and vulnerability.

In regards to critical connections, Khurana states: “With the “lying down …” project, I have been asking myself: Can the critical possibilities offered by small acts of transgression be considered beyond their value as individual acts, for the potential of their accumulation? And can the dynamic build-up of infinitely small disturbances change structure into movement, a thing into a current?” (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/204726/action-activism-and-art-and-as-thought-a-dialogue-with-the-artworking-of-sonia-khurana-and-sutapa-biswas-and-the-political-theory-of-hannah-arendt/, accessed 28/5/19).

With regard to vulnerability, Pollock proposes that Khurana’s Lying Down anticipated Judith Butler’s writing around “elective vulnerability as a necessary political act when we try to resist in and reclaim the political right to public space, even at the risk of violence” where vulnerability “becomes the only language of resistance we now have” (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/204726/action-activism-and-art-and-as-thought-a-dialogue-with-the-artworking-of-sonia-khurana-and-sutapa-biswas-and-the-political-theory-of-hannah-arendt/, accessed 28/5/19). I have been aware of these writings by Judith Butler (and other theorists) relating to vulnerability and resistance, and intend to read further into these ideas as I progress through the MFA program. I have long held the belief that much of society’s issues stem from vulnerability and our collective shunning or fear of it, resulting in psychological defensiveness and inability to understand one another.

In considering Khurana’s work and how it relates to some key concepts in my own work, it may result in some experimentation next semester with performance (or performative presence, similar to aspects of Martin Creed’s work) in public space.

24: Donald O’Connor. Make ‘em laugh. 1952. From ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (directors). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA

This classic piece of slapstick comedy performed by Donald O’Connor has been included in this dossier as it represents a new precedent. I have commenced research into physical performance, in particular performance based on humour and the absurd. Make ‘em laugh is a pretty good place to start, give it’s hilarious. I was reading about O’Connor’s experience of performing Make ‘em laugh, he recounted the significant physical toll it took on his body, carpet burns and all. There are some other interesting visual and conceptual layers to this performance related to the real/fake; it is a performance for a film on a set, which is set on a film set, and at one point O’Connor runs up a wall, which is a tromp-l’oeil of a hallway.

23: Christian Boltanski. The Life of C.B. 2010 and ongoing. MONA, Tasmania.

The Life of C.B is a reference point for my work You See, I See, We All See, What I See. At MONA there is a bunker where David Walsh contains a 24-hour, live video stream of Christian Boltanski’s studio near Paris, capturing his every move there until his death (https://mona.net.au/museum/outdoor-art/christian-boltanski-the-life-of-cb-outdoor-art, accessed 28/5/19). Although my work does not operate in the same voyeuristic manner as The Life of C.B, it shares an intrusion into the private space of the studio.

22. Martin Creed. Work No. 184: An intrusion and a protrusion from a wall. 1997. Gold-plated silver in / silver out; internal corner. 2 parts, each 4 in / 10.1 cm diameter

Work No. 184: An intrusion and a protrusion from a wall was chosen from Martin Creed’s body of work as it most directly relates to my work You See, I See, We All See, What I See. This work could almost disappear into the background of the gallery space, much like Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. What peaked my interest in Work No. 184: An intrusion and a protrusion from a wall was the effect it has on the space and the artwork itself. Abstract thought allows the viewer to see the potential for interconnection between the two parts; if they were to connect, the walls (and the artwork) would collapse in on each other. This is an interesting work as it causes the viewer to experience the movement of space by being in the presence of static objects, like experiencing an idea.

21. Judith Butler. Gender Trouble. 1990. New York. Routledge

If I am interested in incorporating performative elements into my work, it is vital that I engage in Butler’s notion of gender performativity. The thrust of Butler’s argument is that everyday actions, gestures, behaviours, speech, dress codes, rules, taboos, prohibitions etc., all work to produce what is perceived as an essential masculine or feminine identity (http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/07/judith-butler-gender-trouble-summary.html, accessed 24/5/19).

Gender Trouble will no doubt form a part of my conceptual basis for developing performative work and as a tool to more deeply understand bodily movement and gesture. Butler’s theory relates to my interest in questioning the social norms and rules of behaviour that govern the way we interact with each other, in order to share connections of playful vulnerability.

20. Fiona Abicare. Rose Moon. 2019. Solo Exhibition at West Space Melbourne.

What drew me to Rose Moon is its minimal aesthetic embedded with deep meaning and emotion. Rose Moon is both “feminine (in a traditional visual / maker sense) and feminist (in its approach to the politics of history), the body of work that comprises Rose Moon offers an intriguing and meticulously realised revisionist perspective on cultural traditions, and the divisions that have historically marginalised women as artists and authors of their own lived experience”(https://westspace.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2018/10/corrected-Rose-Moon-catalogue.pdf, accessed 28/5/19).

19. Dan Graham. Public Space / Two Audiences. 1976. 37th Venice Biennale

Public Space / Two Audiences was originally produced for the 1976 Venice Biennale. The work consisted of a room bisected by a glass wall, where two doors allow access into both sections. Each section is sonically independent of the other, meaning you can see people in the other section but you cannot hear them. The end wall of each section is mirrored, which makes it seem as though your reflection is mingling with the people on the other side of the glass. The effect of Public Space / Two Audiences is “an odd combination of intimacy and detachment. Viewers are united by their communal objectification as they perceive and become the artwork” (http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/scott/dan-graham7-7-09.asp, accessed 24/5/19).

Similarly with Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor, Public Space / Two Audiences upends the viewer’s expectations of self/other and subject/object. Public Space / Two Audiences involves multiple audience members, in fact, for a viewer to fully experience the work; it relies on there being more than one viewer. This in itself is an interesting conundrum, in a similar way to other works in the dossier (Erwin Wurm and Franz Erhard Walther for example), what happens to the artwork when it is not activated? For me, the solution is in ‘nothingness’; when not activated the work disappears into the everyday.

18. Zimoun. Untitled. 2018. 663 prepared dc-motors, 3315 metre rope, steel washers ø 40mm

This entry is included purely because it peaked my interest in the way that everyday objects, in this case steel washers (easily found at Bunnings!), can be used to make minimal, kinetic, meditative sound installations. I have an interest in using sound in future works; in what way I am not yet sure.

17. Anna Dezeuze. Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art. 2016. Manchester University Press

A long held conundrum I have grappled with over the years is a conflicted relationship with ‘art-objects’. Physical, tangible art-objects, such as a painting or a sculpture or a drawing, for me can ultimately become vapid or are subject to my changing aesthetic taste over time, or quite simply, I grow tired of looking at them. They too easily mimic consumerism, an out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new mentality. I mean, what is one to do with all these art-objects lying around the house, gathering dust, if one is bored of looking at them? Perhaps the solution is to establish an art practice devoid of art-objects, which instead seeks out situations, speaks to relationships, finds other problems to solve, without losing poetry.

Enter ‘invisible’ art and Anna Dezeuze’s book Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practice in Contemporary Art. Dezeuze’s book is providing me with a critical framework with which to more deeply understand the historical contemporary contexts of a slew of practices where the ‘artwork’ is almost ‘invisible’. It is also contextualising the strategies of reduction and aesthetics of minimalism that have flavoured my work this semester.

For Dezeuze, precarious art practices “usually consist of daily activities, banal objects and situations, or rubbish - to the point of sometimes disappearing completely into the very fabric of the viewer’s everyday” (p. 5). Often the uncertainty of precariousness “inflects the artist’s use of impermanent materials...and the fleeting performative gesture” (p.5). Key phrases describing the field of precarious art practices are “on the verge of disappearance, and actions that risks passing unnoticed, an object that teeters on the point of destruction” (p.9).

Dezeuze identifies two radically different tendencies in the exploration of nothingness: one focuses on chance and the everyday, the other on the reductive and minimalist (p.11).

Using Marcel Duchamp as an example, Dezeuze explains how these two narratives operate. On one hand the readymade can be read as a strategy of refusal and negation, a destructive Dada ploy to undermine accepted ideas of taste and value in art (p. 11). This reading is a kind of closed circuit, a dismissal. On the other hand, the readymade can be viewed as opening “up a field of inquiry into the very nature of perception as a performative process” by focusing on infinitesimal differences (p.12). The readymade is seen as being only slightly distinct from the everyday; Fountain is only distinct form its mass-produced counterpart by an inscription, a titled and a change of position (p.12).

These tendencies play out similarly with the monochrome. In many ways the monochrome is seen as the point zero of reduction, as a rejection of representation, reducing painting to its bare minimum, as a negation or refusal (p. 13). Alternatively, the monochrome can be read as dissolving the art-object into the banal of the everyday, thereby inviting the viewer to be attentive to the surrounding, be it light, shadows, falling dust particles or ambient noise (p.13).

Dezeuze argues that precarious art practices, along with other contemporary fields of practice, resist being spectacular or becoming entertainment “by exploring the insignificant, the trifling, or the anti-monumental” (p.20). Importantly, Dezeuze argues that is the precarious materiality, i.e. “junk art, assemblage, the ‘makeshift’, the ‘derisory’ and the ‘unmonumental’...as well as with various forms of performance, participatory and conceptual art” that “allows them to explore political and economic issues” (p.20).

Dezeuze’s book, so far as I have read, describes practices that align with my political impetus to transgress the commercial art world and resist becoming entertainment (a modern day opioid for the masses?) - I don’t believe art should help us adjust to oppression. I am particularly interested in practices that achieve this poetically, a feat no less. I expect this book will continue to inform my practice as the ideas are slippery and complex, especially as I venture into testing performance and participatory modes of making.

16. David Cross. Hold. 2010. Performance Space, Sydney

As I have not experienced Hold, I have taken this direct quote from Cross’s website. “Would you trust a total stranger? Would you help a stranger in return? Would you enter an artwork designed to test our fears of dark, unstable spaces and our limits of trust? Hold examines the fluid divide between our experience of pleasure and fear by juxtaposing the visual and sensory languages of minimalism, pop and the body with that of children’s recreational structures. Consisting of a 25 meter by 8 meter purpose built inflatable structure the work is part bodily ordeal, part children’s playhouse that draws the audience into a dynamic relationship between play, interaction and phobic space. In interrogating the art/entertainment divide, Hold turns from sculpture to performance to spectacle as it considers a number of issues to do with architectural space, performance art, participation and aesthetics. Specifically, Hold asks us to consider the nature of trust in the context of current participatory art forms. By limiting the audience’s knowledge of the performer to the act of touching or ‘holding’, the work questions whether trust can be established without a clear understanding of the identity of the performer. To this end the work seeks to explore the relationship between current participatory art practice, with its focus on exchange and the individual agency of the audience member, and the more assertive and often agitational methods of performance art” (https://www.davidcrossartist.com/artwork/hold, accessed 12/4/19).

Hold as well as other works by Cross are situated in a contemporary community of practice in which my work is currently sitting. I am exploring concepts of vulnerability and audience participation through the device of sculpture, and more recently, through manufacturing situations. The body is becoming more important in my work as I work through these concepts and as such I am looking to artists like Cross. It seems to me from my fairly brief research into Cross’s work, that there is plenty of space to inject feminist critical theory into the conceptual mix, particularly with regard to the power dynamics between performer and audience. My practice is more located within the everyday and un-monumental, attempting to avoid becoming entertainment. Hold got me thinking about how avoiding something, can actually make its presence stronger, so there here is something to be said about confronting the art/entertainment divide head-on and Cross’s work is doing exactly that. Rather than avoiding something, make it part of the work.

15. Francis Alÿs. Paradox of Praxis 1. 1997. Documentation of an action. Mexico City

Paradox of Praxis 1 is a precedent for my investigations into ‘invisible’ art, minimalism, the everyday and the function of humour. A part of the rubric ‘Sometimes making something leads to nothing’, Paradox of Praxis 1 is the record of an action where Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. Over nine hours the quintessentially minimal rectangular block was melted until it was small enough to kick along the street (http://francisalys.com/sometimes-making-something-leads-to-nothing/, accessed 10/4/19). I chose this work of Alÿs’s for its poetic action upon a minimalist sculpture, reducing it to literally nothing, leaving only its documentation. In a way it’s the point zero of minimalism, pushing it to its very edge, until one can casually kick it around.

Alÿs’s use of humour has been influential in understanding how it functions in my own work and how I can more critically understand humour in order to play with it in future work. Alÿs uses humour to catch the spectator’s attention, to trap them in the narrative, or as an entry point into the work. This is so far how humour is functioning in my work this semester, peaking audience curiosity and playfulness, warranting further engagement. Alÿs states that humour “has a critical dimension. To laugh can be a way of abstracting yourself from a situation, a way of negating its reality…Humour is a double-edged weapon” (Alÿs, F., Medina, C. Ferguson, R. and Fisher, J. (2011). Francis Alÿs. London: Phaidon: 29). It is possible that my work will use humour in a different way over the final year of the MFA program, perhaps using humour’s double-edge to think more deeply about viewer expectations and how to reveal the more serious concepts driving my work, such as vulnerability.

14. Bruce Nauman. Live-Taped Video Corridor. 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, video recording, and video playback device. Dimensions variable, approximately: 365.8 (for ceiling height) x 975.4 x 50.8 cm

Live-Taped Video Corridor is a precedent for my work You See, I See, We All See, What I See, which I have talked about in Entry 13. A lot of my work is about playing with the expectations of the viewer. In Live-Taped Video Corridor you expect to see yourself walking towards the end of the corridor, instead you see yourself from behind. This bending of self-perception relates to psychoanalytical concepts, specifically Jacques Lacan’s writing about the mirror stage and alienation. Familiarising myself with these concepts may form some of my research next semester.

13. Lou Hubbard. Eye Ops (video still). 2013. 5-channel video. 8:00 min

Melbourne based artist Lou Hubbard’s practice test then shapes ‘everyday’ or readily-at-hand objects, often through a series of self-imposed rules, into formal relationships and draws out emotional resonances through their carefully considered selection and placement. Hubbard’s actions can take the form of sculptural assemblages or are captured on film, such as Eye Ops. The ultimate effects of her works can be an absurd sense of perverse humour or a kind of strange sentimentality (http://www.sarahscoutpresents.com/web/lou-hubbard/, accessed 26/5/19).

Already there are several themes shared between Hubbard’s work and my own: the use of readily-at-hand materials, absurd humour and sculptural assemblages. I chose Eye Ops from Hubbard’s oeuvre as it relates most closely to my own work (with the tentative title of) You See, I See, We All See, What I See. The five short videos of Eye Ops depict the squashing, dissection and otherwise brutal manipulation of a series of fake confectionary eyeballs.

Art theorist, Justin Clemen’s proposes that Eye Ops is embedded with conceptual reflexivity. Not only does the artwork take the form of a video (the word video itself is derived from the Latin ‘to see’) it also is a video where you are seeking eyes being mutilated. The title Eye Ops also places Hubbard in the position of a surgeon. As Clemen’s points out: “It’s a sinister joke. What is an eye surgeon? Somebody who operates on your eyeballs. What is an artist? Someone who opeates on your eyeballs.” (https://www.monash.edu/muma/collection/First-languages-of-the-Collection/2018/lou-hubbard2, accessed 26/5/19).

It is in this reflexivity where Eye Ops operates most similarly to You See, I See, We All See, What I See. For this artwork, I drilled a 10 cm diameter hole through the walls my studio shares with the Gossard Space in RMIT Building 49. A mirrored cylinder was inserted through the hole to bridge the 20 cm gap between the two walls. When looking through the hole from the Gossard Space, a laptop is seen on my studio desk in which a looped video is playing depicting my eye looking directly at the camera through a hole. The effect of all this is a strange, perception-bending sensation of looking at an artwork that calls into question the very act of looking by asking, who is looking at who? You See, I See, We All See, What I See is indicative of my interest in exploding the relationships between artist, artwork and viewer through manufacturing situations. The viewer’s role in Eye Ops is less active.

12. Brent Harris. Swamp No. 3. 1999. Oil on linen. 274 x 137.5 cm

Swamp No. 3 could be described as post-minimalist in the sense that it is the expression of emotion through a reduced use of line, form and colour on a flat surface. My work is similarly trying to articulate human emotion and manufacture viewer interaction through the use of a reduced materiality. I find Harris’s work is often humourous, a significant precedent for my own work. Swamp No. 3 teeters between a serious holding-the-weight-of-the-world-upon-thy-shoulders and a humourous pathetic, sad-clown droopiness.

11. Justin Clemens. Preface. 2011. In Minimal Domination. Surpllus. Melbourne

My primary preoccupation in Studio 1 was influenced and heavily driven by critical social theory, including intersectional feminism and queer theory. I noticed and was provided feedback to the same effect, that being heavily driven by critical social theory resulted in making overly didactic art. I found myself encountering what Justin Clemens described as the fraught relationship of paradox between the socially critical artwork and its exposure to the public realm. Clemens explains further that an artwork that “speaks critically to society, must paradoxically achieve this from a position of powerlessness, relying only on the apt use of unique sensory tools of communication” where art’s “ability to communicate that, which cannot be expressed didactically, is where its potency is derived” (p.15). Clemens’s writing is a key precedent in the development of my practice and I revisit and ponder Preface regularly. In fact, thinking about art’s unique sensory tools influenced a shift in the materials I choose to make work.

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