Anne Walton and Michelle Outram - Ryan Leech

Ryan Leech Interdisciplinary creator Anne Walton and sound artist Michelle Outram, combined their efforts in a performative research project at The Performance Space, in Sydney. From this situation, as a participating viewer, I derive the following poesis. A hand reaches to cleanse layers of transparency glass- and reflection time displaces space as if between cause or causation HABITUATION windex-residue evaporates. By lighting and cloth - reflection, the image the layer revealing by-revealing, concealment. Preparation for the event, which never …comes- cometh wound drapes bound w/hands, an assistant as surrogacy displaced .A doorbell chimes each 2 minutes a timekeeper chimeric ladder, performer-costume unmasked w/harsh shadow ladder as sillouette as layer - disjunctive relay of reflex tions REGISTRATION to view alternating conditions of specificity Cleans inner Ilya Kabakov Desiring escape .From MANhole? -( causation as castration)? .The impermanence of fixtures .Ordinance audience _3_______9_______11_ 2 ……………and Bergson- the real action passes though - the virtual action remains.

Chris Bell John Aslanidis Phil Edwards Simon Kilvert ­ - Michael Graeve

4 Eckersleys Open Space Melbourne Chris Bell John Aslanidis Phil Edwards Simon Kilvert 5 April –26 April 2001 Michael Graeve 4 featured four Melbourne artist-friends: Chris Bell, John Aslanidis, Phil Edwards and Simon Kilvert. Housed in the expansive but low-ceilinged gallery behind Eckersleys Art Supplies, there was generous room for each of the artists to exhibit a major work. In the most site specific of the works, Chris Bell has created a piece that is physically married to the gallery. Passing Through takes as its starting point an existing set of six window panes. He has constructed a sculpture comprising two large, equally sized interlocking triangular wedges that project into the space from these windows. Inspired by horticultural greenhouse architecture, they are made of white steel mullion frameworks crafted to replicate the existing architecture, and subsequently glazed­. A number of Bell's works have been driven by two related characteristics: the combination of incompatible elemental forces, and the rush of danger, excitement and awkward poetry that ensues. Thus, previous uneasy alliances have included switched-on televisions, irons and lamps immersed in water-filled aquariums, or two forks jammed into a power point with a light bulb resting on top: bingo, you've got light. The structure of Passing Through, in fact, directs a flow of air that originates from an air conditioner found built into one glass pane. Blown in from the outside, this invisible element moves through the open intersection of the wedge shapes, only to escape from a hole at the opposite end, well inside the gallery. What we are experiencing is thus an eloquent and elaborate form of the kinetic encased by the static; the transparent framed by the opaque. The visually dangerous aspect to this particular work is contributed by the precariously leaning bottom wedge. Having been rotated by ninety degrees relative to its equally sized referent, and balancing on one edge, it is only prevented from tipping over by interlocking with the upper wedge that is connected to the window. That window-based three dimensional triangle in turn seems to defy gravity, being held up by its fellow and all in all making for a fragile sensation of balance. Filtered through the medium of painting, John Aslanidis' works are concerned with a different form of kinetic experience. His painting practice is distinct in its commitment to investigating the use of circles as primary visual building blocks. Commencing with the Transit Zone series in the early nineties, the distorted, tilted grids and asymmetrical patterns created by superimposing layers of concentric circles have provided a rich source of inspiration. Aslanidis' paintings are highly detailed and visually frenetic works. Optical pulsations and beatings are created through colour juxtapositions applied within the confines of intricate patterns and folds. In contrast to this vocabulary of activity, however, the basic circular unit itself is every bit as static as a square, contributing neither a sense of direction, motion nor one of force. This creates a palpable contradiction between the dispersing, movemental energy of the detail as it pits itself against the superstructure's tendency towards containment and stasis. Throughout the 1990's Aslanidis's compositional frameworks, often self-contained, symmetrical or all-over in nature, have reinforced the element of organizational control that the microcosm of intersecting lines and vibrant colours are subject to. Of the two paintings exhibited at Eckersleys Open Space, Dislocation no.5, (2000), with its clearly defined central circular motif placed over a complex field of multiple superimposed concentric circles, clearly functions within these parameters by distinctly articulating the two languages at work. While the conflict between exuberance and containment still fundamentally drives Dislocation Network no. 2, (1999), this work does signal a departure. Rather than the superstructure privileging one or two motifs, it engages many competing components on the symphonic scale of 165cm by 405cm. As the colour relationships have become increasingly dissonant and the composition less resolved and comfortable, the push and pull between fields of kinetic energy and subtle movement has become more complex, thus slowly bringing to the surface what has been bubbling below for some time. All along, the piano sounds of AND Factory Outlet presents new AND cd and poster "SKIP" suffuse the gallery. In this case, factory outlet refers to a busking set-up, where the presentation, performance and potential purchase of a cottage industry product are situated within inches of each other. With a nod to streetcorner performance a plastic plate containing small change sits in a suitcase sporting copies of the limited edition CD (cardboard note nominating $10.- as purchase price) and a pile of posters on the floor (cardboard note nominating $2.- as purchase price). Stacked in the background a CD player, amplifier, loudspeakers, pair of sunglasses and framed SKIP poster on the wall complete the instrumentation. The tracks entitled Skip 1-5 take as their basis a simple, minimal improvisation on piano which is abruptly cut off close to the two-minute mark. While presented as a mono recording in the final track of the CD, the first four pieces are simple studio manipulations of that information. Each one presents the same material either doubled through delay, quadrupled by doubling the previous doubling, reversed or slowed down to a quarter of its initial speed. Technically speaking a no-frills formal extrapolation from the source recording, the resultant pieces evoke sweet lullabies, piano doodlings and tightly composed minimalist compositions all at once. Yet, it is their nearly right-ness, or their nearly wrong-ness that is compelling. After being seduced into a sense of safety by sections of reduced, repetitive piano performances that are by all accounts right and proper, the moments where their inability and instability surfaces are utterly disorientating: any sense of design and logic is dispelled. To make things worse, after the SKIP pieces lose their sense of harmony or able-handedness they do not inspire that trust in a return to orderly musical resolution elicited by some of the classic Minimalist loop, repetition, layer and duration compositions. Phil Edwards is the driving force behind AND, a project that commenced with a performance by himself on keyboards and John Aslanidis on unmiked saxophone at Melbourne's Platform 2 on 14th November 1998. The limited edition CD documenting this first manifestation (released on Edwards' Hard Rubbish Recordings) advises that "AND is the collective name for any performance of improvised sound and music by unrehearsed visual artists. AND has no set format or structure." Edwards has consistently introduced the currency of the untrained hand into projects incorporating sound and object installation, painting, photography, collage, music recording, performance, composition, collaboration, writing, collecting and collection presentation, facilitation, curating, CD and fanzine design, publication and distribution. He has a penchant for the inclusion of multiple, disparate, preferably incongruous elements, combined with a fascination in found materials and things not made in the service of art. All these go some way towards explaining why we are unable to explain the coverart poster featuring black and white (their tonal values reversed) action shots of 1970's dressed children skipping rope. It is said that the photos were found in an in-law's garage. In the aesthetic feel of an afterthought, a little sticker on the CD tray conveniently reassures us that all is well: "Any distortion heard is the sound of the skipping rope momentarily leaving frame." If Phil Edwards utilises installation practice (and CD design) as a loose framework for the presentation of disparate contents alongside each other, then Simon Kilvert's approach to installation is decidedly more painterly and unified. Still Life might be described as an object poem spilling five metres into the gallery space. Leaning against one wall and lying on the floor are a dozen or so discarded, weathered, rotting, split and grey wooden fencing structures. Spread among this mess are all manner of objects: red boxes, mirrors, book covers (evidently chosen for their colour value), red wool, white wool, green broken glass and red enamel paint applied to a pink towel and parts of the fencing. These features are visually anchored to their background by a painterly brown abstract wall painting and a large colour photograph pinned behind the scene. Visually, the elements make for a subtle but breathtaking combination of incidental and deliberately added colour. A Chinese landscape painting scroll on the floor quietly references one of the classic conventions for the portrayal of pictorial depth. Its dense stacking of landscape features is a theme echoed in the large photograph: A layered composition steeped in burnt red and yellow ochres, it is a still life comprising jars, bottles and paint pots covered in a dry red powder pigment. Sheets of glass lean against each of the vessels. Similar to the colour relations featured in Still Life, the conversation between actual and represented space slowly unfolds. Drawn into the equation are issues of placement, composition, movement, space and depth, object relations and their respective associations: The stuff still lives are made of. Kilvert's strength as a visual poet has strongly relied on his development of a visual language that signals an ease of execution, thus allowing for the varied voices and layers of visual content to emerge seemingly on their own terms. While slapdash leaning, layering and haphazard arrangements have been signatures of this approach, Still Life couples these with some explicit intervention. Red and white wool chaotically criss-crosses the scene. Draped over the planks and nails it occasionally leads up to the ceiling and is almost crocheted onto pieces of wood. This time the artist has been at pains to declare his hand, thus treading a fine line between coercion and collaboration, between control and facilitation. Widely differing works were encountered in 4, each one compelling in its execution, and each one evidencing a rich artistic investigation by the author. The exhibition was a delight to experience. Michael Graeve, 2001, revised February 2005.

Day of Protests @ NGV - Christian Capurro

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Update : 15 December 2004 Christian Capurro The response to our call to support the Day of Protests @ NGV was overwhelming and the protest a great success. We estimate around 100 protesters took part in either the Friday morning performance outside the NGV International or the afternoon sketch-in at both NGV venues. We also received messages of support from at least that number again, from people who were unable to attend on the day, including curators and directors from a number of state and regional art galleries. The Free Pencil Movement grew out of the frustration and anger a few artists felt at being prohibited from sketching and note-making at NGV exhibitions this year (The Impressionists, Edvard Munch and James Gleeson). It was soon realised that many other gallery visitors, including artists, scholars, students and members of the general public, had also been prohibited from sketching or note-making and felt similarly aggrieved. The NGV has now publicly acknowledged this was a problem of their making brought on by poor internal and external communication of their actual policy regarding the use of pencils and pens in their various pay-to-see exhibitions. The NGV now says that The Impressionists exhibition is the only show at which visitors were officially prohibited from using pencils or pens; and that this was for insurance reasons beyond the gallery's control. From the personal testimonies we’ve received, however, it would seem this has been a point of public irritation long before The Impressionists show. Since then, apparently unbeknown to the directors, Venue Management and the security staff have continued to impose this restriction more-or-less throughout the entire NGV. Even in the last few weeks, wall signs making this prohibition explicit were still being pointed out to disgruntled patrons at NGV Federation Square. We were protesting about the reality of the situation as experienced by many individuals. The prohibitions were being enforced, sometimes in the name of security, sometimes for insurance reasons and, most worryingly, sometimes on copyright grounds. In the week preceding the protests, the director of the NGV, Dr Gerard Vaughan, called a special meeting of the Trustees to review this policy. The day before the protests he faxed to us a copy of the new rules and a letter of overall support for our position. ("In principle I agree with your concerns and I agree with your position.") The NGV has now communicated this clarified policy to all their staff. Their policy can be viewed at http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/policies/sketching.html The day of protests at the NGV was intended to focus national attention on one specific prohibition, as well as to raise awareness of other associated issues, in order to have the No Sketching prohibition removed . Thanks to the quick and positive response of the NGV leadership, this has now largely been achieved. On Friday no one was stopped from writing or sketching and many of us felt it was a wonderful simple thing to behold. All three NGV directors (Gerard Vaughan, Tony Elwood and Frances Lindsay) personally greeted and Peter Tyndall inside the Munch exhibition. Dr Vaughan concluded his letter of the previous day, "I hope that the document I attach (the new policy), and the statements we made yesterday to the press, have clarified the matter. I want you to know that I personally believe that one of the reasons we exist is to inspire and assist practising artists, students and scholars. We must do nothing that inhibits their optimum use of the collections of the NGV." However, there still remains the outstanding issue of the obligations imposed upon Australian host galleries, such as the NGV, by Art Exhibitions Australia, who manage Federal Indemnity for major imported exhibitions such as The Impressionists. It is this federal body which imposes the "no pens, no pencils" rule. As we understand it, another winter blockbuster indemnified by Art Exhibitions Australia is due for exhibition at the NGV in 2005. So, even though visitors are presently free to sketch and make notes in all exhibitions at the NGV, when next year's blockbuster arrives the NGV will again be forced by these federal regulations to re-impose this miserable restriction. Again, this will surely cause disaffection. The free pencil movement will now encourage Australian host galleries, such as the NGV, not to accept any AEA indemnified exhibitions that impose this restrictive clause against the use of pens or pencils, no matter how marvellous the art offered. We believe these conditions are against the spirit of free speech and are an insult to the regular visitors who, otherwise, are now to be trusted with their pens and pencils in the presence of our own national collections of great works of art. We will also lobby the AEA to reconsider and remove this restriction. Please do likewise. Write to the AEA and to the Federal Minister for the Arts and demand this clause be removed. Not to do so, as we see it, is to acquiesce to the present culture of fear and prohibition. Thank you to all who provided support of any kind. It was greatly appreciated. free pencil movement "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1762)

Ilaria Vanni, Jonathan Jones & Panos Couros - Diane Losche

The Sound of Missing Objects- Reflections on the Museum Diane Losche Every Image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably. (Benjamin, Walter. 1969, orig. pub. 1940: p: 255) It is by now a truism that museums, many of which were developed during the Victorian period of high empire, have lost their identity, at least in terms of their ethnological functions. Anyone who has wandered the huge storerooms of the large museums of the world cannot but think of a graveyard, orderly and well tended, but graveyard indeed. The feelings of loss, mourning and melancholia associated with these graveyards of artefacts should not let us close the book and leave the museum, rather they should make us stop and think about why these storerooms summon up such feelings. If these mausoleums contain lost objects, and they must be lost to someone if they are here in this impersonal, state-run storehouse, then a series of questions follow. Who has lost the objects? Where are they lost from? Are they lost to us? Not apparently, they were never ours in the first place. And who is this us anyway? Are they objects belonging to lost cultures, lost people? Perhaps, but if we consign cultures to the cemetery, we would probably be wrong, for the salvage paradigm turns out to be incorrect. The death knell tolled so often turned out not to be true and many a cultural Lazarus has risen from the dead. Truganini turns out not to be a ghost at all, and her descendants are alive and living in Bondi, Redfern or Papunya, New York, or Paris. Do we mourn for a lost knowledge? The paradigm on which museum collections were based was fundamentally flawed although it may have seemed eminently sensible at the time. The idea that a culture can be known, in any significant or profound way, through a denatured and alienated assemblage of the objects it produces, seems madness and folly, one obviously nurtured under a more general obsession with accumulation. The logic seems to be, if there is any, that if we collect and measure as many bones, images, feathers, toes, heads giraffes, deformed infants, birds, frogs, elephants, drums, necklaces, languages, and on and on and on, we will somehow come out of a universal state of ignorance and comprehend the world, with a finality and totality never seen before. This is a tragic hubris indeed, one associated with empire, for the act of rapacious collecting cuts off the possibility of gaining any significant knowledge of the other. There was another component to this imperial folly, the idea that a culture could be defined and contained within a space or a text, that a culture could be bounded and complete, once and for all. This approach was not confined to culture, it was also applied to the body, the mind and most forms of nature. From this initial premise it seemed evident that you could contain knowledge, culture, the body or natural specimens, in a vast, universal container, a museum, a place in which a final, total knowledge could be attained. This belief also seems the antiquated hubris of a former time. We moderns look on our ancestors with pity, or contempt, and think how advanced we are. We no longer believe that a culture or organism, or person is fixed and containable, rather the discovery, a significant one, of the twentieth century is that the world is a much more open-ended and continually creative creature than our poor deluded ancestors thought. But we can’t leave it at that, can we? We need to examine our own feelings of mourning in the face of the museum. If we are such enlightened modern creatures, why do we have these feelings of loss and grief and nostalgia- why do we mourn these misguided projects, these so obviously deluded paradigms, these lost and homeless objects? For if we are indeed so modern we would not mourn, since this assemblage is not a key to any form of knowledge, we would not hang on to these expensive mausoleums. We might return the objects to the communities from which they came, disperse, the objects across the land, shower people with gifts. Although repatriation does occur it is a slow and bureaucratically encumbered process. Thus the mausoleums stay, monuments to a failed project of knowledge, testament to a rapacious empire. One might think that the modern state would be embarrassed by these visible monuments to failure, but apparently not. Perhaps we are not so modern, after all. Perhaps because they remind us of our own homelessness, our own lost state, how wrong we might be in our notions of how the world works, and of our own fate, when past our use - by date, we too are destined to be stored somewhere, finally the graveyard. But most of us don’t ever get into the storerooms. What is interesting is that the museum and art gallery businesses are booming, so somehow the modern museum erases the melancholy of the storeroom, with the presence of Culture with a capital C. Haunting absence can be banished as people consume beauty, culture, history, wealth, the overwhelming abundance of creativity and life in exhibitions, the theatre part of the museum space. The theatrical front, the exhibition space, is also a place where notions of culture can be comfortably aestheticized , where uncomfortable truths are forgotten, banished and absent. Here culture becomes an object for comfortable Sunday afternoon contemplation via the eradication of the uncomfortable, the complex, the despicable, the cruel, the unseemly. In museums of ethnology history was banished, particularly any history which might disrupt the aesthetic, bland and inevitable quality of the exhibit. When we look at a Pitjanjatjara spear we seldom think of the Maralinga atomic bomb set off on Pitjanjatjara lands. But isn’t this an obvious connection to make? Both the spear and the bomb are weapons- both are part of Pitjanjatjara history. Why is one included, another excluded? Other aspects of history, less monstrous, but equally telling in the particularity of their absence, are excluded. The evidence of real people, living human beings who speak, touch , smell and taste, are also eradicated from the exhibition and the storeroom. Who made the objects, who carried them, who touched them, who smelled them, who talked about them ? Who cared for them? Who wept when they were gone? Whose blood, bones and tears mark them? Who wrapped them in the tissue paper that so carefully contains the objects in the storeroom now? All of these are banished histories, forgotten subjects in this not-so-objective world. In the pursuit of the visible, the orderly and the hygienic the senses have been eradicated and forgotten. Yet this erasure creates a tremendous sense of loss and nostalgia for touch, smell, and sound, a sense of life itself – but this lament is left to poets to linger over. The problem becomes how we can come to re-know these objects, these places, for although they may trouble us and make us melancholy , the solution to this troubling inheritance is not to forget it. As Benjamin suggested ‘to lose these images from the past irretrievably’ would be to repeat the mistake of another era of modernity. To banish the past is to make the present empty. The problem is a difficult one, for we must learn how to summon up both presence and absence simultaneously. How do we retrieve multiple discourses, forgotten feelings , swirling sounds? Elizabeth Edwards called these concealed or disseminated practices, resistant to the order of the mausoleum(1)( Edwards,E. 2001:132). Ilaria Vanni, Jonathan Jones and Panos Couros perform this double take, the enacting of a present absence, in the Installation The Sound of Missing Objects at Performance Space. Using forgotten objects, like tissue paper, banished histories, like Maralinga, and unused senses, the installation invokes and suggests connections which the Museum institution severs. The sound of an atomic bomb blasts dispersal bears an uncanny resemblance to boomerangs used as clapsticks. How strange and empty the language developed to describe these absent objects, how beautiful the cabinets made to display these inevitably missing objects. Why are there no objects in this installation? The objects must be absent not only because they have been taken from someone and are missing from somewhere if they are in museums. This absence reminds us of that loss, to someone, somewhere. The entire Museum Project is based on absence, the disappearing and the disappeared. If these objects are in museums they have been made to disappear, from culture, activity, touch, sound, use, life itself. They come to represent something else, something absent. Perhaps this is why Jim Boon states: Museums perhaps make me sad because of what they revel about representation- a sadness savouring resignation to the museumlikeness (perhaps even museuminess) of what on first sight appear to be a museum of. If there is no of to museums – only more museum: representations without immediate reference making for-the-removal-then that must be what makes me sad.( Boon, J. in Karp and Lavine 1991:256) This installation suggests that Boon’s depressing conclusion, that all representation is based on an ultimately absent reality, may not be the final word. This sense of absence may rather be the result of a particular technology and philosophy of universal display and specular vision. Through the syncopation of absence and presence, many whispering sounds where we are used to silence, empty cabinets where we are used to presence, this installation points to those histories and that life which we cannot absolutely know but which we can almost glimpse, barely hear, almost touch, as it summons the multiple discourses, many sounds, sights and feelings which swirl about the missing objects. Footnotes 1.In ‘Professor Huxley’s ‘Well-considered Plan’, a study of the ethnological photometric project inspired by the Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley Edwards uses the term ‘disseminated or concealed practices’. Thousands of photometric photos are housed in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. Rather than inscribe the photos in a Foucauldian institutional analysis, as has been done, Edwards attempts, through historical investigations of circumstances surrounding some of the photos, to unravel the ambiguities and paradoxes that surrounded the project at the local level. Her attempt here, by looking at the history of very particular photos in this vast archive, is to reveal what she calls, following De Certeau, a variety of concealed or disseminated practices, not totally obliterated in even this most oppressively dominating of practices, the mapping of racial characteristics (Ibid: p.132). Through investigations of the individuals involved in the project, at both ends of the camera, Edwards is able to suggest that there were multiple resistances to and subversions of the project. This is a most important essay that demonstrates how important detailed historical investigation is as a counter to overarching theoretical readings that attempt to circumscribe large bodies of practices under a general proposition. References Benjamin, Walter 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn. New York Schocken Books Boon, J. 1991. Why Museums Make Me Sad in Karp, I and Lavine, S. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Smithsonian Institution Press. Washington: pp.255-277. Edwards, Elisabeth.2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Berg, Oxford and New York, 2001.

Jill Jones - Michael Farrell

Jill Jones - Struggle & Radiance Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne 22.7.2004 book launch Michael Farrell The title of Jill Jones new chapbook of poems, ‘Struggle & radiance ... ’ evokes a measure of transcendence in our 24/7, 7/11 times. The cover image – apparently a representation of ochre— & the snugglepot punning gs of the cover font – suggest to me bushfire and the life after; this notion is supported by the wild honey of the publisher’s name (and once inside: poem IV, The Heat). Its subtitle, ‘ten commentaries’ undercuts this: drier, more detached, and sportier than the ten commandments. The politics of any text is contingent – but what about fun and happiness you ask? ‘Happiness,’ the third commentary, ends with one word: ‘‘maybe’’— doubly qualified by quote marks. ‘Happiness’ begins promisingly though with ‘Signs of heaven’ – transcendence after all? – maybe ‘maybe’’s not so contingent? Maybe reading backwards is asking for trouble? Ebyam. ‘I am living now’ ‘tigress mysteries’ ‘The day whirrs’ ‘could be a perfect day’ ‘fugitive smile’ ‘the beautiful salt’ ‘This is living!’ ‘all that language’ ‘with a crooked grin’ Life during drought-time. Hollering isn’t the only approach. Let’s go backward to commentary I: ‘A Vision’: what do we see apart from the word Yeats? Sharapova? ‘I am down and out on the lawn tracings and tracks a tiny park the winking fishnet insectorama. And above me worlds, meteors ganglands of galaxies. In the darkness dogs and cleft air.’ We could be anywhere as long as it’s Sydney, God. Almost paratactically, like a pensive Pam Brown, Jones subtly shifts the lawn from under our feet. ‘Is this what I look like up there or on Station Street Railway Avenue at The Royal the 7-Eleven? ... In the mind’s eye the very thought of you.’ This is the negative domestic, the domestic taken out onto the streets— to ironise large claims, and to emphasise the power and importance of small ones. These are, I think, Sydney effects. I hope Jill doesn’t mind me referring to the domestic – often a reductive tag – in relation to her poems, but I think the humanist-feminist point is to enlarge the domestic, rather than deny its presence in our work and lives. Of course other analogies could be drawn, such as the scientific / microscopic or the sapphic / fragmentarian, but these evoke worlds either too cold or too literary to do justice to Jones’ original post-modern lyrics. ‘More or less interesting depends on the weather.’ Again Jones emphasises contingency and a perfunctory attitude to both ego and outside forces. These are not, I think, Melbourne effects. She holds the world up like a fly wing to the light in a form of nationalism we can actually digest and prosper on. These are ambitious poems, if not obviously so. ‘A bee visits each dropped flower. That struggle that line it makes.’ (IV. The Heat) It’s 3 in the afternoon and we’re not going home yet: here Jones alludes to the other tradition of the line: the Nietzschean or modern line, that has no home or final destination; each dropped flower a narrative of sorts. Commentary ‘VII. A telephone, a saxophone,’ suggests attempted escape from the written and visual into the voiced or sounded, though the attempt is given up by IX[‘s] The hushing’: ‘(unable to speak the day)’. From ‘A telephone, a saxophone”: ‘A star falls past your window into the alley. And nothing else?’ from ‘VIII. Hazed’: ‘star dissolve through the tense atmosphere.’ and ‘Gazing out at nothing so clear tonight.’ Jones could be Francis Webb’s friend who ‘pointed me to starry skies / On stilts of queer philosophies’. Two more quotes: the first from The hushing, the second from ‘X. A calling ‘Needs no announcement no song only I must make its trace along this arm hand finishing the line’ and ‘because we have been patient under heat and over dust in our exhausted bodies we are keeping on their unknown tracks.’ Kevin Hart, from an essay on Francis Webb: ‘To be a modern poet, he [Heidegger] suggests, is to remain open to a new manifestation of the divine: [Hart then quotes Heidegger:] ‘The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.’ This is a kind of religious poetry: transcendent in Levinas’ definition of transcendence as a turn to the other; but though Jones is serious, she’s not quite that serious: ‘no song’ also suggests to me the post-Mardi Gras aspect of ‘remaining open to a new manifestation of the divine’. In our Deleuzian post-epigraph (Barthesian post-influence) culture, critics like to identify parallel or sister texts: from WB Yeats’ own insectorama, ‘The Cap and Bells’: ‘She laid them upon her bosom Under a cloud of her hair, And her red lips sang them a love-song Till stars grew out of the air She opened her door and her window, And the heart and the soul came through, To her right hand came the red one, To her left hand came the blue. They set up a noise like crickets, A chattering wise and sweet, And her hair was a folded flower And the quiet of love in her feet.’ Would Jill Jones step up to the plate?

Joseph Beuys - Nicole Katz

Joseph Beuys : Actions, Vitrines, Environments Tate Modern, London February 4 – May 2, 2005 Nicole Katz It is difficult to consider Joseph Beuys without first mentioning the legend behind the artist, one which he himself actively cultivated during his lifetime, a legend which has by now become inseparable from his work. In its essence it is this: during World War II Beuys was drafted into the German air force, and in 1942 his plane was shot down over Crimea where he was rescued by Tartars who wrapped him in animal fat and felt to warm him and heal his wounds, thereby saving his life. Robert Hughes has remarked: “Beuys’ wartime experiences have for his followers almost joined Van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art.” Yet this single, sketchy biographical detail remains important because it serves as an entry point into Beuys’ world, simultaneously providing an introduction to his particular aesthetic and to his most commonly used materials, fat and felt; and also to the significant ideas of healing and transformation that are at the heart of his life’s work. Fat and felt, and a good dose of ideology, a regenerative balm for a traumatised post-war Europe. Beuys the artist-healer-teacher, eternally dressed in his felt hat and pilot’s vest, worked extensively both within and beyond the art world. The Tate Modern show divides his oeuvre into three main areas: vitrines (small scale assemblages in glass cases); actions (Beuys’ preferred word for performances) and; environments (what Beuys called his large scale installations). His art also encompassed teaching, politics, and social and environmental activism. He had ambitions for a sweeping programme of human transformation which was to be catalysed by individual creative energy, what Beuys called his “expanded concept of art”, a world in which “everyone is an artist”. His didacticism did not appeal to everyone, nor his “claims for universal solutions and global validity”, but his aesthetic of the damaged seems to have struck an enduring chord. His work can be found in major museums across the globe and sells for millions of dollars, ranking Beuys among the world’s most expensive modern artists. Beuys’ objects, often in part readymades, consist almost entirely of society’s detritus: discarded things with an awkward, scarred presence, unpolished, rough, fragments of life turned into art. His objects are also predominantly organic, incorporating elements from the human, animal, plant and mineral worlds, the kind found in rural, not urban, settings. Plucked from everyday life, these objects consist mainly of plain, unclothed matter that are recontextualised in Beuys’ visual vocabulary to convey disruption and damage. “Burned door, beak and ears of a hare, 1953” incorporates all the materials of the piece’s title; similarly “Cross with kneecap and hare’s skull, 1961”. Bandages, dirt, mould, broken objects, imperfections and dead animals are symbolic reminders of the decay and destruction all around us that must be attended to. And their colour is the colour of the earth, a shade of brown that looks as if it were made of rust and blood. “Virgin 1952” is a female torso of wax, wrapped in gauze binding resting on a soiled pillow. “No title (bathtub)” from 1960 is a chipped enamel bathtub on a stand covered in adhesive bandages and gauze. But the Beuysian cure is never far, his iconic “Felt suit” from 1970 is specially designed to generate, store and transmit energy which is integral to the creative process; and in the case of “The pack, 1969”, rescue is at hand. This large-scale installation consists of a Volkswagen van where 20 sledges, each equipped with a felt roll, fat and torches spills out into the room, ready to come to the viewer’s aid. Central to Beuys’ programme of healing was transformation, and in the realm of the environment, Beuys’ timing was superb. In 1979, he was one of the founding members of the Green Party in Germany, which catapulted environmental issues into mainstream politics. Although he failed to be elected by his party to stand for state elections, Beuys used his work as a conduit for raising ecological awareness. His 1965 performance “How I explain paintings to a dead hare”; his part animal-part medical “Horns, 1961” made using two rhinoceros horns, painted iron, plastic tubing and red paint, a regenerative infusion for the animal kingdom; and “Snowfall, 1965” where branches of fir trees are tucked under layers of felt like blanketed patients in a sick ward. In 1982, at Documenta VII, four years before his death, Beuys inaugurated “7,000 oaks”, his most ambitious large-scale work. The project involved planting 7,000 oak trees, each one aligned with a basalt stone. The tree planting on this monumental scale was meant to provoke an “ecological awakening” by initiating social and environmental transformation in nerve centres of the art world, in Kassel, and later in New York, where the project has continued. About “7,000 oaks”, Beuys said: “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.” Joseph Beuys, perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, was responsible for bringing Germany out of cultural isolation in the aftermath of the war. Messages of healing and transformation were encoded into his entire life’s work, over half a century later the world is no less in need of them. ________________________________________________________ BRIEF BIO 1921: May 5, born in Krefeld, Germany 1940: drafted in the Luftwaffe 1941-46: shot down over Crimea, wounded five times, held in a British POW camp 1947-57: studies art, exhibits and lives in Dusseldorf 1954-55: suffers a nervous breakdown 1959: marries Eva Wurmbach with whom he has two children 1961-72: appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, is part of the Fluxus movement, is eventually dismissed for protesting student admission process 1979: major retrospective at Guggenheim Museum in New York 1982: begins “7000 oaks” at Documenta VII 1986: January 23, dies of heart failure ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ “Our relation to nature is characterised by its having become thoroughly disturbed. There is the threat of total destruction of our fundamental natural basis. We are doing exactly what it takes to destroy this basis by putting into action an economic system which consists in unscrupulous exploitation of this natural basis. The destruction is implemented on a world-wide scale. Between the mine and the garbage dump extends the one-way street of the modern industrial civilisation to whose expansive growth more and more lifelines and life cycles of the ecological systems are sacrificed.” Joseph Beuys, 1982 ________________________________________________________

Lesley Giovanelli & Beata Geyer - Margaret Roberts

Chromophobic - Lesley Giovanelli Beata Geyer Rocketart Newcastle New South Wales 18 November - 5 December 2004 Margaret Roberts In Chromophobic, Lesley Giovanelli and Beata Geyer have collaborated to use their related but distinct languages in an exhibition that engages the spatial framework of the gallery in both serious and humourous ways. Their work is related because both artists work with the apparent subordination of shape and space to colour, but within this realm, each artist’s work is distinct. Beata’s colour in Chromophobic is like segmented, digital worms, flat on the walls, made as lines of oblong mdf panels 15cm wide and 40cm long, painted with a range of strongly coloured household paints. The panels are joined along the walls—and occasionally the floor—in lines that change direction from vertical to horizontal to vertical, once, twice or several times, then stop. The panels seem to have multiplied randomly and unpredictably across whatever surfaces happen to be there, similar to the way liquid spreads out over an uneven floor. Lesley’s colour is made from dyed sheep’s wool, carded so that it is open and light, making it appear to rise off the surface like coloured mist. In Chromophobic, she has painted a coloured square on a wall, or on an oblong board on blocks on the floor or against a wall, leaving the casual brush strokes visible, but ensuring that the coloured wool hung or laid over it vibrates against the rough colour underneath, making it seem that the wool is rising off in response to the high energy colour harmonics. Sometimes the wool is so dense its three dimensionality begins to suggest rich organic shapes in the way clouds do, making a large soft red puppy seem to appear just behind the front wall. The title, Chromophobic, identifies the gallery space of Rocketart as the likely subject of the exhibition, as its clean white spaces (and one yellow stripe) give contemporary art a forceful presence in the street. Visitors are expected to take for granted the lack of colour in contemporary art spaces and how that works to background the gallery space so that the artwork can be seen free of the considerations of ordinary space. Chromophobic collapses the decades-old critique of the convention of the white-cube in a humourous anthropomorphism (as, strictly speaking, only people have phobias) making us think of the convention as some sort of illness, towards which we need to show patience. The framework and history of this convention enables us to see that Beata has used the gallery’s oblong row of three white rooms as an architectural prototype that she brings into the artwork as small oblong panels. We can believe that it is just the addition of colour that has made these panels multiply randomly throughout the space, retaining their architectural ancestry by seeming to only know the right angle, but otherwise demonstrating a spontaneity that shows by contrast, the blank reserve that architecture is designed to have as a contemporary gallery space. The collaboration seems designed to demonstrate a simple ritual cure for this enduring modernist restraint—by Beata repeatedly painting representations of the architectural space with colour (life), and Lesley doing her part by bringing them forth into the gallery space as forms that are increasingly energetic and life-like.

Marshall Allen Sabir Mateen Michael Ray Toshi Makihara & Jeffrey - Michael Graeves

Marshall Allen Sabir Mateen Michael Ray Toshi Makihara & Jeffrey Shurdut Tonic, New York 1.2. 2005 Michael Graeves What do you say? I've arrived in New York to spend the first week in bed recovering from my flu that started on the flight. In nearly customary form, have spent the recovery days digging away at my MAM, the Melbourne Administrative Mountain, that I carry around with me wherever I go. It's lucky the Lufthansa/United baggage allowance is so generous, and that I didn't bring microphone stands, tripods, favorite chairs etc. This mountain is 40cm in height, made up of A4 sheets (they have different papers here?)), and estimated at 6kg's heavy. It's separate to my email administrative mountain, which I have been getting faster at, too. Little wonder that today, 8 days later, I finally put my mind to purchasing art materials, and buy some little expensive paint tubes by manufacturers I have never used before: years of history behind them. No doubt I will keep mixing fast drying alkyds with these traditional slow-dryers, making for a new and old mix that would insult any serious colour-man. New York Central Art Supplies has the prettiest range of brushes, and I bought five beauties for a week's savings, or in my money an equivalent to five bottles of decent white wine. And choosing my likely favorites from their 60 or so canvas samples took me literally 90 minutes, while in the background an 88-year old British Portrait Painter chatted about 1920's American Portraitists to the shop owner, who in turn preferred to talk about how Jasper Johns still shops there, and how he got drunk with Willem de Kooning in the 1950's etc etc etc). Music technology stores just haven't been like that for me, I must say. It's no wonder my dearest companion Elissa Sadgrove is so much more efficient at getting her gouache colours to work on her bagel/donut series, which I hope will fund our continued stay in this cheap backwater called New York. You'll be happy to hear that for the full first week I did manage to avoid music gigs completely, instead concentrating on filling the fridge for the family, rearranging our flat to avoid the lounge room light shining onto Alina's sleeping quarters, and barricading heaters and dangerous cables off with tables, chairs, stuck together cardboard, pieces of wood and suitcases. But in the second week, I wasn't so lucky. I was caught off guard, and before I knew it I was catching Downtown trains leading to the hallowed Tonic to see Marshall Allen. Now having a wider rather than deeper musical collection, you all know that I am a flimsy researcher in the field. But I DO love Sun Ra's music with a deep and devoted passion, so to have one of SR's main men, always described as so faithful, this was too good an opportunity to miss. I wanted to feel the residue, at the very least. Arriving a little late, I walked through the swinging doors, they were already going, and, if you can believe me, I shed the briefest of wet tears, as I entered the room shimmering with blistering saxophones shards. For that first second I felt as if I had come to experience this music in an appropriate place for the first time. Free Jazz had been such a CD experience for me, for so long, it was now beautiful to walk into it in real time in real space. The first 40-minute set was indeed very exciting, as the players traveled through the range of free jazz country available to them: From quiet to loud and frantic, slow to fast, apart and occasionally together etc. They seemed to be having a good time, and enjoyed each other's company on stage. Marshall Allan is an eminent 81 years of age, but showed no signs of slow-down as his fingers raced over the saxophone, barely touching it, as a cap hid his face. The secretive look disappeared as he stared the audience down when he put down the ground for a piece with a short, odd and off-key funky loop. Sabir Mateen has also been playing saxophone since the '70's, and he was the least showy, the steadiest of the front men. He had the stage demeanor of a wise man. Michael Ray on the other hand played the role of troublemaker and entertainer, as well as playing some very good sax and keyboard/synthesizer. A glittering jacket proclaimed his name in large swinging handwriting, and he used to play with Sun Ra and Kool & the Gang. He retained some of the things he learnt from Sun Ra about funny and spacey keyboards. Jeffrey Shurdut, who if you trust Google has more profile as a painter than as a musician, played some odd guitar in the group. At times it hit the right spot, either performing the role of bass or as melody that sat within the other's playing. But at other times it was lost in the mix, or seemed at a little incongruous: It was odd to hear his feedback-drone solo in the middle of a gig that oozed Jazz. The drummer Toshi Makihara was excellent but stayed in the background, listened well and responded to or led all the clues in a proficient manner. He was the only player not to be awarded a solo for the night. The ferocity these artists achieved was breathtaking at times. But it wasn't history in the making, either. It didn't feel outdated, or even dated, (except when Marshall Allan pulled out his electric saxophone, the one that seems to have a WahWah pedal built into it), but what bothered me was that they obviously didn't play together sufficiently often to be able to do the 'together parts' particularly well, struggling a bit with those sections. They would ever so briefly grasp at a slow collective movement, only to then quickly move off into their individual directions and their collaborative apart-playing. So in the end it felt like a great workaday gig, with performers that have an amazing amount of history behind them. But the fact that it is Jazz that I picked up on here first is a reminder to myself of the most treasured parts of my music collection, and of the musical works that I love deepest, even if I listen to them less and less often. Picking up the Jazz newspaper on the way out of the club has put the fear into me: By the end of February I will have had the chance to see about eight of my top fifteen artists. So I am hoping in the next weeks to visit Cecil Taylor (who is 75, and I just read that he doesn't use emails, so how does he get around, I wonder?), Charles Tolliver, The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and Joseph Jarman, all of whom I have one or more records by (dating from the fifties to the eighties, but not much beyond in my collection) that have deeply touched me. But that's the thing about going to see these artists who've been working for such a long time (Cecil started recording in the 50's, Jarman and Tolliver in the 60's), that as a fan who is stuck in the past, and as someone who doesn't have the recent recordings, I will be sitting there reconciling my historical notes with their current whereabouts, with a Campari on ice in hand, no doubt. It's a cross I can bear, must bear, and will bear with dignity. I can always walk out at the end, muttering to myself that 'Well, Charles Tolliver, that gig was just ok. Your double album from 74 is lukewarm and I always regret buying it trusting your name. But man, that thing you recorded in '66, I love it to bits, and figured you could not do wrong after that. Why did you leave the path? And that makes me wonder which of my creative bits people will pick out over the years for loving or for loathing??? But the other thing was that it was just three dozen keen onhearers in the crowd at Tonic last night, and I remember Warren Burt telling the story years ago, at one of his quiet afternoons (for privileged visitors who made the journey down into the backstreets in Richmond to hear Warren's beautiful piece and read his 8-page program), that in New York you get the same or smaller crowds than you might on a similar night in Melbourne. A gig at BUS Gallery, West Space or at The Footscray Arts Center would have been busier than Tonic that night... and of course any gig with ex-Sun Ra'ers in it would have been prized highly. So with Warren's warning from ten years ago, that all made sense. As I quickly worked out the likely takings for the musos that night, ($60 each, maybe???), I remembered what it was all about: The interaction, the joy of making, the play of performing, the pleasure of communicating. Henry Threadgill, who should also be amazing this coming weekend, has a different take on that same phenomenon in a current interview in the Jan all about jazz – new york: "There are no scholars trying to analyze what I've done and critics certainly don't know," he said. "Nobody gets reviews so people look at you the same way year after year. I could turn into Jesus tomorrow and you wouldn't know it." I will look out for signs at the Knitting Factory this weekend... And as music is for pleasure, it's painting that really earns you a living (and this lovely studio and apartment in New York). Speaking of which, I've just completed my consignment notice for Conny Dietzschold for my show that starts in Sydney in mid February 2005. As with all my work, it was a scramble getting that work done, and I'm surprised I haven't been sick for a month trying to recover from the trauma of finishing up art and life in Melbourne to go on this trip! But I'm very happy with the paintings. I've been seeing someone about this last-minute thing I have going in all parts of my life, the thing that I can't get things done without a gun to my head. Let's see if it can be fixed, and if I've got anything to say if I don't say it at the last minute... I'll leave while pondering that, and thank you for your generous time in reading through this monologue with little clues and in-jokes there hidden away for my friends... Missing you all but having a good time, Michael Graeve Feb 02, 2005 Feb 01, 2005—Tonic, New York * Marshall Allen, Sabir Mateen, Michael Ray, Toshi Makihara & Jeffrey Shurdut at 10pm, $10

Richard Tipping - Ben Harper

Richard Kelly Tipping: Public Works School of Design, Communication and Information Technology, University of Newcastle, 2002. ISBN 1 920701 01 X Ben Harper This catalogue was published to accompany an exhibition of Tipping's works at Greenaway Art Gallery in Adelaide last year, focusing on his work intended for public display. Photos of selected works are included with essays by George Alexander and Alex Selenitsch. Tipping's art poems (he also writes 'normal' poetry) are a kind of concrete poetry made concrete - or stone, or aluminium. Sounding Silence, for example, juxtaposes two granite blocks carved with the words 'listen' and 'silent'; Earth Heart (Hear the Art) is a ring of neon letters with three possible readings. Mostly they work in the same manner as puns: semantic short circuits that open up new possibilities of meaning from their familiar but incompatible premises. The punning can be literal, as in the above examples, or built from visual or conceptual expectations - street signs with their familiar appearance, altered to read GO or ONE DAY. The essays provide helpful advocacy discussing the methods at work here and their impact on a public audience, particularly given their incursion on an information- and media-saturated society. Selenitsch claims that by "opening up the imagination rather than restraining it, Tipping shows how one can transform advertising and bureaucratic space into poetry on its own terms." But signs, such as "Airport" or "Australia Post" detourned into "Airpoet" and "Australia Poet", do function as a kind of advertising: for poetry, or rather the idea of a poet - the sizzle and not the steak. These and similar works, taken as a whole, take on a satirical note in the extent of their self-aggrandisement, suggesting an alternate universe where art and poetry claim a public engagement at least as fiercely contested as the consumption of sugar-water. The extent to which it opens up the imagination is questionable. The techniques are similar to those used by 'media hijackers' and other activists, which have since in turn been co-opted and reassimilated by the advertising industry. As for bureaucracy, works such as Sounding Silence are awkward in their monumentality and their didactic content, spelling out an edifying message which any high-minded bureaucrat or council could approve. The work in context is as inoffensive and vacuous as most other official statuary. If Tipping's work is weakest when trying to make a point, then the pieces where cognitive dissonance is allowed free reign are the most satisfying: a skull-and-crossbones logo bearing the motto LIFETIME GUARANTEE, or the mutant parking sign NO UNDERSTANDING ANY TIME (shown here four feet tall, telling the world and not just the street). These truly open the mind, albeit in a way that simultaneously gives information and takes it away, placing the observer in an altered situation instead of simply commenting its context. The nature of his methods and material encourages playfulness, which may explain why these works are more successful than those burdened with a sense of duty to society.

Simeon Nelson - Joanna Callaghan

Mappa Mundi Simeon Nelson Joanna Callaghan Upon entering the world of Mappa Mundi I am transported back in time: I am a child and everything in the world is big and strange. Standing in front of data cloud, a cacophony of bright red shapes on a large white wall, I am Alice in Wonderland. I’m face to face with a massive playing card where the diamonds and hearts have spun off rebelliously only to later sheepishly re-arrange themselves symmetrically. Is this a joke? I’m not sure as I back away carefully. I spin around and find myself in front of Godhead Gestalt, or Keeper of Secrets as I named it. It brings to mind an unopened, forbidden wardrobe imploded from the force of it’s secrets. Appearing harmless in it’s cheap, cheerful, formica garb, it beckons me closer. I am not sure about it. It seems friendly but there is something dark about it. Paradoxically the Keeper of Secrets is transparent, revealing other forms and nuances behind it’s marbled armour. This is a controlled implosion, carefully crafted and manipulated. Ornamatrix is perhaps the most surprising. Seen firstly in a photo I had been repelled by it’s unfathomable mass: dark, silent, dead. In the flesh it was majestic: complex, intricate and teeming with life. I ‘know’ that it is symmetrical, that it’s form is repetitive, that underneath it’s mass is a grid. I know this because I have been told it. I have not however found it myself. I got lost long before I got that far. An analysis of the object breaks it into it’s component parts, but here is the irony and perhaps the joke (again). The object cannot be broken. It has no parts. Where I had got it wrong was misunderstanding the interplay Simeon has created between the movement of the eye and the form of the object. What appears in a single glance as dead, is ignited upon a second glance and subsequently begins to crackle and smoke and burn as the eye whips around the object zapping it with life. Suddenly ornamatrix is a crawling mass of forms and shapes that shift and move and I find myself falling into it. Teetering I move off to decoroced. Funny. The one I thought I liked the most was the least appealing. In the flesh, the red was flat, obscuring and congealing the form. It seemed messy. Yes blood like, menstrual perhaps: slithery clots, hard curves, trailing tendrils, sharp claws that might hurt. The right consistency but not the right colour – this is a man’s view after all. I saw Wall zip as an enormous ladder that if I climbed, might reveal to me this world of forms that Simeon seemed intent on creating. It was after all perfect for climbing: solid, tall and made of wood. What more could I want? Perhaps from up there these bits might come together to form some gi-normous universal, immutable form. Perhaps I might even see my own essence swaying in the breeze on the top of a distant wall zip in a land far, far away. Or wait maybe I would see nothing, or better still maybe I would be blinded by the beauty of the essence of myself: my appearance would not see anything, my essence would not be interested enough to look. Sometimes I felt the urge to break a bit off these perfect sculptures. (Maybe I could fall off Wallzip and be impaled by Ornamatrix.) There is something disturbing about their symmetry. It feels hard and a bit cold though the forms are often beautiful and the use of colour and texture attractive. I wondered about this man that makes things like this. Is this how he sees the world? Does he imagine that there are essences of things and if so is this his attempt at finding them? Why are there so many contradictions in his work? Perhaps it is this duality within himself that is the ‘real’ essence of the work. Human beings are full of contradictions. We are masters of the paradox and celebrators of polarities. The world is easier to understand when then are positions with which to orientate oneself. What position has Simeon taken? Maker of Forms? Transcendor of Essence? I have always imagined an essence as something that is revealed once other things are taken away, a kind of reducible thingee. Simeon’s sculptures appear to take away, to reduce, but at the same time, reveal and complicate. I think they look how transcendence might sound. I don’t think they are any ‘thing.’ They are remnants of some invisible process. Perhaps a computational anomaly or a cerebral infarction. Either way, they are definitely not from this world.

The Electric Bulb - Daniel D. Grafton

The Electric Bulb Daniel D. Grafton To the everyday user of electricity, still, the means of the provision of light are obscure. We know vaguely that behind each light globe there is a factory somewhere that somehow produces the agency for us to illuminate our places. It is for our occasional benefit that power plants run 24 hours a day. They are part of a complex infrastructure consisting of gigantic shapes and endeavours: enormous structures that suspend high voltage cables, a coalface burrowed two kilometres into a mountainside and the workers who confront it daily, workshops and maintenance, and finally, its administration from where a quarterly bill is generated and posted. These systems and events are evoked when an electric light switch is ‘thrown’, and this is why a fragile light-globe is such a powerful figure for progress. It is one thing to possess an electric bulb, it is quite another to have the means to make it light up. The resources needed for an electric bulb's ignition do not come cheaply or easily, hence an electric light globe produces civilised cultures. As such, the idea of a ‘civil’ illuminated society is marked by the ability to electrically light places and spaces, and to do so abundantly. As a consequence, a defining aspect of our electric lighting technology, in addition to its miraculous burning, is its potential for extravagant usage. Whether in use or not, an electric bulb is a symbol for excessive material consumption; whilst one can use the utility of artificial light in small measures, it is impossible to use it sparingly. Thus, regardless of whether a bulb is ‘on’ or ‘off’, ideas of abundant availability and waiting–capacity are behind each light globe. These traits are reflected in its expendability, which at little over 50 cents each, means that thousands upon thousands of globes can be found on supermarket shelves, stacked up and waiting to be used, burnt out then replaced by another. One glaring instance of this luminant superabundance is the way lights in city buildings are left on at night, well after their dweller–workers have gone home. A ‘rational’ explanation for this lighted madness is that power is inexpensive at these times. However, this is only half the story. According to one letter writer to a Sydney newspaper, electricity companies in all states in Australia need electricity to be used at night to keep power generators running at a continual rate. It follows that nocturnal city lights and illuminated yet empty office buildings help in this regard by drawing down power from the network. This is important, otherwise large fluctuations in power demand, such as whole office blocks simultaneously ‘flicking the switch’ in the morning, might cause large-scale power surges. In theory this would overload the generators and substations in the grid and cause the entire system to shut down — a scenario that would make electricity engineers nervous in the night. Hence, we have ‘off-peak’ electricity to maintain what is termed a good ‘loading’ on the grid. The same letter writer states that ‘Off-peak electricity is dirt cheap,’ and suggests that ‘most likely the buildings that light up at night are free, at the electricity company’s expense’ In this scene, illuminated city buildings are used merely to draw ‘a load’ from the power grid. A type of city light is depicted here which, for the most part, is useless except for keeping the city’s electricity supply stable and operational for the next day. And at this point I have an image of a Victorian housemaid trimming an oil lamp wick so to counter as best she can the contingency of the lamp not working in the evening to come. This is a task that Mrs Beeton advises in her 1861 Book of Household Management ‘involves occasional scalding’. After discussing the fragility of our civilised power network it becomes apparent that the concepts of utility, uselessness and surplus are conflated in a contemporary civil night, with the electric bulb at the centre - most likely a fluorescent ‘tube’ at that. The electric bulb’s excessive nature, then, assumes divergent ‘forms’. There is excess in the means of light production, such as the extraordinary infrastructures needed to make and deliver electricity (often in oversupply); and there is excess in its consumption, where a fraction of the light used in present culture would suffice for its needs. Yet these points do not account for industrialised culture’s profligate use of lighting technology. It may be that our electrical, illuminated overabundance is influenced by the electric bulb’s materiality and how it functions. As with fire, candle, or the gas burner, the action of an electric bulb is fungible, that is, it perishes by being used. The Latin base, fungi means ‘to perform’, and is also the base for the word ‘function’. This is a reminder that concepts of performance and function are intermixed in our use of light. As Nikola Tesla showed in his dramatic displays of electricity in the late nineteenth century, the ‘performance’ of voltage is a dangerous business, so too the ‘performance’ of a domestic light-bulb filament involves a certain type of risk and peril. For one thing, an electric light globe is self-destructive; although the tungsten filament produces light and heat, its material ‘resistance’ of electricity weakens its form. Its light, then, is a form of self-death. In its frenetic act of self-extinguishment — a stunning performance that gives light — the electric lamp consumes itself, slowly. Yet in this excessive, self-expiring presentation, the electric bulb also consumes the darkness that surrounds it. In this way the electric bulb is not only a danger to itself but also a danger to the night. This is a different relationship to the night than that produced by earlier forms of artificial lighting. One could say that early illuminations such as fire, candle, oil, and gas were concomitant with the dark that humans lived with, due mainly to their low candle-power or lux. This was a workable adjacency, where the corners and edges of a room or space lit by candle or gas would still be in some form of shade or shadow. In other words, prior to bright electric interior light, one lived with the dark in one’s intimate living spaces. In making light so absolutely, the electric bulb consumes the entire darkness to the extent that its only traces are shadows under tables and chairs or a crevice of darkness here or there. This is another of the electric light-bulb’s material excesses, where light proceeds from its central filament and out to the edges of rooms and spaces to completely efface the dark, chasing shadows up against walls until they become dissipated. For these reasons a light-bulb is not merely switched on but is set-loose upon the night. And so, the light bulb’s material function, extravagant by nature, represents the values and tendencies of the society that uses it. This is why an electric bulb is not merely an isolated, neutral technology but also an object and medium through which the ideology of culture emanates or becomes ‘material’. In this way electricity and light is an idea. In its present form and our usage of it, the white-hot electric overabundance of the light bulb simultaneously maintains and produces developed culture within the night. At such times it displays within its form the bias that a technological society has against obscurity and its preference for superfluent clarity, but also its need for excitability and of becoming overheated. In late eighteenth and early twentieth century culture the introduction of new and bright electric lighting re-made the dark into something new, radically re-organising and modifying human patterns and perception within the night. This is our precedent night-time. This is what our night has ‘learned’, so to speak, as a mode of nocturnal practice. In other words, the way we light our places is necessarily accretive but perhaps unnecessarily imitative of an earlier mode of lighting human actions. Despite such broad views upon technology and illuminated culture, thoughts still return to a small yet concentrated event within a delicate sphere of glass: an intense burning filament – the electric light globe – functioning now as it has done so for over 100 years. Whether resulting from fire or electricity, the transformation of darkness into light is a momentous achievement – astonishing, even — yet in addition to being a positive and miraculous event the production of electric light involves a certain unease. For instance, the ignition of an electric bulb is materially traumatic and is always a loss of the form that gives light. As well, such illuminations subjugate the night within which they occur, hence, both the night and the material of light making are offered up to a greater electrical good. And while the electric bulb has become one of the key markers for the idea of a civil culture, enabling and defining industry, social space and private life, its surplus light casts a shadow over less technically developed parts of the world who cannot reach for a light switch. So, in an industrialised culture, electric light defines built forms and human routines within the night, indeed, electric light defines the night itself. Yet the impact of the electric bulb upon social life is disproportionate to its physicality; it is a fragile object with its delicate tungsten filaments precariously suspended within a thin glass envelope. However, the humble and naked electric bulb ‘burns brightly’ in the collective psyche of industrialised culture, materially and figuratively, and both aspects are present in the act of switching a light on at the wall. It makes things materially clearer and as an object represents the idea of transparency and capacity to cut through obscurity and reveal the ‘meaning behind things’. So it is worth restating our rational, mad, marvellous and primal relation to the electric light-globe. Through its tungsten hearth–fire and the electric night that it makes, the bulb provides a potential and extemporal link between the dweller-at-the-light switch and life in archaic times. Here too, here there was also an urgent and primal need to manage the phenomena of night, yet in our night – tonight – the quiet darkness outside is replaced by a frantic, cadaverous light and an overheated, yet archaic, buzz.

Up Close and Personal - Composer seminar series - John Jenkins

Chris Dench, Andrew Garton, Catherine Schieve, Felix Werder, Rainer Linz, Ros Bandt, Brigid Burke, Ernie Althoff, Tim Kreger, Sonia Leber and Warren Burt John Jenkins Up Close and Personal is a series of talks by eleven practicing Australian composers, held on successive Saturday afternoons in Cecil Street, Fitzroy, from August 7 to October 23, 2004. Generously supported by Arts Victoria, the series presents the interested public and practitioners with an opportunity to meet composers and hear about their music first-hand, and in their own terms. The seminars, which take place outside of an academic framework, also encourage questions and discussion. Melbourne has always been known for art and ideas, and for its music, and these are particularly lively in the experimental tradition, of which the Grainger Museum in Melbourne University is an iconic reminder. The composers taking part (in order of their appearance: Chris Dench, Andrew Garton, Catherine Schieve, Felix Werder, Rainer Linz, Ros Bandt, Brigid Burke, Ernie Althoff, Tim Kreger, Sonia Leber and Warren Burt. Topics range from music on the internet, to sound installations and other technological developments; from relationships between sound and image, to music philosophy; from rhythm and tuning, to instrument building. These subject areas, and the ideas informing them, are vital to present practice as well as to new musical ideas and possibilities continuing into the future. Brief overviews of each seminar are presented on the web, with postings updated on a weekly basis. A web presence gives the talks another life and much wider power of dissemination. The website, which will be further developed over time, remains a valuable and up-to-date public resource for anyone interested in Australian music and its recent developments. See the website is http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/upclose/ for details on all participants in this program