Published November 2014
Edited by Caleb Kelly
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Guest Editor – Caleb Kelly
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
Materials
In the mid-1980s I vividly recall teaching myself Atari Basic from a fat manual. I wrote exceptionally basic code for my Atari 800XL, code that miraculously produced large pixels that moved across a screen, controlled by my joystick. These brightly coloured squares appeared, quite bizarrely, on the family TV set, and I was proud and excited that I could create this very simple ‘painting’ program.
The possibility of writing a simple program that was not all that far from more professional programming is very different to our present day situation. I cannot teach myself in a short time how to make a useful painting program, and why would I when we have very powerful applications available to us? In the ’00s we got used to having applications such as Photoshop, Pro Tools or After Effects do the work for us and most of us have no real sense how they do this work – I have absolutely no idea of what is behind the interface of these applications.
In recent years there has been a tangible shift back to making simple electronics and writing code, and with it a return to handmade electronics. There is an abundance of hardware and software available that helps us to build electronics and code; from Arduino to littleBits, MaKey MaKey to Ototo, Scratch to Python. Even the kids are getting into it, shoved along by the adored and addictive Minecraft game. The maker movement is swiftly gaining momentum, opening spaces for people to meet and learn to hack, make, share and hang out in tool sheds and around tables filled with electronics components. Recently I heard about a board game scene in Sydney where people not only design games, they laser cut the board game’s elements! This hands-on turn is pushing a return to material thinking after a decade of blankly staring at screens.
My specific area of research interest has, for a long time (20 odd years), been sound. Sound is not often thought of as material; it is after all created by wave-making events. Yet we often have a physical response to sound; we can feel it if it hits us hard enough. Recently, at the faculty formally known as COFA, two very physical sound events occurred within the Liquid Architecture 2014 festival. The first was the installation Bunghole, erected by Eric Demetriou. The work is an installation in which metal drums implode, producing a loud short sharp bang. The sound hits the audience and yet it is produced by the inward crumpling of the drums. This explosion/implosion has a strange effect on the mind and body, which expects such a sound to have an outward result. The second physical sound occurrence was produced by Hard Hat, the band of Peter Blamey and Kusum Normoyle (both represented in this issue of Das Superpaper). Hard Hat utilised two mighty guitar amps and the courtyard PA to produce a violent and physical noise that could be heard blocks away. As is always the case, some of the audience protected their hearing from the outburst by plugging their ears, yet there was nothing we could do to plug our bodies from the palpable sound waves massaging our inner organs.
In this issue of Das Superpaper the authors have approached the theme of materials through an array of practices including art, media, music and text. The issues draws together a series of dialogues and conversations, short articles and page works that engage materials in a discourse that is multitudinous and far reaching. Most hail from Sydney and many are associated with the UNSW-based research group Sound and Materials. The group is focused on making and thinking about sound as a material component of arts practice. For the most part these researchers are producing sound not from within a ‘digital studio’ but rather through physical and material means.
—Caleb Kelly
Sound and Materials | UNSW Art & Design
soundandmaterials.com
Published August 2014
Edited by Nick Garner
Imprint
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Design – Missy Dempsey
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
Acid/Gothic
Acid connotes the fragmentation of experience and dislocation of meaning due to un-structuring effects on thought patterns.
H.C. Reitveld on Acid House
Gothic – traditionally a response to the classical – could be said to remain non-, anti- and counter- by definition, always asserting that the conventional values of life and enlightenment are actually less instructive than darkness and death… with classical broadly replaced by all that is newly conservative in art as in politics and society at large.
Gilda Williams on Gothic Art in the Contemporary
This issue of Das Superpaper, Acid/Gothic, accompanies an exhibition that was filmed in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay House at the end of May and held at Galerie pompom in August 2014. The premise of the title came about from a consideration of Acid (or psychedelia) and Gothic as cultural strategies that have reappeared throughout Western history in response to authoritarian or highly structured theoretical regimes. These strategies, when placed next to each other, became a lens through which to view the world. These last decades become a kind of torrid cheese dream, a nightmare had by someone who awoke in the Middle Ages and passed out sometime towards the end of the 20th century.
At its core, this project is concerned with pairing things, with saying ‘these things go together, if only just for a moment’. The pairs in this project, spiralling out from the initial connection of Acid and Gothic, don’t exist as stark absolute binaries; they don’t exert the guiding influence of north/south, the moral influence of right/wrong, nor the scientific absolutism of true/false. A world of absolutes is not representative of how I navigate (here/there), how I remember (now/then) or how I relate (you/me), nor is it representative of a world I would want to live in.
The formal pairings born from the conjunction of Acid and Gothic form relationships that are ambivalent, unclear, distorted, at times romantic and often consciously uncertain. Rather than existing as coherent, independent entities, they have blurred edges, they seep into each other, merge and shimmer. In this way the pairings exist as iterations of themselves, as might a shadow or an echo or a memory.
…
The formal qualities and history of cinema have been key to the development of this project – in particular, through a consideration of the influence of cinema on the way that we form memories. Cinematic moments act to graphically and textually associate disparate events, works and lines of thinking. In 1993, Jurassic Park’s dashboard cups rumbled not only with the coming of the T-Rex but on a personal scale, with my own coming consciousness and on a grander scale, with the approach of the new millennium, the Internet and hyper-connectivity. In the exhibition these two rippling cups, stuck on repeat, become quotation marks that, alongside the glasses of W. C. Heda’s Still Life With Ham (1635), mark out on one hand the journey of Enlightenment and on the other the journeys of the Gothic and of psychedelia.
If the cinematic is a central subject of Acid/Gothic, it has been equally important to its production as an object. On entering the gallery, passing through a hall, the main space is empty but for two screens facing each other and a Persian rug aligned between them. The two video channels show different points in a 20-minute loop that walks through an exhibition installed at Elizabeth Bay House. The loop is shot from the perspective of a traveller walking through the historic home, stopping to look at the various artworks and the architecture.
At times we see the traveller from later in the loop enter the frame; the viewer becomes the viewed and, across the two channels, the artworks can be viewed from two different perspectives and from two points in time. The score for the journey the camera takes through the space was choreographed, in response to the show and the architecture, by Jess Olivieri. The camera loops around the house’s famously striking elliptical saloon staircase, along the banisters of the upper arcade and throughout the rooms. The presentation across two channels becomes, in part, a jerky appreciation of Russian Ark and The Shining.
…
Elizabeth Bay House was built by Alexander Macleay between 1835 and 1839 from designs interpreted by the colonial architect John Verge and was often introduced as ‘the finest house in the colony’. In situating Acid/Gothic in this Greek Revival (or rather Greek Revival Revival) mansion, the central saloon acts like an iris or vortex, analogous perhaps also to the cinematic spool. It exists as a cultural site both associatively, through its form, rhythm and proportion, its lighting and furnishings, and geographically within the physical and historical landscape of Sydney and Australia more broadly.
The house has its own Revival pairing in Vaucluse House, the Wentworth family’s unfinished Gothic mansion several kilometres away in Vaucluse. Indeed, the story goes that William Wentworth had on occasion ended up drunk at the steps of Elizabeth Bay House hurling abuse at Macleay, forever tying the two houses in some half-forgotten affected landscape. Perhaps though, Elizabeth Bay House would be more appropriately situated against Harry Seidler’s Grosvenor Place in Sydney’s CBD. Opened in 1988, the bicentennial year of Europe’s grasp on the continent, the curved skyscraper enjoys a simple rhyme with the finest house in the colony.
There are formal and poetic resonances between the two buildings’ plans and locations: both were built around an elliptical core, one with a square frame, the other framed by a pair of segments of a circle, and in true Sydney fashion, both floor plans were designed to make the most of the view. Both buildings pivot off the same reference point, the same hinge; like the same pendulum 150 years apart, they are attached to the same anchor, the same vanishing point that lies between the heads of Port Jackson. In setting their sights on the heads the buildings gaze not only toward the rising sun but outward, away from Australia, as though yearning.
In taking Acid and Gothic as cultural trajectories that can be followed and intertwined, Acid/Gothic tries to imagine alternate realities; it traverses time and space and promotes a world where relationships, ideas and social and cultural frameworks exist on an expanded plane, in multiple dimensions and careening off in multiple directions. This issue of Das Superpaper looks to emotional, experiential and, above all, uncertain stances on existence, the cultural fabric and the eternal task of living with each other.
—Nick Garner
Published June 2014
Guest-Edited by Brooke Babington, Liang Luscombe, and Pip Wallis
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Guest Editors – Brooke Babington, Liang Luscombe, and Pip Wallis
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
The importance of not doing as you say
In Colorado there’s a woman who runs and can’t get exhausted. In 1997, she underwent a partial right-temporal lobectomy to correct the epileptic seizures she experienced daily. The seizures and surgery have short-circuited that part of her brain assigned to sense the passage of time. As a result she has become a champion ultramarathon runner, unfazed by the oppressive awareness of how long she has been running.
In the visual arts industry, making and communicating ideas can end up seeming very much like multi-tasking and marketing products. One hopes not to produce only more ‘content’ for the contemporary art machine, which either runs off, or produces, publicity (even more so than objects now) in the service of capital.
In such a context – symptomatic of an overly corporatised society and its values of service and high-performance – we seem increasingly prepared to reproduce and internalise these conditions: artists play at being entrepreneurs and marketing agents while critics and curators perpetuate a marketing paradox that puts any enunciation to work as positive exposure to satisfy funding bodies and stakeholder interests.
Subversion might be, if we are not careful, the sweetener that makes it easier for us to run faster, harder. It seems that all moves are funnelled toward productiveness by invisible variants of the human resources department (the most nauseating of word combinations) and worker ‘support’ strategies (read: peptides). The office chair is more ergonomic, although not for your comfort.
How to be hopeful that we can become what is not required of us?
In his essay ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’, Jan Verwoert asks how we might ‘effectively interrupt the self-contained economic cycle of supply and demand and truly break the spell of the pressure to produce for the sake of production.’1 He goes on; ‘[A] dedication to imagining other ways to perform and other ways to enjoy consumption means claiming the imagination and the aesthetic experience as a field of collective agency where workable forms of resistance can be devised.’
With this in mind, the texts and artist pages here move away from the pre-determined functions of contemporary art criticism to self-consciously consider their own form: that of the magazine. We have also considered how the magazine itself functions as a proposition to embody a critique of the production, framing and dissemination of creative activity.
The issue is both a proposal for and an experiment in shapeshifting, drawing attention to ways in which contemporary creative work fulfils predetermined requirements, considering models of alternative institutions and looking to strategies of inefficiency, unspeakability and withdrawal as workable forms of resistance.
To this extent, the recent events of the Biennale of Sydney Boycott have similarly played a part in our discussions for this issue. The BoS Working Group’s strategies of refusal and divestment were proposed as affirmative action toward actual improvement of refugee policy and treatment in Australia.
Although inactivity is effectively forbidden today, the refusal to work, as in Lee Lozano’s work, can embody useful and positive action. The demands of some unwieldy organisations raise the question: who is working for whom? Organisations, and indeed individuals, might look at reducing operations or slowing production as a means to align the ways in which they function with their ideologies and to manage their own accountability.
Divergence and contrariness are possible modes for relating to the contemporary art machine. Happily, a multiplicity of modes is at play since a few spanners in the cogs gives us time to look closely at the pieces.
The trajectory through this space of real political and lived conditions is the long haul; luckily exhaustion is guaranteed.
—Brooke Babington, Liang Luscombe, and Pip Wallis
1. Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’ in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010
Published March 2014
Edited by Robyn Stuart
Imprint
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
Collected over the following pages are the works of ten writers. To each writer we provided a provocation loosely centred around the idea of restoration – and if this issue were to have a uniting theme, restoration would probably be it, especially if you allow for a version of restoring that encompasses re-story-ing: new stories emerging from the ruptures that appear in the old. From the literal cracks in the surface of Malevich’s Black Square to the glitches and slippages of the digital, the works in this issue no longer look towards conserving or preserving, but rather towards reclaiming, recalibrating, renewing, renovating or otherwise revelling in states of entropy and decay.
Of course, much of this is political: the chance to imbue objects with new stories implies that we can set aside versions of history that are no longer palatable. As Juán Gaitan suggests, we are seeing a “disavowal, a need to remove the 20th century, perhaps with the sense that it prevents the forming of an affirmative collectivity”. And as Iván Muñiz Reed writes, restoring (or the choice not to restore) “indulges in the same vices as the writing of history, giving us the power to build upon the meaning of an object or to change its meaning altogether, skewing and distorting to our will.” Indeed, Astrid Lorange describes the “certain kind of pleasure” elicited by the “dissolution of the fantastic seamlessness of representation”. There is pleasure, too, in the fact that certain relics are crumbling, certain ‘embarrassments’ are fading into static or dust. The 2013 exhibition Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century presented that notoriously troublesome century, pockmarked by wars and genocides, as one of “false starts, obsolete technologies and unrealised utopias”. Perhaps there is even a desire to view the entirety of the 20th century as a kind of systemic glitch, an accident, a mistake.
Another dominant theme that emerged for the writers within this issue is that of poetry, literature and art and the relationships between them. A history of these relationships is presented in Alys Moody’s essay Parallel Texts, via the example of the collaboration between Belinda De Bruyckere and JM Coetzee: “art and literature can be restored to each other—and re-storied by each other—secure in the specificity of their own mediums”. Elsewhere in the issue, Mathew Abbott responds in verse to John Gerrard’s Exercise, and Stella Rosa McDonald and Moyra Davey discuss aspects of the writer/artist relationship.
Visually, we begin this issue with Black Square and finish with a white page from Moyra Davey’s Burn the Diaries. In doing so, we also attempt a kind of restoration: from darkness to light, dusk to dawn. This is not to suggest that we have reached an endpoint, but rather a reference to the cyclical nature of both history and imagery – and to implicate the reader in the act of repetition.
—Robyn Stuart
Published December 2013
Guest-Edited by Alys Moody
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Guest Editor – Alys Moody
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
Irrational Agents: Gender, Economics and Affect
Women (and gay men), the old story goes, are unusually emotional: they weep, they gasp, they faint, they quarrel. Even feminists, defined by their attempts to get beyond this old story, don’t escape the stigma of their gender’s perceived emotionality, even if they burn with man-hating rage instead of expiring with a delicate sigh. If the early women’s liberation movement embraced this more aggressive emotional register as an antidote to the passivity of traditional feminine emotion, though, the history of both feminist theory and feminist art practice has tended until recently to avoid questions of affect, in favour of debates about female representation (in all senses of the word), the nature and origin of “woman” as a category, the value or otherwise of domesticity or women’s lived experience, and so forth.
A new wave of feminist and queer theorising, however, has shifted the focus back to emotion, arguing that affects offer both a powerful (if dangerous and unpredictable) political tool, and a productive way of understanding how identities and social relations are structured. The earliest work in this vein emphasised the importance of affects in structuring our gender and sexual identities—we might think here of Hélène Cixous’s description of a woman who trembles when called on to speak in public, which forms the basis for her claims about an essentially “feminine” writing, characterised by its inherent embodiment; or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim in Touching Feeling (2003) that “queer” means “those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame,” reinventing queerness as being inherently and fundamentally “about” a specific affect.
More recently, theorists have started thinking about the affective dimensions of gender and sexuality in more social terms. Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, for example, argues for a productive repudiation of the unquestioned advocacy of happiness, in an attempt to preserve a space in which women, queers and others can be angry, while Sianne Ngai suggests in Ugly Feelings that envy might be reclaimed as a way of analysing the dynamics of the feminist movement, and of relations between women more generally. For Ahmed and Ngai, happiness, anger and envy pervade the politics that run through the feminist movement and determine how it relates to society as a whole. Affect offers a way of refocusing the vagaries of personal relations and group dynamics as a key site of political action, even as these writers insist that affect is as much about how people relate to each other as who they are (or think themselves to be).
Running through all these thinkers is a sense that affect is both embodied and contagious, describing the point at which the most personal articulates with the most public, as well as the point at which emotion articulates with cognition. In place of older theories that would oppose thinking and feeling, placing affect mystically outside the political or the social, these thinkers locate affect as a dimension of language and politics, a response that is produced in and through social and cultural dynamics and that is inextricably bound up with cognition.
The contagious, social and public aspect of affect has led theorists including Ahmed to speak of “affective economies,” systems in which affects circulate in such a way as to establish systems of value. But affects also animate real, monetary economies in ways that are central to the articulation of capitalism with questions of gender and sexuality. Decades of work in cultural studies has pointed towards the ways in which affects, positive and negative, are mobilised in advertising, with the goal of encouraging consumption but the side effect of cementing personal identities that often gravitate around gender and sexuality. Similarly, Ahmed’s critique of happiness seems particularly pertinent in light of the way economics as a discipline orients itself towards the maximisation of utility, and suggests new ways of thinking critically about capitalism’s relation to gender and sexuality.
This issue of Das Superpaper asks what it means to think about the conjunction of affect, gender and economics in light of contemporary art practice. It suggests that the orientation of affect in contemporary art is, as Julie Taylor argues, structured by ambivalence, both in terms of developing through the complex layering of contradictory feelings, and by generating its own kinds of mixed or uncertain responses. The writers and artists in this issue suggest that affect enters art through a number of feedback loops—between artists and publics, between members of a curatorial team, between teachers and students. Several are interested in the roles of social media and art—and particularly their intersection—in creating affective spaces that move ambivalently between intimacy and spectacle, blurring the lines between the personal, the interpersonal, and the public. In these pages, affect is staged, masked, and silenced. Art, in other words, doesn’t simply express or provoke affect; it engages in a complex set of affective exchanges and evasions that implicate and weave themselves through our economic circumstances and our gender and sexual identities. It reveals us all to be irrational agents.
—Alys Moody
Published September 2013
Guest-Edited by David Capra
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Guest Editor – David Capra
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
Western Sydey: a portrait of a place
In 2005 I spent a year living in Italy, staying at my great uncle’s house. He ran the Laurus Robuffo publishing house and was quite wealthy. I slept in the room where Mussolini learnt fencing, bathed in the ground’s Olympic swimming pool and had my own Roman Holiday affair with the family dachshund. After all this indulgence, I wasn’t looking forward to coming back home.
Home is Western Sydney, where I have lived all my life.
When I arrived back, I became aware of Parramatta Artists Studios, which was co-ordinated at the time by Michael Dagostino: the ‘art dad’ to a generation of Western Sydney artists. Fairly soon I had a studio myself and made friends with artists that came from “out west” too. I began to discover Western Sydney on a deeper plane, and met mentors who had already figured out its tracks.
Talking about Western Sydney can feel tiresome at times, especially when funding comes into conversation (arts funding bodies often require organisations to run programs out west). “Rough. Cultural wasteland. A place people don’t go (unless they have to find ingredients for an exotic dinner). Too many people.” All things I have heard when the west is brought up. When approaching this edition of Das Superpaper I wanted to go beyond those familiar stereotypes and instead focus on what I find truly exciting about Western Sydney. Das, being a responsive format set in the now was perfect to address the topic.
All across Australia similar social and economic landscapes sprawl inland from the coast, from the western suburbs of Sydney to the eastern suburbs of Perth. Transport is particularly significant to Sydney’s extensively spread out west. There are always adventures to be had on the T-80, the governmentfunded bus from which Tom Polo took inspiration for his addition to Das. Polo has used the T-80’s carpeted seat patterns and phrases overheard in conversations on the journey. There is Elizabeth who, willed by God, shakes people’s hands on trains from Ashfield to Campbelltown after her nightshift. JD Reforma has found another way to get around: an epic swimming pool saga, starting at Ingleburn and ending on the other side of Sydney to see how the other half live.
This issue of Das features a section dedicated to presenting new works by artists from Western Sydney, including Justene Williams reflecting on her dance eisteddfod days, Heath Franco’s heavily mascaraed man in what appears to be a grocery catalogue, Paris and Tacky morphing into madcap decoupagists, and Regina Walter taking a break with the smoking women of Stockland Wetherill Park. Elsewhere in the magazine, Giselle Stanborough and Alana Dimou take us on a two-day Big Mac eating extravaganza, and we learn about future project Funpark, which shares Mt Druitt’s fascination with themeparks.
It’s all happening out here.
—David Capra
Thank you to Anne Loxley who generously mentored me through this process and the Das team for making it all happen.
Published June 2013
Guest-Edited by Drew Pettifer
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Guest Editor – Drew Pettifer
Producer – Nick Garner
Editor-In-Chief – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Sub-Editor – Mckinley Valentine
The Body Politic
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the relationship between art and politics, with several key texts published on the subject and major exhibitions, festivals and biennales addressing the issue. Much has been written on the topic, with critics for the most part lining up on two opposing sides; on the one hand we have those commentators critical of “activist art”, scathing of its apparent lack of aesthetic consideration, and on the other we have those who advocate socially-engaged, relational or participatory art practices as a means to challenge existing social norms. This issue of Das Superpaper could be considered a propositional publication, navigating the terrain between and around these competing positions. Most of the artists featured in this issue would not consider themselves to be activist artists – with a few notable exceptions – but nevertheless their work encourages political analysis.
What connects these artists is their engagement with the body as a site of encounter, whether this is through bodies on display or through implied bodies (either within the artwork or those of the audience). Many of the selected works address the politics of representation, directly exploring how artists engage with questions of gender, sexuality and race; markers of identity that are anchored in various ways to the body and which can see the body become a site of contestation. But can this kind of art effect change, in particular in relation to sexism, homophobia and racism?
Foucault has argued that it is through our bodies that we are systematically repressed. He gave the term biopower to the “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power”.1 Biopower is a technology of power that facilitates the management and control of populations through a range of disciplinary institutions which foster normalisation, such as schools, hospitals, prisons and the defence force. This kind of normalisation perpetuates the divisions and prejudices in society, such as sexism, racism and homophobia. The artists in this edition all pose a challenge to this method of control by challenging the tropes of this normalisation.
The artists have used a range of methodologies to challenge this normalisation of the body, this biopower, ranging from the humorous to the confronting, the absurd to the poignant, and many permutations in between. Kate Britton looks at the “ethico-political” work of Santiago Sierra as a form of “territorial realism”, where an aesthetic formalism is overlaid on real bodies and real situations. The exploited and territorialised bodies in Sierra’s work come uncomfortably close to the various forms of exploitation that exists under capitalism, piercing the anaesthetised, pristine space of the white cube and confronting the viewer.
Marco Fusinato’s recent works often rely on audience discomfort, but rather than territorialising the bodies of his paid subjects, Fusinato’s works implicate the bodies of the audience in an immersive spectacle that demands a corporeal response. Fusinato’s earlier work commented on the politics of resistance through an active engagement with anarchist politics, but as Michael Ashcroft notes, late capitalism has come to cater for individual self-expression and creativity in a way that integrates the goals of revolutionary movements, sanitising and repackaging resistance as a consumable product and increasing the challenge to avoid artistic co-option.
Kate Mitchell’s practice reminds us of the relationship between art, bodies and work and the absurdity and futility of artistic labour under our current economic system. As a woman performing repetitive work tasks, one can’t help but think of the role gender plays in conceptions of labour when witnessing Mitchell’s work. Several other articles address the politics of gender within contemporary artistic practice, including Clare Rae’s article on the recent exhibition Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery;
Deborah Kelly’s anthropomorphic challenges to the gendered body; and Tess Maunder’s article on the professional development needs of women artists and arts workers. In a related manner, The Kingpins and Leigh Bowery challenge expectations of gender and corporeal totality through performance and the subversive nature of altered bodies. Nic Tammens’ piece on the agit-femme art rock group Pussy Riot is perhaps the most overtly political article in this edition, highlighting how a conservative state can reassert its identity through the oppression of an avant-garde feminist group.
Other artists like Eugenia Lim and Paul Knight take a quieter look at the body and social engagement, investigating the relationship between intimacy, the body and the everyday in the contemporary moment. While Knight’s practice involves a vernacular look at queer intimacy, Paul Yore’s work is a kaleidoscopic paean to experimental sexualities and uninhibited play. Yore recommends the use of psychotropic substances as a methodology for the reimagining of self, which is arguably reflected in his playful, psychedelic, decidedly queer works.
Richard Bell’s practice also employs a playful humour, albeit in a more antagonistic way. Bell contests the historical (and persisting) injustices against Aboriginal Australians and the contemporary prejudices held about them. Kelly Fliedner discusses his distinctive use of abrasive humour to highlight the oppression of Aboriginal people. Yhonnie Scarce also creates confronting works about Aboriginal history, but instead of humour Scarce uses a seductive aesthetic to draw in the viewer to her fine blown glass works. Her works confront such important historical issues as the stolen generation, Aboriginal deaths in custody and the colonisation of Australia.
Christian Thompson also engages with historical material relating to colonisation, with his recent series We Bury Our Own enacting a form of “spirit repatriation” by creating works in response to the archive of photographs of Aboriginal Australians dating back to the mid-nineteenth century in the collection of the Pitts River Museum in Oxford, UK.
Finally, Helen Johnson’s work investigates the body and identity through figural painting. In her most recent series she has shunned her usual subject matter in favour of paintings of islands, which serve not as the tropical paradise they promise to be, but as a “repository of Australian shame… the place where Tasmanian colonists sent Indigenous Tasmanians to perish, the place where we indefinitely detain asylum seekers”.
In considering the range of works included in this issue, I must say that I agree with Paul Yore when he states – and I’m paraphrasing – that when restricted to an institutional or gallery context, artists can merely comment on pressing socio-historical concerns. Controversial though it may be to some to make such a suggestion, art is not a substitute for political action.
Art will not overthrow a corrupt system. Art will not liberate an oppressed people. But art exists in a dialectical relationship to society.
The art of the day is therefore a reflection of the dominant culture at the time and a force influencing the dominant culture. It is through discourse then that these influences can be felt and thus through discourse and engagement that artists can hope to highlight, challenge and reflect the exploitative, oppressive and discriminatory aspects of our culture.
This issue of Das Superpaper highlights the various methodologies that a selection of artists attempting to resist the status quo use. It is neither encyclopaedic nor a cross-section of current practices. Instead of a destination this edition is another beginning in the discourse around the politics of contemporary art practice involving the body, one hopefully pointing in an outward direction.
—Drew Pettifer
1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007: 1.
Published March 2013
Guest-Edited by SuperKaleidoscope (Sarah Mosca & Kim Fasher)
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Guest Editors – SuperKaleidoscope(Sarah Mosca & Kim Fasher)
Producer – Nick Garner
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Editorial Coordinator – Robyn Stuart
Editorial Team – Kate Britton, McKinley Valentine & Grace Winzar
RE: Performance and what we spoke about on the last day on earth.
“We must experiment with ways beyond objects.” Hans Ulrich Obrist
“Performance art is a living form of art and should be re-performed” Marina Abramović
...
Performance has a long and rich history within the visual arts, from early 20th century movements like Futurism, Dada, and Bauhaus, to the Happenings, ‘actions’ and Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 70s.
We are currently witnessing an extraordinary resurgence in the popularity of performance art. The medium has moved from the margins to the centre of contemporary visual art discourse. Recent years have seen performance art being embraced with unprecedented confidence and major institutions have reflected this by presenting shows of mass appeal such as Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present exhibited at MOMA, Tino Sehgal’s This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern’s new Tanks programming, and locally with the next installment of 13 Rooms curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach.
There is a largely undocumented history of Australian performance art, though in the last decades it has never been absent from our artist-run-spaces, theatres, carparks and galleries. Local organisations such as Performance Space and Artspace have been challenging conventional notions of performance making for the last thirty years.
The contributors to this issue of Das Superpaper met for a discussion about performance art at SuperKaleidoscope’s studio on the 21st December 2012. We talked about the character and consequences of new performance formats used by artists, curators, and institutions. It became the blueprint for this issue.
Live gestures are one of the most direct expressions you can make in art. We view this in reference to time, history, fiction, participation and collaboration. We also reflect on the recent trend of re-performance and re-enactment that questions the nature of performance art, and how best to preserve it whilst maintaining the potency of the initial physical encounter.
Over the following pages we invite you to consider why performance art is being adopted with such frequency by new generations of artists, and why at this moment, audiences are demanding participation and such an undeviating engagement with their art?
—SuperKaleidoscope (Sarah Mosca & Kim Fasher)
Published November 2012
Guest-Edited by Iván Muñiz Reed & Lorena Peña Brito
Imprint
Guest Editors – Iván Muñiz Reed & Lorena Peña Brito
Producer – Nick Garner
Editorial Coordinator – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Editorial Team – Kate Britton, Mckinley Valentine & Grace Winzar
Periférico
Periférico was initially conceived as a platform to present the research undertaken between us for the development of an exhibition of Australian and Mexican artists, to be presented in Mexico in 2014. As much as Periférico has enriched our collaboration and will inform our future choices for the exhibition, it has also evolved and become a project of its own to a much greater extent than we had expected.
Our decision to focus this issue on Mexico was driven originally by our desire to provide Australian audiences a glimpse into the recent history of artistic practice in Mexico. However, during the process of discussing the editorial line we wanted to follow, we became aware of the need to address an unavoidable subject: the perception of Mexico from abroad nowadays, particularly regarding warfare and the political landscape. It was an opportunity to raise awareness and inform readers about Mexico’s sombre situation and for ourselves as a selfreflective exercise.
Mexico’s political and social climate has been on a steady decline for over a decade and there are simply no words to describe some of the harrowing realities that the country is facing. Since 2006, more than 60,000 people have lost their lives across the country in a nearly continuous string of shootouts, bombings, and ever-bloodier murders, driven by confrontations with and between drug cartels. In addition, the outcome of the recent elections has seen the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), known for its corrupt domination of Mexico for over 75 years, return to power. It is no surprise that several artists from Mexico directly or indirectly address these circumstances: Edgardo Aragón , Artemio, Fernando Brito, Edgar Cobián, Rubén Gutiérrez, Eduardo Sarabia, Tercer un quinto, Lorena Wolffer and emerging artists Juan Caloca and Yollotl Gómez Alvarado. As the title of Teresa Margolles’ exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale asks us gravely: What else could we talk about?
We found that some people prefer not to speak of what surrounds them and instead find reassurance in avoidance. Our preference is for engagement, and so with the purpose of confronting our thesis, and to hear the perspective of Mexican and Australian colleagues, we invited our contributors to reflect on three major points of enquiry:
• Tracing some of the key developments from the 1990s which positioned contemporary Mexican art on the global art circuit and their subsequent impact on the current milieu of artists.
• The way in which art production in Mexico responds to the pessimistic situation that the country faces.
• The intersection of ideas between Australian and Mexican cultural agents in different scenarios.
We asked them to reflect on the impact that such a harrowing context has on artistic practice both as an insider and as a foreign bystander, asking questions such as: If there is a generalised crisis across all strata (political, social, cultural…) of Mexico’s reality, how does it affect art? How does it affect the commonplace and individual, social, national and international relationships?
The issue’s title Periférico, short for ‘anillo periférico’ or peripheral ring, refers to the name of the main road that encircles Mexico City. In one of our earlier conversations, we asked ourselves whether being perceived as operating within the periphery of the art world is something we possibly shared. We wanted to bring into question the relevance of the idea of ‘periphery versus centre’ (or ‘alternative versus mainstream’), exposing these dichotomies as problematic – especially within an increasingly homogenised shared reality precipitated by the exponential proliferation of superhighways of cultural exchange. The ‘anillo periférico’ in Mexico, as a project, is a monumental failure; the road is mostly known for its constant congestion and its failed attempts to cater for ever-increasing drivers in one of the most populous cities in the world. The recent construction of a second story to the highway has not only aggravated the chaotic traffic conditions with endless construction, but it has further destroyed the road’s harmony with the local urban landscape, destroying all sense of place and context in a desperate attempt to connect. And as a metaphor, the confused routes, unfinished building sites, construction errors and irregularities in the line and its architectural components reflect the ethos of the social structure of the country.
We have included texts on the work of Teresa Margolles (written by Gabriela Jauregui) and Yoshua Okón (written by Denise Thwaites), providing an insight into practices from the 1990s that were crucial in laying the foundations for the current artistic climate of Mexico and its dissemination at an international level. Pedro Reyes discusses his practice with Giles Thackway, and the potential of art to act as a laboratory where new experiences can be produced. Looking from a different perspective, Sumugan Sivanesan and Joaquin Segura reflect (amongst other things) on the complications of the legacy of the 90s generation, the normalisation of violence and the implausibility of art as an agent for social change.
Throughout the issue we also present diverse and sometimes unexpected responses – interestingly, most authors chose to engage with the amorphous and uncertain relationship between both countries, which initially led to this project. They preferred to address collaborative processes, similarities and mutual experience, focusing on the cross-pollination of ideas which arise from encounters between artists from both locations and from the convergence of artists and place. Tony Garifalakis, for example, introduces three works by Mexican artists which were part of a Melbourne exhibition that responded to the infamous Mexican tabloid Alarma! – known for its explicit depiction of violence interlaced with sexual imagery. Joaquin Segura writes a series of brief stories of coincidence and concurrence – incisive, honest and even humorous accounts of ‘localisms’ and encounters abroad, and Thomas Jeppe intervenes directly into the magazine, creating a collage of images and text which relate to his time spent in Mexico. Both Joaquin Segura and Thomas Jeppe resolve their participation through fragmented narratives and incisions, like bullets, to describe their experience as visitors and hosts. There are other accounts of crossed paths. Will French reflects on his experience of the streetscape of Mexico’s capital (Mexico Distrito Federal), a city perpetually in motion, and Cuauhtémoc Medina and Aline Hernández both introduce an action by Lauren Brincat which resulted from Cuauhtémoc’s suggestion to the artist: “you should walk in traffic.”
Due to the dual nature of the publication, many similarities and coincidences emerge. The unconscious relationships between collaborators, both in the way in which they formally resolved their texts and in their approaches to producing them, have been enlightening to us. As Regine Basha’s piece cleverly suggests, language also binds us, perhaps not as countries but certainly within the networks in which we operate. She identifies the evolution of a transient language (Artspeak/Nu*Speak) that originates as a means of communication between groups that do not have a language in common but need to understand each other in order to trade. The borders blur. Naturally, an interest arises to describe some of the roads and circuits that may already connect Mexico with Australia. Violeta Horcasitas, for example, presents us with an unofficial map of an artistic community, revealing existing lines between artists which we might not have been aware of.
As Aline Hernández points out in her text, to talk about traffic in Mexico City is to open a sort of Pandora’s Box: the topic is complex, endless and has no apparent solution. For inhabitants of Mexico City it is the most commonplace topic of conversation one could choose, like talking about weather, perhaps because it affects everyone, every day, invariably – and distracts from the more woeful topics, which sadly are part of Mexico’s every day. A great portion of life is spent in the stagnant concrete highways (particulary Chilangos1 in the cultural centre of the country): idle, enduring, waiting for change. But there are plenty of people out there who are resisting, reacting; some finding poetry in failure, and others fearlessly walking into traffic as a way to describe the world. Without any proposed solutions, we hope that talking about traffic in this instance serves as evidence of such acts of resistance, for how boring and lonely would the world be if left undescribed?
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof art is (fortunately) incapable of being silent.”2
It has been a true joy and a stroke of luck to collaborate with so many fantastic writers, curators and artists from both countries. We thank them all very much.
—Iván Muñiz Reed & Lorena Peña Brito
1. ‘Chilango’ is a Mexican slang demonym for a person born and/or living in Mexico City
2. from Guillaume Désanges’ Tracticus Logico-Artisticus, a pastiche of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus
Published August 2012
Imprint
Producer – Nick Garner
Editorial Coordinator – Robyn Stuart
Art Director – Elliott Bryce Foulkes
Graphic Designer – Sara Morawetz
Editorial Team – Kate Britton, Mckinley Valentine & Grace Winzar
Semantic Networks
In its initial conception, this issue of Das Superpaper was going to investigate the very special relationship between the visual arts and literature. As the issue developed we realised this was a somewhat slippery question, so to organise our ideas we turned to our faithful friend: the mind map. As we drew dots and arrows, we started thinking about mind maps generally, and how they related to our question about visual arts and literature. Diagrams that visually map information have been around for centuries, of course, but since the development of the internet, they’ve evolved into huge and unwieldy beasts. Google maintains a semantic network (that’s a fancy name for a mind map) with more than 500 million objects and 3.5 billion connections between them.
Throughout the 90s, there were scholars who thought that the internet was going to radically alter literature, encouraging a kind of multiply hyperlinked narrative that would allow you to duck and weave through the pages like a very advanced find-your-own-adventure novel. At the time, this probably felt like a natural progression for literature; the visual arts had been engaging directly with audiences for decades and hypertext provided a means for literature to do the same. But after 20+ years of this technology, literature still hasn’t invited the audience in to the extent that the visual arts has. There may be different logically cohesive ways to arrange an exhibition, but can we have a coherent text if each new reading transforms it into a new literary object?
We open this issue by asking curators to reflect on the literary-type devices they use to present exhibitions. Given the way that exhibitions unfold – spatially rather than linearly, experientially rather than literally – it’s not surprising that they turn to metaphors of maps, architecture and spiderwebs in their discussions.
Later in the issue, we focus in greater depth on some specific relationships between visual artists and the written word, with essays on Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Fluxist text scores, the visual arts legacy of Samuel Beckett, and the spilt paint within Patrick White’s The Vivisector. We feature profiles on a selection of contemporary Australian artists who engage with the logic of performance, including Heath Franco, Stuart Ringholt and Marcin Wojcik. In specially commissioned artist pages, Wil Loeng responds to The Decameron, and Gregory and Watts explore Sydney’s public art (with audio guides available by scanning the QR tags).
At the point of going to print, our investigation of the relationship between literature and the visual arts is more convoluted than ever. There are so many arrows covering our mind map that we can barely see the dots anymore, and there are still hundreds that we’ve left out. But then again, incompleteness is the whole point of a mind map – it’s the ultimate case of the map not equalling the territory. In the meantime, though, happy exploring.
—Robyn Stuart & Nick Garner