Un grand nombre de Sœurs

Here follows my artists statement for an upcoming show, The French Connection, opening in Richmond, Virginia (that’s right – the one in the USA) on February 24.  It’s not the most succinct artists statement I have ever written but thinking about my time in France unleashes something of a torrent, it probably reflects that.

“The primary purpose of my arrival in Paris seven and a half years ago was to collaborate with Canadian filmmaker and fellow lapsed Catholic, Toni-Lynn Frederick.  We had met and become fast friends in Vancouver, Canada 4 years earlier.  TL was working on a PhD in the UK at the time and it we managed to orchestrate this meeting, somewhere between our two homes (I live in Tasmania, Australia) quite successfully.

She joined me in Paris and we travelled together to Lourdes (in it’s off season), shot black and white reversal super-8 film, ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant every night, drank, argued about the Catholic church and discussed our experiences growing up within it and tried to record as much of this as possible. We collected 2 large 4 litre jugs of the famous Lourdes water and carried them with us back to Paris where TL taught me to hand-process reversal movie film in chemistry we mixed up with the water we had transported. The film when processed, turned out to be a divine blue-on-blue rather than black and white, like the blue of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s robe.  TL assured me that this sometimes happened in hand-processing, but I prefer to think of it as our personal Lourdes miracle. We planned to call whatever we made with what we had done,The Pilgrims.

I have tried many times in the years since to turn what we have, the film and recordings, into SOMETHING.  I edited together a short video piece soon after but it left me unsatisfied. I have screened short loops of the film (the crown on the Basilica, the ring of stone lambs just a few hundred metres away) for a couple of exhibitions but nothing seemed an appropriate use of this material.

Even prior to being invited to exhibit here, I had made a resolution for 2012 to resolve this work. This exhibition and it’s collision in timing with a local symposium on socially engaged and relational artworks at which I was speaker, exhibitor and audience suddenly made something clear to me – The Pilgrims WAS the trip.  I couldn’t make the work because we had already made it.

I now plan to create a blog to document The Pilgrims, pulling together letters, diary entries, film, video and photographs to act as coda to the project but this has not yet happened so I offer up instead, two small film stills from the project, that I have, rather unimaginatively. titled Two Nuns and Three Nuns respectively (lets date them 2004 – 12) each blessed by me with some of what remains of the Lourdes water. I kept some in a Mary-shaped bottle. As well as ‘rebirthing’ the images, this kind of treatment/abuse of prints has since become somewhat of a signature for me.

The Pilgrims took up one month of a four month residency and while there were brief visits from my husband, some other family and from Europe based friends, for much of the time I was lonely. I suffer periodically from both agora and social phobias and I was gripped by both while resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts. I also drank very heavily.

The video Encore was shot in my studio over an afternoon and night, as I sang along repeatedly to an aria from  Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers that had continually brought me some comfort while simultaneously breaking my heart, Je Croix Entende Encore.  The first take was performed sober, and subsequent takes performed as I consumed a sequence of martinis. The drunken take used was after about 9, but in actuality I continued to drink until I collapsed and had a little blackout on the  marble floor of my studio. I had hoped that some great truth might be revealed in the comparison.  You know that old furphy that you always tell the truth when you are drunk?  This video suggests it is a lie. While sober me is reserved but open, drunk me is a game-playing showoff. She looks like a liar to me.

I’m glad now that when I met our curator Amie Oliver at the Cité I was sober.  She and another Australian artist, Eugenia Raskopoulos ambushed and commandeered me as a fellow body to storm the Australian embassy and crash an exhibition opening there in protest of the fact that we were not invited. These two women tore me from my solitude and ensured that my last month there was not so lonely, nor wasted. We three linked arms and together crashed more events, drank hot chocolate, walked in the snow and adored Paris together. I will always be grateful for their friendship.

From the distant to the recent, A Pack of Lies is my first artwork made for podcast and incorporates the voices of both our curator, Amie and her partner Harry Kollatz Jnr. (who I was lucky to meet in Paris also) who volunteered as two of the sixteen readers of alternate biographies of my life. Biographies borrowed from film-stars, musicians and sportspeople. It was always important to me that the lies were openly declared as such and so I assembled a selection of readers who knew me personally.  I am not a good liar or a happy one and can only tell lies if I also confess immediately. How very Catholic, I imagine you thinking. Someone told me recently of this work They know it’s not true. I can hear the smiles in their voices. I think I’m happiest when friends give in to my vision and join me in a quest for the ridiculous. This was just such a project.

My time in Paris tore me down and filled me up again and was entirely instrumental to my continuing body of work that has proceeded as an an investigation of identity and the self.  It was a time where I learnt new skills in both craft and diplomacy and was given the opportunity not only to meet with friends and collaborators old and new but to also be truly with myself in a completely messy and exploratory but ultimately constructive way. And all surrounded by the greatest beauty I could ever imagine.

Sally Rees
January 2012″

Below: Me, Eugenia, Amie – @Angelinas for the finest hot chocolate in the known universe. Paris 2004

…and a week later, my Touchy Feely wrap-up.

So… where were we?

I was off to the Debate/Panel Discussion which turned out to be neither but instead a very general discussion, ably chaired/managed by Sarah Rodigari* on the topic Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world.

But just before I go into that I should briefly mention the CWA CBD who spoke the following night about their branch and projects. It was unfortunate that so many of the participants had been called back to busy lives by the time Paula Silva, Bec Stevens and Judith Abell spoke on behalf of their project on the Friday  Saturday night which is jolly interesting in terms of socially engaged practice both for its adopted model of and legitimate entry into the CWA network (the acronym stands for Country Womens Association, just in case you didn’t know) but just as much because of the vague confusion it caused me.

Unfortunately I had to leave this session before it ended, but I did get to hear a bit of talk about Bec Stevens CWA project STOP. REST. PLAY. , which was rewarding because this was precisely where my confusion lay.  Bec, who became a mum for the first time well within a month of when I did too, conceived it as a resting space for parents and young children. A place in the city where kids could safely play, tea could be made, nappies changed, sandwiches eaten and fruit divided: a place such as did not currently exist in Hobart. As a new(ish) mum also, I found this space to be an oasis in the city during it’s 3 weeks of operation and I quickly volunteered to be available for some shifts to help keep it running. Why not? I welcomed it, it helped out the CWA project and it was the easiest place to be with my son, Arthur, in tow. Plus Arthur loved to be there.

My confusion lay in the fact that although I loved it, welcomed it and have volunteered myself should another, more permanent, setup be orchestrated, I found myself unable to assess it as an artwork. I assumed I was so grateful for it’s existence in my role as a mum, that I was simply unable to look at it with a critical ‘art’ eye. And in the end I did love it. Why did it matter if I identified it as a good facility or good art? But it troubled me because I really wanted to be able to respond to it as a fellow artist.

When Bec spoke at the final night of TF, she talked about the small CWA shop, a few blocks up from the city centre, and how it was the only place she saw elderly women in the city. About children who are also visually absent from it’s streets.  Without anywhere to ‘be’ within the city centre, factions of our community like children and the elderly have lost ownership of the city. In fact the city is gravely in danger of becoming a site where only commerce has a home as opposed to a place where people ‘live’.  Bec sourced a site for the project with a broad shopfront with the express purpose of allowing children, families, breastfeeding mothers to be VISIBLE, and in doing so provided a valuable picture for our city of just how else things might be. This visualisation of a suggestion, an aspiration… well, of course that’s art.  And I’m suprised at myself that all it took was for me to be inside that frame to have difficulty seeing that.

But back to Thursday night…

It was a pretty rousing conversation and the entire room spoke with passion across the evening.  I do wish I had taken better notes (er… or any) or at least written this summation fresh off the back of it because mostly all I can remember well enough to report accurately are my own thoughts.  I’d hate to misrepresent anyone so this is all I shall tend to here.

I do hope the audio record of this event goes up on the Touchy Feely Tumblr some time soon because, in very brief summation, it was a ripping chat.

I listened and listened and when I couldn’t hold my thoughts any more they tumbled out of me like a big, wordy fountain.  Much of it was thoughts I had already constructed that day and written into my previous blog post but at the core of it was this:

That for me, the word should was highly problematic, for it suggests that artists have some social responsibility beyond attempting, with all authenticity, to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art. In my opinion this is the only should an artist should concern themselves with.   This does not negate the work of the artist that does, as a part of their works construct or function, enact some direct societal change, but to agree with this statement somewhat discredits the work of artists that investigate an infinite variety of other subjects, themes and concerns.  It would suggest for instance, that an artist whose works are highly visual, aesthetic investigations does not have the same value as an artist whose work creates a more tangible societal ‘improvement’ (and I think we have all agreed through this project how malleable and subjective terms like ‘improvement’ are anyway).

Ultimately I would argue (and I did) that if you believe in the value of culture; it’s ability to both enrich and elevate society, then you must also believe that to ‘make a better world’, all one need do is to continue to practice as an artist and attempt through that practice to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art.

This is no small thing.  For as one participant in this discussion so rightly pointed out, Australia is a country that doesn’t really value it’s artists. I noted last post (and suggested this as a reason for the current prevalence of relational and socially engaged practice), that artists are viewed very suspiciously outside our own field.  To continue to practice and identify as an artist is actually somewhat of a transgression against the wider Australian community. I know that I have been guilty of embarrassment in social situations when answering the question ‘What do you do?’, I have apologetically mumbled ‘Oh… I’m an artist…’ and extricated myself with some speed to avoid accusation and confrontation.

But I don’t do this any more, because despite making work that might appear to be entirely self-absorbed, I do believe that this is my role, my job and the best contribution I can make and I do my very best to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art at all times. Of course I don’t hit that target each time. I just keep aiming and hope the bullseyes come more frequently.  And how very Australian of me to construct a sports analogy to defend the value of my societal role as an artist.

So yes, while I have managed (as I so often do) to turn this into a rant about myself, in truth this is my statement of confidence investment in the profession of visual artist. Cheerleading, if you will. Some of you make amazing art projects that, in a very direct fashion, work to improve lives, but relational and socially engaged works are a narrow mode of practice in the larger scheme of culture and there are an infinite number of ways to make art. So if you are an artist who wants to be the good in the world, just go make things and have ideas. Try very hard to make good art. I genuinely believe that this will also make a better world through providing ideas, aesthetics and aspiration.

Yes. I am that idealistic and sentimental.

And so what of sentimentality? The single niche I found for myself within this whole symposium. Is socially engaged art too sentimental? Is my art too sentimental? Well… we never got to that. And sadly I didn’t get a single response to my yardstick work.  So I have to then surmise that yes, it is too sentimental for discussion. I’m still unsure of details such as whether that means that people just don’t feel comfortable talking about it with me because the sentimentality makes them uncomfortable or because the sentimentality makes bad art which makes them uncomfortable, but the experiment so far speaks for itself. Or does it?

I would still, really, like to know.

* Yes, I’ll throw Sarah’s name in again.  She’s interesting, engaged and stayed to contribute right across the duration of the event. Plus she wore a lovely blouse. Okay -  full disclosure: I do seem to have become a fan.

Voodoo

Exhibition open.  Dust settled.

Here’s a sidenote about A Pack of Lies that I’d like to talk about.

CAST, the gallery where the exhibition is being held, is my former workplace, which you may or may not know.  I worked there for a relatively long time.  My first five years there were a total joy and I felt like the luckiest gal in town to have the job that I did.  The last two years however were a different story, primarily due to my own, at that stage undiagnosed, illness.

My anxiety led me to be paranoid and fearful and I was often physically ill at work because of it.  By the end this happened most days at least once, sometimes more.  I would repeatedly run and hide in the toilet and be sick.

After leaving the job I returned a few times to pick up some casual work, extra admin I think and in one instance, truck driving.  But every time I returned to the building I felt ill again.  I found it beyond embarrassing and tended to pretend it hadn’t happened so it took some time to notice the pattern.  I’m quite good at denial.

I remember post-diagnosis, better but still quite socially phobic as I continue to be, being terribly pleased when I worked out that it wasn’t my old colleagues that were making me feel ill, as I had suspected, but I was able to track the nausea specifically to the building.  The architecture itself made me sick.

Because of this, I have largely avoided going there, as you might avoid a particular food that makes you ill.  This means I have missed quite a bit of art that I would have liked to see and I have lost touch with a lot of people.  I have (literally) stomached it briefly for the occasional friend’s exhibition opening but I could never take it for long.

When the curator, lovely Sarah, first approached me by email to become involved in Erotographomania, I was very apprehensive.  I didn’t know how I could do this.  I installed a work for Matt there once in his absence and found it a little hard-going and felt psychological aftershocks for a little while afterwards.

I confessed to her, probably a little obliquely, that I had some difficulty and gave some suggestions as to why I might not be the artist she was looking for.  But when we met up to discuss it, I began to be filled with hope that making and installing a work would be the voodoo that would break the curse that 27 Tasma Street seemed to hold over me.  When I conceived of A Pack of Lies it really felt like it might mean something about the person I was in those last couple of years there.  Someone very confused and who had been subject to many paranoid, false ideas.  I became convinced it could help me heal.

The organisation had changed since I worked there and what was once my poky office space was now a broad, mostly empty foyer containing some seating plus books, catalogues and cultural free papers.  I decided to bypass the actual gallery and to instead install the gallery version of the work around the space where my desk had sat.  The show was already full of some big works and gallery space was at a premium so, curatorially-speaking, this was actually quite helpful.

When the time came to install, the use of this space had changed again so it is not exactly as I imagined, but the intention remains.

So are you wondering if it worked?

Well… I don’t see the experiment as being over just yet.  I tried to build up my exposure by driving past the building every day leading up to the install.  I had a fairly nasty panic attack early in the day beforehand but I just felt a little twitchy when I actually installed.  At the opening I felt quite fearful and as we had taken Arthur along, had the perfect excuse to skip away quickly and put him to bed.

Once home I was really disappointed in myself and the voodoo.  I had wanted too much for the anxiety switch to be immediately flicked to it’s ‘off’ position, and that’s a big ask.  But in the days that have passed I have realised that I need to go back to properly appreciate the show as a whole, and in doing so, can be there without the added stress of a lot of people.

So… watch this space.

I hope if you came along to the opening, you’ll forgive me if I didn’t say hi, or only did so very briefly.  I was struggling.

But one morning early this year I woke up so tired and angry at the things my own brain puts me through that now I’m trying harder to be brave and to do everything I can to fix it and be done with this stuff.

There’s too much other stuff to do.

Wish me luck.

Language

January is fast disappearing and I am pretty well at my desk as much as I can be,  getting ready for these two Feb shows, so still not blogging as much as I would like to be.

The art is the thing though eh? I know my priorities…

For the Jazz Festival project, I am working with two wonderful translators for the deaf, Roey and John, to develop a video for the Jazz Café.  I will start shooting the video in about a week but in the meantime, at our meeting last week, Roey generously did some on the spot translations for my still camera of one of the great classics (and a strong childhood memory song for me), Summertime.

While never really having mastered any other languages (I just ‘get by’ overseas) I am always fascinated with the changes in construct, syntax and logic that happen in translation so this part of the project is really interesting.  I enjoy being amazed about how much I don’t know; in this case about how many signed languages are in use in any one place and about how many things cease to make sense or change meaning as they are converted – translation is truly an art.

When the translators (among other people) ask me where the idea came from for the work, I have to confess that I think I lifted the idea from my old friend Louise.  A gifted writer and eternally original thinker, about fifteen years ago Louise expressed interest in submitting some work to a local festival of erotic writing.  There was to be an evening of writers reading their prose for an audience and she had the idea to ask a deaf performer to sign the work for her instead.  She was fascinated by the idea of how the physical signs for her words might heighten their erotic effect.

Unfortunately it seemed to be too touchy a request and she was unable to get any leads to find an appropriate and willing performer so it never happened.  But I never forgot it.

It’s actually a much better idea than mine but I hope in my case a visual translation of these classic jazz lyrics will at least bring something new to them for the fans of the genre.

…and I hope Louise still writes.  I have no doubt she still thinks!

I’ll put a spell on you 2

The incomparable Diamanda Galas.  Devil, devil, devil…

The Holy Trinity’s 1200CC Mary: Worshipping the Teenaged Wasteland

Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eye
It’s only teenage wasteland

Pete Townshend, Baba O’Riley

Photo by Kevin Leong

I remember massive, red dirt mounds, the byproduct of ‘new-ness’ that seemed to signify something as potent as an egg about to hatch.  Incomplete but habitable houses, in fresh subdivisions, in brand new suburbs, marked out by the rust coloured piles shoveled to the perimeter.

These mounds were a site for throning oneself, for staring out into a choice of undeveloped bushland in one direction or back to the established town in the other.  They were places to gain independence and some privacy before school or around teatime, at the darker, bookends of the day.  Maybe you would share a sneaky cig and swap heady and naive, adolescent divination; the sort of thing that might predict a future destiny (rock star, leader of an alien investigation task squad, world’s best hairdresser) or lover (rock star, pop star, porn star, that guy/girl whose dad owns the shop where you buy your chips).  These mounds became sites of aspiration and of fantasy.

In the name of the suburb, and of the dirt and of the feral cat,

Amen.

Here the mounds are transposed indoors and the adolescents are the imaginary male alter egos of three female artists.  Instead of imagining themselves as famous musicians or movie stars, these egos instead imagine themselves into the cornerstone of catholic doctrine: Capital G, God, his half-human son, Jesus and that mysterious bird, the Holy Ghost.  And why not?

In a spirit of pure fun, the trappings of the faith are translated with a camp and juvenile ad-hoc flair. The focus of the site is the grotto of the Virgin Mary, the previously unsullied mother of Christ, who opens her blue marshmallow robe to display six breasts like a beast in a strange marriage of Coney Island freak-booth and an Amsterdam shop window.  She bears the scars of having been toasted and served up to the faithful in gooey lumps scooped onto popsicle sticks.  Served up by masked pussycat alterboys (better behaved than feral),  I can tell you now she was sickly sweet but not entirely unsatisfying.

At the opposite end of the room in place of a confessional stands a hut made of cardboard boxes, where inside one can ‘relieve oneself’ (in private and by candlelight) of sinful thoughts with the aid of a ‘girls with guns’ magazine and a blurred, obscure video of a female figure disrobing.  Oh look it’s Jesus!  Wank for Jesus!  He’s got tits too and he’s all flesh.

In his physical form he roams the space in a black gimp suit, his intestines outlined in a flesh coloured felt (he always was a little desperate to prove, wasn’t he?).

I’m human too guys, see guys, just like you.
But wait.. aren’t you either the son of God or a cyst that grew legs…?

Another video depicts the Holy Ghost floating and gesturing its owl-headed way through the universe, its many-phallused collar there to penetrate you, to open you up to Gods word.  It floats around like an old Stevie Nicks video.  Stevie Nicks – with dicks.

God on the other hand is all about God.  All beard and cloudy arms he’s a show-off dazzling us with rainbows and lightning, endlessly impressed with his own skill.  As he inhabits the space, his desire to pop a wheelie is almost palpable.

In the name of the Bearded, and of the Gimp and of the Bird-Headed Hippie,

Amen.

The Trinity come together on occasion to patrol the space on pink dirt-bikes and communicate through electronic voice boxes mounted inside the heads of feral cats on frighteningly wired wristbands.  High tinny voices scream at you to ‘get off the dirt’ and remind you that you are just a visitor here.  But you may stay to admire their work; the rainbow made of fence palings and tree branches and the glowing rain cloud made of plastic milk-bar straws that releases a static rain of glue-string.  There is even a satellite dish made of cardboard and fairy lights to draw prayer from the ether.

Wow.

Here is a universe and a theology created on site. But remember, this is not really the Godhead.  It is three young boys pretending to be the Godhead as evidenced by the ornamental aesthetic of skulls and guns that litter the dirt.  But this is not really three young boys.  It is three women pretending to be three boys pretending to be the Godhead and the presence of these three women is still felt in the retro 80’s aesthetic (the era of their own adolescence for the most part).  The fairy-floss pinkness of the bikes, the marshmallow and the cats and the rainbow itself, which immediately evokes sickly (but highly desirable at the right age) Lisa Frank stationary and scented erasers – all these speak strongly of ‘girl’.

It’s an identity matroyshka.  We begin rooted in reality with the Arthead (three female artists) nested cosily within the fantasy identity of the Dickhead (three adolescent boys) who are in turn enclosed by the colourful outer shell of the Godhead (the three pronged cosmic deity driving the universe).

Sally, take my hand…

OK, I’m up for it.

In the name of the Artists and of the Boys and of the Cosmic Engine,

Amen.

Sally Rees, October 2009

This text was commissioned by CAST for the 1200CC Mary catalogue.
1200CC Mary continues at CAST Gallery until November 8, 2009.

Essay by Monique Germon

‘The Western World, it is argued, is largely nihilistic today in the sense that it no longer believes in grand truth narratives. When that happens, people will believe, at least temporarily, any story you spin at them. In the absence of grand truth narratives, society as it was once understood ceases to exist. Instead of the universal Church or the march of History, instead of society, we have a fun-fair array of booths hawking crystals and tales of intergalactic visitors; we have celebrity astrologers, wonder drugs, tantric Buddhism, predictions or mysterious epidemics, football frenzy and a vague fear of what Wheen calls ‘secretive, impersonal forces’ ruling our lives. We have been atomised. Suspended alone in a state of unrelieved apprehension bordering on panic, we cast about frenetically for some story line to write ourselves into. Instead of citizens, we have been turned into individual consumers; instead of tradition, we have had fashion foisted on us; instead of history, we are force fed docudramas about the mystery of the Sphinx. Desperate for company and direction, we’ll form a herd behind anyone – Princess Di, JK Rowling, the Pope, Barack Obama, Lacan, anyone. Just tell us a story. It may be humbug, it may be bullshit; it doesn’t matter: we don’t know the difference anymore. Just tell us a story. Any story. Please.’

Robert Dessaix ‘On Humbug’ (MUP 2009)
pp. 87-88

Six months ago I was in a caravan in North West Tasmania enjoying a rather hilarious discussion on both art and sexuality, when my host suddenly made the following announcement: ‘Artists are cunts. I don’t understand the bastards. I’ve seen men out here dying in those seas so you pricks can have your fucking crays and your flash openings in Hobart with all the yuppie snobs. It’s not right and you know why? It’s bullshit! They’re all up themselves – fucking artist cunts.’

A week later I entered the local pub with a photograph of Sally Rees wearing a t-shirt which stated in written text across her chest,‘I’M A CUNT’ and pinned it on the carefully guarded noticeboard. I watched as the picture was received and sat in an interesting moment where this work, recently commissioned for an exhibition in Sydney, found its way to a rather unsuspecting audience. Rees in all her glory looked over the pubs regulars evoking laughter and conversation whilst they in turn applauded her sense of humour, not so far away from the North West town of Burnie where she  was raised.

Autoportrait (Update) 2009

Sally Rees’ work speaks to us of our human selves. Her practice has the unique capacity to involve self-examination, whilst avoiding any stigma of narcissism. Rees dives head first into emotions and experience that are confrontational and often unpleasant. Her work therefore reaches into what it means to be a human being as she boldly explores realms within the human psyche that most of us spend time avoiding as best we can.

Rees’ personal approach to art making invites her audience to engage in a manner that does not, in turn, punish with vacuous performance or over-intellectualised enquiry. She deliberates and expresses, providing an experience of awareness that carefully side-steps the unfortunate trend of alienating audiences through elitist delivery.  Her work for this latest exhibition offers us a personal insight into the contradictions and dualities that contribute to the inner-conflicts which human beings can often experience. Her offerings are subtle, considered, elegant and measured and possess a timbre of gentle innocence that is consequentially, anything but naïve.

We’re at a place in human history where we clearly need to understand why and who we are. As a result of this need to genuinely understand and to break through the artificial walls that can indeed overwhelm us, some of the more poignant expressions we are seeing are those which delve into matters regarding the human condition – specifically through a deliberately personal enquiry. At a time where people are searching so desperately for personal meaning (so much so that we’re witnessing the abandonment of individual narratives and the borrowing of others in the hope of greater notoriety and recognition), the most rewarding experiences are those that have an underlying essence of honesty and therefore, authenticity. It is through artists such as Rees that we gain access to such truths, for we are able to experience the sheer purity of her contribution, which comes to us through this process of sharing, and of sharing very deeply.

Rees is one of the few artists I have known who has the ability and conviction to self-reflect in a direct and unadulterated manner. Her work has an element of generosity, which furthermore, births a particular kind of integrity, seldom seen in contemporary art practice today. She is blatant and brazen in that she is willing to vent, to purge and to absolve through catharsis and exposure, through a courageous practice of personally expressing her individual truths, and this she does by simply – telling her own story.

Monique Germon – July 2009

facts from stats

That last post was pretty heavy-duty.  Just in case you worry the laffs have gone, here is a list of terms people have typed into Google and as a result have found this blog:

1) image de scato

2) art à la rue 1890

3) gutter uncensored my

4) striborg breakdancing

5) crack whore sex

Haha. The interwebs is funny.

Horses

As I mentioned  a few posts below, Prof. Jonathan Holmes was going to (and indeed did) write a catalogue essay for The Arresting Image, the exhibition where Encore currently resides at the Plimsoll Gallery.  As I indicated when I wrote that post, that particular work is somewhat problematic and confusing for me in the way people respond to it.

I was grateful for J’s approach to writing about it and indeed the whole show, mounting his discussion on the messy and rather abject death of Marat and the famous Jean-Louis David painting that depicts the event.

His analysis of my own work was particularly appreciated, as my perception of the way the work itself is, in turn, perceived is frequently as a comic piece.   But for me, my drunken experiment falls further on the side of tragedy than comedy, although I know only too well how many very successful works (books, poems, films etc.) tightrope-walk the rickety fence between. It felt good for the work to be discussed with the seriousness with which I view it.

JH says:

The work has been selected for several exhibitions now perhaps because of the stark and pitiless insight it gives into human frailty, mental and emotional collapse, and sheer lonliness and exhaustion.  Indeed there is much to remind one of the Sydney Pollack movie ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’ 1969 where the dancers in a marathon dance competition dance themselves towards eventual self-destruction.  The end of Encore is brutal and shambolic. [ ] Rees takes us into a self-reflection that is both dark and troubling – at the edge of what one might wish to imagine.

J gave me the gist of his words at the opening (I had not had a catalogue to read until that night), mentioning his comparison with the Pollack  film of which I was aware but had never seen.  I knew about the marathon element, so his words made sense in terms of my own performance, but a couple of nights ago we rented and watched the film, inspired by Js comparison and I feel myself swollen with a whole new barrage of thought about endurance, exposure, performance and audience consumption.

The plot is this:  A dance marathon is held in depression-era California.  There is a big cash prize offered for the last couple standing.  Dancers are supervised by medical staff, take enforced brief but regular rest breaks and are fed 7 times a day during which they must keep on their feet and moving.  Many contestants including a farmhand and his young pregnant wife are taking part simply to have a roof over their heads and the promise of free food for as long as they can remain in the competition.  The contest continues for weeks.

Occasionally the opportunistic MC will launch into dramatic biographies or encourage dancers to break into an individual routine or song which elicits showers of pennies in appreciation from the audience.  Later in the contest he ‘spices up’ the action by cladding the participants in tracksuits and introducing ‘The Derby’, an event where couples, already at the point of exhaustion, race at breakneck speed around the dancefloor for ten minutes to the promise that the slowest three couples will be eliminated.

An elderly woman in the audience of the contest professes to favourite the main protagonists, couple number 67 (Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin), and offers a hand of friendship and support, following their progress like a television soap opera.  She seems unaware of the role she plays in their downfall despite her words of encouragement.

The entrants are uniformly humans at the end of their tether, clearly exploited for an audience whose main interest is in each individuals breaking point – whether physical or emotional.  And as both M, while watching with me, and the MC character observed, they maintain that interest in order to find something more wretched than their own lives and in comparison feel better about themselves.  Watching this harrowing film I have been made acutely aware that this may indeed be my greatest and deepest fear and that which moves me most: pleasure taken in the suffering of others.

Eventually couple 67 refuses the MCs offer to be married as a part of the show and are shown the list of expenses they have incurred throughout the competition for medical care and food that will be reclaimed if they win the prize money – leaving them with little more than nothing.

I was struck by the thought that I was watching a sister film to George Romero’s Dead trilogy (Night of the Living, Dawn of the and Day of the).  The exhausted dancers shuffling around barely moving or conscious like reanimated zombie flesh in a similarly bleak and hopeless scenario, preying upon and uncovering all human weakness.

Comparisons to the Big Brother phenomenon and the various ‘Idol’ shows are obvious too, although those participants desperation to be a part of the show is usually borne of something other than a basic human need like hunger.  But it seems the audience for human debasement is eternal if only to numb their own fears of inadequacy, which brings me circularly back to the fear expressed in my earlier post where I cited my worry that perhaps what I had created with Encore might be best categorised as ‘Big Brother for the cultured’.  I don’t doubt it’s value as a work (how can I when so many respond so positively to it?) but I’m not convinced that my description is not the truth and am somewhat suprised with these reflections today that a work I have made and performed might trade in this, my own deep fear of the enjoyment an audience might take in my own suffering.

Endurance works of mine like Encore are heavily influenced by Deborah Pollard, a remarkable artist and performer now based in Sydney but who I was lucky enough to work with on a few projects when she was the Artistic Director for Salamanca Theatre Company here in Hobart. Debs taught me a lot about sustain and about honouring an idea or an image by just holding it, actioning it, seeing it through to it’s conclusion -  whatever that may be.  I don’t know if Debs has ever seen TSHDT? but I’m going to recommend it at the very earliest opportunity.

There are subtle whispers and wonderings about working together again and to date these whispers have again brought up the E(ndurance) word.  Actually the E word has really been around a lot since Mike Parr was in-house at the TMAG for The Tilted Stage in the Summer.

The history of performance art is peppered with endurance works that in hindsight, superficially at least, feel a little like one-upmanship: who can physically damage themselves in the most serious/curious fashion?  Who can put themselves in the most danger?  Who is the biggest draw in the sideshow?

And how strange it can be when these works happen now… C’mon guys, Parr nailed his arm (his only arm!) to a wall just the other day on the Art History timeline, you think your Jackass-influenced art stunts can compete with that? Dude… read a book and see a bloody (actual, not colloquial) photo and dedicate some meditation to Mr Parr rather than a beer to Bam Margera.

Mr Parr always has a reason, a good reason for what he’s doing.  The gesture, whether violently nailing the arm or sitting quietly still, his head through an angled plane, always has a significant poetry and I guess this is the lesson for me to take away from all this big, hard thinking.  Do it – but make it mean something.

BTW go see the show which ends this weekend.  The Roger Ballen photographs and Amanda Davies paintings are unforgettable.  And now you’ve waded through this text don’t forget to appreciate the irony that the cornerstone of the show is the remarkable Tim Macmillan video Dead Horse.

Some thoughts in the wake of viewing a collaboration

A Tendency to Construct @ 6A A.R.I. 9 May – 7 June 2009

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I’m no scientist, but as I understand things, first of all there are elements.  Everything that comes after is the process of adding one thing to another thing and perhaps applying a catalyst.  But elemental substances themselves? They’re pretty much dead.

I have never failed to be touched by the nature of both creativity and chemistry to produce something out of nothing.  Or at least something out of something that seems like nothing. To infuse the dead with life.

I know how Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is perceived.  A cautionary tale, convenient for creationists to scare the creative away from operating in God’s territory.  But I can start life, or at least energy in an egg cup by adding white vinegar (CH3COOH) to bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO3).  It makes CO2 which escapes as a gas causing the bubbling and leaves behind H2O, water of course.  And you and I and all life could be viewed quite simply as a series of similar chemical reactions and constructions operating on an infinitely grander scale.  Anyway… I guess this lab-coat digression preceding the subject is because since I was a child, I have always perceived Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a metaphor for creative endeavour, with an understanding that things will sometimes fail.  And of late I have to come to realise that the art quite simply, is the things that don’t fail.

So, what happens when there are two creators?  Or indeed, zoom out the microscope further and view the equation this way: add one artist to another and what is the result?

Of course the answers are as infinite and varied as the skills, intent and leanings of the artists involved but here, the result is an anatomical diagram of creativity.  Both these artists, as in love with the creative process of others as with their own, celebrate creativity through the works construction, proximity, content and a rather generous intention.

Artists enliven the spaces they inhabit and the Brinckman/Robinson collaboration has produced something that tracks the paths of creative endeavour in this concrete bunker that the local scene knows as 6A, attempting to mark and map it’s arterial progress and the eddies of rumination.

The rhythms of the resident artist’s ums stolen from between their words about art and making, form a heartbeat that fills the open spaces, each marking individual work areas with animated waveforms of the sound, vaugely medical in appearance.

Is it romantic to present these ‘thinking sounds’ in such a way?  The word is that God made man in his own image, and regardless of the truth of that theology, I certainly know the reverse to be as, if not more true.  Our own bodies are our starting point for understanding everything else.  Why then shouldn’t creativity take the form of human anatomy?  Come on. We measured things in ‘feet’ until half the world realised it was easier to count by 10s…

What appears to me as a large anatomical heart hangs from the ceiling but if I could turn the room on it’s head, it’s an oxygen tent.  There is a perceivable ‘digestive tract’ that flows from the cluster of electrical wall plugs emerging from the heart/tent and flows through the narrow passage, branching though the main space and out into the carpark where a pink wire oesophagus breathes the energy of the thing back out into the world.

A Tendancy to Construct (installation detail). Trudi Brinckman and Cath Robinson 2009

At the opening of this exhibition I hear one of the artists talking with a gallery visitor who finds the medical nature distressing, it recalls for them memories of tragedy, the loss of a loved one in a hospital setting but the artist is insistent – it’s a life support system, this structure keeps things alive, it doesn’t kill them.  Actually I think it could go either way.  Creativity is perilous like that. Isn’t everything interesting balanced on a knife edge?

The thing that makes me both edgy and excitable is the dangerous potential; clustered, arterial groupings of tubes traverse the space,  half with the capacity to carry electricity, half to carry water.  Even if activated, those two things would be kept separate by their plumbing and cabling… but one error… one place of wear against another and it’s a danger zone. Bzzztt!  An out of control electrical charge that could stop a heart but if controlled and reigned in, could reactivate another.

Any collaboration is a risky exercise, and here is the result of that risk taken.  Two artists who know little about each other but admire each others work and want the experience of making in unison, not in tandem.  Emerging from the inevitably tense stage of negotiation, circling one another from a distance to get a feel for how best to play this out, they enter the gallery, combine, catalyse and depart leaving behind the outcome of their activity (their construction/baby/monster).

It is unfortunate for us that all we get to see is this outcome: the process being as valued by the artists (if not more) as the result and the work itself seeming to aspire to honour that process.  But this is not how it works.  If we’d been there, we would have spoiled the chemistry.

Sally Rees  May 2009