Final Thesis File (8.513Mb)

Images & Imagination of Adventure

Emilie Walsh ORCID : 0000-0003-0772-5541

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Art)

April 2020

VCA Art

Faculty of Fine Arts and Music

The University of Melbourne

Abstract

“The Images and Imagination of Adventure” investigates the use of the narratives of adventure in contemporary art practices, and presents the research outcomes through an exhibition and a dissertation. The term “narratives of adventure” is used to describe the trope of adventure that is herein argued as being largely inherited from colonial history.

The exhibition component of this thesis was exhibited at the VCA Art Space in July 2018. It comprised of eight works: Projected in Gallery One to the left of the entrance was the short film Victoire which emerged early in the project. This first work was influential to the PhD development and it later informed Victoire-Machine, a viewing device installation that further explored potential modalities of adventure. The First of The Last Crusade, Scope, Lost and Found and Traversant were also displayed with viewing devices and along with the installation Art’Venture, all were presented in the Gallery Two in the center of the VCA Art Space. The final work that was produced, Glowry, was developed specifically for the exhibition and installed in the small adjacent space to the right of the entrance in Gallery Three.

The practice-led research has identified three strategies that exist in contemporary art practices in relation to the narratives of adventure. Each chapter presents a different strategy, articulates the creative work undertaken in the PhD, contextualises it within contemporary art practices, and analyses it with a range of key texts.

The first chapter, ‘Killing Adventure’, presents the first of three strategies: the artist adopting a critical posture towards adventure, and thus claiming that the colonial trope of exploration is no longer valid in the 21st century. This political approach to the narratives of adventure is observed and described in the work of contemporary artists, and enunciated through the work of Okwui Enwesor, particularly his take on the intensification of proximities in a global context. A portion of the creative body of work produced in the context of this PhD can be retrospectively examined through the lens of ‘Killing Adventure’. The work is contextualised in this framework, and then examined in conversation with the creative practice of other visual artists.

ii The second chapter, ‘Adventure never died’, argues that some art practices develop a Neo- Romantic relationship with adventure, thus embracing or disregarding its problematic dimension and inadequacy. Within those contemporary practices there is a claim for continuity, and an approach to adventure as primarily an exploration of the self. This chapter contextualises the field of contemporary art by looking at the work of Jorg Heiser and his understanding of today’s art practices as ‘Neo-Romantic’. Once again, the creative component of this research was examined retrospectively in reference to this strategy and some of the creative works which fit in this conversation about the continuity of adventure are presented.

The third chapter, ‘Adventure is Dead – Long Live Adventure’, presents the last of the three strategies. It has a much more playful relationship with the narratives of adventure. There is an acknowledgement that the ‘Golden Age of Adventure’ though colonialism is over, but there is a desire to play, recycle and reenact the material of adventure. The world has been mapped, the stories have been told: but now scenarios of adventure are used as a drive for adventure. The artists whom adopt this posture, and the creative work produced during this PhD that borrows some of the characteristics of this strategy, are discussed in conversation with the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, and particularly with his essay ‘Postproduction’.

iii Declaration

This is to certify that

(i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the Doctor of Philosophy except where indicated in the preface,

(ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,

(iii) the thesis is 40,714 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices

Emilie Walsh

iv Preface

• The PhD candidate was awarded a Melbourne International Fee Remission (MIFRS) and Melbourne International Research (MIRS) scholarship from the University of Melbourne. (student number 683166)

• This PhD is undertaken as part of a Cotutelle program with Rennes 2 University, France, under the supervision of Dr. Ivan Toulouse. This a jointly awarded PhD program between French Universities and other University. My primary institution for this program is the University of Melbourne, and a summary of the research in French of 10,000 words will be submitted to the French institution after submission of this dissertation.

• One of the creative works for this PhD was initiated prior to the enrolment in the degree. Victoire, a video installation that played a key role in this research project, started as a project before the commencement of the PhD and was part of the research proposal. However, only one aspect of it was completed before starting the degree and the majority of it was completed during the PhD and played a key role in the practice-led research and defining the methodology. This is discussed in the introduction of the dissertation, under the section ‘Prologue : the original research proposal’

• A section of this dissertation (Chapter III.5.3.b Pierre Huyghes, A journey that wasn’t) is an edited version of a paper that this author published as part of a graduate symposium on Pierre Huyghes at the Nasher Centre, Texas, USA. The full text of the article can be found in the appendix of this dissertation.

v Acknowledgements

All my thanks to my supervisors Dr. Bernhard Sachs, and Ms. Lou Hubbard for your encouragement and commitment throughout this project.

I would like to thank Professor Barb Bolt for welcoming me warmly in the PhD program, and Dr. Simone Slee for her support as VCA Art Research Convenor.

Special thanks to Dr. Toby Juliff for supervising me in the early years of this PhD: I feel privileged to have experienced such a supportive yet critical supervisory relationship. Thanks to Dr. Ivan Toulouse from the University of Rennes 2 in France, for making the Cotutelle program happen and providing generous supervision.

For support through the provision of exhibition opportunities: George Patton Gallery, Abbotsford Convent, Arcade Gallery, Oboro residency in Montreal, Elistir in France, and the VCA Art Space.

Thank you to Eric and Theresa from Recreate for an amazing documentation of the PhD exhibition. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues from the University and beyond who helped with the final exhibition: Eric, Tom, Mitchell, Jaye, Tree Paper Sam, Jon, Corinna, Frances, Elena, Oli, Micka, Adam, Handsome Sam.

Thank you to Mitchell for his incredible help with the conceptual aspects of the dissertation. Thank you to Alex for his great help with the editing process.

Thank you to all my friends and colleagues at the University of Melbourne who support and help throughout the PhD was extremely valuable: in particular Eric, Paul, Frances and Chiara. Thank you to all my friends from Research Platform Services for providing a real sense of community throughout my PhD.

For your support and care, my family.

A very special mention to Cedric for his love and support starting the PhD, and to Eric for his love and support finishing it.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: Original Research Proposal ...... 1 1.1: Victoire ...... 1 1.1a: Victoire-Performance ...... 1 1.1b: Victoire Polysemy...... 4 1.1c: Questioning adventure ...... 5 1.2: From Performance To Fiction...... 11 1.2a: The stories behind us...... 11 1.2c: The imagination of adventure ...... 14 Introduction ...... 15 2.1: The Imagination of Adventure:...... 15 2.1a: Motivation ...... 15 2.1b: What we know about adventure...... 15 2.1c: The Chronological Boundaries And Conceptual Scope ...... 18 2.2: Mapping the Imagination of Adventure in Contemporary Art Practices Today ...... 20 2.2a: Research methods ...... 20 2.2b: Golden Age of Adventure Markers ...... 21 2.2c: Golden Age of Adventure markers in Contemporary Art Practices ...... 23 2.3: Classification of Different Strategies ...... 44 2.3a: Killing Adventure ...... 45 2.3b: Adventure Never Died ...... 45 2.3c: Adventure is Dead, Long Live Adventure ...... 45 I: Killing Adventure ...... 48 3.1: Murder Attempts ...... 49 3.1a: From A Distance ...... 49 3.1b: Art’Venture ...... 53 3.1c: Glowry ...... 59 3.2: Intense Proximity ...... 63 3.3: Decolonising Adventure ...... 68 3.3a: Stamps ...... 68 3.3b: Venus Infected ...... 75 3.3c: Bottle it up ...... 77 vii 3.4: Adventure Struggle to Die ...... 89 3.4a: A Critical Perspective ...... 89 II: Adventure Never Died ...... 90 4.1: Continuity of Adventure ...... 91 4.1a: Victoire Machine...... 92 4.1b: Tranversant ...... 97 4.2: Neo-Romanticism ...... 101 4.2a: Romantic storytelling ...... 104 4.2b: Playful Romanticism...... 106 4.3: Swim Along ...... 109 4.3a: Simon Starling – Shedboatshed ...... 109 4.3b: Klara Hobza - Diving Through Europe ...... 114 4.4: Moving into Playfulness ...... 118 4.4a: Adventure continuity...... 118 4.4b: Make Believe ...... 119 III: Adventure is Dead – Long Live Adventure ...... 120 5.1: Rewriting Adventure...... 120 5.1a: Scope ...... 120 5.1b: The First of The Last Crusade ...... 124 5.1c: Found ...... 127 5.2: Post-Adventure: Nicolas Bourriaud ...... 130 5.3: Recycling Adventure ...... 135 5.3a: Terminal Velocity ...... 135 5.3b: Pierre Huyghe : A Journey That Wasn’t ...... 138 5.3c: Tobias Rehberger – binoculars ...... 142 5.4: Recuperating Adventure ...... 144 Conclusion ...... 147 6.1: Revisiting the Three Strategies ...... 147 6.2: Ghosts of Adventure: Back to the creative body of work...... 150 Bibliography ...... 153 Appendix ...... 158

viii LIST OF FIGURES

List of Figures in Text

Fig. 1. Emilie Walsh, PhD exhibition, VCA Art Space, July 2018. Exhibition view, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 2. Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm, 1902-Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fig. 3. Production still from the filming of Victoire, 2014. Photo Credit: Laetitia Cordaro

Fig. 4. Emilie Walsh, untitled, digital photograph from a screening of Stromboli by Roberto Rossellini showing Ingrid Bergman (Karin) reaching the summit of the volcano, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

Fig. 5. Emilie Walsh, digital photograph of an old postcard (circa 1920) from Aix-en-Provence archives, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

Fig 6. Emilie Walsh, mind map of the different strategies of artists working with the imagination of adventure, 2015

Fig. 7. Aleksandra Mir, First woman on the moon, 1999

Fig. 9. Joan Foncuberta, Sputnik, photograph, 1997.

Fig. 10. Simon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 38 colour transparencies (detail), 6 x 7 cm each, 1x medium format slide projector, 2006.

Fig. 11. Klara Hobza, Arrival, photograph, 2009.

Fig. 12. Pierre Malphettes, Firefly (poster from the video), 2007.

Fig. 13. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, photograph, 2005.

Fig. 14. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, bottle, plastic, fabric, metal, paper, 2005.

Fig. 15. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, photograph, engraved spoon, 2005.

Fig 16. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

Fig. 17. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

ix Fig. 18. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

Fig. 19. Emilie Walsh, Art’venture, embossing print, 33 cm x 33 cm, 2015.

Fig. 20. Emilie Walsh, Art’Venture, stamp (wood, rubber, ink), 2015

Fig. 21. Emilie Walsh, Glowry ,VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 22. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 23. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 24. Yinka Shonibare, Nelson’s ship in a bottle, Fourth Plinth, London, 2010

Fig. 25. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Journal d’une défaite, 2006, glass bottle, string, pastic, sand, tire, 14 × 50 cm, FRAC Pays-de-Loire, Carquefou.

Fig. 26. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 1, 2001, photograph of the rock painting with charcoal and vegetal pigment.

Fig. 27. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 1, 2001, Glass Bottle, wood, bones, feather, paper.

Fig. 28. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 3, 2007, photograph of the performance.

Fig. 29. Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant, Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant, 2012-2014, stamp, ink.

Fig. 30. Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant, 2012-2014, mural, stamp, ink.

Fig. 31. Barthelemy Toguo, The New World Climax, Installation with wooden stamps, tables, ink prints on paper, 2014

Fig. 32. Barthelemy Toguo, The New World Climax, Installation with wooden stamps, tables, ink prints on paper, 2014

Fig. 33. Lisa Reihana, In Pursuit of Venus (Infected), video, 64 min, 21 meter x 2.5 meter, 2017 . Fig. 34. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate..

x Fig. 35. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 36. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2017

Fig. 37. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Fig. 38. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Fig. 39. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Fig. 40. Simon Starling, Shedboatshed (Moble Architecture No. 2), The Modern Institute, 2005. Exhibition view.

Fig. 41. Simon Starling, Shedboatshed (Moble Architecture No. 2), The Modern Institute, 2005. Production still.

Fig. 42. Simon Starling, Project for a Rift Valley Crossing, (2015–16). A canoe built to cross the Dead Sea Rift between Israel and Jordan using 90 kg of magnesium produced from 1900 litres of Dead Sea water. Set of 2 silver gelatin prints. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster, Glasgow.

Fig. 43. Klara Hobza, Diving through Europe, photograph, 2008.

Fig. 44. Emilie Walsh, Scope, two video sculptures, Arcade Gallery, 2018. Exhibition view.

Fig. 45. Emilie Walsh, Scope, video box (3D prints, metal, foamboard, mirror), one minute stop motion video played on a loop on a tablet inside the viewing box, July 2018. Exhibition view at the VCA Art Space.

Fig. 46. Emilie Walsh, Scope, detail, video, 3D prints, metal, foam board, 2017

Fig. 47. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade (detail), 3D prints, photo-slides, digital photograph, 2016

Fig. 48. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade, 3D prints, photo-slides, digital photograph, 2016. Install view at the George Paton Gallery.

Fig. 49. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade (detail), 3D printed binoculars, 2015.

Fig. 50. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. Install view at VCA Art Space, photo credit: Recreate.

xi Fig. 51. Emilie Walsh, Found (detail), 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016- 2018. Install view at VCA Art Space, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 52. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity (detail), 2015.

Fig. 53. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, video still, 2005.

Fig. 54. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, performance documentation, Central Park, New York 2005.

Fig. 55. Tobias Rehberger, Binoculars, sculpture stop, Rehberger walk, Vitra desing museum, Germany, 2016

xii List of Figures in Appendix

Appendix Fig. 1 Emilie Walsh, PhD exhibition, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Appendix Fig. 2. Emilie Walsh, still frame from opening of short film Victoire, 2015.

Appendix Fig. 3. Emilie Walsh, Victoire, digital photograph, 2014.

Appendix Fig. 4. Emilie Walsh, Victoire slides, digital photograph, 2015.

Appendix Fig. 5. Emilie Walsh, Untitled, digital photograph of an old postcard (circa 1920) from Aix-en-Provence archives, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

Appendix Fig. 6. Columbus Map, drawn c. 1490, Lisbon. From the workshop of Bartolomew and Christopher Columbus.

Appendix Fig. 7. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, Getty image, 1930.

Appendix Fig. 8. Klara Hobza, Departing America, Galerie fur Landschaftskunst, Hamburg, 2009. View of the exhibition.

Appendix Fig. 9. Pierre Malphettes, Firefly, Centre d’Art Saint-Léger, France, 2007. View from the exhibition.

Appendix Fig 10. Pierre Huyghe, RSI, un bout de réel, 2006, fluo tubes, 700 x 700 cm

Appendix Fig 11. Emilie Walsh, Bar chart analysing data from Adventure Dream Corp. survey, 2013.

Appendix Fig 12. Emilie Walsh, Pie chart analysing data from Adventure Dream Corp. survey, 2013.

Appendix Fig. 13. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, bottle, cardboard, wood, plastic, foam, twine, 2010.

Appendix Fig. 14. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, 2010. Photograph of the performance.

Appendix Fig. 15. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, photograph, 2010.

Appendix Fig. 16. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Verdun, 2010. Photo credit: Aurelien Mole, view from the exhibition at Bois-Saint-Léger.

xiii Appendix Fig. 17. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Appendix Fig. 18. Klara Hobza, Diving through Europe, photograph, 2008.

Appendix Fig. 19. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Appendix Fig. 20. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2017

Appendix Fig. 21. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2016

Appendix Fig. 22. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Appendix Fig. 23. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Appendix Fig. 24. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Appendix Fig. 25. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. Installation view.

Appendix Fig. 26. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. Images contained within the viewing devices.

Appendix Fig. 27. Pierre Huyghe, L’expédition scintillante, 2005.

Appendix Fig. 28. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, video still, 2005.

Appendix Fig. 29. Emilie Walsh, Scope, Arcade, 2017. View of the exhibition Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review.

Appendix Fig. 30. Emilie Walsh, Scope, video, 3D prints, metal, foam board, 2017. Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review.

Appendix Fig. 31. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016- 2018.

Appendix Fig. 31. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016- 2018. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

xiv https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/Learn/Nasher-Prize-Graduate- Symposium-Compendium-2017.pdf

xv PROLOGUE: ORIGINAL RESEARCH PROPOSAL

This prologue stands as an introduction to this dissertation and aims to take the reader along the path that led to the definition, scope, and methodology of this research project through a key creative work of this project, Victoire. From the original research proposal to the commencement of the PhD, this section of the dissertation will take a dairistic approach, using the fieldnote of the artist-research as a primary material to guide the reader into the key thesis discussed in this dissertation.1

Following this prologue, the dissertation will then develop a discussion of the trope of adventure in contemporary art. It will tie together the creative component of this project, and a range of theoretical and creative examples. Both this analysis and the creative work offer a new understanding of how the narratives of adventure are perceived today, specifically through the use of the trope of adventure in contemporary art practices. We will come back to the prologue and address the initial questions in the conclusion.

1.1: Victoire2

1.1a: Victoire-Performance

The original idea for this research started with the desire to climb the mountain Sainte-Victoire, in Aix-en-Provence, South of France, in a business suit and high heels. The entire performance was shot in France before the commencement of the PhD at the University of Melbourne, on the topic

1 For this prologue, the methodology adopted borrows from autoethnography methodology. In such, the data discussed come primarily from the artist-research fieldnote. We almost exclusively used this methodology for this prologue, to guide the reader along the process that helped define the research scope. For reference on autoethnography see : Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, Arthur P. Bochner, Autoethnography: An Overview, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, v. 12, n. 1, (Nov. 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589 2 To watch Victoire : https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4rx54n of imagination of adventure in contemporary art practices. This commenced by editing the video and investigating the trope of adventure in a practice-led research project.

This prologue will describe and discuss this work that started prior to the commencement of the PhD research, as it is a key work in the genesis of this practice-led research proposal. We will refer to it as Victoire-performance when referring to this exploratory phase of the project and its impact on the research proposal. Once the PhD research started, this creative work transformed into a fictional video work, which is part of the creative body of work for this thesis (referred to as Victoire)

Fig 1. Emilie Walsh, PhD exhibition, VCA Art Space, July 2018. Exhibition view, photo credit: Recreate.

Victoire is the resultant video installation comprised of a 5-minute short film, that is meant to be projected floor to ceiling in a dark room in a continuous loop. 3 It has been shown in a variety

3 Appendix Fig 1. Emilie Walsh, PhD exhibition, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

2 of exhibition contexts.4 The aim has always been to display the work in a simple way: projected, soundtrack coming from above or behind, and dark or dimmed light.

Victoire was intended to be highly cinematic. This is reflected in both the projection display, and the cinematic tropes of both cuts to colour and screenshots from classic cinema.5 It was shot with a Red Camera, alternating Steadicam and hand-held. 6 It adopts several tropes from classical cinema such as a chronological narrative, a main character leading the story line, a clear beginning and ending, and references to cinema through the cut to color and the addition of screenshots from classic cinema.7 The story is easy enough to grasp, yet slightly enigmatic : a young woman wearing a suit and high heels seems to be going on with her busy daily life. The film opens with a long shot following her steps in an office corridor.8

After four cuts to black, we see her driving her car in a suburban environment, where the mountain Sainte-Victoire appears in the backgrounds regularly. She then gradually leaves the city and starts following a narrow countryside road, constantly driving closer to the mountain. The drive last for several minutes, mostly in subjective camera, and takes the viewer along windy roads up until arriving at the bottom of the mountain, where the car stops. The woman steps outside of the car and the camera captures her heels stepping on the road when the film turns into colour. From this second half of the film, we follow the woman decisively yet mysteriously climbing the mountain to its peak.9 The hand-held camera first follows her from behind, progressively revealing more of her body, until we see the woman’s body fully framed in the screen. We then follow her in her absurd journey, wrecking her shoes and tearing her suit apart, ending up rock climbing through a chimney-like section of the mountain to reach the top. The film ends when we see the

4 Victoire was shown: at Elistir, finalist show for emerging artists, Saint-Raphael, France, 2015; Seeing Through, Solo show, George Patton Gallery, Parkville, 2016; National Campus, First prize for video, Australian Art Student show, Newcastle, 2016; Emilie Walsh PhD exhibition, VCA, Melbourne, 2018. 5 Upton, David. “Clip joint: films that use both black & white and colour.” The Guardian. Published February 13th, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/feb/12/clip-joint-films-that-use-both-black-white-and-colour Harmetz, Alijean, The Making of the Wizard of Oz. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013. 6 Red Cameras are a professional digital cameras manufactured by Red Digital cinema company. 7 Victoire comprise screenshot of Stromboli by Roberto Rossellini, which will be discussed later. 8 Appendix Fig 2. Emilie Walsh, still frame from opening of short film Victoire, 2015. 9 Appendix Fig. 3. Emilie Walsh, Victoire, digital photograph, 2014.

3 woman at the top of the mountain, breathing heavily, surveying what she has accomplished, before sitting down to have a look at her high heeled shoes. The last shot refers to the opening shot of the film: a close up of the shoes, who appears to be the main character of the story, opening it, turning the film to colour, and closing the narrative and the video.

1.1b: Victoire Polysemy

The word Victoire has three meanings: it means Victory, which is a major theme of the story; it is also a female name, evoking a bourgeois milieu and in the film referring to the main character, and, nonetheless, it also refers to the place name of the mountain itself: the Sainte-Victoire. Famous for being one of Cezanne’s favorite painting sites, it is a landmark around Aix-en-Provence, where the video was shot and from where this primary researcher and artist originated.10

Fig. 2. Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm, 1902-Philadelphia Museum of Art.

10 For further reference, I shall refer as Victoire (italic), when I talk about the video project, Victoire when I refer to the fictional character, and Sainte-Victoire when I mention the mountain. Victoire-performance is kept for the exploration phase of this work that took place in France prior to the commencement of the PhD research

4 Victoire borrows a lot from cinematographic convention: modes of narratives, flashback, editing technique, subjective point of view and a story driven by a main character. 11 But, It has also borrowed conventions from video art: inclusion of almost subliminal still images, long black screen, and absence of dialogue. It is also characterised by its absence of credits and of title (as the film is played in a continuous loop), which would make the work more referential of video art. The soundtrack is perhaps the key element that differentiates Victoire from a short movie. The sound is not always related to the images, and a rather disturbing humming is almost always present.

The way it is displayed also plays with both conventions: It is meant to be projected, which would lean toward a cinematographic situation. However, this is mainly for the large immersive scale that is required to suit what is on screen: subjective camera and large landscape.

Furthermore, a series of slide photographs are shown along with the video.12 The whole is part of a larger installation, where still images and objects play a part in the narrative. This will be examined in full in a section on Victoire Machine13 : a set of two sculptures that go along side with the video Victoire and were created in a later stage of the practice-led research.

1.1c: Questioning adventure

Victoire started as a performance. The goal at the time was to ask questions about adventure and to explore its potential definitions and meanings. Owing to the practice-led nature of the research, the initial method was to ‘question’ and ‘interrogate’ adventure by applying random potential definitions and testing them through experience and production. The old French expression ‘La question’, is a synonym of ‘torture’: taking aside the cruelty connotation, I kept the idea of systematic interrogation of adventure as a protocol for this early stage of the research.

11 Edgar, Robert, John Marland and Steven Rawle. The language of cinema (2nd Edition. New York: Fairchild Editions, 2015) 12 Appendix Fig. 4. Emilie Walsh, Victoire slides, digital photograph, 2015 13 See Victoire-Machine, II.4.1.a

This methodology was based on the very nature of adventure, the etymology of which is ‘what happens’ from the Latin Ad venture: what is about to happen. It is thus strongly connected to the notions of fortune, chance, randomness and luck. The early methodology was about wandering, staying open to possibility, being permeable to the environment, and testing out potential definitions of what adventure could mean in the 21st century.

Testing this hypothesis was a driving force for creating Victoire. The film asks, what if climbing a mountain today is not an adventure? When the initial investigation of adventure began, it proved difficult to find examples of unexplored spaces and new challenges for the adventurer. With Victoire, for instance, the whole mountain range has been mapped, traced, walked over and over. There is an information centre at the base, and you can climb the mountain with your grandmother on a Sunday afternoon. Not an adventure. This leads to another question: has adventure been replaced by entertainment and tourism?

If so, what does a person have to do to turn this mountain hike into an adventure? Why not add artificial obstacles to make adventure meaningful again? Like climbing in a suit and high heels! This hypothesis had potential to be tested through performance, with the researcher’s own body.

The process of working on specific questions about adventure also required a simultaneous awareness of other common definitions of adventure. Adventure can be understood in multiple ways, depending on the context. If we go back to its etymology, from Latin, through to Old French, adventure means ‘what is about to happen’: Ad Venture. An event, a spur, a disruption of an eventless timeline. As such, adventure has a strong connection with the notion of time: it could be argued that adventure generally coincides with an intensification of the experience of temporality. Something happens that troubles the placid, neutral flowing of time.

The work of Jankelevich has been influential in the research process, specifically when defining the scope of the research and investigating meaning and attempts of definition of adventure in the literature. As such, a brief digression into their work is warranted here. Vladimir

6 Jankelevich wrote about adventure in relation to the notions of ‘seriousness’ and ‘boredom’ and drew a strong connection between adventure and a certain experience of time. 14 In relation to the etymology of the term, he argues that adventure is turned towards the future, as an expectation of what is going to happen:

What is experienced, and hoped for passionately in adventure, it’s the happening of the future. 15

He also states that there is an intense connection with the present in adventure. Adventure generates an acute feeling of the moment, of the right now, because of the unordinary nature of events when adventure happens.

As a counterpoint to adventure, Jankelevich presents two models of experiencing time: boredom and seriousness. Boredom is lived in the present much like adventure; it makes us feel the length or heaviness of the present moment. But it is also an experience of the future as it often manifests as anticipation, as a fear of getting bored in the moments to come. Seriousness appears in Jankelevich’s discussion as a more rational perception of time: one that understands it in its entirety, in the whole timeline of past, present and future.

Jankelevich also adds that adventure’s relationship with the present moment comes in part from its nature as a beginning. Adventure starts a new temporality which will develop as either boring or serious depending on how time is apprehended from that starting point. Adventure is thought to be an antidote to boredom, its counterpoint. Moreover, Jankelevich argues that adventure is a form of experience that pushes at its paroxysm the tension between active and passive. Passive adventure refers to what happens when we find ourselves at the mercy of fortune, and active adventure refers to our relation with the world when we take ownership of the event with energy and intensity.

14 Vladimir Jankelevich, L’Aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux (Eds Aubier, Paris, 1963) 293 p. 15 Op. Cit. p.32

7 Another key point that Jankelevich makes about adventure in the first chapter of his essay ‘Mortal adventure’ concerns risk. Vulnerability, and thus death, is the spice of adventure according to Jankelevich. He thus situates adventure as the point of equilibrium between playfulness and seriousness: too much seriousness and it’s a tragedy, too much playfulness and it’s a futile game. Between present and future, between passive and active, between serious and playful, Jankelevich’s shapes adventure as a complex notion that trumps strict definition.

The etymology of adventure draws our attention to another point: something that is “about to happen” suggests an event that is out of our control. Jankelevich approaches this idea when he mentions the tension between the passive nature of adventure (events that are happening despite us), and the active (the intensity of working with/against those events). We have already established a strong etymological connection between the notion of adventure and that of luck, random, fatality, fortune. French fortune tellers – showing a rare occurrence of this etymological connection – ‘tell the good adventure’ (dire la bonne aventure).

In this sense, the methodology used for this practice-led research draws heavily from the meanings of adventure we have just discussed: staying open to possibilities and permeable to the environment and what might happen.16 The idea of testing out potential definitions of what adventure could be in the 21st century was first approached as a systematic interrogation of the notion of adventure and its meanings.

Early on in this research the definition of adventure was a problem: it is a very large notion and has many different accepted meanings and connotation. Following the methodology outlined so far, a large conceptual survey of adventure was conducted – as an art project - with the goal of collecting a wide variety of instantiations of how the notion of adventure is both perceived and

16 In this early stage of this research, we borrowed our approach from the grounded theory research methodology. In this research project, our understanding of grounded theory methods is to start from a question (what is our relationship with the imagination of adventure today in contemporary art practice?), and a collection of qualitative data (mapping of contemporary art practice dealing with the imagination of adventure). From there, we used induction to form a hypothesis, as opposed to the deductive model prevalent in scientific methods. For reference see: K. Charmaz, Grounded Theory: Methodology and Theory Construction, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

8 used.17 From this conceptual survey, several patterns emerged from the unstructured and informal interviews. The data collected – whilst not used in any substantive way in this thesis – prevented analytical confusion that could have emerged from following too strict a definition of adventure. This small-scale survey, even if inspired by a social science model, was a processed based, artistic mimicry of a survey and the data was analysed in a very simple way through a few infographics. It had no intention of shining a light on how the notion of adventure is perceived in our society and had little traditional rigorous scientific base, as is was an artistic experimentation and not a social science survey.

Such an approach did, however, prevent analytical confusion in the process of defining adventure too strictly. Adventure can be understood in many different ways, but the focus in this research is simply the common, immediate idea that comes to mind when one hears the word adventure. The cliché, or the common-sense usage of adventure will do. This dissertation is primarily concerned with how cultural representations of adventure shape its meaning and reception. Literature on Adventure, Adventure movies, TV shows, video games, and the history of exploration and mapping are all cultural phenomena that alter and define our understanding of adventure.

Adventure is a very broad notion and can be understood in a variety of ways. This prologue has thus far discussed the etymological meaning, its connotation, and surrounding notions, such as risk, death, intensity, exploration, wandering or the unknown. However here is what this thesis is not about: While we acknowledge that adventure exists beyond its cliché, we will not investigate these other accepted notions of adventure. This thesis will not discuss adventure in daily life, adventure just around the corner of your house, or new models of adventure in the urban context for instance. This thesis will not extend our investigation of adventure to a broader understanding of the word and will not talk about the adventure of falling in love, for example, or starting a business. These ‘adventures’ do share some commonalities with the topic of our investigation - luck, transformation, intensity, obstacle, risk – but are excluded from this research to instead focus

17 See Appendix Fig. 10

9 on the cultural baggage – outlined in this prologue – that aggregates and forms the imagination of adventure. This thesis will focus this practice-led investigation on the cliché of adventure. Other investigations of a broader concept of adventure can built up on this research, and this dissertation can be a starting point for further exploration of other understanding of the notion of adventure.

As argued through the discussion of Jankelevich, essentialist definitions of adventure fail to capture its full complexity. With this broad conception of adventure in mind, this thesis will now define the imagination of adventure, which is integral in informing the research conducted.

In starting to plan the climb of the mountain in Victoire, questions of documentation arose. This necessitated a detailed decision making and preparation process. This process of planning the performance – unexpectedly and significantly for this research – generated a loss of the unknown aspect of adventure.

The sought performative and experimentation aspect of adventure was somehow contradicted by the preparation that an expedition or a quest requires: the planning and the mapping. And that is also part of the adventure. Get ready, pack a bag, the anticipation, looking at a map and planning a mental journey. And turning this planning into a story to be lived. Excitement and anticipation.

The process of working on Victoire slowly transformed from performance to fiction. This transformation marks the boundary between the research proposal and the present PhD research. The character was named Victoire, which is a French female name, and given a back story. A story of loneliness and isolation in the urban world. A story of alienation in the workplace. A story of disconnection with the wild. A story of a drive. A drive to the unknown and a drive to finding and recognising something that was dreamt and romanticised. A quest, a thirst, an adventure. The story for Victoire gave her motives and motivation to leave her daily life, jump in a car and drive deep in the countryside, up to the bottom of an iconic mountain and from then on to get lost in the wild and reach for the top.

From performance, the Victoire landed into fiction, through the preparation for the departure.

Fig. 3. Production still from the filming of Victoire, 2014. Photo Credit: Laetitia Cordaro

1.2: From Performance To Fiction

1.2a: The stories behind us

With the PhD project now underway, a return to the footage with the intention of editing reconfigured the trajectory of this research project.

The footage paralleled Stromboli by Roberto Rosselini, which I was unaware of when I shoot Victoire.18 There was a fascinating resemblance between the stories of those two women, escaping their fate by climbing an iconic mountain alone in very inappropriate outfits. In Stromboli, Rossellini shares the story of Karin, a Lithuanian woman played by Ingrid Bergman,

18 Stromboli, Roberto Rossellini, 1950, Berit Film, RKO Radio Pictures, US and Italy, 107 min.

11 who married an Italian man and struggles with her new life in Sicily - a life she ends up escaping by climbing the Stromboli volcano on the island.

From then on, the idea was to imagine retrospectively how that could have acted as a drive for the character Victoire: a role-model, and a premonition. Some of Stromboli’s images were integrated into the footage, which led to an acknowledgment that the work was in fact now a short- film. It was not a document recording a performance anymore. It was not a video. It is a short film. The cinematography is clean and polished, it is to be shown in a darkroom, as a projection. It is cinema. It talks about the stories and the characters we have inherited from the history of cinema. Victoire is walking in the footsteps of Ingrid Bergman climbing Stromboli, Victoire is fascinated by the magic mountain that is calling her: visions, postcards of the Sainte-Victoire, painted obsessively by Cezanne, appear to her, driving her to the top.19

19 Appendix Fig. 5. Emilie Walsh, Untitled, digital photograph of an old postcard (circa 1920) from Aix-en-Provence archives, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

Fig. 5. Emilie Walsh, digital photograph of an old postcard (circa 1920) from Aix-en-Provence archives, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

It is all about the chase with the past stories of others populating the mind of the character, pushing her into action. What is that drive? When watching Victoire, the question keeps popping in our mind: why is she doing this? A significant part of the short film is an actual drive through the country for no immediately apparent reason. Why?

Adding material in the form of subliminal images constituted rewriting the story retrospectively. In relating the journey of Victoire to that of Ingrid Bergman, the key hypothesis of this research project emerged. Namely, it is through the process of telling a story which turns it into an adventure. From there we posit the hypothesis that it is when you tell a story that you turn it into an adventure.

You had to change the tire of your car at midnight under the rain? It’s terrible. But when you tell the story, afterwards, it is now an adventure. The narration of it is a substitute to the actual experience through storytelling. This insight further substantiates the open-ended definition of adventure derived earlier in this proposal. Adventure – as Jankelevich rightly notes – is all about

13 obstacles, misfortune, difficulties along the road. That’s what makes the story. However, it is the process of configuring these elements into a story that makes an adventure. It was only through the open-ended process of inquiry developed in this proposal that such an understanding of adventure could be reached. Certainly, there may be refinements and other modes of adventure to be discovered, but for the purposes of this proposal this definition will suffice in understanding adventure.

1.2c: The imagination of adventure

At this point in the development of the methodology – which was informed by the making of Victoire - the aim was to then explore different potential definitions of adventure that were experienced through practice. From this experience, further definitions were placed into three distinct perspectives on adventure:

- Experimentation: Luck, random, fortune, test - Anticipation: The mapping and the planning – getting ready - Adventure in retrospect – fiction making sense of reality – the building of a visual and narrative culture of adventure – how we are driven into adventure, fuelled by the stories within us.

Informed by the direction the practice was taking – focusing on the imagination of adventure as a drive – we narrowed the research down to this very aspect. As such, we will focus the following discussions on this last part: the imagination and the narrative of adventure.

This process of exploration and refinement, the touchstones of the open-ended methodology discussed so far, eventually clarified that the imagination and narrative of adventure were the clear drives in producing Victoire. Where to go from there? What exactly constitute this imagination of adventure? The next step was to spend some time understanding the content and scope of this imagination of adventure and defining it for the research. In the introduction of this dissertation, we are going to attempt a genealogy of the trope of adventure and propose a framework to look at its use in contemporary art practices.

14 INTRODUCTION

2.1: THE IMAGINATION OF ADVENTURE: MEANING AND SCOPE

2.1a: Motivation

When I was at dinner parties explaining that I was doing a PhD on the imagination of adventure, people would always want to engage the conversation by knowing exactly what I meant by adventure. To do so, it was usually through examples that we engaged with this topic. I was questioned on Treasure Island by Stevenson, or on the Zelda video game series, or the Marvel movies and superheroes as adventurers. Apparently, when we talk about adventure, we first and foremost refer to stories and to figures – heroes, adventurers.20

The importance of this excerpt from the fieldnotes is to stress the way in which clichés of adventure decorate the popular imagination. These clichés, from Indiana Jones to Treasure Island, are what this thesis seeks to investigate.

But here is the complexity: is it problematic that a white male steals archaeological artefacts to put them in a western museum is glorified into the archetype of the adventurer? Why does Indy still make us want to put on a fedora, jump off a train into the jungle and enter a forbidden temple? What is it about unknown places and untouched cultures? The ways in which academics have grappled with these questions is the focus of the first section of this introduction.

2.1b: What we know about adventure

Sylvain Venayre, a historian specialised in contemporary history, conceptualises ‘adventure’ as belonging to modernity21. According to him, it is in 19th century Europe that the search for

20 Artist’s fieldnotes, edited, Emilie Walsh, unpublished, 2016 21 Sylvain Venayre, La Gloire de l'aventure. Genèse d'une mystique moderne. 1850-1940 (Paris : Aubier, collection « Historique », 2002), 352 p. 15

adventure became a positive life model. Through war, conquest and exploration, the desire for travel and adventure spreads, and the model of the adventurer is created in this context: a type of adventurous destiny, which continues to appeal today and make us dream.

With travels starts a frantic quest, on a planet which is to be more and more mapped, where unknown space and untouched cultures disappear every day. 22

This is very reminiscent of the Indiana Jones movies, which cover untouched cultures that Indy abruptly hurts.

This mapping of adventure is meant to be completed. If it is not yet the case, it will be sooner or later. In his series of essays, Bubbles, Peter Sloterdijk elegantly describes our world as a bubble, an enclosed shape, which is to be entirely explored at some point.23 We will go all around the globe, there will be no unmapped area, and our planet will no longer be a place for adventure.

These somewhat pessimistic statements of a shrinking space for adventure are contradicted by the fact that adventure still appeals to everyone today and is valued positively. Adventure is used as a theme in advertisement to sell products that have very little to do with adventure: one might sell a 4WD car that will only be driven in cities. It will never go on adventure in the cliched sense, but it is the story of adventure that is sold to the consumer.

We could compare this to the notion of intensity that Tristan Garcia argues is a core value of modernity.24 In his essay, Garcia argues that intensity is a core value and acts as a moral compass for our lives since the 18th century in Europe. He compares the notion of intensity, that he argues is valued positively, to the ‘invention’ of electricity. We are enticed to engage in extreme sports

22 Op. Cit. 23 Peter, Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, translated by Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). 24 Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession, translated by Abigail Ray Alexander, Christopher Ray Alexander and Jon Cogburn (Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

and exotic travels; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences and recreational drugs, all in the pursuit of intensity, seeking a life less-ordinary, and sense of acuity of the present moment. Marketers use the concept of intensity in advertisement in the same way that adventure is invoked as a marketing strategy for a range of products that have very little to do with risk or exploration.

But then electricity entered into humanity, where it would always remain as a sort of intoxication cultivated by the modern mind. Like blood coursing through the veins of society, electric light spread through optical science and transported fabulous cinematographic images to the screen. It broke the image into a thousand bits of light, decomposed and encoded it into short pulses capable of being transmitted over distances, and made way for the diffusion of television. It invaded all data, images, texts, and sounds and then placed itself in the service of electronics. It illuminated the streetlights of the great capitals as well as the lamps above the beds of children reading late into the night. It fed the indefatigable motor of growth and progress. It demanded that dams, generators, power plants, and windmills be constructed. It set in motion all things or nearly all things to the extent that humanity, without even knowing it, became the living medium between entities (cables, telephones, radios, pacemakers…). Little by little, humanity forgot the electric nature of those entities, but the idea remained in the bloodstream. It was as if Leipzig’s kiss, which sealed the modern alliance of desire and electricity, had never ended 25

We could argue that the notion of adventure shared a similar history of reception with that of intensity. Both concepts have gained a new attention and growth with modernity, exploration and scientific development in Europe from the Enlightenment onward. In Garcia’s revaluation of intensity, he calls for pulling the concept off its pedestal and rethinking moderation and equilibrium, a position shared by some calls for simplicity and frugality in consumption or desire of disconnection often heard by multiple voices today, and following a long philosophical tradition preaching moderation, starting with Aristotle.

25 Op. cit. p.97 17

The historical parallels of adventure with intensity suggest that adventure ought to undergo a similar conceptual revaluation to that conducted by Garcia. This will examine different perspectives on the notion and the history of adventure through art practices. Some artists seem to reflect Garcia’s attitude towards intensity when it comes to adventure, pointing out the damage the thirst for discovery has had in history, from both cultural and ecological point of view.

2.1c: The Chronological Boundaries And Conceptual Scope : Exploring The Cliché Of Adventure

This research has aimed to understand our relationship with this imagination of adventure today – and more specifically how contemporary art practices deal with the narratives and the visual culture inherited from what will be conceptualised in this section as ‘the Golden Age of Adventure’.

For the purposes of this research the Golden Age of Adventure is defined as a period going from Christopher Columbus 'discovering' America26, and the great mapping of our planet from then on, to renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss27 punctuating this era with his essay 'Tristes Tropiques':

I hate travelling and explorers 28

Columbus marks the popular conception of the start of the United States of America, even though the factual history of the ‘discovery’ is far more complex and non-western centric. The dominance of the USA in the creation of adventure narratives is an elephant in the room (i.e. Hollywood) and thus utilising the popularised origin story of the USA is a logical boundary for

26 Appendix Fig. 6. Columbus Map, drawn c. 1490, Lisbon. From the workshop of Bartolomew and Christopher Columbus. 27 Appendix Fig. 7. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, Getty image, 1930. 28 Claude, Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by John and Doreen Weightman, (London: Penguin editions, 2011). 18

the dissertation. Columbus is utilised here as a symbolic milestone, as we will develop later in this section.

In contrast, the end of the Golden Age of Adventure would be marked by Levi-Strauss’ aim to make the explorer enter the scientific legitimacy of anthropology. However, by turning social sciences into hard science, he calls for a rationalization and a purification from the romanticized narrative of the adventure. This attitude removed the romantic allure from the mystery of adventure, and so the imagination of adventure deteriorated.

At this juncture it must be acknowledged and stated that this concept of 'Golden Age of Adventure' is a western view - Eurocentric - and that of course adventure as a drive existed and continues to exist beyond this narrow view. It is a constructed Eurocentric historical narrative, with symbolic boundaries (Columbus and Levi-Strauss), but that is specifically why it is of interest - precisely because it is such a cliché of adventure: a cliché of western civilisation. The legacy of this tradition informs how the West thinks of this tradition today. This research project is written within this historical tradition, and this tradition informs the foundation for the understanding of adventure developed in this dissertation. The foundation and the reception of the western trope of adventure will be discussed critically through this research, but we believe it is key to acknowledge that western biases start such a genealogical investigation.

Biases on adventure are indicative of our representation of adventure and this informed the decision to narrow the scope of the research to this very specific imagination and cliché of adventure and how this populates contemporary art practices.

This section has defined the scope and definitions adopted throughout the rest of this dissertation. It firstly established the boundaries of this research in the Golden Age of Adventure, as well as briefly hinting at the relationship between colonialism and adventure through key academic theories of adventure in the literature such as Venayre, Sloterdijk, and Garcia’s contribution to the discussion. The next section will examine adventure in contemporary art practice today, and specifically look at how significant contemporary art practices present, represent, use or recycle what we have now conceptualised as the Golden Age of Adventure. 19

2.2: MAPPING THE IMAGINATION OF ADVENTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICES TODAY

2.2a: Research methods

The previous sections developed questions concerning the imagination of adventure. This section will now relate these questions to contemporary art practices. However, the question emerged from examining artists playing with that imagination of adventure. Many artists today seemed fascinated by the narrative of adventure, even though the ethics behind them come from a place that can be highly critical of the 21st century and soaked with colonial values. However, the field of contemporary art practices is full of examples of artists using the images and the narrative of adventure as a primary material.

Initially, a non-exhaustive list of artists working on adventure was created and organised in terms of the different strategies they adopt toward adventure. This was determined by using mind maps to systematically spatially organise the artists and their artworks by grouping them into broad categories according to their relationship with adventure.

This investigation on artists working today with the trope of adventure occurred simultaneously with the examination of key texts, in order to ultimately formulate and reformulate research questions. Parallel to these investigations was my ongoing art practice - investigation of adventure as an artist.

Both will be articulated in this dissertation, yet these artworks will not be presented in chronological order in this dissertation. Rather, the artworks are retrospectively organised according to the categories derived from the investigations into histories of adventure and other contemporary art practices.

Fig 6. Emilie Walsh, mind map of the different strategies of artists working with the imagination of adventure, tape and photos on the studio wall, 2015

This allowed retrospective organisation and classification of the art practice, situating it within the different strategies that will be presented in this dissertation. Just as the previous investigation into the scope of contemporary art practices around adventure led to mapping and classification into three main different strategies (that constitute the majors chapters of this dissertation), the practice-led research culminated in the situation of my own work in these different families and allowed me to position myself in the scope of contemporary art practices around adventure.

2.2b: Golden Age of Adventure Markers

After selecting a non-exhaustive list of artists and artworks navigating the trope of adventure, we were able to flag five Golden Age of Adventure markers - or markers - in the practices. These are topics, processes, methods, themes, that all revolve around and belong to the imagination of adventure. Those markers can be classified as such:

Imagination Reality Storytelling Archival Testimony Practices Characteristics Fictional Performance Narrative Curiosity Objects adventure and real-life dimension cabinet or brought adventure ethnographical back from museum an aesthetic and adventure: mode of testimony, display souvenir and trophy Artists Charles Klara Hobza, Tacita Dean, Mark Dion, Abraham Avery, Pierre Laurent Simon Jan Fabre, Poincheval, Huyghe, Joan Tixador, Starling, Klara Hobza, Laurent Fontcuberta Abraham Pierre Yinka Tixador, Poincheval, Malphettes, Shonibare Simon Stalker lab, Francis Alys Starling Simon Starling, Francis Alys

1. Imagination/reality: Artists working in performance and real-life adventure, and others focusing on a more imaginative version of adventure. - Towards reality: Includes artists Klara Hobza, Laurent Tixador, Abraham Poincheval, Stalker lab, Simon Starling, Francis Alys… - Into imagination: Includes artists such as Charles Avery, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Fontcuberta…

2. The storytelling dimension: A variety of artists working on adventure themes give a narrative dimension to their artworks: Tacita Dean, Simon Starling, Pierre Malphettes, Francis Alys,…

3. Material culture: How can adventure visually take form? By mapping the art practice around adventure, we can trace an emerging material culture of adventure. A certain aesthetic appears, with some of its characteristics being: Archival practices: Tacita Dean, Joan Fontcuberta… Curiosity cabinet or ethnographical museum aesthetic and mode of display: Mark Dion, Jan Fabre, Klara Hobza, Yinka Shonibare…

5. Objects brought back from an adventure: testimony, souvenir and trophy: Abraham Poincheval, Laurent Tixador, Simon Starling…

The following sections will develop a selection of key examples that will provide the reader with an idea of the scope of adventure in contemporary art practices, as identified through systematic analysis. Some of the works discussed will become relevant later in this dissertation and will be analysed in more depth, moving from mapping them according to the markers of adventure, to classifying and analysing relevant practices in the framework of the different chapters. The aim of the following sections is to introduce a variety of examples of contemporary art practice that the mind-mapping analysis revealed to be adopting a range of different exemplar strategies in relation to adventure.

These five markers constitute how the trope of adventure is expressed in contemporary art practices. Each artwork will be linked to the different markers discussed, in order to see how they approach the Golden Age of Adventure and reflect on the shrinking of the untouched space discussed by Venayre. There will also be an analysis of how the Golden Age of Adventure markers are connected to different works produced during the practice led research process, and in particular the first work for this project, Victoire. This pattern of interwoven discussions of Golden Age of Adventure markers, contemporary artworks and the practice led research is repeated throughout this thesis, each time adding conceptual layers to an understanding of Adventure in Art.

2.2c: Golden Age of Adventure markers in Contemporary Art Practices

Aleksandra Mirr

Aleksandra Mir’s project, First woman on the moon (1999), started as a performance staging a moon landing by the artist, that has been documented in video. On the 28 August 1999, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, bulldozers constructed a moon-like environment with false craters on a beach in the Netherlands. The project was funded by Casco Project with a small budget of $2000, which was spent on the first day of the project for an advertisement in the magazine Artforum. To carry and document the fake moon landing, Mir then 23

took the next four months building relations and sourcing corporate support. The video consists of a collection of amateur footage captured on the day and media coverage in video and stills, chronologically revealing the whole process of staging the event, and culminating with the ‘landing’, when Mir and a group of woman planted an American flag in the sand, smiling for the cameras.29

Fig. 7. Aleksandra Mir, First woman on the moon, 1999

The emphasis on publicity is visible throughout the whole project: in the way the budget was spent, and in the video itself featuring media coverage and showing people taking photos of the event. In an interview in 2003, Mir stated that:

29 David Hodge, “First Woman on the moon.” The Tate Modern website, published February 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mir-first-woman-on-the-moon-t13704 and Christopher Bollen, “Aleksandra Mir”, Believer, Jan 2004, Vol 9, https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-aleksandra-mir/ 24

It was a conscious way of trying to match the media reality of the moon landings that only twelve people in the world have actually experienced. For everybody else, it’s become a mediated reality 30

In his paper on the artist’s work in Frieze, Will Bradley articulates Mir’s relationship with the media as pragmatic. She believes that when dealing with the publicity industry, for instance, artists should be media competent and aware of the ideologies at play in order to balance the power dynamic.31

the gap between the scale and power of art and the scale and power of the other forces at work in the world. Her answer is a double strategy: pushing the work as far into the realm of the spectacle as she can, and simultaneously heading in the opposite direction, trying to find representation or spaces that escape the media economy. 32

The fake and playful aspect of this project positions it in a particular relationship to the narrative of adventure: staged, false, re-enacting modern myths of adventure such as the moon landing. First Woman on the Moon comments on the mediated nature of our experience of adventure, which is shared by most. This draws an opposition with the figure of the super-hero explorer, admired yet looked at from a distance which fictionalise the adventurer and distance it from reality.

This project positioned itself in the realm of imaginative adventure, with a strong connexion to the real history of outer space exploration. The fact that it is claiming its staged dimension seems to be also referential of the popular culture of claiming the moon landing by the Americans as fake. While being a fake moon landing, it maintains its performative dimension, and

30 David Hodge, “First Woman on the moon.” The Tate Modern website, published February 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mir-first-woman-on-the-moon-t13704 31 Will Bradley, “Life and Times.” Frieze 75, no. 1 (May 2003: 63-64) 32 Op. cit. p.64 25

a strong point Mir’s work makes is through the involvement of the community in the Netherlands, by getting the community to experience it directly, by being on the active side of the events, and not only witnessing the mediated versions of the landing.

As for Venayre’s claim that the space for adventure has shrunk, Mir proposition draw attention to the fact that it may have indeed shrunk for humankind - as going on the moon is nothing new - but it is still an untouched space to explore for most part of humankind, including as her works point out, women.

While generating a feminist conversation, Mir’s work can be strongly linked to The Golden Age of Adventure trope. Markers of this trope such as the storytelling dimension, but also the material culture of adventure, make her work a key example in this mapping of contemporary art practices revolving around adventure.

Charles Avery – imaginative lands

This Scottish artist decided in 2004 to devote himself entirely to a single project: The Islanders. Through texts, drawings, sculptures and installation, The Islanders is the depiction of an imaginary island world - its geography, fauna, flora, inhabitants – as discovered by an explorer.

His work seems at first glance extremely realist - particularly the drawings - which are entirely designed for their narrative dimension. The world he describes is in many ways comparable to ours: a land, with its inhabitants and own social organisation. However, it turns out to be a very different place, inhabited by strange animals, and governed by laws of logic which challenge our own system.

Avery’s patient exploration of a fantasy world can certainly be qualified as an adventure, playing with the tradition of the travel novel and the way it challenges our own culture. But his strategy is very different from artist who goes out into the real world to explore the possibility of adventure in the 21st century. Avery’s exploration uncovers a totally new world no one has been to before: the imaginary world of endless possibility.

With his armchair adventure, Avery constructed The Islanders, as an ongoing exploration of a fabulous imaginary land that could have arrived from the pen of Swift or Voltaire. A series of exhibitions beginning in 2004, The Islanders draws on fictitious narratives of discovery. Exhibited through drawings, hybrid taxidermies, fabulist objects - The Islanders presents a fictional journey to the island of Onomatopoeia. Whilst the island is made up of humans - as in Gulliver’s Travels - there are considerable differences in scale and customs. Fantastic animals - including the dreaded Jabbawocky-like ‘Noumenon’ - stalk the land. Avery, the fictional artist ethnographer, brings back and exhibits in various compositions a range of objects and drawn experiences of the imaginary world he himself created.

Driven by the remembered narratives of curiosity and adventure - William Blake, Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne - Avery’s long-standing and continuous projects is in keeping with the allegorical impulse of 18th and 19th century satires. The Islander’s - as is the case with Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver - has the appearance of an adventurous and far-fetched narrative of colonial exploration. And as with Gulliver, there is also a deep suspicion that the narrator has not in fact travelled anywhere at all. Even if he had not travelled - as Levi-Strauss refused to do after the 1930s - would that invalidate the findings? As with the narratives to which Avery draws on, the

physical proof of the adventure is less important than the objects created on the mental journey of the artist. Avery’s work demonstrates how narratives of imaginary worlds produce not only signs, but contexts in which those signs are rendered coherent: he is the explorer of a universe inside which the idea of contemporaneity is abolished in favour of a voluntary confusion of eras and genres.33

As such, Avery’s work is both absurd and critical in its effect. The remembrances are not only of prose narratives of adventure, but of museology and Surrealist juxtapositions of early 20th century exhibitions.34 But nevertheless, whereas the ethnographic impulse may be an absurdist and problematic positioning in a global context, Avery keeps an impulse alive, an impulse motivated by curiosity, a sense of fantasy and fascination for otherness.

Here again, Avery’s practice can be flagged as bearing a number of Golden Age of Adventure markers : the blurring of fiction and reality in complex world making, as well as the mimic of a scientific documentation approach.

Joan Fontcuberta – Sputnik – Archive & Fiction35

Fontcuberta works with one of the iconic narratives of modern adventure: the space conquest. In his project ‘Sputnik’, launched in 1997, Fontcuberta used archive images to recreate and document a fictional story about a missing cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov. Here are the events as related by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian36:

33 Nicolas Bourriaud et al, Altermodern: Tate Modern Triennial (London: Tate Modern, 2009. Published in conjunction with the Tate Modern Triennial) Exhibition Catalogue. 34 Stephanie Rosenthal and Mamu Katoka, Walking in my Mind (London: Hayward Gallery, June 23rd – September 6th, 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Walking in my Mind) Exhibition Catalogue. 35 Olga Kondakova, Sputnik (Nil Sputnik and Fundación Arte y Tecnología. Madrid: Fundación Arte y Tecnología, 1997) 36 Stuart Jeffries, “Joan Fontcuberta: False Negatives” (The Guardian, Published July 8th, 2014) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/08/joan-fontcuberta-stranger-than-fiction.

In 1968, during a routine spacewalk, the Russian cosmonaut and his dog went missing. When Soyuz 3 was dispatched to find them, its crew found only a vodka bottle containing a note, floating outside the empty, meteorite-damaged ship. Nothing was heard about Istochnikov for nearly three decades: it was as if the Soviet authorities had erased their cosmonaut from history.37

In his book and exhibition Sputnik – the Odyssey of the Soyuz II, Joan Fontcuberta investigates Istochnikov's life, exhibiting archives about his story and family, but also meteorite fragments and pieces from the spaceship. The story soon reached the news: Why was Istochnikov erased from history? What role did the Soviet government play in this?

Fig. 9. Joan Foncuberta, Sputnik, photograph, 1997.

As it turns out, ‘Ivan Istochnikov’ translates in Russian to ‘Joan Fontcuberta’ (which could be both translated as ‘Hidden Fountain’), and when we get a better look at Istochnikov’s

37 Op. cit. 29

photographs, we notice that the Russian cosmonaut is in fact the artist himself ! The whole visual story can be considered a hoax, carefully written and documented by the artist to critique the supposedly neutral and objective nature of documentary photography, which he suggests is in fact another construction of reality.38

Similar to Avery’s imaginary world The Islanders, Fontcuberta creates tales and fictional narratives. But he does it using photography and archive, which have a different relation to reality and authority:

The idea is to challenge disciplines that claim authority to represent the real – botany, topology, any scientific discourse, the media, even religion. I chose photography because it was a metaphor of power. When I started in the early 70s, photography was a charismatic medium providing evidence. Photography is a medium impregnated with all the ideological values of the 19th century – the industrial revolution, liberalism, colonialism, positivism, and realism. When you push the button of a camera all that is compressed. As a photographer, you must be aware of that heritage. Reality doesn't exist before our experience. Photography is one of the tools that help us construct reality. It is not an innocent medium. 39

Fontcuberta’s project clearly positions his work in a relationship with adventure in the imaginary, constructed world. Similar to Aleksandra Mir, he also refers to the history of spatial exploration, but as unlike First woman on the moon (and also Victoire), there is no performative dimension to his work, as it didn’t actually happen. It is entirely constructed and staged, while pretending to be part of reality by using the authority of photography and archives.

Simon Starling

38 Op. cit. 39 Op. cit. 30

Autoxylopyrocycloboros is a process-based work by the British artist Simon Starling that was commissioned by Cove Park, in 2005. In this performance, Starting pilots a small steamboat called ‘Dignity’, that is fueled by pulling apart the wood of the small vessel’s structure and feeding it into the boiler that powers the boat. Through this process of self-destruction, the boat ends up sinking at the bottom of the lake, where it was originally dug up, and thus ends it cyclic journey.

Fig. 10. Simon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 38 colour transparencies (detail), 6 x 7 cm each, 1x medium format slide projector, 2006.

There is a clear adventurous aspect to this particular work by Starling: a storytelling dimension, risk and danger, the choice of a romantic means of transportation. But there is also a major difference with regard to classic adventure stories inherited from modern times: there is an absurd dimension to the quest, and the artist himself is the voluntary creator of the adventure,

danger and narrative twists.40 There is no external force to fight and the adventure is auto‐ nourished by the adventurer.

I was thinking about this also in relation to Bas Jan Ader. His frame of reference was also rather un-contemporary in a way. It was almost sort of nostalgic or something, all those nods to the Casper David Friedrich and the like. I’ve always tried to find ways to use, you know, very outmoded, outdated kinds of technologies and conversations and ideas and try to give them some new life in relation to a contemporary understanding. Bas Jan Ader was also the fall guy too, riding his bike into and canal, trying to cross the Atlantic in a ridiculously small boat. The title of this project too, with its nod to alchemy, suggests an outmoded philosophy. To me alchemy is particularly interesting when understood in terms of process and not product. It’s not really about obtaining gold from base metals but rather the mental space that that process allows – that utopia, if you like. Process over product, that’s the key. 41

What if the only way to live adventurously today were to purposefully add obstacles, to contribute difficulty? If so, who would decide to undertake such an absurd challenge and why? Should one voluntarily add spice to experiences to enhance the comfort of routine and daily life?

This particular work by Starling has some strong connection with Victoire, which we discussed in the prologue. When Starling adds the dysfunctional steamboat as a disruptive props in his journey, Victoire hacked the ascension of the mountain with high heels and a business suit.

What does Autoxylopyrocycloboros tell us about contemporary art practice in relation to adventure? the artificial – or staged - dimension of adventure found in contemporary art practices reflect our disillusionment with its imaginative possibility today. However, this nostalgic

40 Sylvain Venayre, Rêves d'aventures. 1800-1940 (Paris: La Martinière, 2006) ; --. La Gloire de l'aventure. Genèse d'une mystique moderne (1850-1940, Paris : Aubier, collection « Historique », 2002) 41 Ross Birrell, “Simon Starling interview” (Art and Research 1, no. 1, 2006: 1-3). 32

relationship with adventure demands a new critical reading. The desire to instrumentalise difficulties as a methodology maintains a playful aspect that balances this pessimistic view on the possible death of adventure. Though Autoxylopyrocycloboros is, in comparison with the mock- heroic failure and death of Jan Ader, a ‘safe work’ - the artist was supported by a team and the latest aquatic safety equipment - the curiosity that drives the recuperation demands a careful navigation through choppy waters.

The distance travelled by Starling and his crew was particularly small. But the time it takes to cross the small lake with such an inefficient steamboat demands a metaphorical distancing. The short distance is relative to the difficulty of the means to transport us to the shore. As Paul Ardenne notably concluded:

The quality of a journey is not in its destination, but in the use of a particular means of transportation 42

The journey itself is indeed self‐sufficient. It is not about getting far away, discovering new worlds, the wonder and the discovery lies in the journey itself. This romantic impulse is an active way of rehabilitating romance and discovery, outside of the exploration of distance and travelling.

For Starling, the very literal recuperation of a 19th century boat, its restoration and then return to the bottom of the loch seems immediately to be a romantic rehabilitation and re-enactment of Turner and Delacroix.43The critical frames of reference are more wide ranging than 18th and early 19th century landscapes however. Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous - an unfinished and perilously mortal work in three parts: a walk around Los Angeles, a sail across the Atlantic in the small 13-foot dingy ‘Ocean Wave’, and a walk in Amsterdam following the same pattern as in

42 Paul Ardenne, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon moins vingt : précédé de In Utero Terrae / Laurent Tixador ( Paris: Isthme Editions, 2006) 43 Romantic here refers as much to the notion of sublime and destructive capacity of nature as it does a political or philosophical discourse. 33

Los Angeles earlier that year - ending with Jan Ader’s disappearance somewhere between New York and the western shore of Ireland in 1976. To here

Such a project places Starling not as a nostalgic recuperator of historical heroics. Rather, he attempts to set out new critical conditions for the historiographical review of conceptual art and its precursors. Similarly, Starling’s steam powered ‘Dignity’ may bring to mind Delacroix’s ‘Medusa’ but it also critically examines Jan Ader’s ‘Ocean Wave’. In this, contemporary art’s ‘archive fever’ examines the amelioration of time and space that draws together the 19th century with mid-late 20th century conceptual strategies.44

We will come back to Simon Starling’s practice more extensively in the second major chapter of this dissertation: Adventure Never Died. His work is emblematic of the use of the trope of adventure in many regards: recuperating romantic imagination of adventure, the performative dimension, the material culture of adventure, and a strong storytelling dimension. As such, his body of work constitute a bedrock for the discussion of the Golden Age of Adventure trope in contemporary art practices.

Klara Hobza

Klara Hobza is a Czech artist based in Berlin. In the late 2000 she spent some time working in New York City, from a studio just above the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 2009 she moved back to Europe and had her first solo show at the Galerie fur Landschaftskunst in Hamburg in Germany. In this show, the artist presented a selection of her New York works, from a variety of media, presented on table structures made of wood. The tables where made from a bundle of timber with the intention that the material would tell their own story and come as a testimony of Hobza performance work. Indeed, Hobza studio space in Brooklyn was located above a body of water,

44 We could similarly consider Tacita Dean’s many ‘searches’ for Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the Sebaldian reconstructions of walking. See, Foster, Hal. ‘An archival impulse’, October, Vol. 110, 2004. 34

which led the artist to the idea that she could make a small raft from material in her studio and cross the water with all of her work packed up to reach the international water in Port Newark, New Jersey, and deliver her work in wooden container to be shipped to Germany.

Fig. 11. Klara Hobza, Arrival, photograph, 2009.

The gallery in Germany happened to also be located above water, on the canal. In Hamburg, Hobza rebuilt a raft and went to the docks to pick up her container and got the work back to the gallery, navigating the Elbe river and the canal into the city. The gallery staff then helped her lift

the boxes up through the windows, where she unpacked and used all the wood from the container to make the table to display her work for the show.

The wood, originally from her studio in New-York City, then transformed into a small boat, was soaked and swollen with water, from America and Europe. The material themselves were physically transformed by the journey, and this was reflected in the materiality of how her work was displayed in the gallery45.

Hobza’s project has an adventurous dimension, in the risk-taking aspect of her performance, in the narrative driven project, and in the Do-it-Yourself attitude. Her practice is about really going through the process of living an experience, gives her work an aura of realness that both engages and captivates.

But her practice is also defined by the importance given to the materials. As ambitious as her project is, the goal is to make it despite the obstacles and the high risk bet it constitutes. Hobza’s work in that sense can be linked to Starling’s practice with Autoxylopyrocycloboros In that both create obstacles to enable an adventurous mode of experience. But the transformation of the material from a raft to a curatorial project showing her New-York work is also reminiscent of Crusoe’s wrecked boat that formed the basis for anything he built on his desert island.

The work shown at the gallery is also transparent about the whole process of the project and the collaboration with the gallerist - Till Krauss - which adds a narrative element. The genesis of the work is to be seen in the show in form of email exchanges between the gallery and the artist, sketches, blueprints, administrative authorisation papers, and photos, all assembled under the title ‘Departure Diary’. They all constitute a narrative, non-linear and broken into different media, that share the adventure through fragmentally. The project is an adventure, and the adventure is the work.

45 Appendix Fig. 8. Klara Hobza, Departing America, Galerie fur Landschaftskunst, Hamburg, 2009. View of the exhibition. 36

Much the same as Starling’s self-consuming Autoxylopyrocycloboros boat, Hobza’s practice will be discussed in greater depth in ‘Adventure never died’ chapter. Her radical performative approach to the narratives of adventure makes her work key to understand the different postures that artists today hold in regard to adventure. Most of the Golden Age of Adventure Markers are found in her practice, from storytelling to material culture, from the performative dimension to the narrative tropes of the solitary hero overcoming obstacles though a physical journey.

Pierre Malphettes

In 2007, French artist Pierre Malphettes left Marseille in a Peugeot 504 pick up, to which he had attached a luminous pink box. With a collaborator, they drove all the way to the north of Scotland, documenting and filming their trip. The car appears to be both a sculptural means of transportation and the main character of the video they shot. Titled ‘Firefly’, the work was edited and displayed in cinematic way, from the poster to the quality of the cinematography.

Fig. 12. Pierre Malphettes, Firefly (poster from the video), 2007.

It is the central piece of the documentation of the trip, but the exhibition ‘Road Movie’ that took place upon the artist’s return from his trip also featured some other works, including photos, installation and some models of the car in landscapes.46

Travel as an art form is a well explored path, a genre in itself, with its code, its myths and hero, who populate cinema, literature and art. Pierre Malphettes project exploring the landscape does not position itself in the scope of land art, but seems to be more investigating the genre of travelling as an art form, referencing the type of narrative (road trip), the aesthetic of loneliness in

46 Appendix Fig. 9. Pierre Malphettes, Firefly, Centre d’Art Saint-Léger, France, 2007. View from the exhibition. 38

wide open space (cinematography), and the apparatus of sharing the experience of the journey when back home.47

When coming back from his journey, Malphettes was left with hours video footage, that he had to edit to narrate his experience. As was seen in the prologue of this dissertation with the practice lead research on Victoire, the process of editing transforms the experience, and adds another temporality to it:

EW: Earlier you were talking about a double temporality: the moment of the actual experience and the moment when we narrate it, in your case by a material production. Do you think we relive a second it, sometime even more acutely, with more intensity, the adventure when we take this narrative distance?

PM: Yes and I have a very specific example of that. Once the journey was done – and the journey was also a shooting – we come back rich of the experience and hours and hours of rushes. So there is another temporarily that starts with working on the rushes and editing them. We are still in the project, but in a totally different way. New collaborations happen and we relieve the journey in another from. We had more than 40 hours of rushes, the trip was almost entirely filmed (even it lasted longer than 40 hours, but we filmed every day). Everything that we lived during the trip, I relived in front of the screen. And then, the film became something else. It does not give an accurate account of the adventure. The way it is narrated in the film is something different. Even if it tells the story of Christophe Aker (PM partner for the project), and myself. So there is indeed a second temporality. The different temporalities interconnect with one another and each of them have their unique coherence.48

47Sandra Patron, “Pierre Malphettes: Road Movie”, Documentsdartistes website, Published 2007, http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/malphettes/repro1.html. 48 Interview with Pierre Malphettes, Artist’s fieldnote, edited, non-published, 2014. 39

Firefly’s main character is the pickup car with the pink neon box attached to it, and we see it on screen more that we see the two protagonists. His enigmatic presence in the landscape is the most visually striking aspect of the movie and also the main engine of the narration. Just like the pair of high heels were the main character Victoire, the magenta firefly moves the story forward and offer a visual leitmotiv to the entire video.

Pierre Malphettes transformed the 504 Peugeot which stars in the road movie Firefly and mounted a large hot-pink light box at the back of the car. The road trip takes the artist and his collaborator from Marseille to Scotland, filming the whole travel to feature the glowing magenta car in the urban and natural landscape.

The artist, accompanied by a film producer friend, sets off with this vehicle to film it as both the sculpture and main character of the film. The vehicle thus transformed, becomes an urban sign, deprived of its advertising slogan, which escapes the town and its commercial purposes to roam free in the countryside. The itinerary brings them from the limpid luminosity of the Mediterranean to the mist and heavy skies of Scotland, allowing the monochromatic box to confront town lights with those of the countryside, to slide into the night of industrial zones and to reach the dawn sun rising above vast stretches of green pastures.

Firefly is emblematic of the storytelling dimensions of the Golden Age of Adventure, outlined earlier in this introduction. In particular, it clearly addresses adventure in retrospect, reconstruction of the narratives, as well as the romanticism in the absurdity of the adventure quest.

Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval

Today at the core of many contemporary artists’ works, the expedition is about to become an artistic practice in itself. And maybe even a new way of exhibiting. (...) Without being a clear artistic movement those expeditions, collective or solitary, are a general mood:

behind this ultimate desire to 'hit the road', lies in fact individual processes that reflect the singulars faces of the 'elsewhere'. 49

Laurent Tixador is a French contemporary artist who is, among other things, known for being the first artist ever to reach the North Pole in 2005. This rather absurd title can be seen as an ironic gesture to mock the culture of record. However, Tixador did embark on this journey, entering the long history of polar expeditions. By turning his trip to the North Pole into an artistic gesture, Tixador recuperates adventure as a valid paradigm in contemporary practices. Distance and exploration of a hostile environment are kept, but he is shifting the culture of pioneer by playing ironically with it.

Fig. 13. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, photograph, 2005.

At a time where distances are shrinking, places that still manage to convey a feeling of remoteness assume an even greater value. As mentioned earlier in this introduction, Sloterdijk

49 Paul Ardenne, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon moins vingt : précédé de In Utero Terrae / Laurent Tixador ( Paris: Isthme Editions, 2006) 41

argues that the globe is destined to be entirely explored and mapped, thus shrinking the world while creating an aura of rarity on the quickly disappearing un-explored territories. The poles continue to be protected from excessive tourism, but are paradoxically victims of globalisation, being at the frontline of places hit by climate change. This dual phenomenon of distance and fragility gives the poles a dimension which has become rare in the 21st century: they are still lands of adventure.

Fig. 14. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, bottle, plastic, fabric, metal, paper, 2005

But from his singular experience of the elsewhere, Tixador brought back an artistic testimony to share. This is another interesting relation to adventure in Tixador’s works: the creation of artefacts documenting his performances, bringing the elsewhere in the exhibition. Photographs have been used to document performance art since its development. Tixador uses them as 42

testimony of his journey in the far north, but he would also bring back simple objects, such as a spoon engraved with 'North Pole 2005'. This type of testimony, or memento, could be found in historical or ethnographic exhibitions, documenting the early days of the polar expedition for example. How do these objects have the power to reenact an adventure? The paradox of an everyday object with an extreme adventure allows the viewer to identify with the story and its protagonists. The simple engraving reminds the viewer of the names and dates found on trees or ruins, which give a humble 'I was here' testimony. However, in this case, the extraordinary dimension of a polar expedition creates a powerful aura surrounding the object.50

Fig. 15. Laurent Tixador, North Pole, photograph, engraved spoon, 2005.

This resonates with the material culture of adventure, as well as providing an interesting strategy for narrating an adventure through objects and visuals. By bringing everyday object into the exhibition, Tixador found a simple but efficient strategy to convey something of the distance into the proximity.

50 Another example of Tixador’s work on his trip to the North Pole is his creation of a bottle souvenir. For each of his art projects, Tixador created a bottle that encapsulated some element of his adventure. For his North Pole journey, he recreated a polar landscape with a miniature version of the flags he planted in the ice cap. Full of humor, the bottle even has a little hat to keep it warm during the polar winter. These evoke the boats trapped in a bottle made by bored sailors during their long months at the sea.

As key artists exploring the trope of the Golden Age of Adventure, we will come back to Tixador and Poincheval in the chapter ‘Adventure Never Died’. They address most of the markers of adventure in their practice: storytelling, failure, reconstruction of the narrative in retrospect, testimonies and material culture of adventure.

Through looking at this selection of exemplary works, we now have a better understanding of the scope of adventure narratives in contemporary art practices. This section has outlined (number) of exemplary modern works identified through the exploratory mind-mapping process as expressing important aspects of the imagination of adventure. With this clear view of the field of adventure in mind, the key markers of the Golden Age of adventure were derived from an analysis of these contemporary art practices. Beyond those markers, we can now see different attitudes or strategies emerge from the range of art practices. With this established, the next section will present a clear classification of the fundamental strategies of adventure. Each strategy will then be discussed in the following chapters to shed a new light on our societal relationship with the Golden Age of Adventure.

2.3: CLASSIFICATION OF DIFFERENT STRATEGIES: PRESENTATION OF THE THREE DISSERTATION CHAPTERS

In examining the material of adventure as has been done previously in this chapter, ways of interrogating our relationships to these narratives emerge. A selection of artworks and practices was compiled forming a collection that was mapped to understand the different strategies and relationships within the visual culture of adventure.

Through observation and analysis of what is happening amongst artists using the trope of adventure as primary material distinct patterns, similarities and differences in approach were identified. As a result of these investigations, three main attitudes towards the imagination of adventure emerged. These are summarised below, with in-depth discussion provided in their three respective chapters.

2.3a: Killing Adventure

Some artists adopt very critical attitudes towards the imagination and narratives of adventure. Exploring the world, reaching new territories, standing in awe before the exotic and the different; as romantic as it sounds, also means claiming ownership over lands that belong to others, entering into relationships of power and domination over territories, culture and people, creating hierarchies through fascination for otherness, and superiority disguised as curiosity.

The culture of the pioneer is a powerful drive, but its darker side comes from the fact that it is fuelled by an egotistical desire to plant a flag in a new piece of land and claim it as one’s own. A new land? Perhaps new to the newcomer, but certainly not to the people or creatures who have long been treading its length and breadth.

In reaction to this observation, an array of art practices have emerged that deconstruct the myth of conquest and of the adventurer. The Killing Adventure chapter explores a range of expressions and strategies that are aligned and driven by this moral direction.

2.3b: Adventure Never Died

Some art practices seem to develop a neo-romantic relationship with adventure, somehow embracing – or disregarding – its problematic dimensions and possible inadequacies. Inherent to ‘Adventure Never Died’ positions is a claim for continuity, and a conception of adventure as exploration of the self over anything else. It does not necessarily embrace colonial values of domination in the trope of adventure, but rather explores the romantic drive and endless curiosity that adventure and exploration carry.

2.3c: Adventure is Dead, Long Live Adventure

The final clear posture with regards to Adventure is a much more playful relationship with its narratives. There is an acknowledgement that the Golden Age of Adventure though colonisation is thankfully over, for the most part, but there is a desire to play, recycle and re-enact the material of adventure, and the layers of imagination it creates. Stories of adventure are thus the primary material of the artist as a playful adventurer. The world has been mapped, all the stories have been told, thus impetus and inspiration are centred around scenarios of adventure.

These three divergent approaches constitute the central analytical structure of the next three major chapters of this dissertation. They each address investigation and discussion of 1) how the creative body of work of this PhD can be classified according to those three different types of relationship with adventure today and what insights and revelations this can bring, 2) the conceptual framework that can help understand this strategy, and 3) artists who are working primarily within each particular strategy in relation to adventure

The logic of these three chapters arose from researching and mapping contemporary art practices using the imagination of adventure as primary material. How the creative practice situates itself in relation to these different strategies and how it informs the research will be discussed in each chapter. It is important to point out that the creative body of work is not presented separately in its own chapter, nor is it presented chronologically. While most of the work produced during the PhD candidature has been exhibited on multiple occasions, the final PhD exhibition brought together the majority of works produced and was an opportunity for reflection on the creative journey. Only retrospectively then, was the artwork produced throughout this candidature able to be identified with the strategies and postures of adventure identified throughout this research process.

I: KILLING ADVENTURE

The introduction highlighted the three key strategies adopted by artists who engage with the imagination of adventure. This chapter interrogates the first of those strategies: Killing Adventure. These works can all be gathered under the idea that the Golden Age of Adventure bears colonial values and that to keep using those narratives is inadequate for the 21st century, in a world where we are trying to move past the colonial era. The colonial legacy has so far been inadequately addressed and constitutes what many have argued is a fundamentally “neo-colonial modernity” and provide references. In an attempt to fight this reality, several artists and thinkers are undertaking a systematic genealogical dig, looking at ways to reveal how the colonial values still permeate a range of phenomena today. Contemporary art practices are one of these phenomena This chapter will analyse where and how colonialism lies in contemporary art practices, and how artists are attempting to decouple colonialism from the cliché of adventure.

We will look at a range of tactics and approaches by artists today trying to kill that Golden Age of Adventure. This chapter will open by presenting a selection of works created during this PhD, that can be best understood though that posture of Killing Adventure. Secondly, this practice will be linked with a theoretical discussion on the state of ‘Intense Proximity’51 that is used to understand globalisation, and the impact on Adventure. To move further in the chapter, we will then look at a range of contemporary practices that echoes the creative body of work produced during this PhD. We will analyse in which unique way they develop a strategy to kill colonialism and related issues within adventure.

51 Okwui Enwezor, Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain, (Paris: Paris triennale, Palais de Tokyo, April 20th - August 26th, 2012. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain) Exhibition Catalogue.

3.1: MURDER ATTEMPTS

In this section, we will look at a selection of three works produced during this PhD. The body of work is here documented, described and stand as a posture on adventure - specifically on Killing Adventure.

3.1a: From A Distance

From a distance is an installation that was shown at the George Paton Gallery in Parkville, Australia in 2015. It comprises a pair of sculptural elements and a pair of framed old found postcards. Founds objects, sometimes referred to with the French expression Objet Trouvé, have a long tradition in contemporary art, from Ready-Made to old objects collected for their vintage and poetic quality. 52 Mark Dion’s practice of collecting artefact and displaying them in curiosity cabinet or museum installations could be connected to this practice, as it shares similarities with aesthetic of adventure.53

The sculptural elements consists of a pair of old binoculars mounted on copper pipes at eye height, standing on a flat pedestal in an anthropomorphic way.54 The viewer looks through the binoculars and sees a postcard, enclosed in a fennel-like frame, that prevents it from being easily seen outside of this apparatus. The post cards are early 20th century sepia photos of archaeological sites in the Middle East, in Syria. The sites are not accessible anymore due to conflict in the region, or that have simply been destroyed by war. The two sculptural elements are arranged in space creating two mental paths between them and the postcard. They stand still in the gallery, with the

52 “Found Objects”, Tate online resource, no date, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/found-object 53 Sarina Basta, Cristiano Raimondi and Villa Paloma-nouveau Musée National (Monaco), (eds. Océanomania: souvenirs des mers mystérieuses, un projet de Mark Dion. Monaco: Villa Paloma-nouveau Musée National (Monaco), April 12th – September 30th, 2011. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Océanomania: souvenirs des mers mystérieuses, un projet de Mark Dion, in partnership with Musée Océanographique de Monaco.) Exhibition Catalogue. 54 On anthropomorphic sculpture see : Kate Nesin, “Abstraction and Anthropomorphism in Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture”, The Art Institute of Chicago; Lisa Lee, University of Chicago, CAA Annual Conference, Chicago, February 12 - 15, 2014

binoculars floating up at 1.5 metres above the ground on average, evoking imagery of a pair of eyes on skinny legs.

Fig. 16. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

Looking at anything though binocular distorts reality: it brings what is faraway closer, it transforms a three-dimensional space into an image framed by the lens, allows to suppress distance and project a more powerful gaze onto the world. From a distance in one of my first works with viewing devices, and binoculars in particular. The work represents an interest in those devices as an expression of domination over space and territories. Binoculars point at something in the landscape in a similar way a gun sight would do, which is a relation with territories that has been discussed in photography theory extensively, notably discussed by Susan Sontag in On

Photography55. They allow the viewer to go beyond our limited sight. Moreover, whoever is in possession of these technologies, has a considerable advantage and is able to embrace further territories.

But what are we looking at through binoculars? Beyond its use in power-driven human activities (hunting, military), binoculars are used either for science, leisure, or tourism. But even in those activities there is an element of taking power or ownership by understanding or accessing an object.

Fig. 17. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

55 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p.11 51

Furthermore, by suppressing space, binoculars consequently have an effect on time. One can see instantly what would take a number of minutes to physically reach, in the same way that powerful telescopes allow us to see images of our universe from the past.

When looking at the old postcard from Syria, we gain visible insight into a past that no longer exists. Tourism does nothing more. But in this particular instance, we are looking at ruins from the Roman era in the Middle East. As Colletta Lisa in The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture has noted, the ruins have constituted a point of interest and curiosity for the whole of the Modern era. In this sense, the fascination for ruins has run parallel to the development of the imagination of adventure.56 The fascination for going far away to exotic places can be compared to the drive for archaeology and reconstituting the past. Both attractions led to the recreation of the far-away in space and time. These romanticised versions of the past are similar to the fantasised constructions of exotic otherness.

The fascination for exoticism - often exaggerated or tokenised at best, misunderstood, fetishized or ridiculed at worst - can be seen a key drive in the Golden Age Of Adventure, as well as in the use of trope of adventure in Modern and sometimes contemporary art practices. In this sense then, Levi-Strauss’ decision to abandon adventure ought to be read as a rejection of the problematic exoticism outlined so far in this chapter. This fetishization of exotica in art has been discussed by major exhibition and their reception, such as Magicians of the Earth, Africa Remix in France57. Acknowledging this historiography, the use of ancient ruins in this work, hope to continue generating a conversation of our relationship to exoticism.

56 Lisa Colletta, The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture, (2015 Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), p. 226 57 Annie Cohen-Solal et al, Magiciens de la terre : 1989, 2014 : retour sur une exposition légendaire (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2 juillet-8 septembre 2014, Ed. X. Barral, Paris, 2014), 385 p. Exhibition catalogue. Jean-Hubert Martin, Magiciens de la terre (18 mai-14 août 1989, centre Georges-Pompidou, musée national d'Art moderne, exhibition catalogue, La Villette, la Grande Halle, 1989), 271 p. Exhibition catalogue. Lucy Steeds et al, Making Art Global (Part 2) 'Magiciens de la Terre' 1989 (London, Afterall Books, 2013), 304 p. Marie-Laure Bernadac, Africa Remix (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2005), p. 11

Fig. 18. Emilie Walsh, From a distance, 2016. Exhibition view at George Paton Gallery.

Using post card instead of photos is also a reference to tourism, flirting with the idea that tourism has replaced adventure, keeping the drive to the exotic but removing the risk.

The relationship between tourism and adventure will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. The ruins in Syria used to be a tourist attraction, but the world context is different and the conflicts in this area do not allow for tourism any more. It is well and truly in the distance, inaccessible, endangered, while at the same time close and omnipresent through the lens of journalism.

3.1b: Art’Venture

A round stamp, made of wood and carved rubber, is attached to the wall at eye's height, the stamp part facing out. At the opposite side of the gallery, an embossed print, approximately 33 cm x 33 cm, on white paper in a white frame. The embossing shows, highlighting the white paper, a

combination of three circles similar to a Venn diagram or Celtic tracery. That motif has been used abundantly throughout art history, and notable in contemporary time by Pierre Huyghe – whose work we will discuss in the third chapter - with his fluorescent tubes sculpture ‘RSI, a fragment of reality.’58 On a closer look, the circles appear to be schematic compasses, with the needle pointing south. The word ‘Art’venture’ repeats itself three times around the main circle. This enigmatic figure is difficult to decipher due to the nature of the embossing technique.

Fig. 19. Emilie Walsh, Art’venture, embossing print, 33 cm x 33 cm, 2015.

On the other side of the space, the stamp appears to repeat the same figure, only much smaller (4 cm in diameter), and in dark grey, the colour of the rubber covered in ink which shows that the stamp has been used.

58 See Appendix Fig. 10, Pierre Huyghe, RSI, un bout de réel, fluorescent tubes, 2006. Based on Lacan drawing. 54

Fig. 20. Emilie Walsh, Art’Venture, stamp (wood, rubber, ink), 2015

The two elements together work in the space and give the illusion of a projection between the stamp and the print, just like if the first one had created an enlarged imprint on the second. It mentally projects a large imaginary cone, from the small stamp to the larger print, linking the two pieces together by a playful mind game of scale, colour, space and repetition, like a logo repeating itself in the world, on different surfaces and forms.

Art’venture is an art project that has developed over many years, and that has taken many forms. In the exhibition space, it takes the form of a stamp of a logo for a fictional organisation called ‘Art’venture’. The stamp is displayed in relation to an embossing print that shows the same logo, only larger than on the stamp.

As mentioned in this introduction, one of the initial steps taken in questioning the trope of adventure for this research was to go through the systematic method of asking what is adventure today and coming up with propositions of definition that were being tested out by other art projects. Two key hypotheses that emerged from this were whether adventure was even a valid practice today, or similarly whether it had been replaced with a dull tourism.

Adventure is constantly used in advertisements as a positive value that sells well. Adventure is everywhere in advertisements and used to sell anything to the point where it completely lost its significance. The broad concept is also used as a positive over-evaluation of tourism: adventure travel packages are sold by most travel agencies, and some extreme examples are found in tourism in conflicts zones. War area travel books are found, and high risk - but highly controlled and secured - adventure travel packs are a popular way of travelling nowadays.

This observation led to the founding of a fake adventure business called ‘Adventura dreams corporation’, which applied methodologies of building a business, such as commencing with a large “customer” survey. A questionnaire was created, shared widely and received 200 responses.59 The questionnaire was comprised of a range of questions trying to understand what was the definition of adventure for each participant. The intention was to come up with a personal definition for each ‘customer’, and then offer an adventure experience suited to their needs, desires and representations. The project was comprised of a website, a Facebook page, a Google form for the survey, and an ‘inside’ document analysing the result of the survey.

59 See appendix Fig. 11 and appendix Fig. 12 56

The whole project was also branded and had its own fonts and colour palette, as well as a logo. The ‘Art’venture’ logo was designed and then tested out on different media: collage, drawing, linocut, stamp, embossing, digital… Logos travel through space and take form on an array of objects, support and material. The logo was tested through different mediums to determine its ability to be repeated both in print and digitally.

The stamp was of particular interest as it connotes ‘the official’, the authority of bureaucracy. The exploration of this motif involved reproducing it in a wide range of forms, starting with increasing its size and playing with the printed aspect of it, as a mark, and imprint in the material world. The embossing was an experiment with that idea and the physical relation between the stamp and the embossing opened the possibility to explore the spatial relation between them. to here 25th June 3.54

So far, this section has examined the project Art’Venture and its relationship with entrepreneurship. This section will now examine a selection of practices that incorporate elements of entrepreneurship and business in the artwork. The authority of the administrative methodology, through marketing strategies, business models or simply administrative forms such as paperwork, stamps and other documents with an appearance of officiality, are used by artists as a methods of subverting those very institutions. Several examples will be developed to highlight the ways in which entrepreneurship and administration are antithetical to the spirit of adventure.

Fake Businesses are a unique type of practice that both use and hack capitalism, blurring the line between producing a critical discourse while putting in place a production machine. 60 A particular example that sheds an interesting light Art’Venture, is the long lasting enterprise Ouest Lumière, by Yann Toma.61

60 Rose Marie Barrientos, Lucy Lippard, Les entreprises critiques La critique artiste à l'ère de l'économie globalisée, (édition bilingue français-anglais, Yann Toma (dir.), 2008), 472 p. Yann Toma (dir.), Stéphanie Jamet-Chavigny and Laurent Deveze, Artistes et Entreprise, D'ailleurs (revue de la recherche, ERBA Besançon et Art&Flux CERAP - Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2012), 212 p. 61 Paul Ardenne, Ouest-Lumiere (Translation Sally Laruelle, Heinke Wagner, Isthme éditions, 2005), 107 p. 57

Yann Toma is a French artist and researcher who has centred his whole art practice under the umbrella of his fake company ‘Ouest Lumière’.

Ouest-Lumière, the fictional company conceived and run by Yann Toma, who adopted the name of the defunct power plant in the west of Paris. It is a means for the artist to colonize a new territory for art through fiction. With zany organizational charts and proliferating reports, the artist creates a parody of the hierarchical structures and opacity of a society that claims to be communicative. But, in the end, such a project clearly and openly remains within the art world and exploits its fictional power. 62

Yann Toma stumbled upon an abandoned electricity plant in 1991: Ouest-Lumiere (west-lights). The factory was built in 1890 by Gustave Eiffel in the outer suburb of Paris. It has powered the west of Paris for decades until the 1930’s, when it started to be progressively dismantled. The building stayed up until 1992, when it started to be demolished. Yann Toma was following the destruction and fighting its disappearance. He collected fragments and testimonies of the institution: light globes, electrical cables, administrative documents. He states that he was driven by the desire to ‘stage a new reality of the object becoming waste63’. For three years, Toma built an archive of Ouest-Lumiere, using the creative framework introduced by French writer Georges Pérec64 in Espèces d’espaces: a creative and poetic fragmented inventory. Ouest-Lumiere became the center of his art practice, both exploring the enterprise process as a creative practice (admin and infrastructure), but also using it as a production structure.

The third section of this chapter will later interrogate in further depth the role of the institutional and the official as a critical tactic of artists attempting to kill adventure.

62 « Ouest Lumiere », Ouest Lumiere website https://www.ouestlumiere.fr/ouest-lumi%C3%A8re/background/ 63 Op cit. 64 Georges Perec, Espèce d’Espace, (Gallilée, 1974) 58

3.1c: Glowry65

A room with ten old frames of different sizes hung in a salon style on a single white wall. Three spotlights on tripods shining bright light on the wall over the frames. Not much to see in this room as the frames are empty and just hung on the white wall.

Fig. 21. Emilie Walsh, Glowry ,VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

On closer inspection, they appear to be some sort of off-white painting on the wall where the frames are located. Some yellowish patterns can be seen from close up, but they are difficult to make sense of. 66

65 To see the installation in a short video clip : https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x71okxx 66 Appendix Fig. 14. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 22. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 23. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Then, the three spotlights turn off all at once, letting the room in the dark: the paintings inside the frame are now glowing and revealing themselves to the eye as they adjust to the dim room. The lights stay off for ten minutes, allowing the viewer to closely examine what now appears to be a series of portraits. Men, posing with allegories of knowledge and power - globes, books, and so forth - face the viewer in their ghostly appearance, floating in the dark space.

The glow in the dark paintings are stencils of classic portraits from the modern era, directly referencing The Golden Age of Adventure as defined in this research. The portraits gradually fade over ten minutes, before the lights all turn on all at once again to recharge the glow paint for ten minutes under the bright spotlights.

The viewer in the room might not identify all of the men portrayed in the installation, but some of them are reproduction of quite famous paintings that are easily recognisable. One might spot Captain Cook here, or the mosaic portrait of Marco Polo.67 The general impression is that we are facing a series of images taken from the classic genre of portrait from the modern era, and that the men portrayed – whether we recognise them or not – are all historical figures.

The selection of the ten portraits come from an internet pop culture article published in ‘Men Journal’ about the ‘Greatest adventurers of all time’. 68 The choice of this mainstream article came from the interest in the cliché of adventure, and what constitutes the ‘myth’ of adventure from a popular culture point of view. The magazine was also chosen for its name: ‘Men Journal’, claiming itself as a platform for ‘men culture’, and that being related to the fact that the article presents those great adventurers figures that happen to be all male and white: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, Alexander Von Humbolt, Jean-François De La Perousse, Jacques Cartier, Robert Livingston, Robert Peary, Vasco De Gama and Richard Francis Burton. They all indeed participate into forming the myth of adventure, and all made a great contribution to

67 Mosaic of Marco Polo displayed in the Palazzo Doria-Tursi, in Genoa, Italy 68 ‘Who is the greatest adventurer of all time?’, Men journal, https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/who-is-the- greatest-adventurer-of-all-time-20140327/ 61

knowledge and lived intense and rich lives. These homogenous portraits of white, western, educated males highlights the problematic lack of alternative models of adventurous agents.

The history of adventure, in the Golden Age period defined by this research, is a men's story, with very little if none female models. The Europe-centric perspective on the trope of adventure makes it a white men’s story, with no room for other perspectives. And when women adventurers are to be found, in history or fiction, they often borrow masculine traits. Just as an example we could mention Calamity Jane or Rose de Freysinet, who actually disguise herself as a male sailor to join her husband expedition. As much as this is problematic from a post-colonial and feminist perspective, it turns out that these ‘myths’ of adventure are still active in the sense that they are perpetuating a story that populates our imagination of what adventure and adventurers are. Whilst there is need to change contemporary narratives of adventure from critical race and gender studies, Glowry enters the conversation but does not offer alternative narratives or models. Rather, in acknowledging the white, western, educated, male paradigm of the adventurer, it underlines how this paradigm is operative in our contemporary imaginations of adventure. Glowing in the dark like ghostly figures, they maybe start to fade in with time, but are constantly reactivated by being retold, re-enact, and maintained on a pedestal. They stay in our mind like retina impression, floating around like a backdrop of the cliché of adventure. Those ten figures, featured in Men Journal, are on display in this installation under the bright spotlights, reminiscent of a glamorous photo-shoot. They shine for a while, then fade out, before being under the spotlight again.

The whiteness of the whole installation can be read as a comment of the whitening of the narratives of adventure, written by white men for white men to fantasise about it. Furthermore, the off-white mural on a white wall is setting the installation in a western tradition of painting, from Malevich to Klein.69 And the salon hanging is also heavily referential of European painting tradition. Both acknowledge the Europe-centric perspective, from the apparatus to the iconic

69 Mark A. Cheetham, “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now.” Art Journal 4, no. 64 (2005): 94-109 62

content of the installation, not as a claim to maintain these figures on a pedestal, but as a statement on the fact that they are indeed, still up there.

Glowry, as well as Art’Venture and In the Distance, are three separate works that take a specific position in relationship with adventure. All three, while produced at different stages of the PhD, stand in a critical way in regard to the Golden Age of Adventure. Claiming for an acknowledgement that we are still entangled in colonialism (Glowry), arguing that adventure is a marketing concept in late capitalism (Art’Venture), or reflecting on the increasingly complex and globalised world and the impact of this on the drive for adventure (In The Distance); all three works can be understood as a murder attempt targeting the Golden Age of Adventure.

3.2: INTENSE PROXIMITY

So far, this thesis has examined how a section of the creative work produced during this candidature reflects the strategy of murdering adventure. This section introduces Enwezor’s political reading of globalisation – termed Intense Proximity – as a means of further understanding this strategy.

As discussed in the introduction, it would appear that the great anthropologist Claude Levi- Strauss has closed the door on The Golden Age of Adventure by beginning his major essay ‘Tristes Tropiques’, with the sentence ‘I hate travelers and explorers’.70 Interestingly, Okwui Enwezor - the curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale - opens his introduction to ‘Intense Proximity’ by quoting and questioning this very sentence. Enwezor’s examination of this opening sentence in his introduction to the Biennale catalogue marks out a much longer set of propositions for the adventurous and curious. Among these propositions, it is important to note that Enwezor reads ‘Tristes Tropiques’ as a mental journey rather than a physical one. Discovery is now conducted as much in an armchair, through Google Maps, Netflix and online subscriptions to National

70 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Penguin editions, 2011)

Geographic as it is through backpack and canoe. And yet, despite the everyday encountering with that which was once called ‘other’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘discovery’, curiosity persists. The pixelation and capturing of the global (and increasingly interplanetary and interstellar) marks out the tension between want, capacity, and imagination that Intense Proximity demands.

The desire of ‘elsewhere’ is fed by the constant realisation that every centimeter of our planet is pixelated by satellites and it is difficult to find a land that has not been filmed. Artists have the desire to reinvent an ‘elsewhere’ and to give it to viewers. The question of the exhibition is then key: what to bring from a journey? Of course, one can bring testimonies (photos for example, evocative of the slides’ night with friends or family), but what can one bring to turn the viewer into the traveller, the storyteller and the explorer, to bring the ‘elsewhere’ into the exhibition?71

Lévi-Strauss’ advocacy for the analysis of the structures of anthropology rather than the ‘field adventure’ matters in the sense that it de-privileges the authenticity of travel and presence. The persistence of the desire to discover, though vastly ameliorated - Enwezor argues - exists as a sort of mental hangover or persistent itch that needs to be scratched. But the tools to cure that hangover or to scratch that itch must, in the 21st century, be different to those tools employed by the colonial traveler and the 19th-century adventurer.

Hal Foster, in ‘The artist as ethnographer’ shows how artists, from the 1930s until today, have borrowed from ethnography, or, more precisely, from what artists believe ethnography to be.72 According to Foster, artists - ignorant of ethnographic methods - transform it into a ‘narcissistic practice of auto-investigation’.73 Enwezor accepts Foster’s reflection, but minimises it by drawing on examples of contemporary art practice, such as Renée Green’s or Fred Wilson’s

71 Jean-Max Colard, “De l’exposition à l’expédition. Minute/transcription of the panel discussion at ‘du rendez-vous’.” Le laboration du geste. Published 2003. http://www.laboratoiredugeste.com/spip.php?article109 72 Hal Foster, « the artist as ethnographer », in Hal Foster, The return of the real, the avant-garde at the end of the century. Cambridge: MIT press, 1996 73 Op. cit. p. 25 64

work which takes into account the post-colonial contact, in order to put identity issues into perspective.

Okwui Enwezor argues that we live in a time of disappearing distance, and his exhibition ‘Intense Proximity’ builds on this idea. He shows how the historical process of migration, colonisation and decolonisation has generated social, political and cultural tensions which are common to our contemporary multicultural societies. The crumbling of distance creates a paradox: differences are actually more visible because very diverse groups, sometimes with opposite values, live close to each other, interact and somehow enhance their differences:

‘Here we enter the zone of intense proximity, a form of disturbing nearness that unsettles as much as it exhilarates, and transforms as much as it disquiets the coordination of national vectors’ 74

If - as Enwezor argues - we live in a world of proximity and the abolition of distances, the far away comes closer to us. We have to wonder what would a world without distance would be like. Paradoxically, for Enwezor, the fact that the world shrinks creates a disorientation due to the collapsing of the ‘far’ and the ‘near’.

Enwezor argues that proximity is between hostility and hospitality: it is a frequentation, a contact. However, the more distances disappear, the more contacts there are and the more the tensions are important. Multiplication of contacts may also wear away the curiosity, and somehow kill the desire for differences.

Very diverse identities coexist in the same space: and paradoxically the proximity emphasises the distance. But, the variety of proximities multiplies the type of contacts and they might also be a source of rediscovery. It allows us to realise the specificity of different cultures as

74 Okwui Enwezor et al, Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain (Paris: Paris triennale, Palais de Tokyo, April 20th - August 26th, 2012. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain) Exhibition Catalogue, p. 22 65

well as their fragility. Mary Louise Pratt names these antithetical spaces ‘Contact zones’, where different cultures collide, mostly in asymmetrical power relationships (colonialism, neo- colonialism, slavery, economical domination, and other important power relationships). 75

For Enwezor, modernity was built on an oppositions to a problematic contact: the tribal, on the one hand, and the modern, on the other. This concept has been criticised in depth by post- structuralist thinkers, within a context of immigration and decolonisation: until the end of the 19th century, ‘contact’ could mean discovery or curiosity, before shifting to an endless exploration, then an occupation and source of injustice and tension, criticised by anti-colonialism. And, not only did anti-colonialism criticise the political and economic domination, but also the rejection of the possession of local knowledge by the colonial authority. 76 But, as much as post-colonial studies have tried to reevaluate this opposition, Enwezor argues it is still active and rooted in our conceptions of the global world dynamics.

Today, the former colonised subject has become the migrant. We could think that they can now borrow the position of the colonial traveler: curious and seeking discoveries. But the situation is modified by the fact that, firstly, the percentage of the population that travel keeps increasing, and, most importantly, the social and economic pressure of the migrants are entirely different to that of the coloniser. This movement towards travelling and cosmopolitanism creates more contacts, and more frictions. And - due to economic and political disparities – contact for the migrant, today is not adventure or discovery, but a rather more protective quest.

Travelling today partially reverses the earlier idea of contact as adventure and discovery. Instead of exotic sensations of ethnophilia, poetically inscribed and recorded in colour slides and motion pictures, today’s travelers are seekers of things more prosaic and basic,

75 Pratt has studied what she calls contact zones - areas which allow the intermingling of two or more cultures. She remarks that contact zones are ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.’ In Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91, no.1 (1991): 33-40. 76 Enwezor, Op. cit. p. 23 66

more material than aesthetic or philosophical. They want economic opportunity, political stability. They seek social mobility in the global world. 77

Migrants today do not necessary look for assimilation: whereas in the past colonial context of domination, they were made invisible. The colonised swaps position of displacement with the coloniser, but the power dynamic remains largely unchanged: new contact situations occur, more visible and generating more tension.

Okwui Enwezor’s reading at our current situation of intense proximity leads him to investigate the different modes of contact, distance and proximity within the different cultures, rather than focusing on one of them.

Enwezor points out that contemporary artists have used and played with the culture of adventure, the colonial story and the ethnographical aesthetic. The history of adventure, as argued so far in this chapter, is profoundly linked to modernity, colonisation, and decolonisation, and through the rise of ethnology, the history of science and knowledge.

How have artists been employing this heritage? With distance? Irony? Nostalgia?

the attitudes of these contemporary artists borrowing from the vocabulary of adventure can best be mapped according to the work of Enwezor, discussed in depth throughout this section. Furthermore, the vision he promotes about space, temporality and contact implies an important disruption in the modernist conception of adventure, and invites the rethinking of adventure in the context of intense proximity.

In the next section of this chapter, a range of contemporary practices that appear to develop a critical relationship with adventure will be examined. The ontology within those works

77 Enwezor, Op. cit. p. 24 67

acknowledge the collapsing distances described by Enwezor and adopt personal strategies to keep using adventure as a methodology while killing colonialism within it.

3.3: DECOLONISING ADVENTURE

In this third section of Killing Adventure, we are going to examine a series of contemporary art practices that have at their heart a desire to decolonise adventure. While paradoxically using the aesthetic and narratives of adventure, they generate a critical discourse on the motives of adventure, exploration or travelling today, in a global context.

The practices presented in this chapter are organised in three sections: those working with adventure within today’s migration context, and using ‘passport’ stamps as a comment on migration; those rereading colonial history of exploration through new lenses; and those using the material culture of adventure to produce a critical discourse on travelling and exploration today. These three categories mirror the practices of the artworks discussed previously in this chapter: Stamps (Art’venture); Rereading colonial history (Glowry); and material culture, with binoculars in the case of In The Distance – as explored later in this section – and ships in bottles in the works of Shonibare, Tixador, and Poincheval.

This parallel between some of my art practice and other contemporary artists practice allows to position the creative work within the different strategies that we have identified for this research.

3.3a: Stamps

Stamps in passports are collected with pride by travellers today, easily forgetting their privileged situation of even being able to cross borders for leisure. In the first section of this chapter, the use of stamps in Art’Venture was highlighted. In this section, a selection of practices around stamps in relation to migration today in a context of disappearing distance and increasing migration tension will be examined.

Mark Godinho: Forever Immigrant

Fig. 29. Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant, 2012-2014, stamp, ink. 78

Fig. 30. Marco Godinho, Forever Immigrant, 2012-2014, mural, stamp, ink.

78 To see a video of the installation : https://vimeo.com/129084083 69

Forever immigrant is an in situ installation, that spreads a cloud of ink over the wall of the gallery. From a distance, it looks like a dark mist, but as the viewer get closer they see that it is formed by thousands of prints, similar to administrative stamps, with the words ‘Forever immigrant’ written all over the wall.

For many years I have been exploring questions of exile, immigration and geography. The study has been fed by a nomadic existence in between languages, impacted by continuous travel and an accompanying diversity of social and cultural influences, and permeated by the presence of literature, philosophy and poetry. 79

‘Migrants forever’, ‘eternal immigrant’, these phrases invite questions of belonging and territories and of uncertain permanence of the migrant situation, of exile and identity, but also the fluidity of a world in which nomadism, cultural porosity have become a way of life. Godinho’s work itself is nomadic, in that it consists of this single stamp, which he can repeatedly print over different space through the repetition of a strictly minimal gesture.

Barthelemy Toguo: The New World Climax

To see my passports stamped with the words ‘No entry’, ‘immigration officers’, ‘no entry transit’ or ‘expired’, gave me the idea for The New World Climax. This work is the illustration of the difficulties encountered by people who travel, while merchandise and consumers goods traveller easier. 80

79 Marco Godinho, Le Pavillon de l'Exil 03 (Escale à Saint-Louis, Sénégal , Du 28 avril au 3 juillet 2018; Institut Français de Saint-Louis – Galerie du Fleuve, Marie Deparis- Yafil et Mounir Fatmi.) 80 Alexia Fabre, Barthélemy Toguo, Artiste en Transit, Hommes et Migrations, 2006, Accueillir Autrement, 1261, p.170 -176 70

Fig. 31. Barthelemy Toguo, The New World Climax, Installation with wooden stamps, tables, ink prints on paper, 2014

Fig. 32. Barthelemy Toguo, The New World Climax, Installation with wooden stamps, tables, ink prints on paper, 2014 71

The New World Climax is a three-part project by Barthélémy Toguo begun in 2000 that combines sculpture, performance, and installation. The series reflects on the significance of man-made borders and the artist’s own experience as an immigrant in countries like the U.S. and France. In New World Climax, Toguo reinterpreted the stamps found in a passport book as large wooden blocks, which he then used in a series of performances that paid tribute to immigrant workers. Toguo lifted the weighty wood to produce unique prints on paper, highlighting both the difficulty of carrying a non-western passport and the labour-intensive jobs taken up by immigrants. With stamps that read, for example, “Illegal,” “Colonisation Imperialism,” and “Guantanamo Republic,” Toguo exposes the absurdities of such labels while also revealing the hypocrisy of western expansion in the world. New World Climax becomes a critique of monolithic, white imperialism and questions who anyone really is in today’s globalized world.

Wooden busts at first glance, these sculptures are also giant stamps, where the flat bottom of the object is carved and inked. In the installation, the actual prints are also exhibited, revealing the text they carry : ‘Carte de séjour’, ‘Mamadou’, ‘Clandestin’, symbolising the identity sorrow of the migrant, the rejection and cultural miscomprehension. 81

Between those oversized stamps and their actual prints, the decision about the future of the migrant is held back, left unknown, and can only be created in the imagination of the viewer. It is through the printing of those stamps, on an imaginary passport, that the complex path and identity of the migrant will be decided:

We are all in a permanent ‘transit’, no matter where we come from. Migrants are all potentially in exile. To mock the use of those stamps, reinforce the idea that identities are sometimes dictated by rigid administrative decisions. 82

81 French for: Visa granted, Mamadou (African first name derived from Mohammed), Illegal immigrant. 82 Barthélémy Toguo, ‘Entretien réalisé par Arnaud Beigel, in Alexia Fabre, Barthélémy Toguo, artiste en transit’, Hommes & Migrations, n° 1261, mai-juin 2006, p.173), author’s translation. 72

There is an element of cynicism in that attempt to turn the open concept of adventure into a narrow business model. That exploration of adventure as being replaced by tourism, and of experience being a commercial good.

Jean-Didier Urbain is an anthropologist who has studied tourists and tourism extensively.83 He claims that his topic is the tourist and not tourism in itself, and he focuses his research on the imagination of the tourist.

Urbain notes that literature and art tourism does not have a good reputation and is often mocked and portrayed cynically. From Duane Hanson hyper realistic sculptures, to Martin Parr photographs of mass tourism, the example of a positive re-evaluation of the tourist are rare. Similarly, rare are the people who claim themselves as a tourist, usually preferring the more romantic title of 73traveller – if not adventurer. Mass tourism has indeed created social, economic and ecological damage, but tourism also has its virtues: growing with the development of paid leave, it allowed a democratization of leisure, and is an opportunity for contact and exploration. Why, then, does the tourist has such a bad reputation? Urbain notes that the distain for the tourist has an history as long as tourism itself. Flaubert was already mocking the figure of the tourist in his 19th century novels, and that bad reputation could be rooted a class disdain, that regard the appropriation of travel as leisure by the working class as a bastardisation of the elite art of travelling.

Beyond questioning the representations of the tourist today, Urbain also embarks in a survey of the tourist’s representations. What is the tourist dreaming off? What are its drives and motives?

The anthropologist claims that the desire to travel is a learnt cultural trait: it is not an essential drive, but it is a cultural phenomenon, that long integration tend to make us forget that is

83 Jean Didier Urbain, “Le touriste : du sujet symptôme à l’homme qui rêve.” 606 Conference of the Université de Tous les Savoirs. Paris: Université de Tous les Savoirs, 10th of January 2006.

not natural. Leo Lagrange nicknamed youth hostels ‘Travelling school’, pointing out how travelling is something that is learnt. The history of tourism has deep roots: it has developed from the humanist ‘grand tour’ (Montaigne) and the picaresque tradition (Quixote), to a democratisation of travelling with paid leave. Urbain also points out that the industrial revolution in the UK is key to the development of tourism: the extreme urbanisation the UK underwent through in the 19th century pushed for a desire of evasion. That demographic pressure and urban intensification is coupled with the colonial enterprise of the British empire, offering a distorted glimpse into other exotic cultures. In that sense the history of tourism follows an exact parallel to that of adventure.

A romantic reclaim of travelling with the beat generation and the creation the Routard travel guide in 1974, has also evolved into mass tourism today. Those ‘hippie’ romantic narratives are now used by travel agencies, and as much as they are commodified, it has planted seeds for the tourist dreams. Urbain specifically claims that the tourist is put in motion by its representation of travelling. This leads us to ask: what are the models, the imagination and the mediations that entice the tourist to travel? What is the content of this desire?

Urbain uses René Girard’s concept of mediation to understand the tourist’s representations. For Girard, there is not direct relation of desire to an object, but the relation is always mediated by a mediator. In Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque84, he takes the example of Don Quixote. Why is he travelling? To discover Spain? Not at all. He travels through Spain to check if what he read in his books is true. There is a desire of imitation of the Chivalry novels. Spain is not the object of his desire, it is Amadis de Gaulle.

Urbain argues that as tourist we are all Don Quixotes: the climax of the tourist experience is the moment when the experience and the representation finally matches. When the tourist recognises what he read in his tourist guide, there is a release, a satisfaction. On that note, Urbain also points out that it is common for tourists to complain to the editor when what they experienced did not match what was written in the travel guide.

84 René Girard, Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, 1961, Eds Grasset, Paris 74

Urbain sheds an interesting light on the representation of tourism today, and the tourists own representation of themselves as an adventurer. Some art practice that has been examined so far appear to be built on the pessimistic claim that tourism has replaced adventure. But Urbain’s approach argues that tourism - despite its bad reputation - has a parallel history with adventure. Even though a tourist may wish to be recognised as a traveller, the difference between the two are thin.

Despite Urbain’s point of view, it can also be claimed that the mass commodification of tourism has had an impact on the possibilities of adventure. The development of the tourism industry and infrastructure has consequences on the level of risk and unknown that tourists can expect while travelling. Urbain clearly states though that his object of study is the tourist and not tourism as an industry, and notes that the two are too easily confused. Tourism has perhaps replaced adventure, but the tourist still dreams himself as an adventurer, a world explorer, collecting stamps in his passport.

3.3b: Venus Infected

Fig. 33. Lisa Reihana, In Pursuit of Venus (Infected), video, 64 min, 21 meter x 2.5 meter, 2017

In this section we will present the new work on New-Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, which offers a thought-provoking re-writing of colonial history in Australia and the Pacific. As previously alluded to, Reihana’s work parallels the practice of Glowry.

Reihana's panoramic "digital wallpaper" In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] reimagines Cook's pre-colonisation encounters in the Pacific, placing re-enactments by performers and actors of Polynesian, Maori and Aboriginal First Nations descent within a painted Tahitian landscape in which the historically accurate geographical features and architecture, bumps up against the imaginary exotic and fantastical plant life. In various vignettes we see a Kava ceremony, a Hawaiian mourning dance, a "wedding", a welcome to country, two floggings, and episodes of intercultural communication and trade. Historical figures include Cook (played by a man in some scenes and a woman in others), Joseph Banks, Hawaiian Chief Kalani'opu'u, Tahitian navigator, arioi (priest) and artist Tupaia, and Ra'itean adventurer Omai.85

The viewer is positioned as a witness – perhaps a complicit witness – observing the scene scrolling and evolving along the 21 meters long video projection. The sounds design, as the video content, is a syncretic melt-down of traditional indigenous music, natural soundscape and classical European music: setting a fantasy reconstruction of the colonial historical events.

The background landscape in the video is based on a French wallpaper design by Joseph Dufour’s workshop, in 1804–05, Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique. Exoticism was in vogue, and the colonial power that was France had its imagination fueled by western interpretation of the natural and cultural world of the southern seas. Perhaps motivated by curiosity, it was nonetheless a fascination happening in an unbalance power dynamic, and would be now interpreted as cultural appropriation. 86

Les Sauvages draws upon journal accounts of Pacific voyages of exploration but Dufour and his team harvested information from different historical sources and relocated

85 Jefferson, Dee. “Lisa Reihana: a monumental, immersive new artwork reanimates the story of Captain Cook and first contact.” ABC News website. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-31/lisa-reihana-in-pursuit-of-venus- reimagines-australian-history/9376114 86 In Pursuit of Venus (Infected) website. About the work : http://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/about 76

the bodies into a fictional Tahitian landscape, removing these Pacific Islanders from their cultural, historical and political reality and dressing them in Neoclassical attire.87

Reihana’s video work challenges these nineteenth-century exoticized understanding of indigenous people and culture and opens a space to reflect on what is the exotic for the western eye: While Dufour’s work models Enlightenment beliefs and ideas of harmony amongst mankind, Reihana’s reading of the past is darker and more nuanced. The artist foregrounds the complexities of cultural identity and colonisation by including scenes of encounter between Europeans and Polynesian 88

The title itself refers to the fantasised – and eroticised – image of the pacific by 18th century’s France (Venus), as well as including a dark reference to the shock of colonisation. ‘Infected’ could indeed refer to the damage and trauma - physical, mental, cultural… - induce by the violent encounter between Europeans and Pacific islanders.

So far, this chapter has demonstrated that the narratives and cliché of adventure bears colonial value. Through the work of Reihana, as well as Glowry, these colonial clichés and models are constantly being reactivated by mainstream culture. How to escape that? How to create new models? Something specific about this work is that it uses the narrative of colonial adventure and state that it is indeed the backdrop of the cliché of adventure. Acknowledgment and understanding of the mainstream comes before proposing new models.

3.3c: Bottle it up

After presenting a series of works that adopt a range of tactics to kill colonial adventure, this final section examines the practices of Yinka Shonibare, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Pointcheval and

87 Op. cit. 88 Op. cit. 77

how they use the material culture of adventure to decolonise adventure. Their productions were grouped together in this section as they all propose an interesting strategy to defeat colonial adventure, by ‘bottling it up’. What appears to be a process of preservation or conversation of the Golden Age of Adventure, using an iconic element of the material culture of Adventure – ships in bottles – is a critical posture on the nostalgia and exotica of adventure.

These works can be put in parallel to the material-focused work From a Distance, examined earlier in this chapter.

Yinka Shonibare

As part of the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Commissions, begun in London in 2002, Nigerian- British artist Yinka Shonibare MBE created this massive ship in a bottle. At 1:30 of the size of its original model, the replica ship was placed in an oversized bottle. The sails were made from a vibrant batik, symbolic of Dutch wax practices of western Africa. The bottle was placed strategically in relation to the remaining 3 plinths, all of which host symbols of British colonial expansion in the 19th century.89 This work can be seen as a critical example of the mobilisation of colonial memory. Seen as a critically engaged examination of the legacy of colonialism that demands further deconstruction, restitution and re-examination, Ship in a Bottle encapsulates the complexity of historical journeys of discovery and painful conquest.

89 Deborah Cherry, ‘Statues in the square: hauntings at the heart of empire’, Art History, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2006 and Juliff, Toby ‘Livingstone-heritage and the interstitial spectres of Trafalgar Square’ International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2013 78

Fig 24. Yinka Shonibare, Nelson’s ship in a bottle, Fourth Plinth, London, 2010

Moreover, Ship in a Bottle examines a new set of conditions of distance and proximity that are not at first glance identifiable. The origins of the symbolic batik are not, as Shonibare reminds us, emblematic of indigenous practices but rather of colonial ones.

People have come to associate the fabric with Africa, but actually it is Indonesian- influenced fabric produced by the Dutch for sales to the African market. It was made in Hyde, near Manchester, and I buy it in Brixton market. I like the fact that something seen as being African is actually the product of quite complex cultural relationship. 90

When the Dutch colonised Indonesia they borrowed the indigenous tradition of batik, to create new products to sale to the African market. This has created a confusion for the general public

90 Martin Gayford, “Fourth Plinth: Yinka Shonibare interview”, The Telegraph. Published May 19th, 2000. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/7739981/Fourth-Plinth-Yinka-Shonibare-interview.html 79

about the origin of batik. Shonibare research on batiks for this commissioned project informs his art practice and shed a critical light on that specific history of colonialism. By incorporating this research phase in his art practice and unpacking the colonial history of batik, Shonibare draw attentions to the complex socio-cultural history of batik:

Shonibare’s research took him first to the Museum of Mankind in the British Museum and then to Brixton market. He discovered that the exuberant batik that goes by the name of Dutch wax was not, in fact, African; originally, it was Indonesian. Dutch colonialists, hoping to make a profit by selling it, had set out to manufacture the cloth commercially in the Netherlands. When their venture failed, they sold off the surplus to west African markets, where it became, over time, a national costume for millions of Africans: a statement, in the 20th century, of their post-colonial independence.91

Unlike other artworks examined in this section, Shonibare’s is not a performance. This is important because Which makes sense for artists whose practices deny the validity of adventure as an adequate experience for current world.

As pertinent as it is to return to Shonibare’s examination of post-colonial hauntings, what matters is the model of ‘Intense Proximity’ that would be taken up by Enwezor as the specific theme for La Triennale92. The shift from ‘discovery’ to ‘encounter’, from ‘far to near’ and from ‘rare to everyday’ marks out a new set of possibilities, frictions and anxieties that would explore beyond that of the narrative of the 18th & 19th-century colonial project. Ship in a Bottle is a powerful examination of the critical necessity to question both the inheritance of the British colonial project together with the necessity to confront its mythologies in everyday encounters.

91 Cooke Rachel, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/may/16/yinka-shonibare-fourth-plinth-trafalgar. “Yinka Shonibare: I wanted to do a work connected to Trafalgar Square.” The Guardian, Published May 16th 2010. 92 Okwui Enwezor et al, Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain (Paris: Paris triennale, Palais de Tokyo, April 20th - August 26th, 2012. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Intense Proximité, pour une anthropologie du proche et du lointain). Exhibition Catalogue. 80

What are the broader challenges laid out by Enwezor and Shonibare to both construct and deconstruct a set of conditions that all at once appear co-terminous with contemporary life – globalisation, multiculturalism, neocolonialism – together with the possibilities of constructing, reconstructing and reenacting modes of discovery, curiosity and adventure that appear anathema to the everyday?

The sets of geopolitical and neocolonial anxieties highlighted by ‘Intense Proximity’ exist in the recuperative efforts of a range of artists to imagine, recuperate and re-enact narratives that similarly critically examine inherited conditions. These strategies are in no way nostalgic or apologetic for the long 18th and 19th centuries. Nor are they critically revisionist of those projects. Rather in the mobilisation of curiosity, wonder, and discovery, contemporary artists have sought to find new critical criteria to discuss distance, proximity, and encountering.

Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador

Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador were an artist duo who worked together on performance-based work until the late 2000s. They have since parted to pursue separate art careers. Most of their art practice is performance-based, with a strong emphasis on materiality for the restitution of the work. Their performances are highly referential of the imagination of adventure, and for each of their work they used to produce a small sculpture encapsulating the gist of their performance in a glass bottle, reminiscent of the tradition of ships in bottles.93

Horizon -20

What are the artists’ motives? First motive: reliving old-fashioned experiences, that modern life has made absurd or that are now the object of ridiculous reality TV shows (…) destined for mass entertainment and voyeurism. In reappropriating the right to adventure in all its forms, even the most unexpected, Poincheval and Tixador act as authentic artists. They see reality as a place of infinite possibility, as a site for radical experiences. What the

93 Appendix Fig. 10. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, bottle, cardboard, wood, plastic, foam, twine, 2010

motives for the artists [of adventure]? Second motive: to create an aesthetic of the concept of adventure in a critical way. Even if they behave as real adventurers, [artists] do not call on the arguments or the references ordinarily used, such as exoticism, heroism, or seeking to enter into the Guinness Book of Records. (...) Adventure, now, is an overused concept, and the adventurer ‐ unless he is a conqueror of space, which still holds exciting possibilities ‐ at most a comic book’s myth. 94

One of their last projects together was about getting themselves buried 1.50m underground, and embark on a twenty-meter journey for twenty days, digging the soil to move forward their buried capsule.95

When Poincheval and Tixador talk about their practice, they immediately make clear that they wish to step aside from the tradition of Land Art:

To the question of whether we feel close to the artists of Land Art – since our work meets the criteria which generally defines it, that is, being in a natural environment and working with space – we immediately reply: no. (...). Our studio is in nature but what we hope to achieve is simply to put ourselves in adventurous situations. 96

Their performance rehabilitates real-life adventure as an art practice, while changing some of the parameters: the challenge and the exploration of a confronting environment are kept, but the distances are annihilated.97

The absurdity of this challenge is not to be read as a pessimistic statement on the impossibility of adventure today, but rather as a thirst of 're-eventing' and playing with adventure

94 Paul Ardenne, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon moins vingt : précédé de In Utero Terrae / Laurent Tixador (Paris: Isthme Editions, 2006) 95 Appendix Fig. 11. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, 2010. Photograph of the performance. 96 Alain Berland, “Portrait / Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador. Le Club des aventuriers.“ Particules 15, no. 1 (2006): 1-6. 97 Appendix Fig. 12. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, photograph, 2010. 82

in the 21st century. The context has changed, adventure is no longer necessarily about long distance and exoticism, but the desire of new challenges and exploration is still as there.

One can think about the Voyage Around My Room, by late 18th-century writer Xavier De Maistre in which he narrated his 42-day-long journey imprisoned in his bedroom for killing a man in a duel.98 Borrowing his literary style to that of the travel journal, De Maistre fundamentally switched its main characteristic by describing a still journey. The connection with Tixador and Poincheval performance comes to mind, but the duo of contemporary artists managed to turn an almost still journey into a muddy, uncomfortable, and exhausting adventure. The choice of the natural and hostile environment returns to the more conventional characteristic of the proper exploration.

If exploring the underground is rather common, and even a popular sport with spelunking, it is a different matter to attempt to travel underground while moving the soil in front of you to put it behind you. Tixador and Poincheval’s performance turned out to be a failure. The soil was too hard to dig, their food portions were getting low, they had to abandon a little after eleven meters where they were aiming for twenty. Failing is part of the culture and the history of adventure. By embracing their failure as part of their practice, Poincheval and Tixador act as both adventurers and artists. Abraham Poincheval even says that there is a myth of failure that contributes to the culture of adventure:

When you read adventure stories, so many of the adventures are incredible failures. It is part of the whole idea of adventure: it creates a myth of failure. In the polar expeditions, there are so many defeats, deaths. This contributes to the fantasy. In the first Himalayan expedition, for example, the team got lost and only their camera was found. When the photos were developed, they were practically all white, with very little information. Their failure has created a myth. 99

98 De Maistre, Xavier, Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794, re-edition. Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2002). 99 Author’s interview with Abraham Poincheval, Artist’s fieldnote, 2008, edited, unpublished. 83

Bottle 2 – Verdun

Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval – Bottle 2 – Verdun – Journal d’une défaite (journal of a defeat)

Fig. 25. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Journal d’une défaite, 2006, glass bottle, string, pastic, sand, tire, 14 × 50 cm, FRAC Pays-de-Loire, Carquefou.

Journal of a defeat is the project of a cycling tour of France -following a geometrically perfect circle traced on a map – leaving from the FRAC Art centre in Carquefou (FRAC Pays de Loire, France). The installation in the art space resulting from that experience consists of three different artworks. A video, shot in first person, that acts as a journal of the adventure; a bottle with miniature figuring of the two artists with their bikes — reminiscent of the ship in a bottle memento made by bored sailors during long trips ; and a white canvas with the trace of their trip that would remain uncompleted. As the title suggests the two artists did not finish their whole trip, tracing on the canvas just an arc, and not a whole circle. But it specifically failure, defeat, and the unfinished adventure that are active and productive in this strange journey.

On the edge of absurdity and slapstick, the results of Tixador and Poincheval’s experimentations never have an efficient outcome, but rather consist rather of trials and tests of new gestures. Although working with the outdoors, their processes are far away from the Land Art framework, and if they go outside or in the wild it is also because their performances act as generator of work for the exhibition. If they go on an adventure, it is more to position themselves outside of the map, and question our relation with realities and territories in an ultra-mapped world. The souvenir objects that come out of their performances have a humorous edge to them: trapped in their bottle forever, the two figurines representing the artists seem beaten up and exhausted, sitting next to their bikes lying on the sand. We are far away from a glorification of the heroes of adventures, but perhaps closer to an anti-hero culture, sharing failures and mistakes as a narrative strategy.

E.W: Have you ever had major failures in your adventures?

AP: yes, quite few, there is often a moment where things do not go how they were meant to. There is one particular project where it became the whole central idea of the work, we called it ‘journal of a defeat’.100 I was a cycling trip, and it started from an conversation we had with the historian Sylvain Venayre, who wrote the introduction of a book we made, and who told us at the time that there was no such things as return journeys. 101 We since found out that it is not exactly true…

E.W: Ulysses, that’s a return journey…

A.P: Yes, and there is another classic Greek story of an army that goes to help another country, but they lost their war before they get there, so that the journey of a defeat, a failure. There is also Lewis and Clark, two American adventurers. When France sold some

100 Journal d’une défaite, Tour de France en vélo en Nantes à Nantes en suivant un cercle parfait, dans la cadre d’une résidence au FRAC pays de Loire. 101 Laurent Tixador, Jean Max Colard and Sylvain Venayre, L’inconnu des grands horizons (Ed. Michel Baverey, collection Antipode, 2003). 85

American states, all the cartography has been made by the French and it was not accurate. Firstly because it was a large and faraway territory, but also because at the time the interest wasn’t solely on the accuracy of the map, but also on the map as object of fantasy, to project on the world and create a fantasised territory. When America buy those territories from the French, they send Lewis and Clark on a boat along the Mississippi. They went up stream and then down again to map the territory around. So that’s another example of a return journey.

So we were looking for a way to start a journey that was already a return, the geometrical shape that was closest to that idea was the circle, because a circle has a start, but it is instantly a return as soon as you leave. So we drew on the map of France a circle and decided to start a cycling trip along it. But at the time we were working on a lot of different projects: we were leaving on something new as soon as we were getting back from something, and we were exhausted. So when we arrived in Verdun we were wrecked so we decided to stop.

E.W: That is a good place for a defeat!

A.P: Yes is was the perfect spot! There are some tourists shops with postcards, and there was one particular one that said ‘In Verdun, we shall not pass’. 102 And it as exactly that, we shall not pass. We started the ‘Journal of a defeat’ from there.103

Bottle 3 — Total Symbiose

Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador – Total Symbiose 1

102 Author’s Interview with Abraham Poincheval, artist’s fieldnote, 2013, edited, unpublished 103 Appendix Fig. 13. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Verdun, 2010. Photo credit: Aurelien Mole, view from the exhibition at Bois-Saint-Léger.

Fig. 26. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 1, 2001, photograph of the rock painting with charcoal and vegetal pigment.

Fig. 27. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 1, 2001, Glass Bottle, wood, bones, feather, paper.

Total Symbiose was the first collaboration of Poincheval and Tixador on an adventure, in 2001. The idea was to spend 8 days in complete autonomy on the Frioul island natural reserve, located off the coast of Marseille. The ambition was to live in autonomy, as hunter-gatherers, while only possessing theoretical knowledge of such lifestyle. The conclusion is not surprising: it is a real demonstration of their vulnerability as modern men and city dwellers: difficult cohabitation with rats, skin that burns day by day, fruitless hunting (thankfully the mussels and figs where easy enough to collect). Beyond survival, they reinterpret a semblance of cultural and cultic practices: making a penis case and a bone necklace, 21th century version of rock paintings (M & M’s and fast food logos).

They renewed Total Symbiose twice, in different environments, culminating in 2007 with Total Symbiose 3, camping on the top of a sky scrapper in Seoul, Korea.

Fig. 28. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Total Symbiose 3, 2007, photograph of the performance.

All these artists bottling up adventure paradoxically use an iconic element of the material culture of adventure: ships in bottles. Positioning themselves in a tradition of sailors and explorers seeking to encapsulate their journey, they nonetheless offer a strong statement on the need to renew the narratives of adventure in world of disappearing distance, as described by Okwui Enwesor.

Shonibare, Tixador and Poincheval, through their attempts to bottle up adventure offer a renewed perspective on what it means to seek travel and exploration in the 21st century. Together with Togo and Reihana, they constitute a family of artists offering a critical view on the Golden Age of Adventure, and the need to decolonise the trope of adventure today.

3.4: ADVENTURE STRUGGLE TO DIE

3.4a: A critical perspective

This chapter has identified a variety of art practices that demonstrate a particular relationship with the Golden Age of Adventure: a highly critical perspective, that accurately spot the colonial values that lies within the narratives of adventure. However, when Yinka Shonibare or Tixador and Poincheval trap the imagination of adventure in bottles, it gestures towards a paradox in their claim that adventure has died. There is an attempt to preserve something that no longer belongs to this world. Like a stuffed dodo in a natural history museum.

This is symptomatic of a particular relationship with adventure: an acknowledgment that there is something rotten within the colonialist narratives, while the drive to adventure is still here, still making us dream of exploration and heroically overcoming obstacles. As such, no matter how hard artists attempt to kill adventure, the ghosts of adventure – its conventions and its attitude – remain in the work of purportedly critical artists.

In short, despite spotting the colonial values of domination over territories, cultures and people that adventure bears, the contemporary art practices that have been examined so far also demonstrate a will to keep following the form of the Golden Age of Adventure.

What does this paradox mean? As mentioned in the introduction, the drive to adventure exists beyond the boundaries of the Golden Age of Adventure as defined in this dissertation. The imagination of adventure as inherited from the colonial era is just an extreme crystallization of the stories and values of adventure within that particular moment of western history. This crystallisation is used to refer to the concept of adventure as a whole. As discussed in the introduction, it is thus difficult to analyse/explore the definition of adventure without resorting to examples, and the one that come to our mind are often clichés, inherited from that Golden Age of Adventure.

This dissertation will attempt to dissolve this definitional dilemma by differentiated the drive to adventure from the imagination of adventure. The art practices that demonstrate a will to 89

kill the Golden Age of Adventure are fighting with the other drive that is a passion for the curiosity and the exploration that adventure also contains.

Towards a positive adventure model

The narratives of adventure are resisting to be killed because of a confusion between the essential drive into adventure and the imagination surrounding the Golden Age of Adventure. The first one often resorts to the later as a narrative path to express itself, but nonetheless there are ways to express adventure outside of the dominant trope of colonial adventure. We use the imagination of adventure as a way to talk about something larger: curiosity and exploration.

The next chapter of this thesis will examine a different strategy addressing adventure in contemporary art practices. This strategy is one which develops a romantic relationship between adventure and the self: an exploration of the self through alterity and obstacle – an exploration of the self through adventure. Through an analysis of these art practices, the next chapter will discuss to what extent such a strategy disregard the complexities inherent within the imagination of adventure. The political perspective questioning the positive way we regard adventure and spotting out the colonial values intertwine in the narrative of adventure, seems to be obliterated. The key strategy thus adopted by these artists is namely that ‘Adventure Never Died’.

Some art practices attack the imagination of adventure for bearing colonial values, while at the same time displaying a longing fascination for it. Some other artists approach adventure without apparently worrying about the toxicity that the Golden Age of Adventure have spread. They, on the contrary, propose a very positive attitude towards adventure, positioning it as a beautiful drive, still valid for the 21st century.

II: ADVENTURE NEVER DIED

In the previous chapter, this thesis examined the strategy of ‘Killing Adventure’ adopted by several contemporary artists, and how this is situated within a critique of colonialism. In this next chapter we are going to deepen our understanding of the trope of adventure in contemporary art by investigating the second of the three strategies in relationship with adventure: Adventure Never 90

Died. As demonstrated, the attempt to kill adventure met some strong resistance, even amongst the artist-murderer themselves, and this is indicative of the strength of the dream of adventure as a drive. This chapter follows a similar structure to the previous, focusing on works developed as part of the practice component of this PhD Candidature, before discussing the concept of Neo- Romanticism and examining the work of other contemporary artists.

‘Adventure Never Died’ argues that some art practices develop a Neo-Romantic relationship with adventure, somehow embracing or disregarding its problematic dimension and possible inadequacy. Within those contemporary practices there is a claim for continuity, and an approach to adventure as primarily an exploration of the self. This chapter contextualises the field of contemporary art by looking at the work of Jorg Heiser and his understanding of today’s art practices as ‘Neo-Romantic’. In a similar approach to the one chosen for the first chapter of this dissertation, we will start by presenting the creative component of this research. We will invoke the concept of Neo-Romanticism as a means to shed light on the practices of continuity of adventure in the second section of this chapter. Finally, some contemporary practices which fit in this conversation about the continuity of adventure are presented.

4.1: CONTINUITY OF ADVENTURE

In this first section of this chapter, we are going to look at two works created during this PhD, that can be understood as belonging to the strategic posture of a continuity of adventure. Methodologically, this is a contextualisation of the creative body a posteriori. Once the final exhibition was put together, it allowed for a reflective phase, that enabled to map the works and position it within the framework. Victoire-Machine and Traversant, both share similarities in the apparatus: nostalgic viewing boxes, reminiscent of the Victorian Era. As such, they can be read as embarrassing the neo-romantic posture of continuity of adventure.

The works are presented here as a documentation of the creative component: description, presentation of the process and photographic documentation.

4.1a: Victoire Machine

Victoire Machine is a set of two sculptures that go along side with the video Victoire. They were developed after the video work, as a re-reading of it. When the project was shot and then later on edited, the footage appears to be very polished and clean, lacking the disturbing edge that the narrative implies. The video was shot with a professional camera, which did professionalised the postproduction and forced the project into a polished aesthetic, and it felt as another side of the main character Victoire needed to be told. This tension arose early in the process, and a few days after the initial shooting, it was decided to go back to the mountain Sainte-Victoire and shoot stills with a phone camera. The resolution was much lower and the photos thus had a raw feel to them with closed up and saturated colours. This lent them a ‘voyeuristic’ feel, reminiscent of a long tradition in art history, including notably ‘Etant donnée’ by Marcel Duchamp.

For a long time those resulting images were left un-used. A series of experimentation was conducted, including editing them within the video as stills, but this could not capture the voyeur, alternative, secret, aspect of those photographs.

As they were stills they created a tension with the moving images of the video Victoire. They needed to be exhibited as a series of images to give them a narrative dimension, and start a dialogue with the video. Different strategies were tested to display them in a moving image fashion, that was not in the video Victoire itself. An early idea was to make a very short video from the still that would be displayed on a screen outside of the projection space for Victoire. But the nature of the series pulled the project in a direction that conveyed something about those images being a secret narrative, a side story from the main video work.

Fig. 34. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 35. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Those images were meant to be accessed by a peeping hole. As such, a variety of slide viewers were examined as potential candidates for capturing this effect. The most appropriate were Viewmasters. Those slide viewers from the 1970s have the peeping voyeur aspect to them, and the narrative dimension as well, as they display a series of 7 panels that can form a sequential narrative. All the stills were printed– transferring them from their digital form to physical objects - and then photographed as films from the digital print, operating another format transposition. The films were then processed as positive slides, and cut and inserted into Viewmaster reels.

From then on, the photos became physical objects. They are all low-resolution images, thus differentiating themselves from the polished footage of the video. These photos were all taken with a phone camera to offer a counterpoint to the cinematographic quality of the project. The numeric photos were printed and then shot with a film camera, to be finally processed as positive slides. Transferred from a medium to the other, they are like ghosts embodying themselves into a form or another.

Fig. 36. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2017 94

One has to look through the device to see the pictures: they are hidden from the view in the exhibition space and require an effort to be seen.

In each reel, seven photos slides are inserted, creating a very short moving image narrative. One of them shows a series of close up of Victoire’s high heels, as she is climbing a rock. As the viewer pulls the trigger, the short scene animate itself inside the Viewmaster.104 This offers an alternative sequential art perspective in relation to the short film, Victoire.

The Viewmasters were then mounted into wooden boxes, with peeping holes to look through it. The boxes are standing on tripods, and their overall appearance is reminiscent of cameras obscuras and old standing cameras. The two ‘eyes’ of the Viewmaster are poking out of the boxes, looking at the viewer in an inquisitive manner, and standing on three legs in an anthropomorphic way.105.

The two viewing boxes are installed in spatial relation to the projection of Victoire. They stand before it, facing the viewer as he approaches the video. They look at the viewer looking at the video. This creates a playful relationship between the two sculptures and the video, and projects a series of imaginary lines and invites the viewer to come closer and have a peep, while also being somehow inquisitive. If the viewer gives in to the temptation to peer through, they then access the images from the Viewmaster reel and makes a connection with the video playing on a loop behind the sculptures. The apparatus of accessing the images are aligned with the content of the reel themselves, as the photos have a stolen, forbidden, mysterious feel to them, with close-ups cutting the body into pieces and crooked framing. The viewers thus position themselves as voyeurs and then access the video with a different perspective.

104 Appendix Fig. 17. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2017; Appendix Fig. 18. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2016 105 Appendix Fig. 16 Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

The slides shown in the ViewMaster are still connected to the video in the sense that they are also moving images. They are very slow-moving images, which are activated by the viewer through the device: once the side trigger is pulled, an image succeeds another, offering another moving image narrative, which echoes the video.

The slides that come along with the video display another kind of images, which are not found in the video: more intense, saturated close-up photos of Victoire. These visuals allow another story to emerge. In the video the character is strict, and gets wilder as she climbs the mountain. Here in the slides, we discover another side of the character: more sexualised and more colourful. The video goes from black in white in the first half, to colour in the second part. In the photos, the colour palette is exaggerated and artificial.

In the video, the presence of still images is important at the beginning of the narration, and slowly disappears. These stills are found again in form of slides, to reactivate the dreamlike quality of Victoire.

Some of the still images within the video overlap images of the Sainte-Victoire. They are in fact old pictures from the early 20th century. These were found old postcard from the city of Aix-en-Provence archives, captured as blurry digital photos, which give a feel of these images being stolen or quickly snapped.

Again, these stills act as attractive images that mysteriously push Victoire towards the mountain. Maybe they are some old memories, which somehow makes her want to conquest those heights, or just some outdated image with a magical poetic power.

4.1b: Tranversant

We are dreaming of adventure though representation inherited from the colonial era. What is the content of these images, imagination and narratives? What is the aesthetic of adventure? An exotic wallpaper? A curiosity cabinet? A pair of binoculars? colonial cliché.106

Fig. 37. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

106 Emilie Walsh, artist’s fieldnotes, 2016, edited, unpublished 97

The interest in viewing devices (binoculars, spy glasses, telescopes, magic lanterns…) came from investigating this backdrop of adventure, and material culture of adventure. With Traversant, a body of 3D printed viewing devices was created for an exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne.

Fig. 39. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

If the viewing devices designed for Traversant are inspired by a Victorian Era magic lanterns, the final aesthetic is minimal: a white plastic object, shaped like a canon, sitting on a small holder of the same material and colour. Magic Lanterns were an early type of image projector employing pictures painted, printed or produced photographically on transparent plates, usually made of glass. The image was projected through one or more lenses with a light source. Magic Lanterns were invented in the 17th century for entertainment, before being used for education in

the 19th century107. With industrialization and mass production, it was developed in smaller version as toys. From the 1950’s onwards its usage disappeared, replaced by 35 mm photo-slides projector.

Historically speaking, the development of magic lanterns is contemporary to the formation of the Golden Age of Adventure. Their function as entertainment, and the fact that they were making widely available images from narratives popular at the time, meant that they were also a source for the propagation of the image and the imagination of adventure, just like books and prints were. As viewing devices, they also share with spy glasses, binoculars, telescope and microscope, a particular relation with the images: accessible to just one eye at the time, giving access to an image otherwise hidden. We discussed the unique relationship with images that viewing device have in the previous chapter of this dissertation. However, the interest in magic lanterns and slide viewers more specifically came from the fact that they were design for entertainment, while the other devices with lenses serve a more scientific purpose. These items belong to the material culture of the Golden Age of Adventure due to both the history briefly surveyed here, and their apparatus: they participated in the dissemination of the narratives of adventure and can be consider as early version of contemporary form of entertainment, cinema and television108. In the third section of this chapter we will discuss the work of an artist collective around small toy television viewing devices, which takes the exploration of the trope of adventure into its more contemporary version.

107 https://www.magiclanternsociety.org/about-magic-lanterns/ 108 Appendix Fig. 19. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent. Appendix Fig. 20. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent. Appendix Fig. 21. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Fig. 38. Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Victoire-Machine and Traversant were produced at different stage of the research process when the work was moving towards an investigation of the material culture of adventure. In this case the focus was towards binoculars and other viewing devices. But as opposed to In the distance, discussed in the Killing Adventure chapter, the work presented here do not seem at first glance to offer a critic of colonial adventure. Instead, they embrace the romantic inward focus of the exploration of the self that adventure also is. It is specifically because of the nature of viewing device that these objects are suited to explore romantic adventure and the exploration of the self. They require a solitary gaze within them to reveal their hidden narratives: their apparatus itself is emblematic of an inward focus.

This section has discussed the practice of Victoire Machine and Transversant. The next section examines the neoromantic conceptual framework of Jorg Heiser as a means of 100

demonstrating how contemporary art practice aims to reclaim a romantic attitude towards adventure.

4.2: NEO-ROMANTICISM

The conceptual art that emerged in the 1960s, with its claim to autonomy and its strict rules aimed at objectivizability, has a reputation of being intellectual, critical and rational, whereas Romanticism emphasized the subjective, the emotional and the transcendent, and set itself against the utilitarian mind-set of early industrialisation with a new pantheistic understanding of nature. (…) Even today, the critical, emancipatory and political impetus of Conceptual art causes it to be viewed as something that is barely reconcilable with the attribute ‘Romantic’. The Romantic Conceptualism exhibition conceived by Jorg Heiser proposes convincing arguments to the contrary. It shows that conceptual art, from its beginnings to the present day, is also perfectly well able to deal with Romantic subject matter.109

Conceptual art is not to be considered as opposed to romanticism. The dichotomy between the objective, intellectual, systematic, even ‘dry’ quality of conceptual art; and the subjective, emotional aspect of romanticism, is too strict to be true.

Offering a new reading of the history of conceptual art, Jorg Heiser reevaluates the emotions, the irony, the humour, the storytelling and subjective qualities of a large range of art works and artists’ practices too quickly labelled as conceptual.

Sol LeWitt, in his 1967 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', stated: 'It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with Conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. [...] The expectation of an emotional kick, to which one

109 Jorg Heiser, Susan Hiller, Collier Schorr, and Jan Verwoert, Romantic Conceptualism (Eds Kerber Verlag exhibition catalogue BAWAG Fondation Wien, 2008), 216 p. 101

conditioned to Expressionist art is accustomed, [...] would deter the viewer from perceiving this art.' At that time, distinguishing Conceptual art from what had become the cliché of artistic subjectivity, the emotional pathos of Expressionism, may have seemed fundamentally necessary. And yet these are still strange and anything but self-explanatory claims: why should a spectator not be able to find a piece 'mentally interesting' and emotionally rich? Why would an 'emotional kick' inevitably deter from perceiving the Conceptual? Could it not be quite the opposite: that charging a concept with an emotional investment, or subjecting emotions to a Conceptual approach, might focus rather than distract? 110

This understanding of conceptual art allows us to draw a new line through time and see a tradition of conceptually-driven yet playful and emotionally engaging art practices. This tradition can offer an interesting insight in the work of artists using the narratives of adventure as a primary material in their practices.

Once you have your mind set on these co-ordinates, the tension between the Romantic and the Conceptual occurs - intentionally or not - where you wouldn't always expect it. This is very obvious in the case of Robert Smithson: his central notions of erosion and entropy are closely linked to the romantic predilection for decay, ruins and ancient monuments.111

The romantic fascination for ruins is also to be found in the trope of adventure : the artist as archaeologist is a fantasy explored by a number of artists today, amongst which Mark Dion, who frequently works with museum institution to investigate the aura of fascination artefacts from the past have on society112. Works from the practice component of this thesis such as In the

110 Jörg Heiser, “Emotional Rescue”, Frieze Website, published 11 Nov 2002, https://frieze.com/article/emotional- rescue 111 Op cit 112 Sarina Basta, Cristiano Raimondi and Villa Paloma-nouveau Musée National (Monaco), Océanomania: souvenirs des mers mystérieuses, un projet de Mark Dion (Monaco: Villa Paloma-nouveau Musée National (Monaco), April 12th – September 30th, 2011. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Océanomania: souvenirs des mers 102

Distance (see chapter 1) and The first of the last crusade (see chapter 2) share Dion’s romantic fascination of archaeology. An example that Heiser uses to show the complicity between the conceptual and the romantic is the practice of Bas Jan Ader.

Bas Jan Ader's entire, if small, body of work invests the Conceptual with what appears to be its antithesis: romanticism.113

Ader is an emblematic figure to understand the tradition of the narrative of adventure in contemporary art, and his tragic disappearance sadly contributes to the posthumous romanticisation of his life as an artist-adventurer.

In 1975 Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod hoping, among other things, to break the world record for the smallest one-man transatlantic crossing. The trip, modelled after the man versus nature type pilgrimage most often found in boys’ magazines, was aptly entitled In Search of the Miraculous. Equipped with a camera and tape recorder, Ader planned to document his survival at sea as the completion of a three-part project. Months after his departure a Spanish trawler found the wreckage of his boat about 150 miles west of the coast of Ireland. Somewhere between the glimmer of Hemingway and Dylan Thomas, Bas Jan Ader disappeared. I would imagine that Ader, the collector of survival stories, was a big Jack London fan. I wonder if, at the point when his boat overturned, he remembered the boy fished out of the sea and put to work by London’s iconic captain, Wolf Larson. And for a brief moment maybe Bas Jan Ader became the galley slave; the property of gigantic men with yellow eyes and yellow teeth who blocked his way as he passed by with steaming pots of slop. Ader’s boat drops and

mystérieuses, un projet de Mark Dion, in partnership with Musée Océanographique de Monaco). Exhibition Catalogue. 113 Op cit 103

rises in sky-dyed water. There is no body, no note. Carollers enlisted by the artist to sing shanties by the shore wait the long wait of sailor’s wives.114

Ader has strong connection with conceptual art, as his project are cerebral and led by the ideas rather than the form. But the element of storytelling and emotion is undeniable and central to the work. We could argue that his influential figure could easily give him the title of the grandfather of artist-adventurer.

In this section we are going to analyse how Heiser re-reading of conceptual practices - historically and today - can help us understand the work of artists using the narratives of adventure in their practice. Two aspects of romantic conceptualism seem to be particularly useful to shed a light on such practices: romantic storytelling and romantic irony.

4.2a: Romantic storytelling

This section argues that the romantic quality of work belonging to the tradition that Heiser spotted is partly due to the storytelling dimension of such art practices, and the works that we analysed for this research all share that narrative quality.

Jorg Heiser makes a point about the intellectual will to create closed? systems, which appears at first to belong to a conceptual tradition, but which, he claims, is also driven by a romantic impulse:

What is really important to me in contemporary art? In as far as Romanticism – in the sense of the kind of essayist writing favoured by German Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel – is about rejecting the idea of a holistic, ‘objective’ world view, I’d agree, yes, I’m struck by art’s ‘fragmentary exigency’. I dig open

114 James Roberts and Collier Schorr, « Bas Jan Ader », Frieze Magazine, Archive, Published on 06/06/94 https://frieze.com/article/bas-jan-ader 104

fragment rather than closed system (though I can enjoy the cool, cool aura residing in the claim of having created a closed system, whether it’s Donald Judd or, say, Kraftwerk; I would say that the claim, ironically, has a romantic kernel) 115

Closed systems driven by strict rules and protocols may at first glance seem dry and rational, but often led to elaborate - almost decorative in a way - world buildings, such as those observed in the work of Charles Avery’s long term project The Islanders (See the Introduction). Avery’s works have a romantic feel to them, while being driven by a conceptual practice.

One of the methods used by artists to create stories is the creation within the work of a set of strict rules, a systematic protocol. This approach draws directly from the conceptual tradition, while also generating ironic narratives that are affiliated with the romantic trope. When Simon Starling (see chapter 1) set in place a rigorous yet absurd method of dismantling a steam boat and use it as the fuel to propel itself, thus resulting in the destruction of the boat, he uses a conceptual approach which results in the telling of a paradoxically light and fun yet dramatic story. We will discuss more about Starling work in the next section of this chapter, looking closely at practices that bridge the gap between the conceptual and romantic tradition, while using narratives of adventure. But Autoxylopyrocycloboros is particularly interesting to look at though the lens of romanticism : not only does it share with romanticism a fascination for the figure of the artist in confrontation with the splendour and terror of nature (the highlands of Scotland where the work took place are iconic of such trope), but it also portrays the artist as a prone to failure, doubt and self-irony. This leads us to the second point that we believe directly borrows from the romantic tradition: Irony and humour.

115 All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art: An Interview with Jörg Heiser, Art and Research, Vol. 2. No. 1. Summer 2008 ISSN 1752-6388 105

4.2b: Playful Romanticism

slapstick method’ as a ‘struggle between doubtful constancy and constant doubt. 116

This dissertation later explores what it refers to as a “playful relationship” with the trope of adventure. This playfulness is best understood in light of Heiser’s analysis of Romantic conceptualism, particularly the dimension of irony which is the subject of this section.

The humouristically-scepticist admittance of doubt and failure reoccurs throughout history, from Diogenes through Cervantes to Alfred Jarry, but ‘reoccurrence’ is not synonymous with ‘universal’. There are continuities, but the advent of new technologies and forms of organization in Modernity, for example, have certainly changed the way the ‘slapstick method’ has materialized artistically. The proverbial ‘Slapstick’ was an instrument of two pieces of wood clapped together by the Harlequin in the Commedia del’Arte, but it wasn’t until silent film that physical comedy could be chopped up and accelerated technologically, and thus reflect on the chopping up and acceleration of Modern life. So to sum up, there is no contradiction really between asserting a trans- historic reoccurrence of productive modes of humoristic doubt, and those reoccurrences being culturally specific and historically grounded. 117

Heiser interprets humour, including physical comedy, as a method, a strategy implemented by artist to introduce self-doubt within their practice, an emotional distance between themselves and the work, while at the same time integrating an emotional kick – laughter – within the work. In the practices analysed in this research we can see numerous examples of such ironic distance and absurd humour : Starling’s absurd means of transportations, Mir’s fake moon landing, Tixador’s self-claimed ‘first artist to reach the North Pole’, etc… Victoire can also be read through

116 Jörg Heiser, “Emotional Rescue”, Frieze Website, published 11 Nov 2002, https://frieze.com/article/emotional- rescue 117 All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art: An Interview with Jörg Heiser, Art and Research, Vol. 2. No. 1. Summer 2008 ISSN 1752-6388 106

this lens : the character Victoire’s absurd quest in a ridiculous outfit, climbing to a mountain top and turning the romantic trope of the artist confrontation with nature into a comical adventure.

Heiser describes a specific approach of the romantic figure in the work of artist Courbot:

Didier Courbot's series 'Needs' (1999-present) consists of photos of the artist seemingly acting off his own bat, 'fixing' urban problems. We see him watering flowers on a Rome roundabout, mending a rusty railing with gaffer tape on a Prague pavement, or fastening a bird box to a street lamp at a busy Paris crossroads. Instead of staging a Situationist disruption of urban space, Courbot over-affirms the conservative demand for private initiative in response to public needs, and exposes its ideological character in the sweetest way. The artist turns into a tragi-comic, hopelessly romantic figure who confuses the anonymous urban space with his own garden, someone who hasn't yet heard that Modern society doesn't rest on a little bit of goodwill and a helping hand, but on the ever more complex division of labour. 118

The romantic figure described by Heiser in the work of Courbot is reminiscent of the heroic solo adventurer model that populated the narratives of adventure. A sort of naïve belief of the ability to impact the world by exploring it seems to inhabit the spirit of adventure. However narcissistic, there is something moving about it and we argue that it participates in the fascination the adventure seems to have on artists still today.

Slapstick as a sudden jolt in a smooth sequence, an absurd attack of hiccoughs in everyday life and world events, allowing us to catch glimpses of the truth about ourselves and our relations with others. There’s something liberating about this, and something moving. 119

118 Jörg Heiser, “Emotional Rescue”, Frieze Website, published 11 Nov 2002, https://frieze.com/article/emotional- rescue 119 Op. Cit. 107

Coming back to Bas Jan Ader we can also draw a connection with the way he portrays failure and a critical gesture on heroic adventure.

The crossing was many things, but principally a test of Ader’s own loyalty to the myths of machismo. Much of Ader’s work comprises of rituals that are undertaken to question the expectations placed on the male body. The dilemma for Ader is how earnestly one can critique that with which one is still enamoured. His work wavers between a deconstruction and a mimicry of heroic movement. This territory was virgin at the time - here was a man blindly swatting flies, debunking a notion that hadn’t really been contemplated by the (male) art community. As it stands, Ader has become the myth he studied so earnestly, a quixotic figure enmeshed in an aura that comes dangerously close to eclipsing the photographs, drawings, films and documentation he left behind. Bas Jan Ader’s work proposes the artist as Greek tragic hero. While Gordon Matta-Clark cut holes in buildings with a chainsaw, Ader was in pastel California falling, waving and weeping. His work split open, with a ticklishly soft touch, his own illusions of masculinity and the fictions that they promote. While Matta-Clark was heroic, Bas Jan Ader was Hero, the grief-stricken priestess who drowned herself in the Hellespont.120

This lens of Conceptual Romanticism sheds light on the ways in which artists attempt to maintain a continuity of adventure, from the Golden Age to today. These contemporary artists will be the focus of the next section Indeed we could say that these artists seem to be in denial of the problematic dimension carried by the trope of adventure (i.e. its colonial values), but it also demonstrates a helpless romantic stubbornness to find the gold still contain in adventure : exploration of the self, not only as a narcissistic drive, but also through failure, self-doubt and irony.

120 James Roberts and Collier Schorr, « Bas Jan Ader », Frieze Magazine, Archive, Published on 06/06/94 https://frieze.com/article/bas-jan-ader 108

In the next section of this chapter, we are going to analyse a number of contemporary practices that adopt that romantic, playful relationship with adventure, and try and discriminate what is purely a joyful fascination for adventure, and what renews the trope through irony and vulnerability.

4.3: SWIM ALONG

This third section of Adventure Never Died will discuss the work of two key artists which works are essential of this study on the narratives of Adventure in contemporary art practices: Simon Starling and Klara Hobza. They were already used as examples from their practice in this introduction, with Autoxylopyrocycloboros by Starling and Departing America and Hobza, as they were iconic example of practices where we could find the key markers of the Golden Age of Adventure, such as the storytelling dimension and the use of the material culture of adventure. In this section, Swim Along, we are going to analyse another production by Starling, Shedboatshed, and a 10 years long performance by Hobza, Diving Through Europe. We selected these two works as they adhere to the strategy discuss in this chapter in relationship with adventure, that is, a romantic perspective and an attitude indicative that Adventure Never Died. Those artists swim along the narratives of adventure somehow disregarding it problematic history. However, their approach as we will see participate in renewing the trope and bring along the current political framework for adventure to exist within.

4.3a: Simon Starling – Shedboatshed

In the exhibition space stands a wooden shed: a quite high house-structure, mainly made of wood and elements of corrugated iron roofing. A long painted rowing paddle serves a decoration on the façade.This shed, however, is an alteration to the shed that it used to be. The wooden shed was once standing along the Rhine river, not far from Basel, Switzerland. Simon Starting stumble across it, and started a project with it, that led us to this piece being presented at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 2005.

109

Fig. 40. Simon Starling, Shedboatshed (Moble Architecture No. 2), The Modern Institute, 2005. Exhibition view.

Fig. 41. Simon Starling, Shedboatshed (Moble Architecture No. 2), The Modern Institute, 2005. Production stil 110

Simon Starling is fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object into another. He makes objects, installations, and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas about nature, economics, transformation and narratives. Starling describes his work as ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process’, revealing hidden histories and relationships. 121

For this work, the abandoned shed along the Rhine river was transformed into a boat by the artist, that was then used to navigate the river for 8 kilometers, up to the center of Basel, where it was then dismantle and rebuilt into a boat to be presented at the museum. The boat is a copy of a traditional Weidling122, and it was built only with wood from the shed. The remaining parts of the shed where then used to help transport the Weidling boat. The shed happened to have an oar attached to its outside as decoration: it was used to propel the boat along the river. Once arrived at destination, the boat was dismantled, and rebuilt as a shed, exactly as it used to stand a few kilometers away. The shed showed a few scars from its metamorphosis experience.

The introduction examined another work by Starling – Autoxylopryocyloboros – which bears similarities to Shedboatshed. They are both performance-based artwork that feature a nostalgic mean of transportation in the form of a boat made by the artist. And they both have a similar circularity in the process which is reflected in the title of the work. ‘Cyclo’ and ‘ouroboros’123 for the first one; and in the mash-up title Shedboatshed, a self-explanatory title that contains and describe the process: from a shed to a boat and into a shed again.

They bear similarities too with a third work by Starling: Tabernas Desert Run. In 2004, Starling travelled on an electric bicycle he made through the Spanish desert. The bike would only

121 Tate Museum website, unknown author, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize- 2005/turner-prize-2005-artists-simon-starling 122 Weidling is a type of traditional swiss roar boat with a flat bottom, typical of that part of the world. http://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/traditionen/00191/index.html?lang=en 123 An ‘Ouroboros’ is a symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It is a symbol of endless cycle in ancient Greece and Egypt. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ouroboros 111

produce water as waste, and Starling then used it to paint a large watercolor illustration of a cactus. The contrast between the efficiency of the cactus as a plant, adapted to desert climate and ecosystem and the contrived efforts of the artist creates a comical effect124.

The self-contained dimension of all these works by Starting, shed an interesting light the art developed during this thesis. The addition of artificial obstacles in Victoire (the high heels) aid in the achievement of the experience of adventure, those strict processes of keeping the work restricted to the strict minimum materially, and the absurdity of the quest itself, have a resonance with this approach to adventure.

Another work by Simon Starling that features a boat is Project for a rift valley crossing. In this more recent work, the artist built a canoe out of magnesium extracted from 1,900 litres of seawater. The magnesium used to create Starling’s boat was extracted from the politically charged waters of the Dead Sea, which as he explains is also ‘the most concentrated source of magnesium in the world’. After exhibiting the boat in his solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary in 2016, Starling returned it to its source and used it to make the difficult crossing from Israel to Jordan.125

124 Tate Museum website, unknown author, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize- 2005/turner-prize-2005-artists-simon-starling 125 “Recent Acquisitions at the Hayward Gallery.” Arts Council Collection website. http://staging.artscouncilcollection.contagiousdigital.co.uk/news/recent-acquisitions-hayward-gallery 112

Fig. 42. Simon Starling, Project for a Rift Valley Crossing, 2015–16, silver gelatin print. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster, Glasgow.

My work is extremely simple in a way; it's almost an allegory, a little story about making a boat with some salt from the sea, and then using the boat to cross the sea that it came from. A super simple thing that has an almost child-like innocence to it. But then you realise that the greatest source of magnesium chloride in seawater is in the Dead Sea, and you're suddenly confronted with an outlandishly complex political situation within which to realise the work. It's a factor, you know, and an interesting one, too. But I always try and hold on to a sense of the work's autonomy within that situation. It's driven by its own logic, in spite of retaining the ability to talk to its context, and the tension between these factors drives the decisions behind how I end up showing the work 126

There is another dimension to Startling work that goes beyond the romantic approach to adventure: it is charmingly slap-stick and yet a profoundly ecological voyage. All of his works have a frugality to them: everything is kept yet transformed in a cyclical manner. As much as

126 Alex Quicho, “Simon Starling in conversation”, Ocula conversation, Ocula Magazine, April 2017 https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/simon-starling/ 113

Starting practice seems to disregard the political implication of reusing the classic narratives of adventure, there is a clear difference between the journey he embarks on today, and colonial exploration. Starling’s adventures navigate the contemporary world and its idiosyncrasies and they often offer an ecological statement that counterbalance the romantic perspective on the narrative of adventure.

4.3b: Klara Hobza - Diving Through Europe

I start in the North Sea, though the Rhine river, up to the intersection with the Maine river, in Germany. So, I will dove to there, and then to the Danube Chanel, and to the Danube all the way to the Black sea. The idea came up, as an image in my head, to draw a line through Europe. My approach as an artiste, is that I have a kind of mission, so I have to do this very difficult task, and I do it outside, and I will need the help of many different people. It is like opening your door, going outside, and seeing the world through this perspective, from this endeavours. And confronting the outside world and people with this task, with this perspective, so to create a shift of how you look at the world. You have this image in your head, that on one hand is link to this real task, but in the meantime - and that is interesting for art - beyond the proposal, it opens up imagination in our heads. Of course, in your own head, but also in the head of everybody which gets involved. And that is something you can never capture in material, in a drawing, or videos, or anything else material. It is somethings that goes beyond the material. And that is why it is important that I really do it. Because if I was an artist which will do it only as a project - or as a fake, which I could easily do - I could easily narrated the sorry and fake it, but I believe it is key for the art itself that I really do it, that people look at the video, but at the same time they know for sure that you are really undertaking the project, it give it another emotional level. One of the other reasons to really do it, is that when I confront myself with the reality of the task, so many funny, or absurd, or deep, or surprising situations happened. So, the reality brings another aspect, and surprising myself with things that I could have never come up with!127

127 Author’s interview with the artist, 2012, edited, artist’s fieldnote, unpublished 114

Klara Hobza is Czech artist living in Berlin who is undertaking a 20 to 30 years-long project that consists of successive dives throughout the waters of Europe. Her long-term project, Diving Through Europe, started in 2010 upon her return to Europe after spending eight years living in New York City, and after a first work celebrating her arrival in Hamburg, Departing America, discuss in this introduction. Taking a train journey from Berlin to Prague, the artist describes her experience comparing European and North American landscapes.128

How rivers look in Europe is so different than those in the American continent. Here, most of the rivers are channelled, squeezed in. In America, they are undisciplined, branching all over and into swamps. Being back in Europe, I was looking for a project and thought, 'There’s something to those rivers. Maybe I should learn how to scuba dive, check out what’s down there, and somehow find my way back into Europe as an adult.129

Hobza planned a scuba-diving journey that would take her from one end of Europe to the other: it starts in the Rhine River up to the Main, from which she then enters the Main-Danube Canal, continues into the Danube, ending her year-long dive through Europe in the Black Sea.130

The extremely ambitious – and dangerous – nature of this long term performance project has a clear adventurous aspect to it : risk taking, exploration, pioneer culture, and of course the capacity to trigger our imagination and make us dream. The artist herself claims the last part as key to her project: opening up a realm of imagination in the viewers’ head. Her perseverance into carrying this project long term also stands as a resistance towards the culture of the fake. She claims that to actually confront herself with the reality of this endeavour brings another dimension in the reception of her work. Knowing that this is really taking place, creates an aura of authenticity that a fake story would have lacked.131

128 Emily McDermott, “An Artist Is Scuba Diving Across Europe”, Garage, Published February 2018, https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7nzn/artist-klara-hobza-is-scuba-diving-across-eurpoe 129 Op. cit. 130 Op. cit. 131 Appendix Fig 15. Klara Hobza, Diving through Europe, photograph, 2008 115

Another important point Hobza makes, is about the differences between carrying this project as an artist or as an entrepreneur:

In term of the diving project, I know that there is an endless chain of obstacles, and I think to make art with what happens when you try to get over the obstacle, you create more interesting thing. Because I could do this like my diving instructor, technically, like a record : I could get together a team of people, invest money, find sponsors, and it could be done by three years. And it will have this efficiency, like « problem solved ! ». Very male, and efficient, solving our problem as quickly as possible. But it will be boring, right ? So, as an artist, I have this freedom, and certain privileges as an artist, that people in other field don't have : for example an engineer or an architect have to be very efficient, because they are so bound to the financial aspect, or they have responsibilities, so that other people won't die for example. So they have to go from A to B very fast, and they have solve their problems depending on economical or time-limit factor. But as an artist I'm free from that, or much more free from that. So I can really approach the obstacles in an artistic way, and solve them in an artistic way rather than in an engineering way. 132

Going to a point A to a point B, but not in the most efficient way, but in a way that makes the best story and triggers our imagination. The artist contribution to the narratives of adventure are not about breaking records or establishing authority or domination over territories. But rather explore a world that has already been mapped, and offering new perspectives on it.

The realm of adventure is not dead for Klara Hobza. It is not even a question in her art practice. But despite ignoring the problematic trope of the narrative of adventure – as opposed to practices discuss in the previous chapter – Hobza practice stands as an act of resistance towards the culture of efficiency and the abundance of ‘fakes’ in today’s narratives.

132 Author’s interview with the artist, 2012, edited, artist’s fieldnote, unpublished 116

Fig. 43. Klara Hobza, Diving through Europe, photograph, 2008.

The work of Hobza and Starling demonstrate the romantic attitude towards adventure which attempts to render the colonial legacy of adventure invisible. There is a reclaim of the narratives of adventure that cast a new comment on exploration and risk taking today, in a global context of Anthropocene post-capitalism. The political scenarios in which we live - middle eastern conflict, ecological disaster, discourse on efficiency – are approached as a way to reclaim adventure that has been confiscated by entrepreneurs and as a marketed concept for advertisement and tourism.

Adventure Never Died, they are saying, deciding to ignore the fact that adventure bears all these colonial values, and pointing out that adventure does exist outside of these narratives. These artists go on adventures and thus start conversations on issues for the 21st century, such as how and why travel today. Their critical or ironic stand on mass commodification of adventure leads us to ask how is tourism damaging and how to explore sustainably. Pointing out the lack of new figures of adventure today, they ask how to creates new role models for adventure outside of the white male cliché. How to reclaim values of adventure like risk taking, being bold and daring, outside of capitalism? How to reclaim adventure outside of its tame version marketed to sell us product that have nothing to do with adventure? How to re-enchant the world and let go of a cynical 117

perspective of adventure stating that the world is all mapped anyway? How to actively position oneself in the tangible world offering a counter model to ‘fakes’ and virtuality? How adventure can be a reclaim of empowering our bodies?

Throughout this chapter we have presented and discussed a range of creative strategies that offer another perspective on adventure today, under an appearance of continuity of the narratives of adventure. This chapter has examined the second of the three strategies in relation to adventure: Adventure Never Died, providing a better understanding of where those strategies fit in the overall mapping of adventure in contemporary art practices. The next chapter will move forward to discuss the last of the three positions in relationship to adventure today, moving into playfulness.

4.4: MOVING INTO PLAYFULNESS

4.4a: Adventure continuity

In this chapter we have discussed a range of contemporary art practices that adopt a position of continuity in relation to the history of adventure. Starling and Hobza navigate the water of adventure with a joyful attitude, crafting their way through their explorations and offering new narratives for adventure today.

At first glance, these art practices seem to disregard the problematic dimension and possible inadequacy of the trope of adventure today. One possible interpretation to this attitude, is that adventure is sought as an exploration of the self. Just like Aleksandra Mir embarks in a fictional journey to be the first woman on the moon, there is a claim to try for oneself the adventure of others that are mediated thought narratives but not bodily experienced by most.133 The art practices that we have been looking at do not embrace the colonial values of domination of the Golden Age of Adventure, but rather explore the romantic drive and endless curiosity that adventure and exploration carries.

133 See introduction 118

However, after a more careful examination, we have established that the joyful position of these artist-adventurers is not a denial or a misunderstanding of what the cliché of adventure carries. But it is rather a provocative way to reclaim adventure as a disruptive position. The values of risk-taking and daring attitude, the possibility to step outside of routine and carve a new path for oneself, can all be assembled under the umbrella of adventure. But they seem to have been confiscated by the late capitalism as purely belonging to the realm of the market, entrepreneurial spirit and neo-colonialism. Reclaiming those values inside adventure, with an apparent naïve posture, is actually a strong political statement on opening adventure as possibility outside of entrepreneurship and capitalism.

4.4b: Make Believe

So behind an apparent naivety and childlike attitude toward adventure, those artists are actually highly aware of the implication of using the trope of adventure in a performative art practice today. But they actively decide not to refer to the narrative of adventure from the colonial area, and not to make a comment on it. Rather the strength of their posture is in ignoring that story and just writing their own as an alternative. But what about those who refer to the colonial narratives of adventure, but in a playful way?

In the next chapter we will have a look at this other strategy towards adventure : a much more playful relationship with its narratives. There is an acknowledgement that the Golden Age of Adventure though colonialism is over, but there is a desire to play, recycle and reenact the material of adventure, and the layers of imagination it creates.The stories of adventure are thus the primary material of the artist as a playful adventurer. The world has been mapped, the stories have been told: but the scenarios of adventure are used as a drive into action.

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III: ADVENTURE IS DEAD – LONG LIVE ADVENTURE

In this last major chapter, we will investigate the final set of strategies identified in the introduction: the claim that adventure as we have known it during the colonial era is indeed obsolete, but it is a claim to nonetheless celebrates the narrative and the playfulness of adventure.

Like in the other chapters of this dissertation we will position a sample of the creative body of work produced during this PhD into this family. Secondly, we will bring in Nicolas Bourriaud’s take on postproduction creative methodologies to better understand the practice of the artist- adventurer. Finally we will bring together a selection of practices by contemporary artists that fit into this paradoxical approach: Adventure is Dead – Long Live Adventure.

5.1: REWRITING ADVENTURE

The first section of this chapter discuss three works produced during this practice-led research : the pair of video-viewing boxes, Scope, the binocular installation, The First of the Last Crusade; and the slide viewing-devices installation, Found. The three installations all use existing narratives of adventure and post-produce them to offer a renewed perspective of adventure. We will present and discuss these three works in relation to the strategy analysed in this chapter, as a playful approach to the narrative of the Golden Age of Adventure.

5.1a: Scope

Two sculptures, consisting of viewing boxes with two peeping holes, standing on tripods, are installed in window boxes in the gallery. The viewing boxes are mostly black but are assembled with colourful plastic pieces that give them a toy-like, playful quality. The sculptures stand in front of a window on which they lean, the peeping holes facing the glass, allowing the viewer on the other side to see through.

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Fig. 44. Emilie Walsh, Scope, two video sculptures, Arcade Gallery, 2018. Exhibition view.

Fig. 45. Emilie Walsh, Scope, video box (3D prints, metal, foamboard, mirror), one-minute stop motion video played on a loop on a tablet inside the viewing box, July 2018. Exhibition view at the VCA Art Space. 121

The two holes in the box are made in of red plastic piece that resembles an eye mask, making the sculptures look like they are watching you, glued at the window, looking outside. The viewer is driven, in return, to glue his own face to the window on the other side and look into the eyes of the box-head to access its internals.

Scope 1: Rewriting classic adventure narratives: Moby Dick134

The first box is ‘L’ shaped and functions as a periscope. Square in one section, it bends up, and the video is played on a tablet mounted in the upper part of the box. The video is seen through a mirror that is located on an angle at the bottom of the device. The periscope apparatus is a playful trick referencing the content of the video, which we can think as being seen through a periscope in a voyeuristic way which is reminiscent of works that have been discussed in previous chapters. 135

In this periscope-shaped viewing box, a short one-minute stop-motion animation is played in a loop. The stop motion is made of paper and lino-printed figures, in black and white and grey scale. The video shows a short and free rendition of the classic masterpiece ‘Moby Dick’. The animation style makes it very childish and humorous. Captain Ahab’s little ship eventually gets knocked down by the white whale, and he gets eaten by various fish as he sinks. The whale then eats the fishes – and thus captain Ahab – looping the video back to its beginning.

Scope 2: Rewriting classic adventure narratives : lost island136

The second sculpture shares some similarities with the first one, and they are both read as a pair: same tripod, same red eye mask shape for the peeping holes, same materials and colours. But the shape of the second is made of three telescopic parts, inserted into one another, the bigger part being the one which is looked through. Although it does not necessarily resemble a looking glass;

134 To see the one minute video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4okjkm 135 Appendix Fig. 26 Emilie Walsh, Scope, Arcade, 2017. View of the exhibition Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review. 136 To see the one minute video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5tegef 122

the structure of the box is based on a telescopic construction and is evocative of it. Altogether, the tripod and the viewing box have a vintage feel to them, reminiscent of old camera obscura, while also looking a lot like toys due to the bright colours137.

The video that is shown in this device is played on a tablet computer mounted at the back of the box. It plays on a loop another one minute long stop animation video made in a similar style of paper puppets and lino printed figures, but this one is in colourful tones. The video shows a character alone on a tiny desert island, and follows him in its exploration of it, as things he needs magically appear. After meeting a new crab friend and finding water and food, he finds a small boat. The video fades to black as we expect the characters to escape the island on the boat, but instead we find them enjoying a leisure life on the island which has grown in size. The man is in a hammock, sipping from a coconut while his new crab buddy plays the xylophone. The narrative is playing with the desert island trope, while ironically stopping any kind of adventure or exploration it depicts the characters settling in the small island where everything they need is provided.

Fig. 46. Emilie Walsh, Scope, detail, video, 3D prints, metal, foam board, 2017

137 Appendix Fig. 27. Emilie Walsh, Scope, video, 3D prints, metal, foam board, 2017. Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review. 123

5.1b: The First of The Last Crusade

With The First Of The Last Crusade a toy-like pair of 3D printed binoculars was designed, and photos slide of still images from ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ movie inserted. The photos were shot in Petra, Jordan. The binoculars are part of a spatial installation : they are pointing at large photographs of close-ups of the rock in contemporary Petra. Looking through these binoculars, a blurry, disruptive superposition of the fictional space and the mineral landscape is to be seen. This work is thought as being the viewer’s ‘first crusade’. Expanding on positions that we have discussed in this introduction, in particular Sloterdijk vision of the world as soon to be fully mapped and explored, this installation The first of the last crusade, points out that even if explored and experienced previously by others, the world is to be experienced anew by each individual. This is your first crusade, rewriting a modern classic adventure narrative, through the lens of a nostalgic childhood favourite adventure movie.

Fig. 47. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade (detail), 3D prints, photo-slides, digital photograph, 2016

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An obvious peculiarity of a pair of binoculars is that you have to look through them to access the image. The viewer is the only one to see the image and he does not see anything else. It created an intimate relation to what is seen: there is an exclusive relation between the viewer and the image. Furthermore, the viewer is, in a way, protected from being seen: the device s/he is using hides their face, or, at least, they have the feeling that they are hidden. This also allows a freer reception of what is seen, similar to a person crying in a cinema in front of a film, feeling protected by the darkness. The fact that what is seen is also mysterious to others, can enhance the quality of the experience, its uniqueness: it can be envied by others. It evokes the impatience of kids - or adults, with a pair of binoculars, impatience to peer through and get access to what is hidden.

Fig. 48. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade, 3D prints, photo-slides, digital photograph, 2016. Installation view at the George Paton Gallery.

But the main characteristic of a pair of binoculars is that it allows seeing what is invisible because of the distance. It has an almost magic quality, as it reveals what the human eye is too weak to see. With this gadget, the viewer becomes a superhero, a lynx or a bird of prey with extraordinary vision. This is connecting again adventure with the relation of domination with the landscape, territory. With an optical device, a technological tool, which is not that far from a gun

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sight, one can take possession of larger territory, through accessing it visually, expanding our knowledge and understanding of it.

Incorporating binoculars in the installation arose early in the art-practice: they are the adventurer’s ‘must-have’. They are strongly associated with the history of exploration, the Golden Age of Adventure. Their cliché nature in relation to adventure was the first attraction during the process, but, binoculars also have a particular relation to image and to reality. They abolish distance while transposing from space to flatness, from reality to a representation. This specificity makes the binocular a particular actual: for a romantic, out of date and nostalgic object, it turns out to raise very contemporary issues on distance and proximity, virtuality and reality.

Fig. 49. Emilie Walsh, The first of the last crusade (detail), 3D printed binoculars, 2015.

Okwui Enwesor’s concept of ‘Intense Proximity’ that was discussed in the Killing Adventure chapter of this dissertation takes a new meaning when looked through binoculars. This

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simple optical device has the capacity to give a concrete image of abolishing distance in our contemporary experience.

5.1c: Found

Lost

Thousands of photo slides lying in the corner of a room. Small invisible photos framed in thick white frames made of cardboard or plastic. All piled up together, not given access to anything.

Fig. 50. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. Install view at VCA Art Space, photo credit: Recreate.

Photo slides began to be collected early in the PhD, attracted by the obsolete form and technique reminiscent of slide show nights, or lectures in a dusty auditorium. A lot of focus has

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been given in recent years to the use of archives and documents in contemporary art. 138 Photo slides have been studied in that respect, but most of the interest in today’s art practices have focused on the projected image, rather than on the slide as an object.139

Photo slides have strong material and technical characteristics: transparency, smallness, plastic, cardboard and celluloid material, manipulable, transportable, and fragile. They are also characterised by the difficulty to see the image without light, their relation to the negative film and negative image, as well as more generally their relation with the making of photographic images and the fact that they are reproducible. Finally they have a relation to projection, to light, the ability to change through projection, and a relation to tools that reveal their images (projector, light table, slide viewer).

Outside of the material characteristic, they also have a social and historical connotation: old-fashioned, obsolete, connected to the development of photography as a hobby, but also to the conservation of images and to collection, and the diffusion of images (relation to the intimate and familial ritual of projection, relation to public presentation of images, transmission and education).

138 Okwui Enwesor et al, Archive Fever, the use of document in contemporary art (International Centre for Photography eds. New York: International Centre for Photography, 2008. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Archive Fever, the use of document in contemporary art) Exhibition Catalogue. Anne Benichou, Ouvrir le document (Paris: Eds Les presses du réel, 2010) 139 Jean Michel Ribettes, Le diaphane et l’obscur: Une histoire de la diapositive dans l'art (Paris: Maison européenne de la photographie, 2002. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Une histoire de la diapositive dans l'art contemporain). Exhibition Catalogue. Alexander Darsie, Charles Harrison and Robert Storr, Slide Show : Projected Images in Contemporary Art (Baltimore: Penn State University Press and Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Slide Show: Projected Images in Contemporary Art.) Exhibition Catalogue. .

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Found

Fig. 51. Emilie Walsh, Found (detail), 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. Install view at VCA Art Space, photo credit: Recreate.

Twelve white plastic toy cameras, aligned on a luminous shelf, at eye height. Each little camera is a slide viewer, with a pinkish photo slide inside, the image being revealed by the light shining thought it from the rear. All the slide viewers are the same generic looking toy camera, 3D printed in twelve exact same versions.140

The slides were all selected from the large random collection using a colour criteria: they have all deteriorated due to exposure to light, and are now all of a bright pink hue. The content of the images though appears to be random and the slides do not seem to have a connection between them. But their colour similarity, the fact that they have been selected from a pile a large collection

140 Appendix Fig. 28. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. 129

of random slides, and their display in this installation, push the viewer to put them together in a somehow coherent narrative.141

In this introduction we mentioned Jankelevich’s reading of the notion of adventure, and in particular its relation with time. In Adventure, boredom, seriousness, Jankelevich points out that adventure intensifies the feeling of the present time but also creates a tension towards the future, enticing anticipation though risk and unknown. As the investigation into the imagination of adventure has progressed, we have also established that adventure has a strong link with the past: the stories behind us enhance the experience of adventure, through the feeling of recognising an existing narrative.

This complex relationship adventure has with a timeline is reflected in the way stories of adventures are told. Fragmentated narratives have a teasing effect and leaves the viewer/reader wanting more. Ellipsis as a narrative device is used in adventure stories to create that intensity that is connected with adventure.

Through looking at the examples from my own practice, we can identify a specific set of strategies of how the narratives of adventure are used in visual art practices. To understand this methodology of rewriting existing stories and material from the Golden Age of Adventure the next section discusses the notion of Postproduction, as theorised by Nicolas Bourriaud in his eponym essay.

5.2: POST-ADVENTURE: NICOLAS BOURRIAUD

This section of Adventure is Dead – Long Live Adventure will analyse Bourriaud’s essay ‘Postproduction’, and use it as a framework to understand the set of strategies discussed in this

141 Appendix Fig. 29. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

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chapter. Bourriaud’s conceptualisation of postproduction methodology used by artists can shed an insightful light on the approach of the artists recycling the narratives of adventure.

Indeed, another clear posture towards adventure that we could observe though this research is a much more playful relationship with the narratives of adventure. There is an acknowledgement that the ‘Golden Age of Adventure’, though colonialism impact, is over, but there is a desire to play, recycle and re-enact the material of adventure, and the layers of imagination it creates. The stories of adventure are thus the primary material of the artist as a playful adventurer. Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2001’s Postproduction essay can shed an interesting light on those practices. In this essay, Bourriaud starts his analysis by explaining that the prefix « post- » does not demonstrate a will to go further, historically or methodologically, but describes a zone of activity, a posture. It is not about positioning the research ‘after’, but in a concomitant parallel. It is also not about:

Lamenting the fact that everything has already been done, but (about) inventing protocols of use for all existing modes of representation and all formal structures. It is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. 142

Regarding adventure – or post-adventure –it is thus not out of date, but it has to be conceived differently: adventure is not dead with modernity, merely it functions differently. Bourriaud focuses on uses, function and modality: it is about how to put a heritage into action. Bourriaud argues that the artist in postproduction is a semionaut: one who navigates through the semiotics, to produce a new path within the signs. The narratives and the scenarios of adventure are thus materials to be post-produced, manipulated, recycled.

142 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (New York: Lukas & Strenberg, 2001), p.18 131

In Postproduction Bourriaud demonstrates how many artists use postproduction methods and techniques, and reprocess the work of other artists, quoting, transforming and playing with them. Artists no longer use colour or form as material, but rather already produced images bearing cultural meaning. What if it were the same for the narratives of adventure?

As we have seen, Bourriaud argues that the artist in postproduction is a semionaut. He produces a new path within the signs, and this path could be seen as the adventure and the art itself: ‘Naut’, Greek for ‘navigation’, which positions this practice within the imagination of adventure. Bourriaud uses the analogy of the DJ’s practice, which is key to his argument:

To listen to records becomes work in itself, which diminishes the dividing line between reception and practice, producing new cartographies of knowledge. 143

There is a practice and a craft of the viewer and the listener: being an audience may be the art itself. In a context of mass culture and consumption of culture, establishing an active way of viewing art is what makes the difference. It implies a lucidity of the production context, but it may also be another entry to link postproduction with adventure: creating new paths within the stories of adventure, adopting a playful attitude towards the exciting narratives of adventure. These are all new ways of absorbing and rewriting our culture, which can be understood as an art practice according to Bourriaud.

Bourriaud uses a Marxist framework to rethink the recent history of Art. Artists, from Duchamp onwards, belong to the secondary sector: they do not create ex-nihilo, but from an already produced form, that is Capital. Using this framework to understand the artist working with material of adventure today, the first question that comes to mind is what would be the Capital of adventure. The Capital of adventure can be described as a heritage of adventure, coming from past

143 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (New York: Lukas & Strenberg, 2001), p.18 132

generations, a repertoire of stories of adventure. Images, imagination, memories of adventure, that can become, to a certain extent, a cliché of adventure.

Bourriaud describes how the first step of postproduction is the appropriation. It is not about making an object but choosing from the existing objects and using or modifying them with a specific intent:

If a viewer says, ‘the film I saw was bad’, I say, ‘It’s your fault, what did you do so that the dialogue would be good. 144

Bourriaud emphasises Art both as a dialogue with the culture and as a heritage. This position continues to create a dilution of the viewer’s/artist’s audience/actor categories.

Bourriaud borrows the notion of ‘Derive’, which is a key notion in Debord’s theories.145 Bourriaud states that there is a situationist art, but also situationist uses of the art. Furthermore, he notes that today’s practices do not have the critical and dimensions of the situationist, but are rather a neutral position of appropriation.

Now what is at stake is to positivise the remake, to articulate uses, to place forms in relation to each other, rather than to embark on the heroic question for the forbidden and the sublime that characterised modernism. 146

How can this idea of ‘uses’ be understood? This tends to blur the line between a curational practice and an art practice, or even an Art collector practice. Regarding this, the work of artists using the curiosity cabinet can shed an interesting light on this matter: from Ian Fabre to Mark Dion, how do these artists put the Art into the collection?

144 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (New York: Lukas & Strenberg, 2001), p.19 145 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” Les Lèvres Nues 9, no. 1 (November 1956). 146 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (New York: Lukas & Strenberg, 2001), p.42 133

Bourriaud does not hesitate to compare certain contemporary art practices to shopping and display, perhaps, we argue, forgetting to draw a line between creation and consumption. In his chapter ‘When Screenplays Become Form’, Bourriaud perhaps offers the most useful conceptual tool for this research, as it is centred on narrative postproduction. Bourriaud focuses here on what seems to be the most interesting form of postproduction: the rewriting of narrative. The difference with the other type of formal postproduction is that it is an active and a critical rewriting. The scenario artists:

re-edit historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose them into alternative scenarios. Human society is structured by narratives, immaterial scenarios, which are more or less claimed as such and are translated by lifestyles, relationships to work or leisure, institutions, and ideologies. (…) We live within these narratives. British artist Liam Gillick says, regarding this, ‘we are all caught within the scenario play of late capitalism. 147

Bourriaud suggests the idea that the forms surrounding us are material symptoms of those screenplays: they manifest those narratives, which eventually manipulate us as we use those forms. Thus, changing the forms is, for the artist, a way of rewriting the narrative. This adds a critical and political dimension to the practices of postproduction.

Regarding the narratives of adventure - its assumed death or its surviving forms - remixing adventure stories and paradigm can be an active way of protest against its disappearance or recuperation. If today’s adventure is only found in reality TV shows or in tourism, transforming those models can be a resistance to ‘the screenplay of a dying adventure’ we are in.

147 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (New York: Lukas & Strenberg, 2001), p.45 134

In a number of creative works produced for this research, we can observe an archaeological dig into the archive of adventure to re-mix them into new narratives. This perspective may sound limiting, but it can be understood as offering a great freedom: the possibility to be playful with the narratives of adventure, and more importantly the possibility to use the stories of adventure as mean of transforming the cultural screenplays we live in.

In the next section of this chapter, we will examine a selection of work from contemporary artists that we believe can be understood as using this postproduction strategy.

5.3: RECYCLING ADVENTURE

In this last section of this chapter, we will examine a range of contemporary art practices that this research has classified as positioning themselves in a playful relationship with the narratives of adventure. By recycling the classic trope of adventure, travel and exploration, those artists reactivate the imagination of adventure, with different degrees of scepticism and irony. We will present a couple of typical examples of this strategy and connect those practices with the idea of Postproduction, as developed by Nicolas Bourriaud.

5.3a: Terminal Velocity

Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud worked together developing a project responding to a call from a local association based in Helsinki which was looking for proposals to occupy the south harbor of the city, long abandoned. Their project called ‘Terminal Velocity’, was imagining the possibility of moving terminal 5 of JFK airport in New-York, designed by the architect Eero Saarinen in 1962, and to ship it in a boat to be located on the South Harbor. The terminal would be shipped in a cargo boat and installed in the Finnish capital to serve as an art centre. The project, not achievable, delirious and provoking, was of course not successful but was praised for its audaciousness.

In order to give an account of their initiative, the collective created an installation comprised of hundreds of mini slide viewers, shaped as small television sets, approximatively 4 135

cm by 4 cm. Inside those viewing boxes, fictitious images of the project are to be seen. Hundreds of miniature TVs are aligned on small shelves on one wall of the exhibition space. A few of the slide viewers are accessible to the user to manipulate and play with, which allows a change from one image to the other with a small switch148

Inside, the viewer accesses a photo-collage made of old postcards, evocative of the airline culture of the 1960’s. The collage is bold and does not try to hide their fictive nature. One can see a female flight attendant smiling in front of Helsinki harbor, while another shows the airport terminal precariously shipped on a cargo boat. The cliché of the 60s airport and airline American culture is still vivid in our minds, even if the reality of air transportation is very different nowadays.149

148 Appendix Fig. 22. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. Installation view. 149 Appendix Fig. 23. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. Images contained within the viewing devices.

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Fig. 52. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity (detail), 2015.

It is by manipulating those images that the artist trio is sharing an account of its utopic project. To enhance the narrative, a text description of the project is printed and framed in the installation, sitting by the slide viewers wall. A succession of absurd anecdotes is shared about the supposed development of the project, including a fake fundraiser event starring Jeff Koons and Lady Gaga. A logo for the project was also imagined, resembling an immigration stamp.

The slide viewers are evocative of tourist souvenir, similar to the small photo slide viewer shaped as a small camera that were popular in the 1990s. Those products of mass consumptions are a testimony of the massification of tourism in the 20th century and are here used by the artists for its formal quality while opening a critical and ironic conversation of tourism and travelling in the 21st century. There is a playful aspect in the manipulation of the object and the access to the images through a switch. The contrast between the large-scale installation over an entire wall with the exclusivity of the small images being seen by one person at the time, invest the viewer with

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curiosity, as well as nostalgia. While the repetition of the images in the cheap manufactured slide viewers questions our relationships with images as consumption.

5.3b: Pierre Huyghe : A Journey That Wasn’t 150

Fig. 53. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, video still, 2005.

The polar expedition that Pierre Huyghe joined in 2005 presents a prelude in the form of an exhibition, L’expedition scintillante.151 The artist develops, within the wall of the museum, the idea of the journey that he would have liked to undertake. Across three floors in the museum, Huyghe displays his imaginative journey in three acts. On the first floor, a boat is carved in ice, melting gradually and morphing into the shape of a distant island152. Then the visitor encounters a luminous stage, where pink and violet lights move with the sound of Eric Satie’s piano pieces,

150 This section 5.3.b contain large edited passages of a published paper by this author and can find in full in the annexe of this dissertation. Walsh, Emilie. Exploring Scenarios: Pierre Huyghe’s Video-Sculptures. Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium Compendium, Nasher Sculpture Center, eds. (2017): 28-40 “Graduate Symposium Compendium.” Nasher Sculpture Center website. https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/Learn/Nasher-Prize- Graduate-Symposium-Compendium-2017.pdf 151 Pierre Huyghe, L’expédition scintillante, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2002 152 Appendix Fig. 24. Pierre Huyghe, L’expédition scintillante, 2005.

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colouring the fog that is fuming out of the installation. Finally, on the third level, a black ice rink covers the soil, and a libretto for a musical event in three acts based on this expedition is presented.

The temporality of the expedition is turned upside down: an account of the journey is presented before it happens, and a musical inspired by the expedition had already been written before there was anything to be inspired by.

The exhibition suppresses and replaces the expedition. By not going elsewhere, Huyghe allows us to travel through his fantasy. The artist does not make the experience of distance, but rather recreates the ‘farness’ within the exhibition. This first journey will nonetheless give birth to the actual physical exploration of the far south, three years later: Huyghe went on a real life adventure on the Antarctic expedition, but stated in the title of the video he had made from this journey, that it actually did not happen. The reality of the experience is put in doubt by the multiplication of layers of narrative: the relation to the earlier work, a prelude of the actual expedition, the relation to literature and fiction, as the journey is said to be inspired by The Adventure of Gordon Pyn by Edgar Allan Poe; and the relation to the urban landscape of New York where the last act of the journey takes place.

The journey gives birth to the video recording of the Antarctic journey, but also to a musical piece that was played by an orchestra in New York, where some images for the video were shot as well. The music was composed from the data collected by mapping a newly discovered island in Antarctica. The musical soundtrack lasts as long as it takes to 'listen' to the island. The music is in itself a narrative and more specifically a musical equivalent of a travel journal or of a cartographic work.

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Fig. 54. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, performance documentation, Central Park, New York 2005.

The narrative of the video is elusive and mysterious, mixing images of the Antarctica and of the concert in New York. The near and the far collides in the space of the video, to create a new fictional space to travel through.

Bringing together a set of strategies, Huyghe manages to create distance in the far and in the near. The real and the fictional farness are melted together, to offer, ‘a fiction extended into reality.’153

During the journey, Huyghe also endeavoured to find an albino penguin. He developed the equipment to facilitate the encounter with the mysterious animal, as well as the recording gear to sonically map the island. A large inflatable structure was installed on the island, somewhere between a luminous white whale and an iceberg. This sculptural element within the very dramatic landscape of Antarctica has a narrative function - to supposedly attract the penguin -, but also

153 Amelia Barikin, Parallel presents, the Art of Pierre Huyghe (Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2012), p.1. 140

allows us to better see the landscape in the video as sculpture. The inflatable blob acts as sculpture, but also attracts the viewer’s attention to the ice landscape, and to its very sculptural nature. In the distance the video flattens everything into a fictional, sculptural landscape.154

In the video, the footage from Antarctica alternates with images from central park, New York, where Huyghe organized a public performance: a symphonic orchestra playing the island live, from the score recorded mapping the island in Antarctica. The ice rink in central park is filled with a black iceberg that mimics the one in the south pole, and also echoes the ice rink in L’Expédition Scintillante. The figure of the penguin appears between the fake icebergs, in the fog and light, with Manhattan buildings in the background.

The video brings these two experiences, these two antagonistic worlds together, and connects them through their spatial and sculptural nature. A Journey That Wasn’t is the closing chapter of a complex storytelling network. The video wraps the whole narrative, and brings a sense of cohesiveness, thanks to the sculptural echoes between the scattered storylines and the distant space and timeframes of the performance.

The journey of Huyghe mimics some aspect of an actual scientific mission: the aim was a quest for an albino penguin and the mapping of a mysterious island. While the goals resemble those of a scientific mission, they have a poetic and absurd dimension that the rationality of the scientific research methods does not allow. The legitimacy of the scientific mission as a means of exploration of the far is questioned, and the poetic quest is presented as an equal way to produce knowledge and meaning.

Having actually found a new island in Antarctica, Huyghe registered it with the government of Chile and obtained an official document stamped stating that he has discovered and named the island. In the same way that Huyghe switched the status of the scientific expedition, he gives a poetic value to a dry administrative document:

154 Appendix Fig. 25. Pierre. Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, video still, 2005. 141

The aesthetic of the adventure that the artists have created, a mix of nostalgic citation and burlesque dramaturgy is the opposite of futile. Through it, the languid regret of those who have overused adventure, taken it to pieces through practice, is expressed. Only one option is left, to remain a potential traveler forever, a non- adventurer pleasantly dreaming of the obsolete adventurer. 155

Huyghe employs an unfinished drawing by Jacques Lacan, a sketch of a borromean knot, that materialises, for the psychoanalyst, the relation between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The artist has turned the simple line drawing into neon sculpture, hung from the ceiling. But beyond this sculpture, the relation between those three areas of reality is questioned in most of Huyghe works. A journey that wasn’t lies at the intersection between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary: different strategies of exploring the far are put together in a singular approach to distance.

5.3c: Tobias Rehberger – binoculars

Across the border between Switzerland and Germany, between the Beyeler Art Foundation near Basel and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, a 5 kilometres sculpture walk is marked by 24 stops designed by Tobias Rehberger.

The markers along the way are designed to attract people’s attention with colour and form used to give them a magnetic, alien quality in the landscape. 156

155 Paul Ardenne, Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval. Horizon moins vingt : précédé de In Utero Terrae (Paris: Isthme Editions, 2006). 156 Tobias Rehberger, on the Rehberger walk, Vitra museum website. https://www.vitra.com/en-au/magazine/details/tobias-rehbergers-24-stop-walk

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A giant pair of binoculars constitute one of the sculpture stops. Bright in colour, matching the tone and style of the other sculptures, this particular work invites the visitor to stop and peep through to look over the vineyards of the Rhine valley.

Fig. 55. Tobias Rehberger, Binoculars, sculpture stop, Rehberger walk, Vitra desing museum, Germany, 2016

Those binoculars are very similar to the ones that are readily found on tourist sites, especially when a panoramic view is possible. Often activated by inserting a coin, they offer to the visitor a new access to the landscape, a new visual exploration of the territory. While binoculars as portable devices are easy to carry and are iconic of the adventurer toolkit, those large sculptural binoculars are evocative of tourist culture rather than exploration and adventure. The power over territories that binoculars confer that was once a privilege for the few with the capacity of exploring the world. But now it is highly democratic and come in a range of style for kids, bird watchers, and the tourist in their monumental version, such as the one referred to by Tobias Rehberger. The aesthetic of Rehberger’s binoculars are however more toy-like, reminiscent of the actual touristic version: they are bright in colour and match the overall aesthetic of the other sculptures along the art walk. The toy dimension can be read as a claim to playfulness for all. Everyone can play at being an explorer, and bring the far away closer with the democratisation of lenses of all sorts:

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binoculars of course, but also all sorts of cameras and non-professional telescopes that are available at an accessible price on the market.

Here, we posit Rehberger offers a rewriting of the heroic figure of the adventurer in its democratic, playful and colourful version. Crossing borders by foot and stopping at the top of the hill to contemplate the landscape are iconic and romantic tropes of the explorer and adventurer hero. Rehberger, through his playful sculpture walk, rewrites the scenario of the romantic adventurer as an easily accessible, leisurely walk for all. The question still remains as to whether or not this contains a critical discourse on tourism and our relationship to landscapes and territory. But nonetheless, his proposition of recycling the material culture of adventure offers an insightful overlook on the mapped territories of adventure.

With this selection of varied example of contemporary practices, Terminal Velocity, A journey that wasn’t and Rehberger’s walk, we have closely mapped the different strategies in relation to the trope of adventure today. We now have a clear view of the range of practices that critique, re-enact or play with the Golden Age of Adventure. The relationship that artists have today with the trope of adventure and its relationship with colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy offers a unique insight into the cultural perception of the notion of adventure today.

5.4: RECUPERATING ADVENTURE

If Enwezor - after Levi-Straus - is correct, and travelling in the modern sense is impossible, what can be made of Tixador, Huyghe, Shonibare, Avery and Starling’s attempt to ‘re-adventure’? Certainly, as seen with Enwezor’s mobilisation of an armchair anthropology, the recuperation of adventure is a mental as well as a physical anxiety. The imaginations and ‘non-journeys’ of Avery, Shonibare and Huyghe all hint at the continual recuperative drive of contemporary art. Each artist critically examines the conditions through which we understand our relationship to space, alterity and adventure. For Avery, the establishment of a Swiftian narrative of absurdity rehabilitates the critical and satirical function of many 18th and 19th adventure narratives. Shonibare’s subtle employment of hybrid forms and processes establishes a critical redeployment of the colonial narrative whilst also maintaining the conceit of its deconstruction. Huyghe’s very real, imaginary 144

and symbolic breakdown into a knot of desire and conquer marks out the limits of what is possible and impossible after neo-colonialism.

For Tixador and Starling, difficulty and re-enactment both serve as powerful weapons to critically examine the tools of contemporary adventuring. Impossible to re-create fully, the danger inherent in such projects reminds us of what has been gained and what has been lost. Though for Shonibare, Avery and Huyghe the impulse of this is - we argue - the rehabilitation and restaging of pre-20th century adventuring (colonial, pioneering, allegorical); for Tixador and Starling the impulse is as much a critical return of sets of conditions outlined in the 1960s and 70s Land and Conceptual movements. Though ‘nearer’ in their historical frames of reference and narrative recuperation, Starling and Tixador nevertheless seek out of recapture and rehabilitate an impulse that drove artists to explore and endanger that marks out a related set of challenges after neo- colonialism.

Although not exhaustive, the recuperation and rehabilitation of adventure in a condition of intense proximity marks out a set of related desires to critically examine historical narrative forms - long since unfashionable and politically incorrect - precisely in order to challenge the conceits of neo-colonial conflations of distance and proximity. Adventure is no longer defined in terms of discovery, conquering, distance and difference. Maybe adventurers sit next to those that adventure brought to view: the everyday and the near. Though artists may seek the rehabilitation of adventure through expedition (real and imagined) or to employ local inheritances in order to conflate the conceit of difference, regardless of which route is taken, these critical forms of adventuring mark out new sets of possibilities that – though they may hint at a political Romantic strategy – bring to form ‘disturbing nearness that unsettles as much as it exhilarates, and transforms as much as it disquiets.’157

157 Okwui Enwesor, Intense Proximity, 2012, Exhibition Catalogue 145

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CONCLUSION

6.1: REVISTING THE THREE STRATEGIES

In this dissertation we have offered a reassessment of the trope of adventure today, through looking at its use in contemporary art practices. In the Introduction we have discussed the scope of the research and the methodology. A study of what constitutes the imagination of adventure was conducted and revealed how much the narratives of adventure are inherited from colonial history. Methodologically, the research materials were gathered by mapping contemporary art practices that are using the imagination of adventure as primary material.

In examining the material of adventure, ways of interrogating our relationships to these narratives emerged. A selection of artworks and practices was compiled forming a collection that was mapped to understand these different strategies and relationships within the visual culture of adventure. Through observation and analysis of what is happening amongst artists using the trope of adventure as primary material, distinct patterns, similarities and differences in approach were identified. As a result of these investigations, three main attitudes towards the imagination of adventure emerged: Killing Adventure, Adventure Never Died, and Adventure Is Dead – Long Live Adventure. Those three strategies have been presented in the three major chapters of this dissertation, discussing contemporary art practices, literature and a body of creative work produced throughout this doctorate.

In Killing Adventure, a discussion on art practices adopting a very critical attitude towards the imagination and narratives of adventure was conducted. Exploring the world, reaching new territories, standing in awe before the exotic and the different; as romantic as it sounds, also means claiming ownership over lands that belong to others, entering into relationships of power and domination over territories, culture and people, creating hierarchies through fascination for otherness, and superiority disguised as curiosity.

The culture of the pioneer is a powerful drive, but its darker side comes from the fact that it is fuelled by an egotistical desire to plant a flag in a new piece of land and claim it as one’s own.

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In reaction to this observation, an array of art practices have emerged that deconstruct the myth of conquest and of the adventurer. The Killing Adventure chapter explored a range of expressions and strategies that are aligned and driven by this moral direction.

Secondly, this dissertation discussed another range of strategies: some art practices develop a neo-romantic relationship with adventure, somehow embracing – or disregarding – its problematic dimensions and possible inadequacies. Inherent to Adventure Never Died’s positions is a claim for continuity, and a conception of adventure as exploration of the self over anything else. It does not necessarily embrace colonial values of domination in the trope of adventure, but rather explores the romantic drive and endless curiosity that adventure and exploration carry. A similar structure as in Killing Adventure chapter was used, discussing the creative work produced during this PhD, then putting in conversation with theoretical discussion and finally analysing contemporary art practice. The final clear posture that was analysed in this dissertation with regards to adventure is a much more playful relationship with its narratives. There is an acknowledgement that the Golden Age of Adventure through colonisation is over, but there is a desire to play, recycle and re-enact the material of adventure, and the layers of imagination it creates. Stories of adventure are thus the primary material of the artist as a playful adventurer. The world has been mapped, all the stories have been told, thus impetus and inspiration are centred around scenarios of adventure.

These three divergent approaches have constituted the central analytical structure of this practice-led project, putting in perspective what we commonly believe adventure to be, with responses by artists today, shifting and transforming the narratives and the imagination of adventure.

This dissertation is the first large scale academic examination of the imagination of adventure in contemporary art practices. The trope of adventure in the work of contemporary artists has been analysed and informs an understanding of where the narratives of adventures come from and why they fascinate artists.

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Looking at what narrative materials artists today use in their practice, we have discovered a fascination for what we have called ‘The Golden Age of Adventure’. Examining the trope closely, we have assessed how much of it comes from colonial histories. Puzzled by the long- lasting fascination for this conception of colonial adventure - despite being at first glance inadequate for the 21st century - we have conducted an unwrapping of the narratives recycled by contemporary artists, including this artist-researcher.

From this research we have been able to understand how the narratives of adventure are deeply connected to the colonial history: under the glamourous varnish of exploration lies a more problematic dimension of domination over land, culture and people. The fantasy of adventure, with all its romantic stories, images and material cultures, goes hand in hand with the darker side of colonialism.

Despite this, artists today - and this artist-researcher – continue to be fascinated by the trope of adventure and recycle the imagination of adventure in their practices. We have shed a light on the reasons for such a long-lasting fascination and have presented the different strategies set in place to critique, recycle or play with the narratives of adventure.

It appears that the beauty surrounding adventure struggles to die, despite its darker side: we have analyzed different strategies in relation to adventure in contemporary art : some perspectives are highly critical of colonial adventure, some focus on the playful dimension of adventure as a methodology, and some finally discriminate what needs to be left behind in adventure and what should be kept and transformed for the 21st century.

Looking at those three set of strategies - Killing Adventure, Adventure Never Dies, Adventure Is Dead – Long Live Adventure - we now have clearer view of the different approaches and relationship that artists have with the narratives of adventure.

What does this say more generally about adventure as a trope in the 21st century? It appears that there are definitively some ways to move forward from the colonial values that permeate the narrative of adventure. But to do so, the first step has to be an acknowledgement of its prevalence 149

in the trope of adventure, followed by a deconstruction of the narratives through a genealogical approach, concluded by a reassessment of what is still relevant today in adventure.

Adventure can be a very positive and creative drive: exploration of the self, environmental perspectives, or a political discourse on a global world. The constant re-writing of old and new adventure stories creates a complex layering of imagination that constitute the primary material of the artist-adventurer. If this research can have an impact in the field of contemporary art, we would hope that it could be read as a call to decolonise adventure and write new adventure narratives for the future.

6.2: GHOSTS OF ADVENTURES: BACK TO THE CREATIVE BODY OF WORK158

When I started my PhD working on adventure in contemporary art, I had a positive image of adventure: I was envisioning the thrill of discovery, the escape from the everyday life, the exotic experience, the growth and the possibility to overcome fears and obstacles.

But quickly it became clear where the trope of adventure came from and what values it carried. This thesis has demonstrated how connected the imaginations and narratives of adventure are to the colonial era. While this has been backed up by the literature, it appears that my perception of adventure as solely a positive notion is prevalent in our society and the colonial values within it are rarely questioned. Through this research project, we have substantively participated in reassessing the position of adventure in our society.

A large part of the work of conducting this research has been centred on the practice and the research grows through the creative practical investigation. Through it, I have been able to explore a range of strategies regarding the narratives of adventure. Through my own creative

158 This last section goes back to the preface of this dissertation and measures the gap between the initial ideas and what has been learnt after completing this research project. For this reason, it adopts a dairistic approach similar to the one chosen for the preface. 150

process, I have approached different ways of dealing with the imagination of adventure, and this has brought to my attention how complex our relationship with the Golden Age of Adventure has been and remain to this day.

It is through the practice that I started to question our fascination for adventure and exploration, and it is through developing a body of creative work exploring adventure that I have put in perspective different strategies that we have now discussed. Importantly, this enabled putting the creative body of work in the context of contemporary art practices.

My own practice during this PhD has navigated the different strategies, investigating different approaches to adventure. In that sense, the practice has led the research in exploring those different strategies of adventure though the creative component.

This PhD also contributes to the growing field of practice-led research. Through a creative practice, the artist-researcher has been able to access new perspectives on the trope of adventure today. Looking at the work of other artists working with similar narrative and visual material, the creative practice has often pushed the trope in new direction. The focus of this research on the narratives of adventure inherited from the colonial era, comes from the artist-researcher own enigmatic fascination for narratives that objectively seem somewhat inadequate for the 21st century. Looking at the artist-researcher’s own creative practice and mapping it in the field of contemporary art practices has contributed to understanding the different strategies set in place by visual artists in relationship with adventure.

The intellectual distance required by the researcher to look at artist works, was achieved by separating the PhD exhibition and the final elaboration of the written dissertation. Taking the time to look at the work produced and situated it on the map of adventure in contemporary art, has helped refine the categories and shed an inside light on the fascination for adventure stories.

To conclude we can return to the work one more time: Victoire and Glowry, the first and the last work produced as part of this PhD. The ghosts of adventure seems to haunt both of those works: Ingrid Bergman, as one of the rare female figures referred to in the trope of adventure in 151

this research, and Glowry, with ten iconic adventurers (Captain Cook, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, etc) constituting the trope of adventure as defined in this research. How do those ghosts act in the work? They act as a drive in Victoire, pushing the main character into action. They act as the desire to offer counter-model in Glowry - by acknowledging and unpacking the current models. Those past stories and figures of adventure - those ghosts of adventure - are still haunting our imagination. How artists today connect with those ghosts, how they are summoned though practice, sheds a fascinating light on our contemporary relationship with the trope of adventure.

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Martin, Jean-Hubert, Magiciens de la terre, 18 mai-14 août 1989, centre Georges-Pompidou, musée national d'Art moderne, exhibition catalogue, La Villette, la Grande Halle, 1989, 271 p. https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7nzn/artist-klara-hobza-is-scuba-diving-across-eurpoe. James, Elkins, and David Morgan eds. Re-enchantment. University College Cork: Routledge NY and London, 2009. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’aventure, l’ennuie, le sérieux. Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, collection présence et pensée, 1976. ---. L’irréversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion, Champs collection, 1983. Jeffries, Stuart. “Joan Fontcuberta: false negatives.” The Guardian, Published July 8th, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/08/joan-fontcuberta-stranger-than- fiction. Kondakova, Olga, Nil Sputnik and Fundación Arte y Tecnología. Sputnik. Madrid: Fundación Arte y Tecnología, 1997. Kundera, Milan. Le livre du rire et de l’oubli. Translated by François Kerel. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Penguin editions, 2011 McDermott, Emily. “An Artist Is Scuba Diving Across Europe.” Garage, February 7th, 2018. Morin, Edgar. L’esprit du temps. Paris : Éditions Grasset Fasquelle, 1976. Ouest Lumiere. “Background: The light of the factory.” Accessed May 2015. https://www.ouestlumiere.fr/ouest-lumi%C3%A8re/background/. Patron, Sandra. “Pierre Malphettes: Road Movie.” Documentsdartistes. Published 2007, http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/malphettes/repro1.html. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91, no.1 (1991): 33-40. Quicho, Alex. “Simon Starling in conversation.” Ocula Magazine, 13th of April 2017. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/simon-starling/. Ribettes, Jean Michel. Le diaphane et l’obscur: Une histoire de la diapositive dans l'art contemporain / textes de Jean-Michel Ribettes. Paris: Maison européenne de la photographie, 2002. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Une histoire de la diapositive dans l'art contemporain. Exhibition Catalogue. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et Récit. Paris: Le Seuil, 1983 – 1985.

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Rosenthal, Stephanie and Mamu Katoka, eds. Walking in my Mind. London: Hayward Gallery, June 23rd – September 6th, 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Walking in my Mind. Exhibition Catalogue. Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011. Sloterdijk, Peter. Le Palais de Cristal. À l'intérieur du capitalisme planétaire. Translated by Olivier Mannoni. Paris: Maren Sell, 2006. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Steeds, Lucy, et al., Making Art Global (Part 2) 'Magiciens de la Terre' 1989, London, Afterall Books, 2013, 304 p. Tadié, Jean-Yves. Le Roman d'aventures. Paris: PUF, écriture collection, 1982. Tiberghien, Gilles. Finis Terrae: Imaginaires et imaginations cartographiques. Paris: Bayard, 2007. Tixador, Laurent, Jean Max Colard and Sylvain Venayre, L’inconnu des grands horizons. Paris: Michel Baverey, Antipode collection, 2003. Toma, Yann, and Rose Marie Barrientos, Les entreprises critiques La critique artiste à l'ère de l'économie globalisée. Saint-Etienne : Cité du désign editions, 2008. Toma, Yann, Stéphanie Jamet-Chavigny and Laurent Deveze, Artistes et Entreprise. Paris: Les Presse du réel, 2012. Upton, David. “Clip joint: films that use both black & white and colour.” The Guardian. Published February 13th, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/feb/12/clip-joint- films-that-use-both-black-white-and-colour Urbain, Jean Didier, “Le touriste : du sujet symptôme à l’homme qui rêve.” 606 Conference of the Université de Tous les Savoirs. Paris: Université de Tous les Savoirs, 10th of January 2006. Venayre, Sylvain. Rêves d'aventures. 1800-1940. Paris: La Martinière, 2006. ---. La Gloire de l'aventure. Genèse d'une mystique moderne. 1850-1940, Paris : Aubier, collection « Historique », 2002. Walsh, Emilie. Exploring Scenarios: Pierre Huyghe’s Video-Sculptures. Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium Compendium, Nasher Sculpture Center, eds. (2017): 28-40

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APPENDIX

Fig. 1 Emilie Walsh, PhD exhibition, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

Fig. 2. Emilie Walsh, still frame from opening of short film Victoire, 2015.

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Fig. 3. Emilie Walsh, Victoire, digital photograph, 2014.

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Fig. 4. Emilie Walsh, Victoire slides, digital photograph, 2015.

Fig. 5. Emilie Walsh, Untitled, digital photograph of an old postcard (circa 1920) from Aix-en-Provence archives, 2014. Photograph appearing in the short film Victoire as a subliminal image.

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Fig. 6. Columbus Map, drawn c. 1490, Lisbon. From the workshop of Bartolomew and Christopher Columbus.

Fig. 7. Getty image, Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, 1930.

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Fig. 8. Klara Hobza, Departing America, Galerie fur Landschaftskunst, Hamburg, 2009. View of the exhibition.

Fig. 9. Pierre Malphettes, Firefly, Centre d’Art Saint-Léger, France, 2007. View from the exhibition.

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Fig 10. Pierre Huyghe, RSI, un bout de réel, 2006, fluo tubes, 700 x 700 cm

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Fig 11. Emilie Walsh, Bar chart analysing data from Adventure Dream Corp. survey, 2013.

Fig 12. Emilie Walsh, Pie chart analysing data from Adventure Dream Corp. survey, 2013.

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Fig. 13. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, bottle, cardboard, wood, plastic, foam, twine, 2010.

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Fig. 14. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, 2010. Photograph of the performance.

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Fig. 15. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval, Horizon -20, photograph, 2010.

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Fig. 16. Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Verdun, 2010. Photo credit: Aurelien Mole, view from the exhibition at Bois-Saint-Léger.

Fig. 17. Emilie Walsh, Glowry (detail), glow-in-the-dark paint, found frames, tungsten lighting array, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

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Fig 18. Klara Hobza, Diving through Europe, photograph, 2008.

Fig. 19. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine, VCA Art Space, July 2018. View from the exhibition, photo credit: Recreate.

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Fig. 20. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2017

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Fig. 21. Emilie Walsh, Victoire Machine (detail), ViewMaster Reel, 2016

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Fig. 22. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

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Fig. 23 Emilie Walsh, Traversant, viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Fig. 24. Emilie Walsh, Traversant (detail), viewing devices, 3D prints, found photographic slides, 2016. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

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Fig. 25. Pierre Huyghe, L’expédition scintillante, 2005.

Fig. 26. Pierre Huyghe, A journey that wasn’t, video still, 2005.

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Fig. 27. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. Installation view.

Fig. 28. Thibaut De Ruyter, Esther Mysius and Camille Rouaud, Terminal Velocity, 2015. (detail) Images contained within the viewing devices.

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Fig. 28. Emilie Walsh, Scope, Arcade, 2017. View of the exhibition Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review.

Fig. 30. Emilie Walsh, Scope, video, 3D prints, metal, foam board, 2017. Photo credit: Melbourne Art Review.

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Fig. 31. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018.

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Fig. 32. Emilie Walsh, Found, 3D prints, photo-slides, wood, Perspex, led lights, 2016-2018. View from the exhibition at the Abbotsford Convent.

Appendix 32. Emilie Walsh, Exploring Scenarios: Pierre Huyghe’s Video-Sculptures. Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium Compendium, Nasher Sculpture Center, eds. (2017): 28-40 “Graduate Symposium Compendium.” Nasher Sculpture Center website. https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/Learn/Nasher-Prize- Graduate-Symposium-Compendium-2017.pdf

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7000 Oaks

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Walsh, Emilie

Title: Images and imagination of Adventure

Date: 2020

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/267628

File Description: Final thesis file

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