30
MARCH 2014 DASPLATFORMS.COM FREE 50 51 The Minimalism, Hessian and Steel of Dale Harding. Darren Jorgensen
Dale Harding's Of One's Own Country (2011) contemporary art? One reason comes from languages. In his work, Harding uses their had lost its avant-garde qualities, its ability to information is more visible in the art itself. is a ball of old fashioned steel wool, designed the artist himself, who explains that: strategies to introduce new issues, new stage political dissent. For while in the 1930s, Here he recreates a breast plate or king plate to unravel from the wall over the course of its problems to the institutions that exhibit them, Rockefeller had censored and then destroyed a that was worn by Harding's grandmother exhibition, a single strand falling onto a narrow These histories and these pieces of without falling into ambivalence. Harding's Diego Riviera mural that featured a picture of until her late teens at the Woorabinda plinth below. There is not much to this humble inherited knowledge often don't extend significance lies in the way that he turns the the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, by 1970 Government Settlement. Harding's great- performance, one that is easily lost amidst the beyond the family unit and the wider conceptual/minimal paradigm into Aboriginal Rockefeller was no longer concerned about grandmother also wore one. These women general noise and scale of contemporary Aboriginal community and I consider it art, and conversely, politicises conceptual art's powers, and let the Haacke installation sit. were known by a code that was written into exhibitions. The work, according to Harding, a privilege to be able to use my Nanna's and minimal strategies for art making. The equivalent of Rockefeller's censorship these plates, and on Unnamed the artist has has its roots in some of the darkest parts of stories to be able to try and lessen In Australia, two events were pivotal in in Australian history took place in 1974, when beaten W38, his grandmother's code, into Australian history. The ball of wool some of that burden on the Aboriginal both inaugurating and separating Aboriginal the Honey Ant mural that sat on the walls of the metal. is designed to look like pubic hair, and community and our families. They are art and the sophisticated kind of installation the school at the Papunya settlement was Yet even here, despite its thorough commemorates the experience of Aboriginal really nasty, often hurtful stories and so art are familiar with today. In 1968, the painted over. The destruction of this Aboriginality, Harding's work is not unlike women in domestic service in Queensland. I consider it is quite important work to try National Gallery of Victoria featured a radical collaboration by the old men of the settlement that of the very non-Aboriginal New York Harding's mother, grandmother and great- and unearth these stories and share them display of abstract geometric painting in its symbolises the way that desert iconography practices of the 1960s. The minimalists grandmother worked under the infamous with the wider community and make sure exhibition The Field, a display that would was still regarded as politically dangerous by Carl Andre and Donald Judd used bricks and Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of they aren't just carried on the backs of us.1 introduce Australia to American style white Australia even as late as the 1970s. Since metal in homage to the industrial base of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897, an act that was radicalism in art. Three years later, in 1971, this moment, information has been of the American economy. These artists recognised not much short of genocidal in its treatment Certainly there is a sensitivity at work in the Papunya painter Kaapa Tjampitjinpa utmost importance in the Aboriginal art that art should be sufficient to the silos, of Aboriginal people. Harding's translation of these histories. Soft shared the Caltex Art Award with another, movement. Papunya Tula Artists began to skyscrapers and smoke stacks all around In Breaking Boundaries (2012) a row of wool is sewn onto the hessian collar of Bright non-indigenous artist in Alice Springs. These disseminate what are now known as certificates them. Harding is also embedded in a history partly burned surveyors’ pegs sit like giant Eyed Little Dormitory Girls, as if the artist events effectively marked the institutional of authenticity, documenting the meaning of of materials, using hessian, metal and wire matches along the wall. Here too the artist and grandson is trying to atone for the horrors beginnings of two art movements that would the paintings they sold, in order to preserve that runs through the labour and race history speaks of his work as both personal and of the past. come to dominate the Australian artworld over the political valence of their imagery. Kaapa's of settler Australia. The vintage steel wool in historical. The pegs refer to Harding's Yet there is also something all too self- the coming decades, and yet remain distinct painting Gulgardi (1971), winner of the Caltex Of One's Own Country recalls the experience childhood on a farm, and their place in marking contained about Harding's explanation, as from each other in every other way. Art Award, became known as Men's Ceremony of scrubbing and servitude, while the hessian out the land for profit. Bright Eyed Little there is for much of the reasoning behind Harding's work does not synthesise these for the Kangaroo, Gulgardi. The politics of of Bright Eyed Little Dormitory Girls is tied Dormitory Girls (2013), a series of miniature Aboriginal art. For there is more at stake in different movements, or resolve the rift Aboriginal art became located not so much in to children and sheep, colonial schools and hessian sacks with collars sewn into them, an aesthetic experience than the redemption between them, but instead emphasises their the artworks themselves, which were often shearing sheds. Yet these works also carry could well be mistaken for oversized dolls of history, more at play in creation than either distance from each other. The way that he visually unparseable to white viewers, but in with them the ambivalences of minimalism, clothes, their petite forms showing off the personal or the political. The disjuncture creates a disjuncture between clean installation the information accompanying the artworks. and remind us that galleries themselves are Harding's craft skills. Here too the artist uses between an artwork and its information goes works and Aboriginal information begins to And this information came with a moral still cleaned by people who work with steel the work as a means of explaining his own back at least as far as the 1950s, when the unravel the doubled pretence by which authority, from people who had experienced wool, people whose labour is not discontinuous family history, and Aboriginal history more New York School of painting marked out the contemporary art came into being in Australia. the brunt of settler violence and their families. with the Aboriginal labour of the 19th and generally. His grandmother was forced to end of Anglo-American modernism. Who could The journey to visibility in the artworld was It is through this multiple history of 20th centuries. Just as the minimal revolution wear a hessian sack as a punishment for say what a Jackson Pollock, let alone a Barnett much harder for Aboriginal artists than those contemporary art, which appeared in Alice in American art aspired to the brute magnificence resisting the sexual advances of a whitefella. Newman or a Clyfford Still painting is really following in the footsteps of 'The Field'. For Springs, New York and Sydney at about the of American industry, so Harding's work Harding has attempted to redeem this horrific about? Coming in their wake, conceptualism by the 1970s in both New York and mainstream same time, that it is possible to think through commemorates working livesin the margins experience in the work, by sewing soft, and minimalism took advantage of the vacuum Australia, art had come to be considered to be Harding's work. For he is one of many young of Australian society. feminine collars onto this tough material. in artistic meaning that the New York School a harmless occupation. In New York in 1970, Aboriginal artists who have been through What sense can we make of this created. Their strategies for installation and Hans Haacke installed a polling booth in the the art school system, who have learned the disjunction between these artworks and their information, their use of everyday materials seminal 1970 conceptual exhibition Information visual languages of a post-conceptual era of explanation? How is it that these works and language, put the impetus for interpreting at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The contemporary art, and uses these languages appear to sit so easily within a contemporary art into question. booth protested the conservatism of Nelson to point back to Aboriginal information. For art context, while their artist's reasoning Conceptualism and minimalism remain Rockefeller, who was not only running again for Harding this information is the history of 1 Interview with Dale Harding. GOMA TV.
|• bright eyed little dormitory girls, 2013, approx. 190 x 35 x 3cm. Hessian sack, mohair wool. Image courtesy of the artist