Relational Perspectives: A Visual Investigation Into Social and Cultural Relationships With Place

by James Newitt BFA (Hons, First Class), University of Tasmania

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania, December 2007 Signed statement of originality:

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, it incorporates no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text.

James Newitt Signed statement of authority of access to copying:

This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.

James Newitt Acknowledgements:

Firstly I would like to acknowledge the generous support and assistance of my supervisors Noel Frankham and Justy Phillips throughout this project. I would also like to acknowledge my family and friends for helping me throughout the ups and downs of the research process.

I would like to extend gratitude to the following individuals for the valuable discussions and input they shared with me throughout the research: Tania Doropolous, Andrew McGowan, Paula Silva, Phip Murray, Anthony Johnson, Tom Burton, Amanda Davies, Colin Langridge, Christine Morrow, Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Sean Kelly, Aaron Roberts, James Wilson, Nathan Crump, Megan Keating, Heather Newitt, Tim Noonan, Reg Newitt, Raef Newitt, Jayne Dyer, Michael Edwards, Philip Watkins, Pippa Dickson, Elizabeth Walsch, Julia Clarke, Scot Cotterell, Liz Sadler and Jack Robins.

I would also like to acknowledge the support of Lesley Kirby, Andrew McGowan, Mark Fountain and the staff at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, especially during the development of the come with me… exhibition, 2005-06.

There have been many people who made this project possible and I wish to acknowledge the contributions of individuals in relation to each work included in the project exhibition:

Arberg Bay, 2004 Ian Fee, Pete Fee, Tom Burton and Mark Dixon.

Arberg Bay, 2006 All those who gave me a lift, especially the postal van driver who drove me to Burnie.

Altered State Aurelia Nyandeng Ngor, Alfred Cauker, Fabio Chivhanda, and Laura Chapman for introducing me to Aurelia and Moses Iten for first introducing me to Alfred and Fabio. the write/here project Firstly I would like to acknowledge Justy Phillips for our ongoing collaborative relationship and her contagious enthusiasm. To all the people who contributed stories and experiences to the project; students at the Elizabeth College E.S.L. Program; inmates at Mary Hutchinson Women’s Prison; clients at the Mary’s Grange Nursing home; students at Elizabeth College, Hobart College and the Tasmanian School of Art; people who visited the $1 Story Shop and the Design Island exhibition; people who contributed through the website; and those who came to the BBQ at the waterworks just before Christmas, 2006. To the organisations and institutions who assisted us in organising workshops and conversation groups; Ben from Elizabeth College, Tony Waller from the Migrant Resource Centre, John Holley from Risdon Prison, Greg Lehman from the University of Tasmania, Rebecca Coote and the Mary’s Grange Nursing Home and Karen Clarke from Hobart College. Thanks also to the support of the Australia Council, Arts Tasmania and the Hobart City Council and all the businesses who supported the project, especially Mike Elliot and Geoff Matthews from the Claude Group; Anthea Pritchard from J. Boag & Son; and Julie Payne and Robert Morris-Nunn.

Familiar Strangers Thanks to all the people who responded to my request and shared stories, as well as those who read transcriptions. Kevin Leong and Scott Cotterell for their technical support and equipment loans. To Paula Silva for her valuable feedback and numerous conversations.

Unstable Ground A very special thankyou to Gordon and Stewart for their patience, generosity and friendship during the development of this work. Thanks also to the staff at the Peacock Centre, especially Eve and Jill and to the staff at the Theatre Royal, Hobart.

Saturday Nights Special thanks to the performers, Barbara Clifford, Betty Wylie, Mervyn Magee and The All Ordinaries, also to all the people who were willing to be interviewed. I also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the historians James Parker and Peter MacFie.

Finally a very special thankyou to my mother Heather, father Reg and to Jasmin for always being supportive and for helping me make sense of what I was doing. Relational Perspectives: A visual investigation into social and cultural relationships with place

Abstract

This project uses visual art to investigate the relationships between people and place. Here I investigate social engagement as a form of production within contemporary art practice and seek to expand on aspects of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and Hal Foster’s essay on the ‘Artist as Ethnographer’. While Relational Aesthetics discusses the capacity for artworks to explore connections between people, this project focuses on a situational aesthetic to investigate connections between people and place.

The project’s concern with defining a situational aesthetic is informed by the practices of a number of contemporary artists who, working since the early 1990s, construct various narratives forms using temporal and spatial media such as film, video, installation and sound. These artists continue a lineage from earlier conceptual artists of the 1960s by using non-object-based forms to demonstrate an active relationship between artist and subject, a participatory relationship that is extended through the artwork to involve the viewer in constructing meaning. The project’s theoretical foundation is based on critical theory by writers such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, Paul Arden, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau.

The six videos and installations that comprise the project exhibition seek to identify, describe and elaborate specific personal histories and events that bind people into communities and to place. The project’s form and content have been shaped through research and personal experience with sites and situations specific to Tasmania. Methodologies including observation, interviewing and facilitated performance have been incorporated to expand documentary representation through video, sound and text installation. The videos and installations focus on viewer engagement and are produced as a result of extended research within a place(s) or situation(s) – in some cases over two years. Through a process of discursive engagement, I have collected stories, histories, experiences and information and filtered them into artworks. Each of the videos and installations translate actual conversations and stories into narrative structures that exist somewhere between fictional constructs and documentary observation – thus creating a space for viewer subjectivity and interpretation. This project concludes that the connections that bind people to communities and to place are precarious, subjective and in constant change. Furthermore, these connections are expanded and multiplied through the artist’s relationship to place and subject, and the subsequent relationship between viewer and artwork. The project identifies means to navigate these complex and changing circumstances by constructing situations, creating narrative fragmentation and by incorporating elements of fiction into the artwork. It argues that, by incorporating fictional devices within documentary form, the work can engage with a specific place or situation without resorting to social commentary or ethnographic documentation. Instead, the resulting work remains subjective and universal, allowing for connections to emerge with other places, people and situations. Contents

Introduction 10

Chapter 1: Project Description 13

Aims and Motivation 13 Central Research Questions 15 Project Background and Previous Work 16 The Parameters of the Project 19

Chapter 2: The Project in Context 24

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement 28 Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives 37 Constructed Situations: using elements of the world to construct narratives 50 The ‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices 64 Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition 70

Chapter 3: Research and Process: the development of the project 79

Experimentation and Methodology 80 Development of Individual Artworks 83 Exhibitions and Presentation 112

Chapter 4: Conclusion 121 Appendices

Appendix 1: Bibliography 125 Appendix 2: Illustrations 129 Appendix 3: List of Works Included in the Project Exhibition 138 Appendix 4: Description of Selected Support Work 139 Appendix 5: Project Timeline 149 Appendix 6: DVD Contents List 152 Appendix 7: Curriculum Vitae 153 10

Introduction

Within this project I have explored relationships and connections between people and place via different narrative forms, including video sound and text-based installation. I investigated experiences of isolation, displacement, connection, belonging and memory specific to particular site and situations. Through literal and visual narrative forms, I present internal, psychological relationships between people and the external world. The artworks that comprise the project exhibition have been published at different stages throughout the candidacy and progressively refined for submission.

Early in the project I examined contemporary forms of production within visual art practice and the relational nature of much of this practice.1 Questions about the artist’s position in relation to their subject, the social implications of an artwork and the nature of collaborative practice started to arise early on in the research. These questions were gradually developed into a series of central research questions that subsequently provided a set of criteria from which I would assess individual artworks. The project exhibition brings together a selection of these artworks to demonstrate a consistent methodology and a conclusion to the central research questions.

I employed documentary approaches across different time-based media to make a series of artworks that elaborate and describe individual and community sense of place: each artwork in the project exhibition is created from encounters established with my subjects over periods of time.2 These extended periods of engagement are an important aspect of the research and allow personal, psychological perspectives and experiences to emerge. The artworks included in the project exhibition and identified in chapter 2: The Project in Context are fluid, situational, conversational, performative and collaborative. Central to the documentary approach behind this research is Nicolas

1 Throughout the exegesis I discuss Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing on Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002). I focus on relational practice that incorporates time-based media such as video and film. Even if the term ‘new media’ seems somewhat obsolete in this context, high quality digital video equipment and editing software is becoming more and more affordable. The size and affordability of this equipment results in greater portability and less obtrusive filming – giving artists the freedom to make work in isolated or distant places as well as allowing them to get closer to their subjects without the obtrusiveness of full-scale film equipment and film crews. 2 The length and nature of these encounters varies with each project from several months to two years, they are reflected on individually in chapter 3: Research and Process. The length of this research project has afforded the opportunity to establish several long-term relationships and develop artworks with time for reflection and exchange. 11

Bourriaud’s definition of Relational Aesthetics, and Hal Foster’s critical reflection on documentary methodology in his essay ‘Artist as Ethnographer’.3

Relational Aesthetics provided a theoretical sounding board for identifying the nature of contemporary practice, especially practice which involves social engagement. Crucial to Bourriaud’s theory is a questioning of artistic form; namely, he presents a compelling discussion about socially engaged and time-based practice, asking, ‘What is a form that is essentially relational?’

In observing contemporary artistic practices, we ought to talk of “formations” rather than “forms”. Unlike an object that is closed in on itself by the intervention of a style and a signature, present day art shows that form only exists in the encounter and in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition with other formations, artistic or otherwise.4

Bourriaud extends on the concerns of earlier conceptual artists from the 1960s and 1970s. As Victor Burgin identified in the 1960s, many artistic practices of that time were changing focus from the material form of an artwork to the relationship between different materials, artworks, behaviours and experiences:

Many recent attitudes to materials in art are based in an emerging awareness of the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth. The artist is apt to see himself not as a creator of new material forms but rather as a coordinator of existing forms, and may therefore choose to subtract materials from the environment. As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behavior so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than of quality.5

This project continues a lineage of non-object based practice, where the works exhibited in the project exhibition and discussed in the contextual chapter evolve out of conversations and other forms of encounter. Although each work addresses different situations and contexts, their conversational form connects them in a narrative ‘formation’ where different stories intersect and merge. Through a process of discursive engagement, stories, histories, experiences and information are collected

3 Foster, Hal, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’, Return to the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: October Books, 1997 4 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 21 5 Burgin, Victor, ‘Situational Aesthetics’ (1969), 20 June 2007 < http://www.ubu.com/papers/burgin_situational.html> 12 and filtered into artworks. Each of the videos and installations in the project exhibition translate actual conversations and stories into narrative forms that exist somewhere between fictional constructs and documentary observation – creating a space for viewer subjectivity and interpretation.

Chapter 1: Project Description, identifies the aims, motivations and central research questions behind the project. This chapter provides a brief overview to the research by describing a background to the project, as well as the parameters of the research.

In chapter 2: The Project in Context, specific artists and artworks are discussed in relation to: Partnerships and Participation, Real Fictions, Constructed Situations, the ‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations and Viewer Engagement. This chapter describes how discursive engagement, experimental narrative forms and installation methods have expanded documentary forms into new areas of visual art practice. The structure of this chapter is informed by the central research questions identified in chapter 1.

Chapter 3: Research and Process, provides an in-depth description of the process and methodological approach behind the works included in the project exhibition. This chapter discusses the Experimentation and Methodology behind the research, the Development of Individual Artworks and the progressive Exhibition and Presentation of artworks throughout the research.

The final chapter provides a conclusion that summarises how the project has explored relationships between people and place through its specific research questions and aims. The conclusion discusses some of the ethical responsibilities of artists who incorporate other people’s stories within their work, the function and use of social engagement and constructed situations within contemporary practice, and the relationship between viewer and artwork or exhibition. This chapter also describes the outcomes of the project and how this exploration has added to the field. 13

CHAPTER 1 Project Description

Aims and Motivation

My primary aim is to investigate the capacity for visual art to identify, describe and elaborate relationships between people and place. By focusing on relationships that are fragile, subtle, complex or in a state of change I aim to reveal micro-histories and subjective experiences that bind people into communities and to place. Essential to these aims is an investigation of social engagement as a form of production. This investigation is informed by theorists such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster and Michel de Certeau. As is intrinsic to the use of social engagement, the project also seeks to question the ethical responsibility of artists who create artwork in relation to ‘others’.

During past 15 years or so, socially engaged art practice has received much attention. In the book Art as Experience, Paul Arden seeks to define art practice that engages in the production of social situations. Like Bourriaud, he describes how artists use and manipulate aspects of everyday life to establish an active participation between artist, subject, context and viewer:

When artists break out of their role as simple producers of images and objects – which are never immune to a blunting of their critical (or even subversive) edge by consumer reflexes – they become, as it were, smugglers who give viewers the tools they need to seize control of the means used to produce the visual, acoustic and mental images of their world. The actualisation of the various levels of reality contained in daily life, a development brought about by citizens transformed into transmitters and receivers, would make such citizens veritable participants in the real. It would then become possible to move beyond passive consumption toward a shaping of the experience of the real, in close contact with its material density.6

Arden and Bourriaud have provided critical discussion of many of the artists who contribute to the context in which I place this research. My secondary objective is to

6 Arden, Paul, ‘Experimenting With the Real’, Contemporary Practices: Art as Experience. Paul Arden, Pascal Beausse and Laurent Goumarre (eds.), Paris: Dis Voir, 1999, p. 93 14 demonstrate a field of art practice that contextualises the work included in the project exhibition. Within chapter 2: The Project in Context, I discuss the work of artists who use narrative forms to represent an active relationship between artist, subject and place, a relationship that is extended through the artwork to involve the viewer in constructing meaning.

During this project I engaged with specific social or geographical contexts with the specific aim of encouraging viewers to question and develop new readings of that context, rather than to provide answers and didactic information for the viewer. These investigations spawned new encounters and artworks, revealing connections between different places, people, situations and experiences. Some of the artworks discussed in this exegesis initiate a specific social activity, conversation or narrative that extends beyond the period of the work’s presentation. These artworks exist as part of a continuum and their material form is just one aspect of a series of experiences, narratives and ideas. Bourriaud suggests that this mode of production extends on the work of earlier conceptual artists:

The setting is widening; after the isolated object, it can now embrace the whole scene: the form of Gordon Matta-Clark or Dan Graham’s work can not be reduced to the ‘things’ those two artists ‘produce’; it is not the simple secondary effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures […]. The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line.7

Finally the artworks discussed within this exegesis and included in the project exhibition aim to visually, emotionally and conceptually engage the viewer through strategies such as immersion, aesthetic experience and fractured narrative. Viewer engagement is discussed in chapter 3: ‘Research and Process’ as well as chapter 2: ‘The Project in Context’.

7 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. pp. 20-21 15

Central Research Questions

The PhD project addresses the following questions:

1. What is the capacity for contemporary art to identify, describe and elaborate social and cultural relationships with place within different individuals and communities?

2. What events, experiences and memories bind people into communities and to place, and how can an artwork elaborate these?

3. What is the function and use of constructed situations within contemporary art practice, and how are these situations transferred from one context to another?

4. How does the artist reconcile their position in relation to their subject and what are some of the ethical responsibilities of using other people’s stories as content for artwork?

5. How is the viewer implicated within the space proposed by an artwork or exhibition and what are the some of the strategies used by contemporary artists to encourage viewer engagement and interpretation? 16

Project Background and Previous Work

This PhD project developed in 2004 from earlier work that investigated relationships between memory and historic sites. My earlier work was based in visual communication and interpretation design. During this time I was concerned with notions of site-specificity and interpretation of place and I was interested in the potential for narrative forms to communicate events, histories and places in non- didactic ways.

A personal frustration with what I saw as being a ‘passive’ mode of practice within interpretation design inspired the direction of this research project. I was originally drawn to visual communication by the ideals of communicating issues to a broad range of people as well as collaborating with clients and other practitioners. But the reality of much of the commercial work that I undertook seemed to move further and further away from these interests. I craved a mode of practice that critically confronted different social, cultural and geographical contexts through active participation and engagement. Investigating the work of several artists including Thomas Hirschhorn (who had previously worked as a graphic designer) helped to articulate my feelings at that time and develop ideas to address those concerns. Hirschhorn noted that:

I realised that I had to make the choice to be an artist because only as an artist could I be totally responsible for what I did […] I realised that to be an artist is not a question of form or of content, it’s a question of responsibility.8

To background this research project, I will briefly reflect on the project I undertook as part of my Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Tasmanian School of Art in 2003. This project focused on re-interpreting the historic IXL Jam Factory buildings and the redevelopment of the site on Hobart’s waterfront. The Honours project was contextualised within the field of interpretation design, although it also incorporated artworks such as video projection (footage captured on 8mm film), architectural installation, signage, signage development proposals and concepts for ‘place identity’.9 The Honours project engaged with oral history research as the main source of collecting content for the individual works: I interviewed and recorded

8 Hirschhorn, Thomas, ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn’, Thomas Hirschhorn. London and New York: Phaidon, 2004, p. 11 9 While working on the artworks and signage I developed a proposal to ‘brand’ the new development that would serve as a style guide for the body corporate and maintain a consistent identity across the different businesses. 17 conversations with six people who had previously worked at the IXL Jam Factory before it was liquidated in the early 1970s.10 The stories I recorded revealed personal experiences of factory life: feelings of animosity towards the closure of Tasmania’s biggest private business at the time; and opinions on the changing nature of the site’s 170 year European history, which was about to be transformed into a five-star hotel and retail complex. The stories provided an intimate knowledge of the past, which I then used as material to construct design and artworks.11 Despite their appeal as private and sometimes humorous memories from the IXL Factory, the stories resonated with persistent nostalgia.

Fig. 1 (left) Conserve, 2003, video still Fig. 2 (right) Untitled, 2003

10 John Elliot bought the company in 1972 and almost immediately began asset-stripping. Interviews with people who worked at the factory during this time still reveal strong feelings towards Elliot’s treatment of the company and the workers. 11 I included personal stories in the business signage (some of which told of workers’ struggles with management and corporate takeover) as a way of subtly subverting the commercial imperative of shop signs while also providing a point of commonality between the different businesses. 18

Fig. 3 (left) IXL Redevelopment site including signage, 2003 Fig. 4 (right) IXL Redevelopment signage (detail), 2003

By the end of the Honours project, I realised I was facing a question of commitment, I had become interested in being more directly implicated within situations and circumstances in the present, rather than passively interpreting the past. During the honours project, issues and associations such as memory, place, weather as a metaphor for passing time, derelict architecture and palimpsests had been central to developing my work. At the end of that process I realised my interests were increasingly changing: issues of collaboration, community discourse, public and private space and being personally implicated within the situations I was investigating; became central concerns to the development of new work. The social science research methodologies of interviewing and collecting oral histories that informed the Honours project was valuable to the development of this research project. The Honours research also required University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee approval – a process which informed the structure of artworks developed during this research. Finally, the Honours project initiated my interest in the relationships between text and image, specifically the ways they can be used to explore fracturing and displacement between what is heard or read and what is seen rather than simply illustrating or describing information.12

12 Relationships between text and image are discussed throughout this exegesis: image is described as video, film or photography, and text as elements such as subtitles, sound, printed text or voice-over narrative. 19

The Parameters of the Project

To define the parameters of the research project, here I will briefly address some of the legacies of early conceptual art and the influences this movement has had on the development of my research. I will then outline the parameters for the artwork produced during the research. Finally, I will summarise the parameters of the contextual field within which I locate the research project, by also outlining the structure of chapter 2: The Project in Context.

The practices of several artists from the 1960s and early 1970s – Dan Graham, Bas Jan Ader, Ed Ruscha, Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren and Gordon Matta-Clarke have particularly informed the research in the early stages.13 However these artists are not discussed in chapter 2 as it focuses on contemporary time-based artwork as the key contextual material. However, it is important to briefly acknowledge the parallels between the spatial/‘sensorial’ form of the work of Graham, Buren, Matta-Clarke, et al. and the spatial/narrative artwork of the contemporary artists who comprise the contextual field in which I place this project.

The ‘openness’ of the artwork created by the above-mentioned conceptual artists allows for subjectivity, where the viewer interprets the connections and relationships between objects and images rather than seeing them singularly and in isolation. The active ‘piecing together’ of images, objects and information is continued by the artists discussed within this exegesis, where through their work the viewer is encouraged to fill in the gaps between text, image and other narrative elements. Victor Burgin reflects on the viewer’s participation in experiencing conceptual artworks, where the mind ‘reaches out’ to imagine or interpret ‘distant objects’:

In moving through real, “ssensorial”, space we may touch immediately near objects. Distant objects in real space are “touched” in the mind (we say the mind “reaches out”). The manner, therefore, in which we make our mental

13 I am especially interested in the photo-conceptual artists from this period and the documentary-style photography of Dan Graham and his Homes of America and Ed Ruscha’s multiple photo essays such as his series on empty car parks. In writing about the relationships between Anri Sala’s practice and earlier conceptual artists, Lynne Cooke observed that the radical approach of the photo-conceptual artists was the way their documentary style artwork was a way to, ‘[…] respond to the particulars of the everyday world in a direct or even “dumb” fashion, a lineage that privileges the finding of an image over any technical finesse involved in its representation.’ Lynne Cooke and Anri Sala, ‘From Silence to Language and Back Again’, Parkett 73, 2005, p. 75 20

approach to a distant object of attention is styled through analogy with, and expectation of, the bodily experience of near objects.14

Fig. 5, Dan Graham Homes for America, 1966-1978

Dan Graham and Daniel Buren created work that relies on context and viewer participation to be complete. Dan Graham is widely recognised for his two-way mirror, glass pavilions which are often installed outside traditional gallery or museum environments. These pavilions, which Graham still produces today, make inter- subjective, perceptual experiences physical by creating situations where the viewer is able to observe an environment or situation while their image is simultaneously reflected on the glass structure. Graham’s glass pavilions thus solidify the meeting of Burgin’s real and ‘sensorial’ space. While these works respond to, and activate, the places they are installed, they are not site-specific sculptures that seek to describe particular histories or information about place. In a recent article in Parkett, Nicolas Guagnini, for example, comments on the way Graham’s pavilions continue to trigger new associations and experiences within familiar environments:

Designed with extreme rationality and attention to physical, urban and historical context, these works trigger irrationality inside the quotidian as they allow for an altered perception of familiar places. They free the spectator from established reality and awake the play impulse. In group situations people perceive each other perceiving each other, permitting alternative definitions of self and community. They are objects that activate the subject and are activated by the spectator-participants. They dissolve the split between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, allowing us to be children again.15

14 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag 15 Guagnini, Nicolas, ‘Quasi Schizophrenia: Notes for a Liberated Condition’, Parkett 68, (2003), p. 100 21

Fig. 6, Dan Graham, Two Anamorphic Surfaces, 2000

Where Dan Graham’s glass pavilions inspired social interaction and active participation, Daniel Buren, since the 1960s, has consistently incorporated a striped motif in his work to subtly alter the viewer’s perception of various architectural and urban environments. In a recent, published conversation with Pierre Huyghe, Buren speaks about his striped motif as an empty sign that activates the surrounding environment and allows the viewer to make connections and new associations with the space rather than neutralising it through repetition and pattern.16 As with Graham, Buren’s work is not site-specific; rather he makes work in-situ, which he explains as:

Work in situ could be translated as a transformation of the space of reception. This transformation can be made for the space, against the space, or in osmosis with the space, just as a chameleon changes colour on a green leaf, or becomes grey on a stone wall […] in situ means that there is voluntarily accepted link between the space of reception and the “work” that is made, presented and exposed there.17

The relationship between artwork and its context or ‘place’ is explored by these conceptual artists through perceptual and sensorial means, by creating work that relies on the viewer’s activation of multiple, interrelated elements. The artwork presented within the project exhibition, and the artists discussed within this exegesis continue this lineage by creating artworks that respond to place or context through social and narrative means. The key differentiation here is that, rather than using a physical intervention in place to initiate interpretation or social interaction, this research

16 Buren, Daniel, ‘Conversation between Daniel Buren and Pierre Huyghe’, Parkett 66, (2002), p. 107 17 Buren, Daniel, cited in essay by Alison M Gingeras, ‘The decorative as Strategy’, Parkett 66, (2002), p. 92 22 focuses on social engagement as a mode of production and both the process of making work and the material form of the artwork is time-based and ephemeral.

The artworks discussed in this exegesis are connected by the way they navigate both external, social space and internal, psychological space. A transition between external and internal space also connects my research with the concerns of earlier conceptual artists. Burgin notes that, ‘This mode of appreciation, learned in exterior, sensorial space, is applied when we negotiate interior, psychological space.’18 Within this exegesis I discuss how the relationship between these external and internal spaces creates potential for new narratives to emerge.

My exhibition comprises six discreet artworks that come together as an interrelated narrative. Although a methodology of discursive engagement was utilised across all the artworks, each was structured individually, depending on the scope and particular circumstances surrounding them.

Two basic parameters define the production and content of artwork within the research project:

1) Creating artwork informed by situations and places specific to Tasmania.19 2) Constructing narrative forms using time-based media.20

Despite the significance of place to this research, the artworks made within the project are not about particular places. The conditions ‘here and now’ of different places are used as means to create narratives which can be interpreted from multiple perspectives and relate to universal conditions of belonging, isolation, displacement and community. Being immersed in places and situations informs the development of artwork that suggests connections to other places, situations and people. Personal

18 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag. 19 The artworks made during the research project and selected for the exhibition are not defined as ‘site specific’ (as they are not ‘grounded’ to a particular site), however, they are all created from personal engagement and immersion with places and social situations. The artworks created during this project confront and personalise aspects of localised history, memory and cultural experience. Being personally implicated within specific places and situations allows for a more intimate interpretation of the subjects the artworks address. 20 Narrative formats are discussed in depth within chapter 2: The Project in Context and chapter 3: Research and Process. Within these two chapters I focus on various narrative relationships, especially narrative fracturing between text and image. Video is the main form of production utilised within this project and by the artists who comprise the contextual field. Despite this, video is not discussed in relation to the material form of the medium itself, but rather for the medium’s narrative capacity and ability to translate and transport temporary experience from one context to another. Throughout the exegesis, questions are discussed as to whether video represents the ‘artwork’ itself or if, in some cases, the video is simply a documentation of the artwork that materialised as a temporary event. 23 engagement within place and social situations is an important aspect of this process and as Nicolas Bourriaud observes, ‘… an artist invents new ways of swimming, he or she does not spend time sitting on the shore deconstructing the wakes of the boats, as if it were somehow possible to step outside human society.’21 Chapter 3 provides a detailed reflection on the development of each work included in the project exhibition and the processes of engagement and immersion behind these works.

While Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics contributed to the theoretical parameters of this research and informed the production of individual artworks, the project seeks to expand the criteria of Relational Aesthetics to define a contemporary situational aesthetic. As I discussed earlier, the difference between this contemporary situational aesthetic and that described by Burgin in the late 1960s, is the contemporary version’s concern with social engagement as a mode of production, and incorporation of time- based media and interrelated narratives rather than interrelated objects. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics can be defined as, ‘art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.’22 This project visualises a consistent situational aesthetic by incorporating human interactions and its social context within the expanded context of place. The definition of a contemporary situational aesthetic also considers the ethical responsibility of artists who work with other people (and their stories), and the social and cultural context of these encounters. I reflect on the issues surrounding artist, subject, place and representation in detail in the following chapters.

21 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 44 22 Ibid, p. 14 24

CHAPTER 2: The Project In Context

The contextual field in which I locate this project is defined by contemporary artists who, construct time-based narrative artworks that address social, cultural and geographical conditions specific to place. This chapter is therefore divided into five sections that provide reference points for individual artworks, represent the parameters of the contextual field, reflect the central research questions and establish an argument to asses the artwork included in the project exhibition. The context sections are:

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement: Here I discuss the practices of Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the ways they incorporate documentary strategies to enter into a discursive relationship with their subject. This section identifies how social interactions such as encounters, conversations, meetings, and various forms of collaboration between people have become formal devices readily incorporated into an artwork.

Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives: Here I examine works by Anri Sala, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe and Doug Aitken to provide a breadth of examples into ways artists use film, video, sound, text and fractured narrative to incorporate aspects of real places and encounters with real people within fictional or semi-fictional narrative structures.

Constructed Situations (using elements of the world to construct narratives): I this section I discuss artworks by Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller and Anri Sala. These artists work as director or facilitator in constructing situations that are enacted in collaboration with other people and documented on film or video.

The Other and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices: This section examines the ethical responsibilities of artists who work with other people to incorporate elements of their personal history within an artwork. As well as using critical writing by Hal Foster and Nicolas Bourriaud as theoretical reference points, I return to the work of Kutlug Ataman and Gillian Wearing to provide material examples of such practices. 25

Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition: The final section identifies different ways the viewer is implicated within the space of representation, and how the artist’s engagement with a place or situation is transferred from an external context (place) to a gallery environment. Here I describe the work of Pierre Huyghe, Anri Sala Kutlug Ataman, Doug Aitken and Sharon Lockhart.

I collected information for this context by visiting relevant exhibitions during the past three years;23 reviewing documentation of relevant artworks published in magazines, artist monographs, exhibition catalogues and books; collecting comments and reflections by the artists on their work; and reviewing writing by critics and theorists. This material also provided data and methodologies against which to consider my own artwork.

Quite early in the research I discovered the work of French artist Pierre Huyghe.24 I first came across Huyghe’s artwork through investigating a number of contemporary artists who use narrative structure within their work and with whom Huyghe often collaborates, including: Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija. I began by investigating several of Huyghe’s significant collaborative projects: ‘Anna Sanders Films’, No Ghost Just a Shell, and the Freed–Time Association.25

23 The most significant exhibitions include: Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 22 June – 4 September 2005; 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, 8 June – 26 August, 2006; Centre Pompidou Video Art: 1965-2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 14 December – 25 February, 2007; and Gillian Wearing: Living Proof, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 7 October – 3 December, 2006. 24 At that time I was having difficulty defining a field in which to clearly locate the research project. Reading about Pierre Huyghe’s work provided a significant step towards constructing a valid contextual framework to locate my individual works and the research project as a whole. 25 ‘Anna Sander’s Films’ is a film production company, founded by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Charles de Meraux, Philippe Parreno, Xavier Douroux, and Franck Gautherot. Huyghe and others have released several short and feature-length films and videos under the production of ‘Anna Sanders Films’. No Ghost Just a Shell was a collaborative project by Huyghe and Parreno (1999-2003) where they used the ‘shell’ of a manga character as an empty sign into which they would imbed multiple narratives and personal histories, collaborating with other artists to produce films, installations, events and images. The Freed-Time Association was initiated in 1995 by Huyghe and Parreno, its members include: Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Holler, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Xavier Veihan. ‘The collaboration brings together the participants in a group exhibition and gives it a social reality. Its aim is to extend the duration of this operation and to be the starting point for a series of projects of indeterminate length.’ Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. p. 282 26

Fig. 7, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell, 1999-2003

Looking more deeply into Huyghe’s practice helped to identify and define approaches central to developing an appropriate methodology within my project, including the narrative impulse within contemporary practice; the nature of collaborative practice and different means of collaboration between artist and subject; viewer engagement and expanded approaches to the exhibition format; and the potential for an artwork to actively engage with different places and social environments.26 Huyghe’s methodology signifies an approach to art practice that is fluid, situational and responsive, and that avoids categorisation – approaches shared by other key contextual artists. Huyghe’s ambitious and varied artworks borrow elements of real life, fusing them with fictional situations and representations. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev describes this form of production as representing a dramatic shift in contemporary practice:

By the end of the [20th] century, however, new artists from all parts of the world […] were looking at micro-events, both within ourselves and in the world at large. This meant moving away from History with a capital ‘H’, towards the more apparently limited and modest notion of story. They became interested in all the forms through which story can be told, from literature to film.27

Paul Arden defines the notion of experience as something that, ‘[…] can be concentrated into one phenomenological principle: the practical, theoretical and

26 Expanded exhibition formats are exemplified by modes such as evolving and changing exhibition installations, works in-situ, film distribution, media intervention, viewer participation, etc. These strategies are discussed later in this chapter. 27 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, ‘Pierre Huyghe: Through a Looking Glass’, Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 401 27 cognitive trying out of reality’.28 The artists who have informed my research work in the ‘in-between zones’, not just in terms of defying traditional modes of art practice (painting, sculpture, installation, etc), but also through the encounters or situations they negotiate, establish and construct in order to make artwork for the viewer to ‘experience’. They work individually and collaboratively, predominantly utilising time-based media such as video and film to translate and transport temporary experiences and relationships from one context to another (from a remote site or private environment to a gallery or exhibition space). The focus of the artwork is not its formal treatment alone (although high quality production typifies most of the work discussed); the works are characterised by an ability to communicate a particular situation or scenario by actively engaging the viewer within the space of representation.

28 Arden, Paul, op.cit. p. 12 28

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement

Over and above the relational character intrinsic to the artwork, the figures of reference of the sphere of human relations have now become fully-fledged artistic ‘forms’. Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects […] 29

As Bourriaud notes above, encounters, conversations, meetings, and various forms of collaboration between people have become formal devices readily incorporated into an artwork. A documentary approach within contemporary art practice has flooded recent exhibitions; perhaps the most notable local example of this was the 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact. There are a number of artists working today who continue to expand documentary form to open new relationships between artist and subject and by extension explore relationships between reality and fiction; here I will focus on the work of Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing and Dominique-Gonzalez Foerster.

Such artists establish a level of intimacy with their subjects – producing artwork that has the ability to bind artist, subject and viewer within a space of personal revelation. Different levels of discursive engagement are established over long periods of time, through chance encounters, by scripting and ‘setting up’ situations, or through fictionalising and elaborating conversations. The works discussed in this section emerge from the subject speaking in close proximity with the artist, on apparently equal terms and without obvious direction.

Given my use of documentary strategies to investigate relationships between people and place, and interest in experimental narrative form, I was very interested to discover the filmic works of Kutlug Ataman through the large survey exhibition of his videos at the Museum of Contemporary Art in early 2006 curated by Rachel Kent. This comprehensive exhibition (which was the first major survey of Ataman’s work in Australia) offered an opportunity to experience Ataman’s investigation into conversational relationships with his subjects as well as his experimental approach to video installation. The willingness of Ataman’s subjects to confess, reveal and

29 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 28 29 elaborate elements of their personal lives in front of his camera extends from a mutual trust that is established over extensive periods of time:30

Ataman’s formal subversion lies in the ways he seduces his subjects into revealing and staging the innermost fantasies of their personal lives which are then laid bare in almost unbearable frankness, revealing an intimacy and familiarity with its subject which is difficult to achieve in the programmatic television-hour genre of documentary television.31

Possibly Ataman’s most ambitious work to date, Küba (2004), is also the best demonstration of his commitment to building a discursive engagement with his subjects.32 Küba consists of over 40 interviews with different members of the shanty- town by the same name, which is located on the outskirts of Istanbul. Ataman lived in Küba over a period of two years, and the honesty and openness with which his subjects speak to his camera attest to the intimate relationship he established with the place and the people who live there.33 In her catalogue essay, Rachel Kent describes the context of the town of Küba and its inhabitants:

Not featured on any official map, this locale is home to impoverished Kurds and Turks, Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists, and disparate individuals who have fallen foul of the law or of drugs […] Established during the 1960’s as a rough conglomeration of shacks which were swiftly bulldozed by the authorities, rebuilt and then added to, its persistence as a landmark is mirrored by the remarkable tenacity of its inhabitants […] 34

The confronting, confessional nature of Küba comes in part from the space Ataman gives his subjects in which to speak openly and honestly. As well as remaining invisible behind the camera, Ataman edits each video so it is only his subjects that can be heard speaking, although their stories have obviously evolved through extended periods of conversation and prompting. Rather than manipulating his subjects to inhabit narratives he plans to construct, Ataman enters into a deeply personal,

30 Curator Rachel Kent, notes that Ataman’s videos are made‘[…] featuring only individuals with whom the artist has a prior relationship...’ Kent, Rachel, ‘Reality at the Service of Fiction: the Film Art of Kutlug Ataman’, Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p.8 31 Nash, Mark, ‘Kutlug Ataman’s experiments with truth’, Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 42 32 Küba was funded by Artangle and completed in 2004. 33 Kent, Rachel, op.cit. p. 13 34 Ibid, p. 13 30 conversational partnership with each individual. His apparently genuine interest in and empathy for their lived experience is given expression through each video, and collectively the interviews draw a portrait of a place made up of subjective stories of isolation, dislocation, loss and hope. Kent identifies the broader issues behind this collective portrait, ‘geography and location also become silent yet persistent currents in these works. Seen collectively Ataman’s film work is like an impressionistic, ever changing portrait of modern day Turkey and its wider position within the world.’35

Fig. 8, Kutlug Ataman, Küba, 2004

Fig. 9, Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004

35 Ibid, p. 9 31

Ataman’s skill as an artist lies in the way he manages to balance his concern for individual lives and personal histories while also maintaining a level of critical distance from his subjects.36 Through his interviews, Ataman addresses broader issues of human identity in relation to place and culture:

The individuals who live in Küba are very important, but my main point was never Küba. It was an experimentation. Up until now I have worked with individuals fabricating identities, and I filmed that process: how they fabricate this role, how they make themselves stars, heroes.37

Gillian Wearing is another artist who seeks to establish private and confessional, discursive connections with her subjects, connections that are transferred to the viewer through video installation and documentary photography. Although, like Ataman, she is obsessed with extricating other people’s stories, Wearing says that, ‘[she] can never forget that [she is] always outside the inner experience of another person.’38

Wearing constructs her videos by arranging meetings with strangers or through chance encounters on the street. Her works incorporate a documentary style similar to Kutlug Ataman’s elaborate video portraits and interviews, although they are derived from a vastly different place and cultural context. Wearing implicates herself within different social situations by prompting strangers in the street to write on an empty sign the first thing that comes into their minds. She also places advertisements in popular newspapers asking for people to ‘confess all on video. Don’t Worry, You Will be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian’; another advertisement asks for participants to speak of childhood trauma; ‘Negative or traumatic experience in childhood or youth and willing to talk about it on film. Identity will be concealed’.39 Wearing uses deceivingly simple means to encourage her subjects to communicate their most intimate thoughts and personal experiences – although her subject’s are often disguised and there is no way of confirming the validity of such experiences. As with Ataman, Wearing incorporates elements of other people’s lives to indirectly address broader issues of human identity and subjectivity; unlike Ataman she predominantly engages with total

36 The issue of critical distance will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. 37 Ataman, Kutlug and Politi, Gia, ‘Kutlug Ataman and Atom Egoyan: and the world will be as one…’, Flash Art, May/June 2006, p. 94 38 Wearing, Gillian, cited in essay by Barry Schwabsky, ‘The Voice Estranged’, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003, p. 38 39 Molon, Dominic, ‘Observing the Masses’, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003, p. 14 32 strangers with whom she has had no prior contact.40 Similar to the way Jeremy Deller41 reflects on the unexpected contributions his collaborators can bring to his projects, Wearing identifies the value of the partnerships she establishes with her subjects, ‘I’m more interested in how other people can put things together, how people can say something far more interesting than I can.’42

Fig. 10, Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-93

The subtlety of Wearing’s social surveys encourages the viewer to watch for longer or look more closely, opening space in which the viewer can inhabit and expand the seemingly objective work beyond didactic documentation. As Dominic Molon observes, ‘[Wearing’s] aesthetically structured techniques of ethnographic observation and representation create a picture of mundane existence that reveals human frailties without judgement, putting the onus of empathy or rejection on the viewer.’43

Wearing’s video works, Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994) and Trauma (2000) reveal her negotiation of the territory between documentary and contemporary art, real and fictional dialogue. For these two works Wearing relied on the participation of strangers and their willingness to speak to the artist and her camera. The stories resemble the therapeutic,

40 Wearing’s engagement with strangers is exemplified in one of her earlier and most well known works, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say. This artwork is a series of documentary-style photographs, showing everyday people posing in everyday places (shopping malls, street corners, train platforms, etc) holding their sign without expression towards Wearing’s camera. Signs… presents the experiences of strangers in a carefully structured but objective and non-judgemental way, thus allowing the viewer to consider their relationship to the messages presented and the people Wearing has encountered. She presents these stories and experiences as a collective condition, suggesting common anxieties, traumas, hopes and regrets that connect different individuals in London. 41 Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave is discussed on page 58 of this exegesis. 42 Wearing, Gillian, cited in Burn, Gordon, ‘The Encounter With Reality’, Parkett 70, 2002, p. 110 43 Molon, Dominic, op.cit. p. 23 33 conversational interviews of Ataman, but the origins of these stories are distorted through Wearing masking the identity of her subjects. By covering and altering her participant’s faces, Wearing makes a simple intervention that shifts the video from being a factual documentation of individual confession, to a strangely anonymous series of stories, that’s origins are obscured and distorted. The stories no longer have a familiar and recognisable basis, they seem real through the conviction in each person’s voice but with personal identity concealed – they become a form of fiction left open to interpretation. Barry Schwabsky notes that, ‘Confess all…, through its separation between the face and the voice, is about the possibility of confession without confession – a confession that is neither true or false because it is authorless.’44

Fig. 11, Gillian Wearing, Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian, 1994

44 Schwabsky, Barry, op.cit. p. 31 34

Fig. 12, Gillian Wearing, Trauma, 2000

Wearing navigates a slippery territory between creating works from genuine encounters on the one hand and exploiting her subjects on the other (works such as Drunk45 have been criticised as exploitative and opportunist).46 Exploitative or not, Wearing’s works are a collaboration between artist and subject which evolve from a discursive engagement that is driven by a subject’s compulsion to talk and share stories and Wearing’s acute awareness of the malleability and fragility of human identity.

In the works discussed above, Ataman and Wearing initiated a discursive exchange with their subjects, while also remaining invisible, participating outside the ‘frame’. In the subtle, filmic works of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster both artist and subject remain outside the frame, and it is the actual place of encounter that is depicted. Riyo (1999), Plages (2001) and Central (2001) are a trilogy of short films shot in Kyoto, Copacabana beach and Hong Kong Harbour. Each film is an obsessive yet detached study of the relationships between people and place.

45 Gillian Wearing’s Drunk is discussed on page 68 of this exegesis. 46 In his review of Wearing’s solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Nov. – Dec. 2006), Sebastian Smee isolated Drunk as a work that ‘crossed the line’ to become voyeuristic and exploitative. Smee wrote that, ‘It [Drunk] may be intended as an accusation against those who pass by people like these on the street without doing anything to help. But it goes nowhere. There is not art, just voyeurism.’ Smee, Sebastian, ‘Mind the Gap’, The Weekend Australian, November 18-19, 2006, p. 18 35

Fig. 13, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Riyo, 1999

Gonzalez-Foerster’s films allude to passing encounters in exotic places, using subtitles to create a narrative context for her melancholic observations. Each film reveals a conversation or monologue from an unseen and possibly fictional character. In Riyo, for example, we hear and read a nervous conversation between an adolescent couple who have presumably only recently met. The conversation unfolds as the camera tracks slowly along a riverside at night, filming social activity in the bars and cafés on the opposite bank. Similarly, in Plages, Gonzalez-Foerster surveys the social activity unfolding at Copacabana Beach during sunset from the bird’s eye perspective of her hotel room. As night falls and tropical rain disperses the crowd who run to seek cover, a voice-over with subtitles describes the myth of Copacabana. The film concludes with the voice of an old man, ‘Copacabana is wonderful, it is a wonderful town. Copacabana does not exist.’47 These open and suggestive narratives are continued in Central, where we see the silhouette of a woman waiting at the Ferry Terminal at Hong Kong Harbour, a subtitled monologue reveals she is waiting for her brother to arrive. The stories in Central, as in Riyo and Plages, remain distant and ambiguous: are these real people and real stories being told, or has Gonzalez-Foerster scripted these narratives to elaborate the place-portraits?

47 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Plages, 2001, 35mm film, Dolby surround sound, 15:00 min 36

Fig. 14, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Plages, 2001, production still

Through different terms of encounter and participation, Ataman, Wearing and Gonzalez-Foerster construct narrative works that are connected through an aesthetic of proximity and intimacy. Whether the encounter is established through building trust over time, allowing strangers to confess, scripting actions or recording and constructing elusive conversations, a close relationship between artist and subject opens the space for individuals to speak and construct their own personal histories. Working in this way, these artists have established fluid, relational practices that respond to different social, cultural and geographic contexts. The nature of this fluidity means these artists must also negotiate constantly changing circumstances, a situation Bourriaud has identified as being particularly unstable, ‘Precariousness is at the centre of a formal universe in which nothing is durable; everything is movement: the trajectory between two places is favoured in relation to the place itself, and encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them.’48

48 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Postproduction. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002, p. 49 37

Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives

I see the notion of a documentary as a starting point in reality. For me, these works have been transformed into fiction. They’re all very much fiction […] the idea of a history – an event or a situation – has drawn me in, but simply as a departure point, an open door; what happens thereafter can often create its own pulse.49

This discussion investigates how the displacement of real and fictional narratives invites the viewer to become an active participant, operating within the narrative space created by the artwork. Previously I reflected on the documentary approach incorporated into contemporary practice, in this section I will discuss how forms of documentary and linear narrative are manipulated, expanded and fractured through investigating the complex relationship between text and image.50 ‘Documentary’ fails to accurately describe much of the work identified in this chapter, instead real fictions is a more accurate term to define artworks that incorporate elements of real places and encounters with real people within fictional or semi-fictional narrative structure.51 The veracity of incorporating lived experience and real encounters may be crucial to the work’s success, giving it a rawness, precariousness and immediacy that would not exist otherwise. In an interview with Chrissie Ile, Eija-Liisa Ahtila confesses her compulsion to develop fictional films from real situations and encounters:

All the stories and characters are fictional but based on research. When I start thinking about a work I like to be certain about the facts – I need to know that it

49 Aitken, Doug, ‘Amanda Sharp in conversation with Doug Aitken’, Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 13 50 Within this discussion I focus on fractured narratives through contrasting two consistent elements: text and image. In the works of several artists, image appears as video, photography or even the urban environment, while text appears as subtitles, sound, printed text or voice-over narration. Fracturing occurs through strategies such as subtitles that conflict or create other interpretations of the images they support, voice-over narration or subtitles that are created from multiple voices and compressed into one invisible narrator, and spatial fracturing through separating or multiplying sound and image within video and film installation. 51 The term Real Fictions has been used by artists, critics and curators in several contexts with slightly different meanings, although always relating to incorporating elements of fiction within ‘real’ situations or places. Rachel Kent talks about ‘reality at the service of fiction’ in relation to Kutlug Ataman’s work; Nancy Spector talks about ‘real fictions’ in her article ‘All the World’ in Frieze, issue 98, April 2006; Doug Aitken speaks about reality as a starting point in his work; Elizabeth Fisher wrote an essay ‘Real Fictions’ for her exhibition Sodium Dreams, at the Barb College in Hudson, June 29 – September 7, 2003; Nicolas Bourriaud, called his interview with Philippe Parreno ‘Real Virtuality’ for Art Press no.208, Dec. 1995 pp. 41-44. 38

could have happened and that it’s believable. Then again, the knowledge that you gain through research gives you the freedom to invent things.52

Chance discoveries and encounters lie at the heart of much of Anri Sala’s video work. He combines documentary aesthetic with a fascination for the obscurity of language, while simultaneously resisting didactic narrative. Most of his work begins without a script, requires little or no direction and is constructed through a subtle manipulation of situations happened upon by chance. One of the first pieces to bring Sala international attention was Intervista, a video made in 1998 after Sala found an old role of film while cleaning out his apartment in Tirana during a short return from studies in Paris. The film revealed a communist party meeting, with hundreds of participants enthralled in a speech by their leader, Enver Hoxha. Standing next to Hoxha was a young woman who was later filmed giving an interview with a journalist – the woman was Valdet Sala, Anri Sala’s mother. Finding this footage was the impetus to Sala making Intervista, but there was a crucial missing element to the film – there was no sound track accompanying the images. In Intervista Sala used documentary form (a single channel, 30 minute video) to reveal the story behind the found footage and search for the missing sound. Rather than a detached observation, Intervista provides a personal account of Albanian history and its changed political circumstances while also being a complex video portrait of Sala’s mother and her relationship to a place with a tumultuous political history. Sala’s video is not an attempt to construct a factual document in order to educate the viewer about his native Albania. Rather he uses the chance finding of a slice of history to highlight the flexible relationships between memory and history, truth and fiction, text and image.

52 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, ‘Thinking in Film: Eija-Liisa Ahtila in Conversation with Chrissie Iles’, Parkett 68, 2003, p. 62 39

Fig. 15, Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998

In the video Sala shows his mother the footage of the meeting and interview as she laughs at the images of herself from an earlier time. She comments that she can remember that the footage of the meeting is from the Albanian Youth Congress in 1977, but can’t recall anything more of the soundless interview. The rest of Intervista describes Sala’s journey to find the missing sound and words from the interview footage. After locating the journalist and sound-man from the original interview, Sala learns that sound and vision were recorded separately and the search for the original sound track would be futile. Sala then visits a school for the deaf, where he commissions help to lip read the footage and transcribe the interview which he then adds as subtitles to the images of his mother speaking to the journalist. The actual process of making Intervista, which was driven by Sala’s fascination with his mother’s earlier life in Albania, therefore begins to determine its structure.

Intervista personalises public history and presents a subjective experience of a past communist regime that seems alien to the ‘Western World’. Mark Godfrey identifies that in this video Sala communicates the, ‘impossibility of an “objective” approach to a historical subject and also admitted that everyone was implicated in Albania’s troubled past.’53 There is no suggestion in Intervista that the communist approach was ‘wrong’ per se or that contemporary Albania is ‘right’ – during the interview, which continues throughout the film, Sala’s mother openly worries about recent events in Albania and remarks that she still lives by many of her ideals from that time. In its apparent simplicity, Intervista confronts issues that are central to the works discussed

53 Godfrey, Mark, ‘Articulate Enigma: the works of Anri Sala’, Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 36 40 in this chapter, such as the obscurity and schism that can exist (or be created) between text and image, language and meaning, experience and representation.

In making real fictions, artists like Sala embrace or actively construct a ‘void’ within the narrative structure. They open a space for the viewer to inhabit the scenario, allowing for a subjective reading of the narrative. Tacita Dean also engages with place to investigate links between memory and history. A subtleness and distinct lack of ‘action’ typifies her evocative films. For Dean, actually occupying and experiencing the places where she makes her work is hugely significant, and like Sala, she embraces chance in the process of directing and capturing the content of her films. In a short essay in Artforum, Dean speaks about imagining her journeys to distant places as she ‘sits in urban safety’:

Maybe getting lost, or rather disappearing out of sight, has become an anachronism in our communication-crazed world. Is this why being hostage to such remoteness is so attractive to me when, truth be told, I am a coward to such loneliness?54

Fig. 16 (left) Tacita Dean, Bubble House (exterior), 1999 Fig. 17 (right) Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000

Works such as Teignmouth Electron (2000), Bubble House (1999), Disappearance at Sea (1996) and Sound Mirrors (1999) illustrate Dean’s fascination with stories of isolated places and forgotten ambition. These works obsessively trace past monuments, failed adventures and lost heroes creating narrative voids that lightly touch historic context while remaining unresolved, leaving the viewer with persistent

54 Dean, Tacita, ‘Tristan Da Cunha’, Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 275 41 questions: ‘where is this place, what happened here?’ In these artworks Dean fractures and expands their narrative capacity through the combination of sound and image. Dean incorporates simple devices to change the viewer’s perception of the content of the films and reveal the hidden stories and histories behind the places she investigates. Mark Godfrey observes how sound is used in Dean’s films to evoke further consideration of seemingly ordinary places:

Sound operates in complex ways in all these works, but precise information about the locations is not supplied in the soundtracks, and the works charge often comes from the contrast a viewer makes between the banality or apparent innocence of the portrayed location and the history associated with it.55

Dean’s artwork Boots (2003) comprises three, 20-minute films about an old man and an empty mansion. Without revealing details or background information about either, the film creates an atmosphere of emptiness and subtly describes an unfolding relationship between the movement of the old man, his strangely melancholic observations and the vacant spaces within the building. The setting for the film is an aristocratic villa in an expansive garden. The villa is the Casa Serralves in Porto, Portugal.56 In researching the history of the villa, Dean noted some of the aspects that added to its atmosphere, especially the observation that the lady of the villa, ‘pined for Paris, and even today the house retains a sort of melancholy. It was already a stage set, but for me it was the shabbiness and slight neglect that held its atmosphere.’57 The old man in Boots also holds a rich and complex history that Dean chose to allude to rather than explain through her films. Dean explains the significance of selecting Boots as the co-subject of her film:

Boots was my sister’s godfather […] His real name was Robert Steane, but we knew him as Boots because of his orthopaedic boot, which he would have elegantly handmade in the style of his other shoe by a top London craftsman. Multiple car accidents added to his rather baroque appearance and left him blind in one eye, but his charm transcended everything. His father was almost certainly the illegitimate son of King George V who left England to become a silent movie star in Germany in the 20’s […] One of the many things that

55 Godfrey, Mark, ‘Artist as Historian’, op.cit. p. 143 56 The Casa Serralves was completed in 1940 by the architect Charles Siclis and was commissioned by the Second Count of Vizela, Carlos Alberto Cabral and his French wife, Blanche, who was a model from Paris. Greer, Germaine, ‘Boots’, Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 107 57 Dean, Tacita, ‘Tacita Dean: talks about Boots’, Artforum, October 2003, p. 102 42

attracted me to Boots was exactly this undateable urbanity that he carried around with him without conscious nostalgia. He was somehow the perfect anachronism.58

Fig. 18, Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003, film stills

Fig. 19, Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003, film stills

Fig. 20 and 21, Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003, installation view

I saw Boots installed in a huge structure at Artspace as part of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney Zones of Contact. The three interrelated films were projected in three connected, darkened rooms. What initially seems to be the same film projected three

58 Ibid, p. 102 43 times, gradually revealed itself as a triptych of films, each with a slightly different structure. At first it is difficult to differentiate the slippages between these three parallel narratives, moving between the rooms only seems to make the house and the anonymous figure of the old man, even more elusive and expansive. It’s not until Boots quietly mutters commentary that we realise there is a difference in the three- stream narrative: Boots speaks in German, English and French, a separate language for each film. My lack of both French and German made it difficult to compare syntax and descriptions between the languages, but the disjointed nature of the English version led me to presume that each commentary is more a collection of observations and fractured memories – seemingly by a fictional character who Boots temporarily inhabits – than a clear and flowing narrative. Dean explains the background to Boots’ multi-linguistic narration:

I wanted to animate the house very specifically. So I got fixated on the idea of asking Boots to be in the film. He was an architect, and I wanted a fictional architectural account of the peculiarities of the villa […]

Boots took a dislike to the villa and refused, even for the sake of fiction, to play the architect. Instead he took the part of Blanche. He picked up on the atmosphere of the house quickly and was unscripted.59

Dean embraces slowness, inaction and prolonged observation within her films, a structural device that occasionally verges towards painful tedium. But films like Boots incorporate this observatory structure as a strategy to test the limits of viewer perception and attention. What appears to be a passive documentary of a man walking through a house reveals itself as a narrative experience that is more complex and difficult to define. Every aspect of the anamorphic film is manipulated; the man is actually a symbol for an aristocratic French model from another time; the colour of the film is pushed and pulled, shifting between melancholic soft tones and dream-like vibrancy; the sound is also manipulated and carefully constructed from actual and artificial effects; and, through editing, the film uses three different languages to carefully map the villa through three different routes, each beginning and finishing at a specific point, ‘each is a valediction that ends at night.’60

59 Ibid, p. 103 60 Ibid, p. 103 44

Pierre Huyghe also obsessively explores the emergence of fiction within reality, resulting in elaborate narrative structures that expand documentary representation to experiential and immersive film and installation environments. Huyghe manipulates the sites and circumstances around his experience of place to form fictional models and time-based narrative protocols. For Huyghe, using real places is simply a means to solidify his fictional constructs, a process opposite to Dean’s approach. Huyghe finds places to tell his stories rather than discovering stories through particular places. Huyghe explains, ‘I’m interested in constructing the condition of emergence of a fiction – we invent a hypothesis, and give ourselves the real means to verify it.’61

Fig. 22 (left) and 23 (right), Pierre Huyghe, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating Expedition) A Musical, Act 1 (left) and Act 3 (right), 2002

Almost every project in Huyghe’s oeuvre could be discussed in relation to the idea of real fictions, here I will focus on the recent project A Journey That Wasn’t (2005). Huyghe has a long running fascination with Antarctica, stemming from his earlier project, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating Expedition) A Musical, (2002), which consisted of a three-story exhibition at the Bregenz Kunsthaus in Austria. L’Expèdition scintillante is an exhibition that, ‘provides the scenario of an expedition’, rather than a representation of a place as elusive as Antarctica.62 Huyghe uses place as a context or stage to act out his narrative inventions and social experiments. Instead of directly confronting the history of these places, he seeks out sites that he calls ‘no knowledge zones’, allowing him to write new cultural narratives and construct open scenarios without the burden of historic fact.63 L’Expèdition scintillante was a precursor for the actual expedition Huyghe took to Antarctica several years later with a group of artists in order to make the artwork A Journey that Wasn’t (2005). Huyghe articulates his interest in Antarctica and its ‘emptiness’ by commenting that:

61 Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, Frieze 100, August 2006, p. 217 62 Huyghe, Pierre, Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 92 63 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, p.218 45

In my case, the issue of the ‘remote’ place is not exactly the point. The movement that brings you to the outside is as important as the outside itself. It’s a question of displacement. What’s interesting is how you create this conceptual displacement, the journey that brings you to this elsewhere, not the destination itself. I’m less concerned about place than the production of situations and complex, heterogeneous territories.

Our journey to Antarctica had nothing to do with going far away per se. A boat is a temporary habitat moving toward the unpredictable, a collective moment, a social time. Then it becomes how you translate the experience. The displacement is in the constant renegotiations that takes place between the people engaged in the journey […] Going somewhere like Antarctica is an attempt to produce a place without pre-existing protocol, a no-knowledge zone. It might be easier to find this in a place that’s not overcrowded with meaning, rules, culture, even longitude and latitude.64

Fig. 24 and 25, Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, 2005, production stills

As with most of Huyghe’s work, A Journey That Wasn’t was created in several distinct stages. The artwork began with the hypothesis or outline for a fiction, that there was a new island which had emerged in Antarctica as a result of climate change, and that this island is inhabited by a mythical creature, something resembling an albino penguin. The film revealed the two main aspects to the story; one screen showed scenes from the actual expedition, including the artist’s boat stranded in ice and the group of artists navigating a small iceberg/island. The other aspect was a

64 Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Remote Possibilities: a roundtable discussion on Land Art’s changing terrain’, Moderated by Tim Griffin, with Claire Bishop, Lynne Cooke, Pierre Huyghe, Pamela M. Lee, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittle, Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 290 46 documentation of an opera Huyghe facilitated and directed in Central Park in New York. Huyghe was interested in translating the experience of a journey (fictional or not) through the non-literal and performative mode of opera. Huyghe saw the opera as being, ‘an equivalent experience to encountering the island without being a representation of it.’65 The opera was a form of ‘text’ which describes the physical and experiential nature of the island, and Huyghe speculated that the time-based nature of the performance could reflect the geographic nature of the island.

The premise or fictional structure for A Journey that Wasn’t seems somewhat far- fetched (that the artist somehow encountered a mythical albino penguin on a frontier island). But Huyghe’s concern was not with the veracity of the story, rather it was with how to create new forms of fractured narrative. He saw the operatic performance as an effective and legitimate way to describe a collective experience of a place. He also aptly describes the shift this form of representation constitutes from earlier forms of artistic interventions with place. Huyghe speaks about the change from the concerns of land artists of documenting interventions in place to the contemporary artists’ concern with creating narrative protocols which become imbedded in place:

Smithson was asking himself how you deal with an experience and translate or transport it. What happens in this kind of movement? The film Spiral Jetty, for example, exists at an intersection of science, fiction, document and travel. The film becomes a thing in itself. It has this double effect. And I don’t think I see that so often in the many ‘documentary’ artworks today. For me, documentation really has something to do with the problem of the trace. I think some of the people of my generation are trying to get around the problem of the factual report by introducing a fictional parameter into the account, the real and the unreal dialogue. A coefficient of fiction has infiltrated the pre-production of a project itself, in its narrative protocols as well as in its mediation. The place of representation is real, but it incorporates fictional elements. The fiction is a reality principle…66

Without going into further depth on the particularities of specific projects, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Stan Douglas, Gillian Wearing and Janet

65 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, p. 217 66 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Remote Possibilities: a roundtable discussion on Land Art’s changing terrain’, p. 366 47

Cardiff have also influenced my research into the ways contemporary artists incorporate fictional elements within documentary approaches.

Aitken immerses himself in places to collect material which he manipulates into multi-screen, video installations. Sounds and images are fractured and interwoven to create impressionistic portraits of empty landscapes. Aitken constructs real fictions by travelling to a place and filming according to strict conceptual parameters. In works such as Monsoon (1995), Aitken waited at the site of the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana in 1978 for a monsoon to arrive. The resulting film captures evidence of the site’s tragic history as well as the subtle changes in atmosphere and the darkening sky. Monsoon ends before the rain falls, leaving the film in a continual state of becoming. Diamond Sea (1997) was filmed in the diamond mines of the Namib Desert. To make this work, Aitken filmed the landscape and details of the mine’s elaborate surveillance system for as long as he was allowed to stay. Finally, Eraser (1998) documents the island of Montserrat, almost annihilated by a volcanic eruption a year earlier. To make this work Aitken and his crew simply attempted to navigate a straight line across the island, capturing images of the ‘erased’ landscape as they went.

Fig. 26, Doug Aitken, Diamond Sea, 1997, production still 48

Fig. 27, Doug Aitken, Eraser, 1998, production still

These three works exemplify Aitken’s, ‘attempt to create a narrative out of topographical parameters’.67 The places Aitken explores have been erased, hidden or repressed from collective memory; erased due to natural disaster, left to peace after human tragedy, or controlled and restricted from ‘external’ access. Aitken’s narrative forms are influenced by the experience of actually being present in these places, and new narrative experiences emerge through editing and the reconfiguration of those experiences. Reflecting on Aitken’s practice has been important to the development of my project – as well as artworks evolving through facilitation or direction, narrative structure has also emerged through being immersed in different situations and environments (as in the Arberg Bay videos or Unstable Ground). Allowing a narrative to emerge through unexpected circumstances such as ‘topological parameters’ or social encounters was at times confronting, but this process also lends the works an immediacy and energy that I isolated and refined through the editing processes.

As I have discussed, the real fictions exemplified in this section have been created through scripting and facilitating performances, creating real and imagined dialogues, or by re-configuring reality through complex editing techniques. Documentary strategies are used a starting point in this process, but the intention is not to create documentary artworks that educate the viewer or explain the circumstances of a place, situation or piece of history. Through expanding documentary form and creating real fictions, more questions are proposed than answered, opening room for viewer

67 Aitken, Doug, op.cit. p. 12 49 interpretation and engagement. The following section ‘Constructed Situations’ continues discussion of real fictions by examining ways artists facilitate collective activity or construct events in order to produce artworks that aim to modify social, cultural or historic circumstances. 50

Constructed Situations: using elements of the world to construct narratives

In this section I focus on four projects that use constructed situations to actively engage with a place and its social, historic and geographic context; Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day (2003), Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001) and Anri Sala’s Long Sorrow (2005). These artists continue a Situationist International legacy, especially Guy Debord’s ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’. In this report Debord describes the situationist premise:

Our Central purpose is the construction of situations, that is, the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature. We must develop an intervention directed by the complicated factors of two great components in perpetual interaction: the material setting of life and the behaviours that it incites and that overturn it. 68

In many ways, Debord’s unofficial mission statement remains particularly relevant to the works of Huyghe, Alÿs, Deller and Sala, as well as some of my own artworks, especially write/here and Saturday Nights. Through constructing situations, artists create events, collective action, and shared experiences – rather than objects or images – as a way to modify everyday life. Debord alluded to this participatory mode of production in his idea of unitary urbanism – a means of, ‘cooperating in an integral composition of the environment […] Unitary urbanism must control, for example, the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of food and drink.’69

This section identifies how contemporary artists engage with varied cultural and geographic contexts to create ephemeral, constructed situations which are subsequently transferred from one context to another through re-presentations as films or project documentation. The artworks discussed here involve working with other people, responding to changing social and geographical contexts and establishing and maintaining relations, all of which have unexpected influences on the outcomes of such projects. The artist task in this context is to manage a level of authorship while

68 Debord, Guy, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, Mc Donough, Tom (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationists International, Cambridge: MIT/October, 2002, p. 44 69 Ibid, p. 44 51 also harnessing diverse influences to create artworks that may have life possibility beyond the period of presentation in an exhibition.70

The idea of the ‘story’ and its relationship to reality is a central focus of Pierre Huyghe’s practice. Streamside Day (2003) uses all the elements of a real situation (real people, a real community, a real place) to construct an elaborate scenario that reveals the experiences behind the establishment of a new community called Streamside Knolls in New York State. Huyghe was commissioned by DIA Centre for the Arts in 2002 to make a new work; he was drawn to the notion of a new American community being constructed on the edge of the forest – literally representing the point where culture meets nature. Rather than criticising the homogenisation inherent in America’s expanding suburbia,71 he sought to represent the ways in which communities establish a sense of place and shared ritual, in this case Streamside Knolls.72

Fig. 28, Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003, production still

70 Within Relational Aesthetics Bourriaud argues for the necessity or art to expand and elaborate the conditions in which we live today. The life possibility of an artwork is the means it creates, ‘ways of living an models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist’. Bourriaud, Nicolas, op cit. p. 13 71 And the financial risk of home ownership, as has become apparent with the sub-prime mortgage crisis that swept the United States in 2007. Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose, ‘US mortgage crisis goes into meltdown’, The Daily Telegraph, (2007), 5 October 2007 72 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, op.cit. p. 405 52

Huyghe’s two-part film Streamside Day is intended to be a tale of contemporary migration, and an instructional film for a community celebration. The following synopsis by Huyghe outlines the multiple intentions and issues behind this constructed situation:

In a forest along the Hudson River, future inhabitants progressively arrive at a real-estate development that is still under construction. A new custom will be invented to celebrate the birth of this community. We are in year one; it is the first anniversary of this new kind of village. A date will appear in the calendar that will be celebrated in subsequent years. Streamside Day is a story that will produce an “addition” of reality. The event takes the shape of an annual celebration and a project for a community centre that will be built in collaboration with the architect Francois Roche.

The celebration is based on two themes – environment and migration. A parade followed by a welcoming speech by the mayor and the developer, a meal with a birthday cake, children dressed up as animals, who make houses out of cardboard boxes, a folk song – the hymn of the event – and a balloon of light in the shape of a moon, constitute the main rituals. The tree and the cardboard box are the signs for this tradition, just as a pumpkin stands for Halloween.

Draughtsmen, photographers, writers, a musician and an architect capture the event. A film is made, which will serve as a guideline for the yearly replaying of this new tradition, as if it were a score for the celebration.

The film is in two parts. The first shows the facts that lie at the source of the custom; the second is a re-interpretation of the same facts in the form of a celebration.73

73 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. Pierre Huyghe, p. 147 53

Fig. 29 and 30, Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003, production still

Streamside Day is intended to be a project with life possibility, Huyghe worked in partnership with the Streamside Knolls community to construct a situation based on collective celebration that can be re-interpreted and re-enacted over subsequent years. The partnership was mutually beneficial in that the community helped Huyghe construct the story for the film, and Huyghe helped the community organise a day of celebration to mark the creation of a new place. Despite this mutually beneficial relationship, there is a lack of criticality to Huyghe’s project, and one cannot but wonder that if the community would have held a similar celebration regardless of the artist’s intervention. In her review of Streamside Day, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev references anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1920-83) observation of the potential for celebration to exist beyond a public ‘get together’ and become a valid socio-political force:

Celebrations and their attendant symbols are interpreted as dynamic vehicles of transformation in which accepted socio-cultural forms can be remodelled. Rituals and holidays, he [Victor Turner] argues, are never completely codified because they continuously adapt to new contexts. Societies change and develop through processes of ritualisation.74

74 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, op.cit. p. 405 54

Fig.31, Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003, production still

Within his practice, Huyghe sees acts of community celebration as a valid socio- political forces and a means of allowing people to shape their own reality and localised history. Despite the slightly romanticised, uncritical tone with which Huyghe describes his project, it could be argued that creating a new holiday within a community’s annual calendar is an action that has a lasting effect beyond that of a sculpture installed in a public square. Huyghe’s project also introduces questions about the ‘form’ of an artwork. Is Streamside Day a temporary event experienced by the people present at the celebration and is the film a simple documentation of that event? Or, was the event a means of producing a film that exists independently as the artwork? I believe that both of these are true; Huyghe constructed a situation that served as a genuine celebration for a group of people who were coming together (presumably for the first time) to form a new community. At the same time he also directed a film that featured elements of fiction (especially the first part of the film which describes a family’s migration to the new suburb). The dual process of constructing an event while also considering its representation as film or video (which may incorporate elements of fiction or elaborated narrative elements) informed the development of artworks in my project exhibition, especially Saturday Nights. Projects such as Streamside Day incorporate community participation and celebration as formal elements. Through this research I began to see ways of organising these formal elements into an artwork which is both a video and a participatory event.

Francis Alÿs is another artist who facilitates large, participatory events as artworks. Alÿs is also well known for his video documentations of discrete, performative, urban 55 interventions. Like Huyghe, Alÿs negotiates the fluidity of everyday life by capturing and elaborating common activities such as walking, playing an instrument or digging.

One of Alÿs’ most celebrated works resulted from an invitation to participate in the third Ibero-American Biennale in Lima in 2002. Alÿs orchestrated a monumental community gesture which was documented and circulated through different media.75 Alÿs responded to the social, political, environmental and economic instability he witnessed in Peru by facilitating When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Alÿs enlisted 500 local Peruvians and asked them to stand in line across the peak of a 600-meter sand dune on the outskirts of Peru’s capital, Lima. Each person stood, dressed in jeans and white t-shirt, with a shovel in hand, Alÿs’ then asked them to dig at the dune, throwing sand a few inches in front of them as they went.76 Alÿs’ premise was that by joining together and working in unity, the community could effectively shift a mountainous sand dune (if only by a couple of feet). The event was captured on video and the images of 500 people digging at a sand dune in such a desolate landscape is captivating. Alÿs speaks of the situation that inspired the work:

There were clashes on the street and the resistance movement strengthened. It was a desperate situation, and I felt that it called for an epic response, at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent. Insinuating a social allegory into those circumstances seemed to me more fitting than engaging in some sculptural exercise.77

75 Alÿs made postcards (that were distributed beyond the context of the Biennale and Peru) and a three channel video installation (which was subsequently purchased by the Guggenheim Museum in New York) Doherty, Claire, ‘The New Situationists’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. Claire Doherty (ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 8 76 Ibid, p. 8 77 Francis, Alÿs, ‘A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves Mountains’, Artforum Summer 2002, p. 148 56

Fig. 32 and 33, Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, productions stills

Alÿs distances his work from other projects associated with land art, as its significance remains in the transitory moment of the event and its subsequent re-telling through oral transmission, and not in the actual modification of the place.78 Through his constructed situation Alÿs aimed to create a contemporary fable, an addition to Peruvian mythology.79 In this sense Alÿs shares a common interest with Huyghe, an impulse to create stories and ephemeral experiences; transitory moments that can be retold and re-experienced through other media. Clearly the sand dune wasn’t actually moved – at most a small, temporary trough may have formed through the collective activity – therefore the project’s core value is allegorical, contained in the movement and transmission of its representation, whether through oral history, post cards, or video documentation. Most likely the modification to the sand dune was erased long ago by shifting sand and wind; only the memory of the event along with the postcards and film remain. These narrative ‘artefacts’ are subjective and open to elaboration and modification, allowing for a sort of shared ownership of the project.

78 The Tate Online Glossary provides the following definition of land art: ‘also known as Earth art. It can be seen as part of the wider Conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Land artists began working directly in the landscape, sculpting it into earthworks or making structures with rocks or twigs […] Land art was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery.’ 10 October, 2007, 79 Ibid, p. 148 57

Fig. 34, Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, film still

The fact that Alÿs describes his own project as ‘at once futile and heroic’ demonstrates his foresight of the process, especially in terms of the distribution and circulation of the memory of the event.80 Alÿs saw beyond the few hours in which the actual activity of shovelling sand took place, the gesture itself is just the beginning of the story, the full body of the project will continue to take form through the recounts and re-telling of the time when a group of people moved (or attempted to change) a 600 meter-long mountain of sand. In an article for Frieze, Nancy Spector speaks about artists such as Huyghe and Alÿs in terms of creating real fictions.81 She identifies how these artists use elements of everyday life (from vastly different places and cultures) to create new cultural narratives that circulate and change over time. Spector writes about the viewer’s relationship to these narratives by observing that:

Once presented and documented (as video, film or photography), the work is then replayed through other media, ones that are largely oral in transmission, such as storytelling, gossip or myth. This re-telling over time allows for creative (mis)interpretations, exaggeration and fragmentation – a kind of incompleteness that allows the audience to take ownership of the art.82

As well as constructing situations inspired by a place and its current social conditions, historic events may also provide the context to make artworks that aim to modify collective experience and memory. Jeremy Deller’s, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), is

80 Alÿs, Francis, op.cit. p. 148 81 Frieze 98, (April 2006) 82 Spector, Nancy, ‘All the World’, Frieze 98, April 2006, p. 33 58 a remarkably ambitious re-enactment of the violent clash in 1984 between Yorkshire mineworkers and police. Nato Thompson observed, in writing about the historical context of Deller’s project, that the 1984 clash was, ‘a moment when the Thatcher government sent a clear and brutal message to organised labour regarding its future in England’.83 The 1984 strike still lives clearly in the memory of many people who were adversely affected by the Thatcher government’s policies on the modernisation and privatisation of industry. In an interview in 2001, Gordon Brown (1951–) reflected on the severity of the 1984 strike by observing that:

The coal-mining strike of the early 1980s was a tragedy for so many of the mining families that were involved in it. They were denied proper benefits for a year. Many were arrested. Many families never recovered from this dispute, and it was a human tragedy.

[…] the Thatcher government at the time gave people the impression that they didn't care whether there was a mining industry at all.84

In organising The Battle of Orgreave, Deller set the framework for the re-enactment to happen, negotiated with external parties and then allowed the project to expand into its own form.85 Like Huyghe and Alÿs, Deller’s Battle of Orgreave was a constructed, scripted event that relied heavily on elements of chance and unpredictable circumstances. Deller remarked that for him, ‘the best moment is when you are surprised by what someone can do to your ideas, though I’m sure many artists would be offended if someone deviated from what they expected.’86

83 Thompson, Nato, ‘Jeremy Deller: for the Love of the People’, Parkett 74, 2005, p. 150 84 Gordon Brown cited in interview, (2001), 10 Oct 2007 85 For this work Deller collaborated with historians, veteran miners, family and friends of miners, re- enactment societies, Artangel and a film crew. 86 Deller, Jeremy, ‘Jeremy Deller and Claire Doherty’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. (ed.) Claire Doherty, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 94 59

Fig. 35 and 36, Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, production stills

From the numerous interviews Deller has given about his work (especially since winning the Turner Prize in 2004 for another project, Memory Bucket), there is a sense that for him the Battle of Orgreave is about creating the possibility of re-occupying history in order to reconsider the present cultural landscape – in this case constructing a situation that allows for a cathartic expulsion of a darker time. This is especially evident as Deller integrated ex-mineworkers within the re-enactment, thus providing the opportunity for them to revisit and readdress repressed memories and traumatic experience.87 These concerns have been addressed with equal emphasis to the direction of a re-enactment in order to produce a work of art. In a similar tone to Huyghe and earlier situationist ideals, Deller has commented that for him; ‘Art isn’t about what you make but what you make happen.’88

In contrast to the collective activity that typifies the works discussed above, Anri Sala’s Long Sorrow (2005) is an artwork that indirectly addresses the social and historical conditions of an area of Berlin through the performance of a lone saxophone player.

To make Long Sorrow, Sala directed the American saxophonist Jemee Moondoc to play free jazz while perched precariously on a platform suspended from the top floor

87 I make the point of revisiting and readdressing traumatic experience considering that Thatcher’s legacy remains influential in contemporary British politics even today; current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown recently welcomed the Baroness into 10 Downing Street was quoted as describing her as a ‘conviction politician, much like myself’. Carlin, Brendan, ‘Baroness Thatcher visits Gordon Brown’, Daily Telegraph, (2007) 15 October 2007 88 Deller, Jeremy and Doherty, Claire, op.cit. p. 94 60 of the Long Sorrow building.89 Long Sorrow is filmed to show Moondoc playing from various angles without revealing the platform he is standing on, giving the impression he may be balancing on a window ledge, high above the street below. Sala’s direction brings the viewer in intimate contact with Moondoc’s performance; just watching the film can overwhelm the viewer with a sense of vertigo as if standing there next to him. Long Sorrow takes a social and historical context as a framing device, from which Sala has created a situation that floats and avoids didacticism. The construction of Long Sorrow involved elaborate organisation despite its relative subtlety as an artwork.90 The film is edited so that we feel we have literally stumbled across a chance performance happening on the top story of a seemingly abandoned building.

Long Sorrow proposes to be a public performance as much as it is a film, although witnessing the event in reality would have been a vastly different experience.91 The image of the crane, cameramen, lights and suspended platform reduce the scene to a film set rather than an spontaneous jazz improvisation; the viewer in reality witnesses the recording of a performance, whereas the viewer in the gallery witnesses the performance independent of its recording, Sala’s preference here is clearly to produce an artwork for exhibition, rather than a shared event. Bourriaud argues that a ‘constructed situation’ does not necessarily involve social interaction, he states that, ‘It is possible to imagine “constructed situations” for private use, and even intentionally barring others’.92 In this sense Sala’s constructed situation is not based on a social exchange as with Hughe, Alÿs and Deller; and his relationship with his subject (Moondoc) is clearly that of employer/employee.

89 Sala reflects on his chance discovery of the Long Sorrow building which initiated the idea for the film, ‘One day I was visiting a neighbourhood in Berlin called Märkisches Viertel and I came across a very long building nicknamed “Langer Jammer” or “Long Sorrow” […] The expression kept the notion of “long” as a space rather than a time feature’. Sala, Anri, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Anri Sala’, Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 18 90 Sala flew the saxophonist from New York to Berlin; he hired an apartment in the Long Sorrow building and built lighting rigs and support platforms for the saxophonist; he also hired a huge crane in order to film the scenes of the saxophonist caught in suspension which also required permits from local council and authorities. Godfrey, Mark, op.cit. p. 96 91 Sala, Anri, op.cit. p. 18 92 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 84 61

Fig. 37, Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005, production documentation

Fig. 38, Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005, film still 62

Fig. 39, Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005, production documentation

Fig. 40, Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005, installation view

In this work jazz is used as a communicative device that exists outside language and conventional narrative – in a similar way that organising a community celebration, moving a sand dune, or staging a mass protest create stories outside of standard narrative form. Through constructing situations, these artists use filtered and manipulated elements of everyday life to modify, elaborate and describe relationships that exist between people and places. The artworks included in my exhibition 63 demonstrate a capacity to construct situations in order to create works that exist both as temporary events (such as Saturday Nights or Gordon’s piano performance in Unstable Ground) and as artworks presented in a gallery context.

As well as the complexities involved in constructing situations through social encounters and in partnership with different subjects, ethical complexities arise when artists actively seek out subjects identified as ‘outsider’ or ‘other’. The following section will explore some of the ethical implications behind the encounters between artist and subject. 64

The ‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices

Mapping in recent art has tended towards the sociological and the anthropological, to the point where an ethnographic mapping of an institution or a community is a primary form of site-specific art today.93

Many of the artists discussed in this chapter seek out stories and experiences from peripheral places and communities; this is an approach also taken throughout my research. In this section I question what draws artists to work within such varied cultural and social contexts, often involving dislocated and isolated communities and individuals.94 I also ask why these artists go to such lengths to construct ambitious surveys, observations and performances with people and places that were not previously part of their lives. Perhaps most crucial to this discussion is an investigation into how an artist reconciles their own position within a work that is constructed from someone else’s personal history.

The issues have remained at the forefront of my mind throughout the research, influencing the methodologies and outcomes of the work in the project exhibition. In his essay ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ Hal Foster calls attention to issues surrounding artworks that engage with the social or cultural other, arguing self-promotion and search for new subject matter are often more important for an artist in this paradigm than a genuine concern for social change.95 Nicolas Bourriaud, on the other hand, champions art practices that engage varied social and cultural issues, arguing for the necessity for contemporary art to incorporate everyday space and open new inter- human relations between artist, subject and viewer.96 So where do the artists I discuss sit within these arguments, and how do I locate my own project within these issues? Are these arguments mutually exclusive?

Foster draws parallels between contemporary art practice and ethnographic research and methodology, ‘artists and critics aspire to fieldwork in which theory and practice seem to be reconciled. Often they draw indirectly on basic principles of the

93 Foster, Hal, op.cit., p.185. 94 Huyghe is drawn to a new community built on the edge of a forest; Alÿs is drawn to an isolated community in Peru; Ataman works with social, political and sexual outcasts and displaced communities; Wearing seeks out people who are willing to confess repressed and traumatic experiences; Sala orchestrates micro-performances in social-housing estates and tells forgotten stories from Albania’s repressed history; Deller also revisits repressed and marginalised histories. 95 Foster, Hal, op.cit., p.185-199. 96 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. 65 participant-observer tradition […].’97 Foster contextualises this paradigm with comparisons to Walter Benjamin’s earlier identification of the artists as ‘producer’.98 Foster describes the commonalities between the two paradigms – each concerned with the social function of art practice – although he identifies ways in which the subject of association has changed from interrogating economic relations (in the producer model) to cultural identity (in the ethnographic model).99 Foster then identifies some reasons why contemporary artists and critics are so readily enticed by ethnography:

First, as we have seen, anthropology is prized as the science of alterity… Second, it is the discipline that takes culture as its object… Third, ethnography is considered contextual, the often automatic demand for which contemporary artists and critics share with other practitioners today, many of whom aspire to fieldwork in the everyday. Forth, anthropology is thought to arbitrate the interdisciplinary, another often rote value in contemporary art and criticism. Fifth, the recent self-critique of anthropology renders is attractive, for it promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer at the centre even as it preserves a romanticism of the other at the margins.100

Throughout his essay Foster is openly concerned with the nature of this ethnographic paradigm, especially with the terms of engagement between artist and subject. His concerns revolve around issues of seeking the right amount of distance between the two; that by creating too little distance and over sympathising with the other, the artist may indulge in ‘self-othering’.101 Conversely, when the artist creates too much distance between themselves and their subjects, and thus constructs an ideological patronage or social condensation where they speak for their subjects, or use them and their cultural traditions as material context for artwork (ignoring or disregarding the consequences for the subjects). Foster also observes a ‘horizontal’ approach to practice that is particular to many artists he locates in this paradigm. He cites a trend of artists moving from issue to issue or site to site, developing a project specific to each cultural context as they go, moving horizontally without delving into significant historical (vertical) depth (both in terms of art practice and the history of the particular issue). Foster notes the cyclic nature of this situation, ‘the shift to a horizontal way of working is consistent with the ethnographic turn in art and criticism: one selects a site,

97 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 181 98 Ibid, p. 172 99 Ibid, p. 174 100 Ibid, p. 182 101 ‘For then as now self-othering can flip into self-absorption, in which the project of an “ethnographic self-fashioning” becomes the practice of narcissistic self-refurbishing.’ Ibid, p. 180 66 enters its culture and learns its language, conceives and presents a project, only to move onto the next site where the cycle is repeated.’102

Common to all the projects discussed within this chapter is the idea of the artist giving a voice to their subjects, rather than forcing a dogmatic approach of speaking for others. It is the openness with which the artist relates to their subjects and the mutually agreeable terms of this relationship that determines the ethical implications of each project. Are the subjects incorporated into the production of the work or are they manipulated to unwittingly perform for the artist? Are they given the space and opportunity to tell their story, or are elements of the story taken out of context and re- configured to suit the artist’s intentions? Does the relationship established by the artist expire once the work is completed or is the relationship part of an ongoing encounter?

This brings us back to Ataman’s video installations, especially Küba; where he uses ethnographic video-survey to establish a relationship between artist and subject which is as much about allowing different individuals to share their stories as it is about Ataman constructing his work. Examining Ataman’s work, Mark Nash identifies this relationship as being more therapeutic than scientific or ethnographic:

In his practice he exhibits an exceedingly refined attentiveness to the ethical obligations and constraints involved in maintaining a relationship with those who agree to speak before his camera. Indeed Ataman gives each speaker so much time that one realises his role is less ethnographic – concerned with exploring or producing some kind of knowledge about a group of people – than therapeutic. Ataman and camera, and by extension members of the audience take the position of psychoanalyst, allowing members of the Küba community a space to speak about issues of concern to them, and to present their hopes and fears for themselves, family and community before the camera.103

Ataman’s process of interviewing and filming is at times paradoxical. He approaches his subjects with both critical distance (by capturing subjective stories in order to address broader social and cultural issues), and extreme intimacy (where he is often personally implicated within the space of conversation and exchange). The proposition of engaging with subjects from either a critical distance (objective) or a personal (subjective) perspective is passed on to the viewer. As with almost all of Ataman’s

102 Ibid, p. 202 103 Nash, Mark, op.cit. pp. 44-45 67 video installations, the viewer can choose to either stand back and survey the collection of voices, faces and stories from a detached point of view; or they can enter each person’s intimate world, and share a private space of confession and trust. By facing these issues of subjectivity and objectivity, Ataman’s ethnographic methodology remains open, unresolved, reflexive and precarious. He is not attempting to produce ethnographic documents that survey a group of people he finds obscure or foreign, rather, he implicates himself in the same space as his subjects, revealing their stories as they gradually open up to his camera:

There is a moment in the experience of Küba when you realise that you are being presented with something other than an ethnographic document, however sympathetically presented by Ataman the informant. It is the moment when you realise the difficulty of finding the appropriate critical distance, that you risk being drawn into this sea of voices, but on the other hand, however indirectly, the work has the potential to return the audience’s gaze.104

Fig. 41, Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004

Gillian Wearing’s Drunk (1999) provides a stark contrast to the sensitivity of Ataman’s Küba. For Drunk, Wearing provided all the necessary resources for a group of people to become fully inebriated. Wearing stood back and captured the event on video, translating the unfolding action into a three-channel video that revealed the resulting arguments, fights, loss of co-ordination and passing out of her subjects in excruciating detail. From her detached, observatory vantage point (which we share as

104 Nash, Mark, op.cit. p. 46 68 viewers), Wearing uses a common point of social frailty as material for an artwork that presents the other as weak, pathetic and vulnerable. In contrast to Wearing’s other works such as Signs…, Confess all… and Trauma, Drunk is made without exchange or empathy, rather than extending from active participation and interaction between artist and subject, it is the result of detached observation, a voyeuristic gaze. Drunk seems to be an experiment in seeking the line between objective observation and exploitation of human ethics. Drunk is presented to us without judgement, but the nature of the interactions unfolding before our eyes and the hopelessness of her subjects leads Wearing and the viewer to judge the hopeless and incapable subjects.

Fig. 42, Gillian Wearing, Drunk, 1997-99, video stills

Empathy, exploitation, distance and the artist’s relationship to the ‘other’ are not easily defined or reconciled in any of the works discussed above. Foster’s observations on the similarities between contemporary art and ethnographic research help to categorise a relational mode of practice that seeks to engage diverse communities and voices. However this relationship to ethnography implies a type of scientific study that is concerned with observing ‘others’ in order to learn something of ‘their’ behaviour and collective history – creating a picture of the artist who conducts social science fieldwork in order to collect and publish information about particular groups of people. The artworks discussed in this chapter and included in the project exhibition are not ethnographic documentaries made to ‘educate’ an audience about social and cultural ‘issues’. Ethnographic methodology may certainly be incorporated to help build discursive relationships with different subjects, and many contemporary artists indeed use strategies such as surveys and interviews within their work. However the artworks produced and discussed through this research are not intended to produce factual documentation of the other. The definition of these works as ‘artworks’ lies in their visceral nature, and the way they propose open and 69 ambiguous narratives that require the viewer to actively piece elements together and interpret the space between text and image. Ambiguity, interpretation, hesitation, anxiety, tension, intimacy, sensitivity, time, space, etc. typify these works. Common to most of the works discussed above and within this research project is a situation where the artist frames themselves as they frame the subject,105 implicating themselves within the space of discussion rather than presenting a detached perspective of ‘us’ and ‘them’.106 When the subjects speak directly to the artist they also speak directly to the viewer. This relationship between subject, artwork and viewer is further extended through the immersive structural and narrative devices incorporated within production and post-production. Although derived from real people, real place and real situations, ethnographic parameters are expanded through editing, scripting, structural manipulation and paring back – the local and familiar is thus transformed into the ambiguous and universal.

105 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 203 106 Although the artist is often invisible, working from behind the camera where they facilitate discussion or provide directions off screen. 70

Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition

A landscape is something to travel through, it is not a panoramic view to simply look at. Each one of us travels through it differently, collects evidence and connects it together, thus forming a narrative.107

We could replace ‘landscape’ in Huyghe’s quote above, with ‘artwork’ in order to describe the experience of viewing much of the work discussed within this chapter. The practices of these artists put a ‘chain of engagement’ in motion which connects each artist’s engagement with a place or situation, the artist’s subsequent engagement with people/subjects within that place or situation, the subjects’ engagement with the artist, and, finally, the viewers’ engagement with the resultant artwork. Each level of engagement is intended to be open, responsive and in some cases, discursive. In this section I focus on the final stage of this chain, the engagement between viewer and artwork, and briefly discuss ways in which the artists who form the contextual field for this project are expanding the exhibition as much as they expand the narrative capacity of an artwork.

In chapter 1, I drew comparisons between Victor Burgin’s observations on the way conceptual artists connect near and distant objects and the way my project investigates ways of connecting different narrative elements. Burgin’s reflections are also useful here to introduce ways in which the viewer is involved within the space of the artwork, although, once again, the notion of ‘object’ could be exchanged for ‘narrative’. Burgin identifies that:

Because of the emphasis placed upon the perceiver’s role in the formation of the “object” the specific nature of any such “object” is highly subjective. The required mode of attention would involve a mind “out of focus,” a self-induced suspension of cognition in which experience is emotive but meaningless.108

The intention behind the project exhibition is to actively engage viewers by encouraging them to piece elements of information together, filling in the spaces between text and image, thus shifting their position from that of ‘beholder’ to ‘interpreter’ of the artwork. To quote Bourriaud, ‘the exhibition becomes one big film

107 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. p. 33 108 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag 71 set… a set in which we can mount our own sequence of meanings.’109 Within his theories on Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud argues artists’ practices establish a model of participatory viewing. Artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija construct exhibitions based on modes of social exchange, such as cooking, eating and talking. Social engagement is a fundamental aspect to my research project and provides a methodological approach that connects almost all of the works that comprise this chapter – but here I am not discussing artworks or a form of exhibition that rely on the viewer’s participation in a social exchange. This section discusses participation in terms of the viewer becoming implicated conceptually within the content of an artwork, as opposed to the viewer forming the work through eating, talking, cooking, etc. In reflecting on his installations, Thomas Hirschhorn identifies his concern with implicating the viewer:

Rather than triggering the participation of the audience, I want to implicate them. I want to force the audience to be confronted with my work. This is the exchange I propose. The artworks don’t need participation; it’s not an interactive work. It doesn’t need to be completed by the audience; it needs to be an active, autonomous work with the possibility of implication.110

Similarly, the viewer engagement I have sought through my research and identified within this chapter is based on a time-based protocol: exhibitions that incorporate time-based artworks, works that require the viewer to move through a city or an open space, artworks that reveal connections between text and image, artworks that are open to viewer interpretation, and exhibitions that change over time. One of the questions I ask through this research concerns: how the viewer inhabits the space proposed by an artwork or exhibition and what strategies are used by contemporary artists to encourage viewer engagement and interpretation?

Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day became Streamside Day Follies when he exhibited the film of the celebration at the DIA Centre for the Arts, New York. In this context Huyghe confronted the process of translating and transporting a constructed situation from one context to another by creating a temporary ‘folly’ or pavilion to project his film within the gallery space. Huyghe is acutely aware of the viewer’s presence in relation to an artwork, and Streamside Day Follies creates an experience that

109 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. Relational Aesthetics, p. 46 110 Hirschhorn, Thomas, op.cit. ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn’, pp. 25-6 72 incorporates the viewer within a changing, theatrical space. Huyghe aims to create an environment that involves the viewer within the celebration and the conditions surrounding it, as if they were experiencing the event in the present, and not just watching a documentary of a celebration that happened in some other place at some other time. Huyghe describes the format of the gallery space and the incorporation of the film by noting that:

The gallery is empty. Walls situated in different rooms slowly begin to move towards the main space, almost suggesting a ballet. Their migration ends when they form a new territory in the centre of the space.

The temporary pavilion, a folly, appears in the exhibition space, which has now become the “outside”. The folly remains in this form for as long as it takes to project the film. When the film ends, it comes apart and the walls go back to their original position. This pavilion prefigures what will be the mechanics of a community centre.111

Fig. 43 and 44, Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, 2003, installation view

Similarly, as I explain in chapter 3, I have confronted issues of translating and transporting a constructed situation from one context to another with several works in the project exhibition. The installation of Saturday Nights, for example, reflects the intimacy and sense of celebration which permeated the Koonya Hall where the country-dance was held. Likewise, the camera position and selection of scenes in Saturday Nights as well as Unstable Ground and Altered State, attempt to capture a perspective of the event which provides the viewer with a sense of ‘being there’ rather than watching a passive documentation of an event. The following video installations

111 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. Pierre Huyghe. p. 147 73 by Anri Sala, Kutlug Ataman, Doug Aitken and Sharon Lockhart, are selected for discussion due to the various ways they sensitise viewers to their physical presence within the space of an artwork.

Although not a film or video work, one of Pierre Huyghe’s earlier projects explored the viewer’s physical and conceptual relationship to an artwork which was discretely installed in public spaces throughout Paris. For the work Huyghe used billboard- advertising space to present a series of posters that investigated subtle fractures between reality and representation. Huyghe scouted Paris and selected a number of vacant billboard sites, rented them, and hired amateur actors to enact an improvisation of the activity that would be likely to happen in these places. He captured the performed interactions on 35mm film and printed the images at billboard scale. Through this action, Huyghe manipulated spaces devoted to marketing and media advertising by installing his images within the very places from which they were taken – thus creating a mirroring or doubling of reality where the viewer is unwittingly implicated in the expanded artwork.112 The anonymous images where then installed for a month, with visible indication that they were part of an artwork. Huyghe’s project incorporates a relatively simple strategy to explore relationships between viewer and artwork, and proposes possibilities for these relationships to be expanded outside of a gallery context.

Fig. 45, (left) Pierre Huyghe, Little Story, 1995 Fig. 46, (right), Pierre Huyghe, Chantier Barbès-Rochechouart, 1994

Compared to Huyghe’s spatial interventions, Anri Sala has directly confronted the viewer’s experience of navigating a gallery while also considering means of

112 The artwork remains permanent through the documentation of the billboard sites featuring spontaneous street activity. These images are made all the more interesting by the images of the casual passer-by who seems to ignore or not notice the anonymous billboard nearby. 74 presenting individual artworks within that space. In two recent, separate exhibitions in Paris and Warsaw, Sala manipulated and modified the gallery space to activate both his video works and the viewer’s experience of encountering those works.113 During the exhibition Entre Chien et Loup/When Night Calls It a Day, Sala reconfigured the viewer’s sense of time by creating a permanent state of twilight within the gallery.114 As well as prolonging this period of ‘in-between time’, the computer-controlled lighting also provided optimum conditions to display video projections without relying on a projection within a separate ‘black box’.115 Sala commented that most of his videos were also filmed at night and he was interested in projecting images of night onto a space suspended in twilight:

The space should be one installation, not many, because for me the walking from one video to the next is as important as watching them. The mental image of the show for me was to be a landscape, an archipelago at dusk (or maybe at dawn)?116

Fig. 47, Anri Sala, Entre Chien et Loup, ARC/Musèe d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 2004

113 Anri Sala, Entre Chien et Loup/When Night Calls It a Day: ARC/Musèe d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2004. Anri Sala, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2005. 114 In speaking about the title for the exhibition, Sala notes that; ‘“Entre chien et loup” (between dog and wolf) is a nice idiom for twilight in French, the moment of the day when forms cannot be seen well and everything could potentially be something else, when one can no longer tell a dog from a wolf.’ Sala, Anri, op.cit. ‘Interview: Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Anri Sala’, p. 17 115 In the sense that both dawn and dusk are in-between day and night. 116 Ibid, p. 17 75

The formal strategies incorporated in Entre Chien et Loup were expanded the following year at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw when Sala redesigned the exhibition to include sloping floors, ambient lighting and strict instructions for the installation of the video projectors. Sala commented that he approached this exhibition by disregarding the narrative content of each video, instead seeing them only in terms of light, movement and sound. He intended to trigger subtle association for the viewer by lowering the floor towards some works and creating an incline towards other works, inducing a sense of weight or lightness in the viewer as they approached the work.117 Through using strategies of creating atmospheric lighting and physical sensations (of weight and weightlessness), Sala seeks to implicate the viewer within the narrative space of his videos, perhaps compelling them to watch for longer and become fully immersed.

Fig. 48, Anri Sala, scale model for exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2005

Both Doug Aitken and Kutlug Ataman create spatial narratives through multi-screen video installations. Ataman’s approach differs to Aitken’s in the way the viewer is

117 Ibid, p. 28 76 given an opportunity to ‘witness’ elements of the confessions and interviews of different subjects. In Ataman’s installations, personal histories become merged and multiplied through the combination of voices and faces on projection screens or old television monitors. Ataman’s installations present a series of interconnected, singular narratives and portraits, where Aitken creates spatial environments that are open for the viewer to navigate. Both approaches create a spatial narrative and produce a situation where the viewer participates in a process of physical editing, piecing together images, stories, text and sounds as they move through the space created by the artist. Unable to see all the images at once, viewers are compelled to make choices as to where they focus or move, resulting in a subjective edit of the artwork each time it is viewed.

Fig. 49, Kutlug Ataman, Stefan’s Room, 2004, installation view

Fig. 50, Doug Aitken, Electric Earth, 1999, installation view 77

Just as the configuration of a gallery space can be an important element in presenting video or film works, viewer experience can also be affected by the context of the video or film’s presentation. Sharon Lockhart’s Teatro Amazonas (1999) – which was filmed in a colonial theatre in Manaus in Brazil – is a 30-minute film made in a single take, using a static camera angle from the stage of the theatre. The film is captured looking back at the audience comprising a cross-section of the town’s one-million- plus population; the audience in the film serves as a visual representation the town’s Indigenous and European population and history. The crowd (in the film) sits and listens to a minimalist, live performance by the Choral do Amazonas, performing out of camera sight. The score gradually becomes silent over twenty-four minutes, resulting in the final 6 minutes of the soundtrack consisting of shuffles and coughs from the audience. Lockhart has specified that the film be shown in cinemas rather than gallery spaces, thus mirroring the audience in the film and the audience in reality in a similar way to Pierre Huyghe’s billboard project. Lockhart speaks about the significance of this effect:

It [Teatro Amazonas] wouldn't function if it didn't have the social space of the cinema. Strange things happen. I really liked it when someone in the film was walking out and someone in the cinema from the same side, did the same thing. Things like this make it complete.118

Fig. 51, Sharon Lockhart, Teatro Amazonas, 1999

118 Lockhart, Sharon, ‘A Thousand Words’, Artforum, February, 2000, n.pag 78

Within this chapter I have discussed ways social engagement is transformed into time- based artworks. Activities initiated by the artist, such as facilitating collective activity, directing individual performance or building discursive relationships with their subjects (through interviews, questionnaires, confessionals, etc) are all used to construct narrative artworks. As well as discussing the methodologies behind these works, I considered the ethical complexities when working with others. The ‘field’ identified in this chapter, however, is not autonomous; instead it comprises formal techniques, methodological strategies and collaborative partnerships from other fields of research. The openness of this field makes it responsive, fluid and adaptable. Bourriaud notes that:

As one of the driving spirits behind the Fluxus movement, Robert Filliou said that art offers an immediate ‘right of asylum’ to all deviant practices which cannot find their place in their natural bed. So many forceful works of the last three decades only arrived in the realm of art for the simple reason that they had reached a limit in other realms.119

The heterogeneous nature of the artworks discussed in this chapter does not mean that evidence of the artist’s ‘hand’ is lost in a democratic ‘free-for-all’. A consistent aesthetic connects all the works discussed in this chapter and is defined through the artist’s filtering and manipulation of the everyday. My research project exists within the here and now of particular places, and a situational aesthetic emerges from the relationships between my subjective position within the places I hone in on; the conditions (geographic, social, political) surrounding those places; the people or subjects that I engage with; and my strategies for translating experiences of encounter to the viewer.

In the following chapter, I describe the various contexts in which I have presented the work included in the project exhibition. These presentations and exhibitions were a way for me to progressively test strategies of viewer engagement through experimental installation techniques.

119 Bourriaud, Nicholas, op.cit. p. 102 79

CHAPTER 3 Research and Process: the development of the project

The ‘body of work’ included in the project exhibition has been resolved through a process of reflection and refinement and is supported by this exegesis. Together with selected ‘support material’, the exhibition in conjunction with this exegesis form the project thesis.

During the project I have made approximately twelve artworks as well as many related visual experiments.120 In this chapter I discuss the six artworks included in the exhibition by reflecting on both the methodology behind the artworks and the process and conceptual concerns of each. These artworks are: the two-channel video installation, Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006 (presented as one work); the two-channel video installation, Altered State (2006); documentation of the write/here project (2005-07); the 25-channel sound installation Familiar Strangers (2007); the two-channel video installation Unstable Ground (2007); and the single channel video installation Saturday Nights (2007).

Throughout the candidacy, individual artworks have been included in several significant publications and exhibitions, and here I reflect on these exhibitions and their overall contribution to the project. Presentation of the works contributed to a process of continual refinement – this process is discussed in the section Exhibitions and Presentation. Included in the exegesis appendices is a description of the artworks made during the candidature but not included in the project exhibition. These works are presented as support material to demonstrate their contribution to the development of my research.

Over the course of the project I worked with hundreds of people, either through communities or as individuals. Each artwork involved different levels of social engagement, such as encounters, meetings, observations, discussion and facilitated performance in sites throughout Tasmania. Some of the artworks evolved fluidly by incorporating elements of chance, while other works required extensive organisation and facilitation. As the research project took form, individual artworks became more ambitious, complex and demanding – a process I discuss in detail later in this chapter.

120 Some of which have been selected for the project exhibition, some designated as ‘support material’ and some smaller works made early in the candidacy were disregarded altogether. 80

Experimentation and Methodology

My interest in experimental narrative forms, coupled with research into particular sites and situations, shaped the project at an early stage. My methodological approach progressively took form through visual experimentation and research, and thus became more refined as the research developed. Early experimentation with video was used to combine text with image, in some cases overlaying narrative conversations with images of empty landscapes and documentary observation. Earlier artworks are more passive and observatory in style. As the project developed, later artworks reflect a gradual increase in skill and confidence that helped to shift my role from observer to facilitator, demonstrating a more controlled active engagement between artist and subject.

Early experimentation also included text installation that encouraged viewer participation and various installations with controlled lighting and video projection.121 Different formal approaches were later refined and used to inform the final works included in the submission. Social science research methodology such as interviewing, questionnaires and observation were also incorporated early in the research and refined for use in later projects.122

My research process has been additive, in that each artwork expands on the concerns and processes of earlier works.123 Individual artworks are discussed in detail below, but here I will briefly outline the common methodological strategies including: discursive engagement, narrative displacement, and viewer engagement.

Discursive engagement: The artworks included in the project exhibition involve extensive oral history research, written questionnaires, interviews, and conversations, as well as in-depth background research into particular sites, local histories and personal relationships. This discursive or conversational relationship established through the artworks sets up an exchange where I both speak to my subjects and they speak back to me. Becoming

121 For example, the support work; Discussion Frames, 2004, asked people questions so they would write on blank transparent panels installed in public space. 122 The underlying principles behind human research ethics remain present throughout each project’s structure. These principles include: integrity of the researcher and the research to be undertaken; respect for people, their dignity and rights; beneficence, which means the obligation to maximize possible benefits and minimise possible harms; justice, which means asking who ought to receive the benefits of research and bear its burdens. From the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network Handbook, Research and Development Office, University of Tasmania, January 2005, p.9) 123 A timeline for the overall project is included in the appendices. 81 personally implicated within the situations I investigate is an important aspect of this engagement, and I (and my camera) become closer to my subjects over time.

This process of working in relation with various subjects also involves an element of chance and risk. Implicit risk-taking came into clear perspective after months of setting up certain situations, events or relationships, and then relying on chance and uncertainty during the actual production of the work. For example, I didn’t know if I’d be stranded on the West Coast while hitchhiking and filming Arberg Bay, 2006; or whether Justy Phillips and I could reveal the ‘right’ stories or even raise the necessary funding to realise the write/here project; I didn’t know who I’d meet while visiting the Peacock Centre, or later if my subjects would be willing to let me film them in personal situations while making Unstable Ground; and I wasn’t sure if anyone would turn up to the dance in Saturday Nights. Ethical responsibility was a bi-product of this methodology of discursive engagement. Each artwork required close consideration of human ethics and clearance from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) if it was to incorporate other people’s stories and images within the production of the artwork.

Narrative displacement: Throughout the project I incorporated documentary approaches to create a series of artworks that elaborate real situations into fictional or semi-fictional narratives. I approached fiction as a product of manipulated reality (even subtly manipulated) and these works involved manipulation such as; creating real and unreal dialogues; scripting and choreographing interactions and events; using real stories as the script or content for new narrative works to emerge. I also investigated formal experimentation with multi-channel video projections, subtitled video narratives, sound environments and billboard-scale text installation for their potential in creating narrative experience.

Viewer engagement: I pursued experiments with viewer engagement through strategies such as creating fractured narrative, immersive installation, and by using time-based media. As the project developed, I became less concerned with notions of physical viewer participation and instead focused on strategies to implicate and engage the viewer within different narrative structures, using combinations of text, video and sound. Although I found it difficult to quantify and evaluate the level of viewer engagement with each artwork, contextual research and progressive experimentation focused on viewer experience as a key aspect of the project. In some cases engagement was 82 gauged through public feedback (especially concerning the write/here project), critical reviews, or simply observing interactions between the viewer and the installed artwork. 83

Development of Individual Artworks

The six videos and installations that comprise the project’s exhibition were predominantly developed during the later half of the candidacy. Most of the projects required clearance from the Human Research Ethics Committee from the University of Tasmania, obviously necessitating negotiation and organisation with other individuals, communities and institutions.124

This chapter aims to represent the additive nature of the research and articulate the progressive development of ideas, formal resolution and scale of the artworks that is evident over the period of the candidacy.

Arberg Bay, 2004 5:30 min, DVD loop Silent

Arberg Bay, 2004 is a semi-fictionalised documentary that describes the relationships between a group of young surfers and an area of the West Coast of Tasmania. The short video presents first, second and third person memories and experiences of youth, surfing, people and the changing conditions of place.

The video traces the changing landscape – from post-industrial mining towns to remote coastal environments – overlayed with transcription of the group’s conversation. The video was predominantly filmed from a moving car, using a camera fixed to the passenger’s window. The conversation in the video is represented as subtitled text and reveals personal perspectives on real estate, friends, future aspirations and memory. Like the fleeting images of a passing landscape, the subtitles provide a hazy transcription of real and imagined conversations. I came across the idea for Arberg Bay, 2004 almost by chance – a close friend’s father had died in a fishing accident at Arberg Bay, and it was with my friend that I began to talk about his relationship to growing up on the West Coast. He had since moved away from the area, but still visited regularly, although his relationship with the area was growing more distant.

124 The ethics process required that I resolve the questions I intended to ask participants and, as such, helped to articulate the intentions behind individual artworks. The other side to this process was the pre- emptive nature of the ethics process; having to predict the process and outcomes of the work before any research was undertaken sometimes seemed overly speculative and contradictory. 84

Fig. 52, Arberg Bay, 2004, video still

Arberg Bay, 2004 was a means to investigate tensions of using video as a form of art making, while also avoiding categorisation of video as documentary. It incorporates tracking shots as a device to provide the viewer with an immediate experience of the landscape – as if sitting in the front seat of a moving car. Jean-Christophe Royoux notes the relationships between the tracking shot and the viewer in Mèlik Ohanian’s work:

It [the tracking shot] is essentially a shot that has duration, an empty vessel, as it where, that create the conditions of expectations and immerses the spectator in a passivity peculiar to what Mèlik Ohanian calls “suspended moments of unfettered perception”.125

While filming, I began to build a script for the video over several weekends of visiting the area. The script took form through recording the conversations of a group of friends by placing a microphone in the car, asking questions and taking notes. I felt the video needed to be informed by an intimate knowledge that comes from lived experience, not a removed, purely fictional speculation. Once I collected the recorded data I worked through an extensive editing process, refining the material to minimal

125 Royoux, Jean-Christophe, ‘Mèlik Ohanian; the tracking shot, or revealing the world’, Biennale of Sydney 2004: On Reason and Emotion. Exhibition catalogue, p. 166 85 form, in effect ‘distilling’ what I felt to be the essence of the conversations along with the video footage.126

Fig. 53, Arberg Bay, 2004, video still

Arberg Bay, 2004 is a small but important element of the final submission. Although it isn’t as technically refined as later projects, the video represents early investigation into the shifting relationships between people and place. The video also signifies a gradual development of implicating myself more closely within the production of an artwork, both through the personal encounters and experience that inform the video and through my scripting of the semi-fictional narrative that underlies the work.

Arberg Bay, 2006 8:00 min, DVD loop Silent

Arberg Bay, 2006 re-creates the experience of navigating an area of coastline on the West Coast of Tasmania, as explored in Arberg Bay, 2004. Using the same documentary-style video recorded in 16:9 format and incorporating subtitled conversation, Arberg Bay, 2006 extends on the relationships between people and place I investigated in the earlier version. Instead of producing the work based on a familiar

126 Shot on 16:9, the format of the video reflects the vastness of the open landscape. While editing the footage I resisted an urge to represent a documentation of the entire journey, instead creating a suggestion of a journey. This involved continuously editing the footage and refining the story to a stripped-down, distillation of the events as they unfolded over real time. 86 group of people, Arberg Bay, 2006 uses elements of chance conversations and footage taken while hitchhiking along the same route as the earlier work. As with the 2004 version, Arberg Bay 2006, doesn’t seek to define a particular place; rather, it examines the conditions under which different people experience and understand place.

Fig. 54, Arberg Bay, 2006, production still

Informed by Francis Alÿs’ filmed, walking ‘performances’, Arberg Bay, 2006 describes my journey (hitch-hiking and on foot) through post-industrial mining towns and remote coastline. In writing about Alÿs’ process, Michele Theriault reflects on the use of walking within contemporary practice:

The walk is his [Alÿs’] privileged space of operation. It attests to and intersects with, a multitude of presences: the acts and gestures of unknown people, local and marginalised histories, coincidences – in all, with everything that partakes of the intimacy of life and makes up its imagery…127

Arberg Bay, 2006 is a means to both extend on and re-interpret an earlier work, as well as create a piece where I was directly implicated within the scene. Arberg Bay, 2006 is intended to be exhibited together with Arberg Bay, 2004 to make visible the shifts and slippages between the two videos – slippages of time, place, narrative and experience.

127 Theriault, Michele, ‘Francis Alÿs: The Art of Balancing on a Tightrope’, Francis Alÿs: the last clown. Exhibition catalogue, Montreal: Galerie de I’UQAM, 2000, p. 24 87

Using subtitles in both videos allowed me to compress and filter a collection of experiences and stories into one anonymous voice. Questions thus inevitably arise as to whether the voice is mine, an actual account from an invisible narrator, or a collection of different voices, brought together through the video. This displacement of voice, narrative and image is something I explore further in later artworks.

The process of making Arberg Bay, 2006, provided me with content and perspectives that informed the video’s narrative. I avoided articulating a clear plan for shooting the content of the video, although the fact that I was making a video of the four-day journey was in the forefront of my mind the whole time. This was at times a strange experience: being genuinely concerned about getting to a camp site or the changing weather while also maintaining focus to keep filming the environment and chance events that happened around me.

Fig. 55, Arberg Bay, 2006, production still

I spent more time editing the 2006 version than I did with the 2004 work. Many of the shots were long takes – up to 10 minutes each – because of the time taken to record myself walking along certain paths. While I was walking I became acutely aware of the passing of time, much more so than when I was filming from a moving vehicle with a group of friends. I found it difficult to reconcile and respect these extended moments of time, without making the video impossibly long. I also struggled to reconcile the manipulation and refinement of the broader collection of stories in the later Arberg Bay video. 88

Arberg Bay, 2006 is the only work in the submission where I am actually visible in the work, although this visibility renders me no more present than in later video works. The action of walking in Arberg Bay, 2006 was a way to create a connection between places, experiences and the earlier work, Arberg Bay, 2004, rather than a self-portrait.

Altered State, 2006 14:00 min, 2 channel DVD loop Stereo sound

Altered State is a two-channel video that reveals a series of orchestrated performances that were filmed in private residences in Hobart. The video shows three people (all appear to be African), singing or dancing in different, private, domestic spaces. In each performance the subject waits with neutral expression – occasionally shifting position, then sings or dances directly in front of the camera. The performers act out their song and dance, surrounded by suburban, 1960’s Australian architecture or decorated interiors. This contrast of people, place and experience defines the idea behind the video – that of people existing in an ‘altered state’. Altered State reveals three separate but related situations of contemporary displacement. Each of the subjects in the video already performs publicly in Hobart; but such performances are usually acted within the context of celebration or community events. For this video their actions are re-contextualised and introverted, as each person sings or dances alone at home.

Fig. 56, Altered State, 2006, video stills 89

This video is an early exploration in mixing video portraiture with socio-political concerns. While making Altered State, I began to confront and juggle two – seemingly oppositional – directions that Hal Foster suggests, ‘still plague the reception of art – aesthetic quality versus political relevance.’128

The video incorporates two projections (see documentation of exhibition at Next Wave Festival: Container’s Village) as a strategy to implicate the viewer between the active and waiting performer. Only one screen can be seen at a time, resulting in a spatial experience in which the viewer is compelled to turn or move between the two screens – in the process creating a subjective version of the artwork. Through the installation of Altered State the viewer is implicated within a psychological space of memory and displacement, standing as a witness to the unfolding performance.129

The three performers I chose to work with in the video are Alfred Cauker, Fabio Chivhanda and Aurelia Nyandeng Ngor. Alfred is a young refugee from Sierra Leone who dances to his own hip-hop (I had previously worked with Alfred in the earlier video Big Green, Big Blue130). Fabio is an immigrant to Tasmania from Zimbabwe who plays the mbira and sings in Shona. Aurelia is a Sudanese elder who came to Tasmania as a refugee several years ago – she sings her song (which has no title) in Dinka. Once the performers were confirmed, we worked together to choose and developed the songs and dances that would fit the structure of the video. Different locations were also scouted for the separate shoots, despite eventually filming each performer in their actual home.131

Making Altered State involved developing an atmosphere of familiarity and trust between, my subjects, me and the camera; and we had to decide whether it was better to capture this in one sitting over multiple takes or, alternatively, if the same scene was to be re-shot several times over a period of weeks. In each performance, two cameras were used to capture the same action from different angles, allowing me to work with more footage while also minimalising re-shoots. The performances required four to six takes to achieve the desired result; Alfred and Aurelia were completed in one day each and Fabio was re-shot over several weeks. Aurelia was especially

128 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 172 129 Ataman, Kutlug and Politi, Gia, op.cit. p. 93 130 Big Green, Big Blue is included as ‘support material’ and a description of the work is included in the exegesis appendices. 131 Originally I intended to take Alfred, Fabio and Aurelia to a ‘foreign’ environment as a way to draw attention to ideas of displacement. After working through different options, I realised that each person’s home communicated this sense of displacement better than any contrived situation. 90 difficult to film as conversation had to be translated through her daughter. Somewhere in the translation Aurelia developed the impression I wanted to film her singing a traditional song of celebration. After hours of encouragement and discussion about loss, Aurelia sang a mournful song which communicated experiences of living as a refugee, being in transition between countries and escaping Sudan with her family.132

Fig. 57, Altered State, 2006, production still

During editing Altered State I concentrated on creating a portrait of each person, while utilising the two screens to create a relationship between both performer/performer and viewer/video. Through the editing process I was able to create virtual relationships between the three people and connect different times and spaces which incorporated the viewer as they stood between the characters on two opposing screens. I had concerns that the video may illustrate relationships between these three people that they might not agree with – that is, impose a pre-determined narrative on their personal histories. Experiencing the video installation work successfully was very satisfying, and discussions with Aurelia, Alfred and Fabio confirmed their support for the work.

132 Aurelia originally sang a 15-minute version of this song, but after discussing the possibility of shortening it, she eventually agreed to improvise a four-minute version to work with the structure of the video. 91

Fig. 58, Altered State, 2006, production still

Through making Altered State I learnt a lot about the anxiety of working with ‘others’. I found the co-ordination of multiple subjects difficult, and realised the importance of establishing trust with my subjects (and, by default, their acceptance of my camera). Through producing this video I began to see my subjects as collaborators in the making of the artwork and not passive ‘subject matter’. This level of collaboration not only involved me establishing trust with different people, but also tested my willingness to ‘let go’ and trust that their contribution would help produce a meaningful work of art. Altered State contributes to the project exhibition by indirectly speaking of particular social issues – specifically that of displacement, migration and changing notions of home.

the write/here project, 2005-07 Installation using 27 advertising billboards throughout Hobart during the Ten Days on the Island, March 23 to April 1, 2007 Inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, dimensions variable the write/here project appeared across twenty-seven advertising billboards throughout Hobart, and presented posters (white text on a bright red background) that explored public and personal relationships with Hobart.133 write/here was a collaborative project with Justy Phillips, and individuals and communities throughout Hobart.134

133 In this report, ‘project’ refers specifically to the write/here project and not the research project as a whole. 134 To varying degrees, most artworks included in the project exhibition involved elements of collaboration or participation. write/here expanded the experience of working with others to include 92

Developed over a two-year period, write/here was part community event, part temporary public art project and part media intervention. The project represents Phillips’ and my motivation to transform billboard-advertising space from representations of materialist aspirations and ideals into intimate revelations that represent individuals’ everyday stories and micro-histories. Due to the scale of Hobart, we were able to utilise most billboard space in the city (as well as one at Hobart Airport).135 Texts for the billboards were sourced from approximately twenty facilitated writing workshops and recorded conversations with different social groups including: recent arrivals to Tasmania from Iran, Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Congo; female inmates at Risdon Prison; clients at nursing homes; college students; Aboriginal elders; and anonymous general public submissions.

Fig. 59, the write/here project, 2005-07, production still from interview

collaboration with another artist (Justy Phillips who was also my PhD co-supervisor), collaboration with other practitioners (early on we developed ideas with a professional writer), collaboration with an arts festival (Ten Days on the Island), collaboration with local businesses (who either donated billboard sites or helped fund the printing of the posters), and collaboration with vastly differing communities and individuals whose thoughts and stories contributed text. write/here clearly displayed evidence of our filtering process, but the work’s content and reach had evidently extended to include a broad number of people, organisations and businesses. 135 We worked with the signage company Claude Group to secure every billboard under their management. Even though the Claude Group manages billboard advertising in Hobart there were still a few billboard sites we weren’t able to occupy including several privately owned and two extremely large- scale sites. 93

Fig. 60, the write/here project, 2005-07, $1 story shop, project documentation

Although the project required over two-years research and development,136 the actual billboard installation occurred during a two–week period in late March to early April 2007.137 write/here used vernacular aesthetic to realise a temporary, site-specific work.138 While developing the project, Phillips and I were conscious of other artists also using billboard space to present temporary projects outside of the gallery environment such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzner; and more recently, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Pierre Huyghe; as well as locally, Peter Burke, a.k.a. Shelly Innocence, and Lisa Anderson. The project was not a ‘community artwork’ per se, but it did evolve through in-depth conversations and workshops with particular communities and individuals that we either sought out, or who approached us.

Our aim with this work was to collect intimate reflections on individual relationships with home and place, and then present these through a public platform that is usually dedicated to generic, mass-media messages. We wanted to transform something private into something public, which, in turn, would be interpreted privately. The project is obviously manipulated in the way we ‘filtered’ every piece of information to construct our own distilled version of the tens-of-thousands of words we collected and

136 This period included: applying for funding through federal, state and local council funding bodies; in- kind and cash sponsorship from local business; facilitating writing workshops and conversation with community groups and individuals. Basically, the planning involved two main activities: organising sponsorship and in-kind support on the one hand, and facilitating discussions, workshops and interviews, on the other. 137 the write/here project was included as part of the Visual Arts program for Ten Days on the Island, 2007. 138 We received many comments that the white text on red background was mistaken for a new ‘Virgin’, ‘Vodophone’ or ‘Coke’ advertising campaign. 94 transcribed. We negotiated ethical issues through maintaining the anonymity of the stories submitted, and even though images from the conversations and workshops are used in the project exhibition, the direct connection between particular people and stories is not revealed. The stories on the billboards existed as a city-wide narrative, raising questions as to whether this was some sort of artwork; part of an arts festival; or, perhaps, a new, subversive marketing campaign by Virgin Blue:

In every city, printed words tell us that to live out our dreams, we need to consume more. Even if the messages we take in through advertising do not entirely obscure the truth, they are at least a euphemism for it.139

Fig. 61, the write/here project, 2005-07, production still from workshop

Individually, the texts read like fleeting encounters or bytes of conversations, but viewed collectively (even over a period of time) they became more like a script to an anonymous story, where the viewer/pedestrian/driver becomes a chance actor – piecing together elements of a script and constructing a subjective story as they move through the urban environment. The strategy of involving the viewer within the artwork relates to Pierre Huyghe’s 2002 billboard project, discussed in the previous chapter, where the viewer/passer-by is encouraged to question their relationship to the scenario being played out on the billboard nearby. Huyghe comments on this viewer relationship:

139 Abell, Judith, ‘The Write/Here Project’, Landscape Architecture Australia 114, May 2007, p. 36 95

When you enter into the show you become an extra yourself. You can be the viewer of the poster and compare it with the reality being played out nearby, with the context of the image in which people move, just as you can unknowingly become an extra in the scene, or even, more rarely, you can become its agent – an actor.140

Fig. 62, the write/here project, 2005-07, installation view

To build the content for the project we collaborated with a professional writer to facilitate a number of writing workshops that were open to the general public. After several workshops we acknowledged the relatively contrived and formal nature of the responses collected through this strategy, as well as the limited demographic representation attending the workshops. We wanted to include people who were willing to share stories and experiences of displacement, isolation, belonging, incarceration, transition, aspirations, doubt, loss and depression, in order to reveal less visible perspectives on Hobart’s social climate. After working through an extensive process of accessing appropriate community groups and individuals (such as prison inmates, young migrants, college students, people in age-care homes and Aboriginal elders), we constructed specific questions and conversation topics relative to the project’s background. Each encounter initiated an open discussion – but we aimed to guide every conversation in a particular direction that would relate to the overall project, while still encouraging subjective perspective. Every written response and recorded conversation was transcribed into a series of anonymous thoughts, memories and responses.

140 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. Pierre Huyghe, p. 164 96

Fig. 63, the write/here project, 2005-07, installation view

Justy Phillips and I worked individually to select possible texts for the billboards. This was an intuitive process and we wanted to work through the approximately 900 responses separately in order to instil our individual perspectives on the content we had collected. We were conscious that this filtering process would be critical as it reflected our presence within the project. We attempted to view the stories from a critical distance, taking into account the anonymity of the subjects, so that we could select texts without relying on prior knowledge of the subject or the context of the broader conversation. We compared our separate selections considering narrative content, relationship to billboard site and to other texts, and length of text, eventually culling them to a final 27. 97

Fig. 64 and 65, the write/here project, 2005-07, process documentation write/here incorporated methodologies and working processes that were consistent with other time-based artworks included in the project exhibition.141 I consider write/here ‘time-based’ because of the transient nature of its development process and the manner by which it was encountered by viewers.

141 ‘Time-based art’ is a term usually designated to artworks that involve time-based media such as video, film and sound. 98

Familiar Strangers, 2007 25 channel sound installation Approx. 5:00min loop Speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVD players, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers

Familiar Strangers is a sound installation that presents personal and intimate stories of isolation as a collective experience. Presented on twenty-five small, discreet speakers, voices can be heard telling moving, revealing, mundane, humorous and depressing accounts of isolation – either about extended periods of time or just brief moments of being alone. Presented together, these voices sound like a collective hum of human activity which resonate from any active, public space. Individually each speaker tells a private story specific to Hobart; memories and experiences of personal relationships and loss that have been transferred and shared between different people.

Made during the final months of write/here, Familiar Strangers extends the process of drawing connections between subjective experiences by transforming private memories into public material. For several weeks I collected stories by calling family and close friends and recording prompted responses. After collecting approximately fifty stories, I then transcribed all the conversations into scripts, including instructional notes on the cadence, intonation and pause in each person’s speech. Using these scripts, family and friends (most of whom had contributed stories to the original recordings) were then recorded reading someone else’s story, effectively transferring personal experience between strangers, while also ensuring anonymity for the original story-teller.

Presented together as a sound environment, the audience is encouraged to walk through the almost schizophrenic collection of reflective, melancholic and hesitant voices – creating an additional narrative made up of fragments of stories heard. Multiple processes of interpretation underlie this work: my interpretation of the initial recorded stories as scripted text; the readers’ interpretation of the script as their voice is recorded while reading out loud; and finally the listeners’ interpretation of the individual and collective stories that surround them in the sound-scape. 99

Fig. 66 and 67, Familiar Strangers, 2007, production stills

Similar to write/here, the process of making Familiar Strangers involved a strategy of engaging in a discursive survey with different subjects as a means to gather content and define the project’s direction. The content of this survey was filtered through a process of re-interpretation (both my own and the people who read the scripts), which opened questions to whether these were real or imagined memories and, by reading them, if it is possible to occupy someone else’s reality – even if only for a moment. Using speech to fracture the relationship between truth and experience runs parallel to some of Gillian Wearing’s videos, especially, 2 into 1, and 10-16, where she displaces the voice of her subjects between people of vastly different ages. In writing about this fracturing, Dan Cameron observes: 100

To truly feel someone else’s emotions and sensations in place of our own, to open one’s mouth to speak and have another’s voice emerge, would involve such a profound displacement of one’s sense of self that afterwards it might be impossible to fully regain perspective as a unified self. Worse still, we might never again be satisfied with staying within the confines of our individual shells.142

Gathering the content of the work depended on developing clear, direct and open questions or conversation prompts. Each conversation had to be independent and open, while still revolving around the same focus on individual stories of isolation. I developed a relatively simple strategy of locating people who were willing to talk through explanatory emails and word-of-mouth. I then called each person, informing them that the conversation would be recorded but they would remain anonymous due to my transcription and exclusion of any names.

To record the stories, each person read the transcribed script two or three times. Often the second recording was the most natural, but the multiple recordings also provided more material to construct a sound file from sections of each recording. I then had to allocate each voice to a separate speaker. Technically, this involved resolving a series of problems, such as how to best present one voice per speaker, without having to install twenty-five CD or DVD players and amplifiers. These issues were resolved by combining five separate voices on one DVD; the DVD player then plays each of the five channels on a separate speaker in the space.

Fig. 68, Familiar Strangers, 2007, installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

142 Cameron, Dan, ‘I’m Desperate: Gillian Wearing’s art of transposed identities’, Parkett 70, 2002, p. 99 101

Each of the stories in Familiar Strangers provides a personal perspective on a situation of isolation. These stories are significant in the way they reveal the complexities and commonalities of everyday moments or life-changing events. Beyond the tangibility and intimacy of these stories, it is the process of re- interpretation that defines this work. Initially I was unsure whether reading a script of someone else’s experience would be convincing; but the commonalities between people’s experiences provided a familiarity that lent empathy and conviction to the way people read each script.

Unstable Ground, 2006-07 8:30 min, 2 channel DVD loop Stereo sound

Unstable Ground is a two-channel video, made over a nine-month period in institutional, public and private spaces in Hobart. Unstable Ground is both a portrait of people and place, using documentary style video, semi-fictionalised narrative and ambient sound to reveal aspects of the lives of two men who suffer mental illness as they interact with different private and public spaces throughout the city. Unstable Ground began through my interest in a local mental health care facility, the Peacock Centre, visited by both men.

Fig. 69 and 70, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, production stills 102

The Peacock Centre had previously been the family home of the influential Peacock family.143 I was initially drawn to the changing purpose and meaning of the mansion. I visited several times a week, usually during lunch and began to involve myself within and initiate social activities as a way to meet and engage with people who were visiting there. After several months of visiting and filming, I began to focus on the lives of two clients, Stuart and Gordon. Both maintained a level of stability in their lives through different artistic pursuits: Gordon often played the piano to himself in an empty room in the centre, while Stuart spent countless hours creating abstract, colourful drawings. Stuart and Gordon both knew of each other but had no social contact, despite the connections between their interests and personal histories. I began to focus on establishing a parallel existence between the two men through the choreography of two-channel video – creating a virtual connection between Stuart and Gordon by constructing a semi-fictionalised narrative. The video is presented on two screens and follows Stuart and Gordon through public, private and fictional spaces. Various interactions and conversational exchanges appear on both screens – some directed and scripted, other moments filmed through chance encounters or long periods of conversation. Curator Tania Doropoulos writes about the structure of the video by observing that, ‘Newitt places his protagonists in multiple contexts, confusing reality with fiction and vice-versa, until we are trapped in a space that is neither reality nor fiction, confused and disorientated.’144

Fig. 71 and 72, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, production stills

143 Bequeathed to the Tasmanian Government in the 1940’s, the family specified that the building must be used as a place to care for people with incurable illness. After its use as an old-age care home, the Peacock mansion became a mental care facility, providing respite and services for people suffering various mental illnesses – particularly schizophrenia. 144 Doropoulos, Tania, Eternal Beautiful Now, exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Sherman Galleries, May 2007, n.pag 103

Fig. 73 and 74, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, production stills

The video progresses through three untitled chapters: beginning with images of the Peacock mansion, where after a series of observations and architectural studies, Stuart and Gordon are introduced; it then cuts to close-ups of the two men in their private environments, observing personal idiosyncrasies over long periods of time. Finally the video moves to a fictional space, made actual through subtle choreography. From the initial objective, observatory nature of the video, the narrative gradually becomes increasingly intimate; psychological space is externalised with images of Gordon playing a grand piano to an empty theatre, while Stuart opens the blinds in his dark room and stares at the world outside.

I wanted to implicate my camera (therefore myself) within multiple contexts in order to act as a conduit to reveal interactions, conversations and events that connect these two men to the surrounding environment and to each other. Reflecting on Kutlug Ataman’s films, Rachel Kent identified that, ‘the camera becomes a mediator between artist and subject and the audience its witness and collaborator.’145 A literal and conceptual space is created between the two screens for the viewer to inhabit; it is within this space that the viewer may empathise with – or at least observe – Stuart and Gordon, connecting with a sense of anxiety and isolation through negotiating the space between the images on screen and the subtitled narrative. Doropoulos notes that:

As an audience, we are allowed to connect with them in a very real sense, as we discover their personalities and quirks. Through the artist’s connection with them, we too connect. When the video cycle finally reaches their dream-space, we reach our own dream space with them, imbued with a sense of justice or

145 Kent, Rachel, op.cit. p. 8 104

resolution. A journey initiated by the artist is shared by both subject and viewer.146

Fig. 75, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, production still

Unstable Ground involved spending the longest period of time within a particular situation. The nine months or so in which I developed friendship and trust with Stuart and Gordon added a level of complexity to the video and a new level of social engagement within the research. The social processes behind making Unstable Ground (such as baking cakes for weekly lunches, spending long periods of time in conversation, setting up particular situations) informed subsequent projects, including write/here and especially Saturday Nights. For a long time I was unsure about the social processes behind the work, I was particularly concerned that I could be using significant time on a video that lacked direction or actual subjects. I was clear from the beginning that I was visiting the centre to make a video, and rather than imposing my camera in different situations, I waited and watched as different interactions emerged, eventually asking if I could film. During the last three months of filming and editing I stopped visiting the centre, partially because I was focusing on filming Gordon and Stuart outside of the Peacock Centre, and partially because the centre changed management and its operational structure became much more restrictive to visitors and clients.

146 Doropoulos, Tania, op.cit. n.pag 105

Fig. 76 and 77, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, production stills

I spent more time editing Unstable Ground than any other work in the exhibition. I was conscious of the need to create a specific atmosphere through the work, while also avoiding a didactic representation of two men’s psychological instability. I approached this problem through several different strategies: using subtitled text rather than recorded conversations to provide an underlying narrative (creating a fracture between text and image); using the subtitled text on both screens to open questions about which voice is telling which story – the stories may have come from Gordon or Stuart or me or another client from the Centre; creating an ambient soundtrack (recorded from real situations) that connects different spaces and times and adds to the sense of possible fiction behind the video; and finally by ending the video with a series of constructed situations and scripted actions – both Gordon and Stuart 106 are obviously interacting for the camera – raising questions as to whether the whole video was, in fact, a construct.

Saturday Nights, 2007 10:30 min, HDV DVD loop Stereo sound

Saturday Nights is a single channel video about a country-dance that I facilitated in early March 2007 at the Koonya Hall on the Tasman Peninsula. Saturday Nights combines documentary observations and scripted actions to reveal aspects of the personal histories and relationships within a community involved in country-dances. Saturday Nights was commissioned as part of the Port Arthur Project during Ten Days on the Island, 2007.147

Over the period of making Saturday Nights I used previous experiences of building relationships to inform the production of a participatory event aiming to create a new narrative layer to the cultural landscape of the Tasman Peninsula – a landscape which has been scared by the events at Port Arthur ten years ago.148 I discovered that a country-dance and the micro-rituals associated with the event (preparation, rehearsal, music, supper, dancing, etc.) would be an appropriate means to represent and interrogate the present cultural experience of the Tasman Peninsula area – and to visualise paradoxical isolation and connection. Although Saturday Nights incorporates aspects of nostalgic memory and historic re-enactment, the artwork equally seeks to address the present conditions and issues of a country community. In his essay ‘Artist as Historian’, Mark Godfrey identifies methodologies used by contemporary artists to connect present experience through historic perspective:

Though research on these subjects often begins with an invitation to make work in a particular location, [Matthew] Buckingham’s work does not really reflect on his own personal biography as a mobile artist travelling to these locations. His subjects tend not to be particularly esoteric or quirky or obscure. Buckingham rather initiates his historical research because of the urgency of a

147 Port Arthur Project was curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clark, involved 25 artists and continued beyond Ten Days on the Island, running from March 16 to April 15, 2007. The exhibition was ‘a landmark series of commissioned site-specific installations that engage with Port Arthur's history and culture.’ (From the Port Arthur Project press release) 148 2007 was the 10th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, an unplanned but powerful association with the timing of Port Arthur Project. 107

particular idea in the contemporary moment, and his research produces a politicised reinterpretation of the present.149

Fig. 78, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, video stills

Fig. 79, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, video stills

Saturday Nights investigates contemporary art as event or constructed situation, and modifies everyday experience to reveal a perspective on a place that is often seen only through its past. Given this premise, the following questions by Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev regarding Pierre Huyghe’s practice also seems appropriate, ‘Must the space of ritual always be defined in terms of the backwards gaze as a form of inanimate reception? Can the artist initiate the production of a new reality, thus creating a form of public art that truly modifies shared space, rather than temporarily occupying it?’150

149 Godfrey, Mark. op.cit. p. 147 150 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, op.cit. p. 405 108

Fig. 80, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, video stills

Fig. 81, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, video stills

As a participant in Port Arthur Project, I wanted to avoid engaging with the convict history of Port Arthur, and the limited perspective of only seeing Port Arthur through its colonial past. I also wanted to avoid further sensationalising the Port Arthur massacre – an event which received a flood of international media attention. Instead I aimed to find ways of working with the current community from the broader Tasman Peninsula area, to develop a project that reflected the Tasman Peninsula as a living place, not just a relic of the past. This was a difficult task from the position of an ‘outsider’, although over time I managed to meet and interview approximately 30 people from the Tasman Peninsula area. Conversely, I found my position as ‘outsider’ also privileged me with an objective perspective that allowed me to film with the clear 109 intention of making a video work and not an overly familiar ‘home movie’.151 Through organising a country-dance, I wanted to make visible the relationships and connections that binds a community together, especially a community that has a recent history of violence and trauma.

Saturday Nights is the final artwork produced as part of the research project. Here I used high definition video to capture footage that was of a better quality than previous video works. I wanted the images of the dance and the decorated hall to be rich, clear and almost tangible, creating an atmosphere of both connection and isolation, a sense of the past and present colliding, of individuals coming together and relating through the dance, but also speaking from an isolated and ‘removed’ place, leaving questions as to whether the dance was actually imagined or had indeed occurred in reality.

Saturday Nights was developed over a six-month period during which I worked between Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula. The project began by investigating a large number of oral history transcripts from members of the Tasman Peninsula community recorded in the 1990s by local historians.152 Through this process I came to identify country-dances as important community events. I was also drawn to the changing nature of social activities in the area.153 I undertook several months of interviews to gain a better understanding of the history and people involved in country-dances on the Tasman Peninsula; this process also allowed me to make connections and introduce myself to different members of the community, and to gauge the potential for organising an event of my own. Parallel to the interviews, I worked to locate the best place to hold the dance and find appropriate musicians who would be accepted by the audience as well as willing to be directed for the video.

151 Even though I claim to be an ‘outsider’ from the Tasman Peninsula community, I was very familiar with the area having spent substantial time surfing local beaches over the past 10 years. 152 Peter MacFie is a historian who managed a project during the 1990s recording oral histories from long-term Tasman Peninsula residents. I was able to access transcriptions of these oral histories from another local historian, James Parker. 153 Since the 1960’s dances had gradually died out as young people left the Peninsula looking for work, and, as cars became more popular, they travelled into Hobart to seek entertainment. The Koonya Hall, which hosted the dance, is also under threat of being sold by the local council. 110

Fig. 82, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, project documentation

Up until the night of the dance I had no certainty – just general indications – that anyone would turn up to the event. Therefore, my outline for the video had to be left open – either to incorporate scenes of a social activity or, alternately, to reveal melancholic images of a band playing to an empty hall. I was pleased to see people attending the event, and therefore directed and edited the video to reflect the experience of a shared social event. At the beginning of the night I made it clear to the crowd attending that the entire event would be filmed and incorporated into an artwork, I also indicated that I would be directing certain shots during the dance. In editing Saturday Nights, I incorporated narrative collected from earlier interviews, observatory footage of sites around the Tasman Peninsula, scripted scenes of preparatory activity, and finally selected scenes from the facilitated country-dance. I made no distinction between directed scenes and spontaneous observations. The openness of the work’s narrative structure thus maintained the universality of the video, and its relevance outside of the context of Port Arthur and the Tasman Peninsula. In essence, the video aims to give the viewer the sense of bearing witness to a contemporary fable. 111

Fig. 83, Saturday Nights, 2006-07, production still

Saturday Nights was a project that involved building relationships within a tight-knit community and facilitating that community’s participation within an artwork. On a more ambitious scale, Saturday Nights also aimed to contribute to the collective memory of the community by creating the template for an event that can be elaborated on and re-interpreted over time – an intention also speculated by Huyghe in Streamside Day. It is difficult to gauge the success or otherwise of such projects, without somehow being able to map, evaluate or quantify the discussion or the circulation of these collective memories. Several subsequent visits to the Tasman Peninsula since filming the dance suggests the intention of producing a work with a ‘life possibility’ have occurred.154 Producing life possibility or not, my main interest and motivation in making the artwork was to create an event that represented the connections and relationships that bind people to a community.

154 Several of the performers from the night have began to play together with the intention of re- establishing local dances on a more regular basis. 112

Exhibitions and Presentation

Throughout the candidacy I have presented artworks within group and solo exhibitions, providing the opportunity for experimentation and critical feedback. Testing possible installation methods also allowed me to refine and modify of each work. The works included in the project exhibition are connected by my exploration of relationships between people and place through narrative structure. I have approached this research as an open and additive investigation. The project exhibition demonstrates the heterogeneous, additive nature of the research by visually and conceptually revealing common ideas, concerns and aesthetics.

While earlier artworks such as Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006 were not originally made to fit within the structure of a particular exhibition, I tested exhibiting them together in Quote, by presenting the two videos as back-to-back, medium size projections.155 Exhibited in this way, the viewer’s action of walking from one screen to the opposite side dramatically compresses the two-year time lapse between the two videos. I sought a simplified version of the physical editing Kutlug Ataman describes, especially in relation to his multi-screen installation Küba.156 I refined the Arberg Bay videos for this exhibition by progressively editing each work into a ‘tighter’ narrative format. For example, I re-edited Arberg Bay, 2004 after making the 2006 version, in order to avoid repetition of images and narrative text.

155 Quote. Curated by Colin Langridge, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, August 2006 156 Politi, Gia and Ataman, Kutlug, op.cit. p. 183 113

Fig. 84 and 85, Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006, installation view, Quote, Long Gallery, Hobart

In contrast to the progressive development of the Arberg Bay videos, Altered State was produced with a clear installation format in mind. It was exhibited as part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival: Containers Village and also as part of the exhibition Text Me… at the Devonport Regional Gallery. The theme for the 2006 Next Wave Festival: ‘Empire Games’157 clearly connected with some of the issues and approaches behind Altered State: especially displacement, identity and performance. During the Next Wave Festival, Altered State was installed on two facing panels, within the restrictive space of a shipping container.158 In Devonport, the work was presented on two

157 The 2006 Next Wave Festival: Empire Games coincided with the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. Much of the work included in the festival sought to give an alternative voice to the mass of advertising and ‘games fever’ that infiltrated Melbourne at the time. 158 The images of people projected within a shipping container also drew connotations of migration, displacement and asylum seeking. 114 adjacent monitors with the sound heard through headphones. Both installation methods were successful, although the immersive, spatial experience of standing between two projections (as presented at the Next Wave Festival) proved far more effective. By testing these two approaches, I came to realise that the important aspect of the presentation is to involve the viewer within the subject’s performance and gaze as they stand and watch moments of action and reaction.

Fig. 86 and 87, Altered State, 2006, installation view, Containers Village, Next Wave Festival 2006, Melbourne 115

Fig. 88, Altered State, 2006, installation view …text me, Devonport Regional Gallery

Unstable Ground also incorporates two-screen projections, although within a different format. Presented as part of the exhibition Eternal Beautiful Now at Sherman Galleries, Sydney, Unstable Ground was projected onto two adjacent screens that were linked to create a corner space. Projected this way the video creates a space for the viewer to become immersed in the two video-portraits. The corner projection also visually connects the conversation and exchange between the two, isolated subjects. The claustrophobic presentation of Unstable Ground is intended to heighten the sense of introversion and anxiety that permeates the video. Unstable Ground has also been progressively refined for the project exhibition. The process of making the video resulted in a body of work that included a series of production stills and the video Intermission, an extended version of Gordon’s (one of the video’s subject’s), Theatre Royal piano performance that features at the end of Unstable Ground.159 These related works helped to inform the content and installation of Unstable Ground; Intermission was an especially valuable experiment in creating an immersive, structural video installation.

159 Intermission was presented as part of the exhibition a room with a view, CAST Gallery, Hobart, February 2007. 116

Fig. 89, Unstable Ground, 2006-07, installation view, Eternal Beautiful Now, Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Fig. 90, Intermission, 2007, installation view a room with a view, CAST Gallery, Hobart

Works such as the write/here project were conceived as a temporary event and remain permanent only through their documentation and the used, vinyl poster skins. The experience of seeing the scale of the billboards, the changing light and weather conditions, the urban activity and the act of moving through the city to encounter different (sometimes almost hidden) messages provided unexpected and varied experiences of the project that are difficult to reproduce within the exhibition. The selected documentation of write/here and its development (including workshops and conversation groups) reflects the depth of our research and engagement behind the project. 117

The integration of the write/here project and Familiar Strangers within the project exhibition also reveals connections between the two artworks, especially their mutual incorporation of collected voices through methodologies of surveying and interviewing. The collection of melancholic voices in Familiar Strangers provides an aural layer to the visual experience of the write/here project documentation.

Fig. 91 and 92, the write/here project, 2005-07, project documentation, installation view Boag's Beerlovers Centre, Launceston

Both Familiar Strangers and Saturday Nights were originally produced in relation to an exhibition or event: Familiar Strangers as part of the exhibition Made Public and Saturday Nights as part of Port Arthur Project.160 While these artworks were made to

160 Made Public was curated by Paula Silva, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, January 11 – February 1, 2007. Port Arthur Project was curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clark, as part of Ten Days on the Island, the Port Arthur Historic Site, March 16 – April 15, 2007. 118 directly address aspects of the research project, they also responded to the exhibition themes. Involvement in both Made Public and Port Arthur Project proved a positive experience, and producing work for the exhibitions was helped by critical reflection and discussion with other artists and the curators.

Familiar Strangers is a complicated work to install, and participation in Made Public afforded the opportunity to resolve several technical issues. Installed in the Carnegie Gallery, the speakers produced a clear but very discreet sound; they were small enough for the visitors to hold one next to their ear and listen to individual stories, while they could also hear the overall chatter from the other twenty-four speakers. Installing the speakers in a grid formation created a visual field while also leaving space between each for the viewer to walk through without becoming tangled. This grid formation has been utilised within the project exhibition, although I have refined the installation so the equipment behind the work is not as clearly visible as in the Carnegie Gallery.161

Fig. 93, Familiar Strangers, 2007, installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

161 Susan Hiller’s work Witness in the 2002 Biennale of Sydney: (The World May Be) Fantastic, provided a useful example of how to install suspended speakers in grid formation. 119

Fig. 94, Familiar Strangers, 2007, installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

Saturday Nights was originally shown in the Asylum at the Port Arthur Historic Site as part of Port Arthur Project. My choice of the Asylum was significant as it was reputed to be the best dancing hall in Tasmania.162 Projecting Saturday Nights in the Asylum was a way for me to re-introduce the living Tasman Peninsula community to a site that had been lost to them, temporarily re-establishing the hall as a place of celebration. Projected onto a single, anamorphic screen, Saturday Nights is a more cinematic installation than the other multi-screen video works. I have included the same festoon lighting in the installation that was used during the dance; the single screen of the projection is transformed into a theatrical space, creating an environment that reflects the atmosphere of the dance depicted in the video.

162 The Asylum was used as the town hall as well as an occasional dance hall after the penal settlement closed in 1877. Through my interviews with the community I discovered a degree of animosity towards the controlled nature of the Port Arthur Historic Site and its management, especially towards the transition of the Asylum from community space into a museum. 120

Fig. 95, Saturday Nights, 2007, installation view, Port Arthur Project, Port Arthur Historic Site

Since presenting Saturday Nights within the Port Arthur Project, I have refined the video through progressive editing and, have also resolved problems of inconsistent sound quality. I was conscious of sound production while making the work (especially as sound quality had been an issues with earlier works), but found that sound was still an element that needed resolving during its presentation at Port Arthur. As well as making the sound clearer and more consistent, I re-edited the video to further refine its narrative structure so it is less descriptive and more openly suggestive – creating a video that speaks of relationships and place rather than a documentary of a country dance. 121

CHAPTER 4 Conclusion

In conclusion, I address my initial research questions and aims as well as considering some of the outcomes of specific artworks included in the project exhibition and their relationships to these questions.

As well as summarising the outcomes of the project and the knowledge it adds to the field, it is satisfying to reflect on the shift in practice that has occurred through this research and to realise that methods and formal skills learnt through earlier works (previous to this PhD project) have significantly informed and contributed to its successful completion. Throughout my research, I have sought to challenge my approach to art practice by activating various participatory situations and encountering different people and places. During this process I felt a level of anxiety and apprehension about my research methodologies, and was also unsure how such methodologies would be consolidated to form a physical artwork. In hindsight, the changes and developments within my practice have been significant in terms of production, methodology and subject matter, and my sense of apprehension seems most likely a result of working through those changes.

From the beginning, I sought to incorporate a situational aesthetic to identify, describe and elaborate social and cultural relationships with local places through time-based narrative forms.163 I questioned contemporary art’s capacity to fulfil that objective by developing a series of interrelated artworks as well as defining a relevant contextual field of relevant artists. Here I conclude it is possible to develop artwork that engages with and addresses fragile and complex relationships to place without resorting to social commentaries or ethnographic documentation. Each work in the project exhibition articulates both internal (psychological) and external (situational) experience – reducing the space between artist, subject and place. Observational techniques of recording social activity, speaking with people and photo-documenting places, were at times incorporated to identify relationships between people and place; while experimental narrative forms were used to describe and elaborate those relationships. The project concludes that while contemporary art has a capacity to

163 I have made work specifically from Tasmanian places because personal implication and engagement with the subjects I explored was a crucial element of the research process. I intend to expand this approach in the future to engage with different cultural and social contexts. 122 describe and elaborate a sense of place within individuals and communities, a level of critical distance is also crucial in this context. While the artist might establish meaningful relationships with a subject, those relationships are determined by the artist’s intention to create an artwork – even if it is constructed from time-based media such as video or film. The question of how much critical distance is needed and to the extent to which relationships are maintained after the work is produced remains dependent on the circumstances surrounding the work and, ultimately, reflects the artist’s personal approach and ethical position, along with the preference of the subjects.

During the research, I investigated events, experiences and memories that bind people into communities and to place, and ways an artwork can elaborate these. The events, experiences and memories that informed individual works emerged out of everyday situations, either by chance or through careful manipulation and facilitation. Each of the artworks included in the project exhibition and discussed in the contextual chapter all reflect states of change, displacement and transition. The project concludes that for an artwork to engage with a context of transition it must capture experiences and conversations over a period of time, revealing the subtlety of these ‘states of being’ with sensitivity and commitment. The project has described how conversations and experiences can be elaborated through the artist’s filtering and manipulation of narrative elements in order to retain a sense of universality – thus creating connections with other places, people and situations. An early example of this filtering process is Arberg Bay, 2004, as it demonstrates an approach to presenting individual voices as collective experience. This approach was extended through subsequent artworks, especially Arberg Bay, 2006, the write/here project, Familiar Strangers and Unstable Ground.

The project also questioned the function and use of social engagement and constructed situations within contemporary art practice, and asked how these situations and conversational engagements can be transferred from one context to another. By discussing the work of Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Anri Sala, Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart and Doug Aitken, numerous examples are provided to illustrate the breadth of art practice that incorporates social engagement. Many of these artists utilise constructed situations as a means to manage the changing social circumstances that surround their projects. By incorporating constructed situations, these artists work as directors and facilitators to manipulate and take control of the situations they 123 encounter, producing narratives which then elaborate as well as describe social and cultural relationships with place. Constructing situations therefore allows for a creative scripting of the everyday, subtly shifting common actions and events into new narrative realms. Overall, this project concludes that by using real people and real places within constructed situations, everyday space is transformed to incorporate a fictional dimension, thus revealing questions of relationships between reality and fiction.

Throughout this project I have developed an argument for the validity of social engagement as a form of production, finding that it must incorporate a level of criticality, revelation and intimacy in order to provide a perspective on place that explores beyond the surface of ‘common knowledge’. I developed different modes of social engagement through extensive interviews, recorded conversations, writing workshops and facilitated performances, as a way to gather ‘data’ for the content of individual artworks. Even if I investigated elements of everyday life and common places within this project, the narratives and experiences I have extricated and revealed provide new cultural and artistic knowledge. The ‘Peacock Centre’ in Unstable Ground, the Tasman Peninsula in Saturday Nights, the landscape in Arberg Bay or the everyday interiors in Altered State may belong to common knowledge and experience, but the personal narratives and images that emerged from within those environments are only revealed after long periods of engagement and investigation.

The question of relationships between artist and subject and the ethical responsibilities of artists who incorporate other people’s stories within artworks remains open and relative. Here I have addressed ethical responsibility in relation to most of the works included in the project exhibition and each provides a case study for different ethical issues and possible means to navigate them. Establishing trust and familiarity with my subjects in order to record private conversations, micro-performances and interactions was crucial in works such as Altered State, Unstable Ground and Saturday Nights. These works revealed questions about my position in relation to my subjects and how the presence of a video camera can mediate experience. The project also provides a contextual overview of artists who establish different relationships with their subjects, and provides examples of relationships which are either personal and conversational (Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing, Anri Sala); celebratory and social (Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Sharon Lockhart); observatory and detached (Gillian Wearing, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean). The project concludes that within a range of approaches, there is no single clear ethical guideline to determine the 124 correct way of incorporating other people’s stories into an artwork. Although human research ethics policies clearly state the underlying principles to guide this type of research, the artworks included in the project exhibition and discussed within the contextual field are fluid, responsive, conversational and precarious – ethical issues therefore need to be addressed progressively through the development of individual works. The success of these works lies in their ability to use subjective stories without exploitation in a way that addresses universal themes and issues – transforming the here and now into a broader context and engaging other people within the narrative space of the artwork.

Lastly, I have concluded that the viewer can be implicated within the exhibition space through strategies such as immersion and being incorporated within a fractured narrative. Therefore the heterogeneous structure of the project exhibition doesn’t impose a particular pathway or method for viewing the work. The exhibition can either be seen as one large, interrelated narrative, or as a collection of individual narratives which can be interpreted in isolation from each other. New, subjective narratives emerge through a cross-over of fragments of sounds, memories, images, stories and scenarios. The works discussed within this exegesis and included in the project exhibition seek to open a space and provide narrative elements for the viewer to ‘complete’ through active engagement. Just as this research argues against the dogmatic approach of the artist ‘speaking for others’, so too does it avoid artworks which ‘tell the viewer’ about particular issues or places. Such active viewer engagement may happen through negotiating and interpreting the space between text and image (an in Unstable Ground, Saturday Nights or Arberg Bay 2004 and 2006), or by subjectively reassembling multiple narrative elements (as in Altered State, the write/here project or Familiar Strangers) – opening up questions as to whether the artwork represents one person’s story or if, in fact, it actually connects a combination of stories, experiences, places and perspectives.

Without reaching a singular conclusion – this project has proposed ways to identify, describe and elaborate social and cultural relationships with place through narrative artworks. The artworks discussed within this research remain open and subjective, inviting the viewer to contribute their own relational perspectives to these narratives. 125

APPENDIX 1 Bibliography

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Alÿs, Francis, ‘A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves Mountains’, Artforum, (Summer 2002)

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www.documenta.de www.manifesta.org www.palaisdetokyo.com 129

APPENDIX 2 Illustrations

Chapter 1: Project Description

Figure 1 James Newitt, Conserve, 2003, mixed media on paper, MDF pillars, dimensions variable

Figure 2 James Newitt, Untitled, 2003, still from 2-channel video installation, 8mm film transferred to mini DV, stereo sound, 9:50 mins

Figure 3 James Newitt, IXL Redevelopment, site including signage, 2003

Figure 4 James Newitt, IXL Redevelopment signage (detail), 2003

Figure 5 Dan Graham, Homes for America, 1966-1978 Photomontage, 89x65cm 20 October, 2007 From, www.kunsthausgraz.steiermark.at/cms/beitrag/10259298/7775299/

Figure 6 Dan Graham, Two Anamorphic Surfaces, 2000 Two-way mirror, glass, stainless steel Installation view, Wanas, Sweden Scanned from: Graham, Dan, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art. Cambridge: MIT, 1999

Chapter 2: The Project in Context

Figure 7 Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell, 1999-2003 Staged fireworks display in Miami during the 2002 Art Basel Miami Beach fair. Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 352

Figure 8 Kutlug Ataman, Küba, 2004 40 monitor video installation, 40 parts, each 35-75 minutes Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, pp. 64-65

Figure 9 Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004 Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 66 130

Figure 10 Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-93 Chromogenic development prints, each 16.5 x 12 inches Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 11 Gillian Wearing, Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian, 1994 Video still from video and stereo sound, 30:00 mins Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 12 Gillian Wearing, Trauma, 2000 Video still from video and stereo sound, 30:00 mins Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 13 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Riyo, 1999 Film still from 35mm film, sound, 10:00 min Scanned from: Anna Sanders Films. Verona: Forma and Les Presses Du Reel, 2003, p. 45

Figure 14 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Plages, 2001 Production still from 35mm film, Dolby surround sound, 15:00 min Scanned from: Anna Sanders Films. Verona: Forma and Les Presses Du Reel, 2003, p. 56

Figure 15 Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998 Video stills from video and stereo sound, 26:00 min Scanned from: Anri Sala. London: Phaidon, 2006, p. 35

Figure 16 Tacita Dean, Bubble House, 1999 Colour Photograph Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 101

Figure 17 Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000 Colour Photograph Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 16

Figures 18 and 19 Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003 Film stills from 16mm anamorphic, colour film, 3 films in French, German and English, each 20:00 mins Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 104

Figures 20 and 21 Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003 Installation view, Casa Serralves, Porto, Portugal Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 104 131

Figures 22 and 23 Pierre Huyghe, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating Expedition) A Musical, 2002 L’Expèdition scintillante Act 1; Untitled (Ice Boat), ice 102 x 39 x 236 inches; Untitled (Weather Score), rain, fog, snow; Untitled (Offshore Radio), ‘Radio Music’ by John Cage. L’Expèdition scintillante Act 3; Untitled (Black Ice Stage), 254 x 295 x 11 inches, poster 157 x 118 inches, booklet 6 x 5 inches. Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, pp. 94-95 and p. 106

Figures 24 and 25 Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, 2005 Production stills from super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, colour, sound. 10 November, 2007 From: www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/manhattan/centralpark/wollman/ajourneythat wasnt/index.htm

Figure 26 Doug Aitken, Diamond Sea, 1997 Production still of 3-channel video installation, 1 monitor, Duratrans backdrop, sound, 10:00 mins Scanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 49

Figure 27 Doug Aitken, Eraser, 1998 Production still of 7-channel video installation, sound, 20:00 mins Scanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 12

Figure 28 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003 Production still of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00 min Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 129

Figures 29 and 30 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003 Production stills of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00 min Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 139 and p. 141

Figure 31 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003 Production still of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00 min Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 145 132

Figures 32 and 33 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 Production stills of activity for 3-channel video installation, 34:00 min Scanned from: Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. Claire Doherty (ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 6

Figure 34 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 Film still from 3-channel video installation, 16mm film transferred to video and sound, 34:00 min 15 October, 2007 From:

Figures 35 and 36 Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001 Production stills from activity for 35mm film, transferred to video and sound, 61:00 mins Scanned from: Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. Claire Doherty (ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 93 and p. 97

Figure 37 Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005 Production documentation of super 16mm film transferred to video and stereo sound, 12:57 mins Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 21

Figure 38 Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005 Installation view of super 16mm film transferred to video, stereo sound, 12:57 mins Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 98

Figure 39 Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005 Production documentation of super 16mm film transferred to video and stereo sound, 12:57 mins Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 101

Figure 40 Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005 Installation view of super 16mm film transferred to video, stereo sound, 12:57 mins Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 23

Figure 41 Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004 Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 68

Figure 42 Gillian Wearing, Drunk, 1997-99 Video still of 3-channel video installation and sound, 23:00 mins Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003 133

Figures 43 and 44 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, 2003 Exhibition stage includes 5 moving walls; video projection, 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00 mins, 5 colour wall drawings Installation view, DIA Centre for Contemporary Art, New York Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 152 and p. 153

Figure 45 Pierre Huyghe, Little Story, 1995 Installation view, offset printed poster, 26 x 39 inches Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 168

Figure 46 Pierre Huyghe, Chantier Barbès-Rochechouart, 1994 Installation view, offset printed poster, 31 x 47 inches Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 163

Figure 47 Anri Sala, Entre Chien et Loup Installation view, ARC/Musèe d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 2004 Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 16

Figure 48 Anri Sala, scale model for exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2005 Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 29

Figure 49 Kutlug Ataman, Stefan’s Room, 2004 Installation view of 5-screen video installation, approx. 45:00 mins Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, pp. 54-55

Figure 50 Doug Aitken, Electric Earth, 1999 Colour film transferred to 8-channel laserdisc installation, sound, 9:50 min, installation view, 48th Venice Biennale Scanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001

Figure 51 Sharon Lockhart, Teatro Amazonas, 1999 Film still from 35mm film, sound, 30:00 mins Scanned from: Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy (eds.), Place. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005, p.111

Chapter 3: Research and Process: the development of the project

Figure 52 James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004 Video still from 5:30 min, DVD loop, silent 134

Figure 53 James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004 Video still from 5:30 min, DVD loop, silent

Figure 54 James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2006 Production still from 8:00 min video, DVD loop, silent

Figure 55 James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2006 Production still from 8:00 min video, DVD loop, silent

Figure 56 James Newitt, Altered State, 2006 Video stills from 14:00 min, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 57 James Newitt, Altered State, 2006 Production still from 14:00 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 58 James Newitt, Altered State, 2006 Production still from 14:00 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 59 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Production still from interview

Figure 60 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 project documentation of the $1 story shop

Figure 61 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Production still from workshop

Figure 62 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Installation view, inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, 6 x 3m

Figure 63 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Installation view, inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, 7.6 x 3.1m

Figures 64 and 65 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Process documentation

Figures 66 and 67 James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007 Production stills from recording 135

Figures 68 James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007 25 channel sound installation, approx. 5min loop, speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVD players, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers, installation view

Figures 69 and 70 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Production stills from 8:30 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 71 and 72 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Production stills from 8:30 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 73 and 74 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Production stills from 8:30 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 75 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Production still from 8:30 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 76 and 77 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Production stills from 8:30 min video, 2-channel DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 78 and 79 James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007 Video stills from 10:30 min DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 80 and 81 James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007 Video stills from 10:30 min DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 82 James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007 Project documentation from 10:30 min video, DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 83 James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007 Production still from 10:30 min video, DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 84 and 85 James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006 Installation view, Quote, Long Gallery, Hobart, curated by Colin Langridge, 13 August – 10 September

Figures 86 and 87 James Newitt, Altered State, 2006 Installation view, Containers Village, Next Wave Festival 2006, Melbourne, 15 – 26 March, 2006

Figure 88 James Newitt, Altered State, 2006 Installation view, …text me, Devonport Regional Gallery, curated by Ellie Ray, 5 August – 3 September 136

Figure 89 James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07 Installation view, Eternal Beautiful Now, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, curated by Tania Doropoulos, 9 – 26 May, 2007

Figure 90 James Newitt, Intermission, 2007 Installation view, a room with a view, CAST Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 4 March, 2007

Figures 91 and 92 James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07 Project documentation, installation view, Boags Beerlovers Centre, Launceston, 2 – 26 November, 2007

Figure 93 James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007 Installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula Silva, 11 January – 1 February, 2007

Figure 94 James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007 Installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula Silva, 11 January – 1 February, 2007

Figure 95 James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007 Installation view, Port Arthur Project, Port Arthur Historic Site, curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clarke, 16 March – 15 April, 2007

Appendix 4: Description of Selected Support Work

Figure 96 James Newitt, Discussion Frames, 2004 Installation view, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens 8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people

Figure 97 James Newitt, Discussion Frames, 2004 Installation view, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens 8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people

Figure 98 James Newitt, Projected Conversations, 2005 Video still of video and light installation and sound, Approx. 9:00 min

Figure 99 James Newitt, Projected Conversations, 2005 Video still of video and light installation and sound, Approx. 9:00 min

Figure 100 James Newitt, Big Green, Big Blue, 2005 Production documentation of video, DVD loop and stereo sound, 5:30 min 137

Figure 101 James Newitt, Some Other Place, 2005 Production stills of 2-channel video installation, silent, approx. 4:30 min

Figure 102 James Newitt, Some Other Place, 2005 Production still of 2-channel video installation, silent, approx. 4:30 min

Figure 103 come with me… 1 – 9 April, 2006 Video still of performance by Morganics and Sinpare, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

Figure 104 James Wilson and Nisha De Jong, Playscape (rhizome), 2006 Installation view, come with me…, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens Grass and MDF structure

Figure 105 Justy Phillips, quiet days, 2006 Installation view, come with me…, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens CNC routed acrylic board 138

APPENDIX 3 List of Works Included in the Project Exhibition

Arberg Bay, 2004 5:30 min video DVD loop silent

Arberg Bay, 2006 8:00 min video DVD loop silent

Altered State, 2006 14:00 min video 2-channel DVD loop Stereo sound

the write/here project, 2005-07 Documentation of installation using 27 advertising billboards Type-C prints (crystal archive) from digital files 600 x 400 framed and 450 x 300 unframed

Familiar Strangers, 2007 25 channel sound installation Approx. 5min loop Speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVD players, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers

Unstable Ground, 2006-07 8:30 min video 2-channel DVD loop stereo sound

Saturday Nights, 2007 10:30 min video HDV DVD loop Stereo sound 139

APPENDIX 4 Description of Selected Support Work

Discussion Frames, 2004 8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people Dimensions variable Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

Discussion Frames was one of the first works I made during the PhD project as a means to explore ideas of initiating social interaction. Installed at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Discussion Frames, posed questions for people to respond to by drawing directly on the frames. Vinyl text on the frames asked short, conversational questions such as: ‘so… tell me what you did today’, ‘what happened last time you came here’, ‘um… what will you be doing in two-weeks?’ Although somewhat naïve and simplistic, the questions where intended to encouraged the viewer/participant to think about past/present/future experiences of a particular place. During its 10-day installation period, a group of school children where provided with permanent markers and encouraged to write and draw on the screens. The notes, drawings and comments remained on the screens like a chaotic collection of conversations and thoughts.

Fig. 96, Discussion Frames, 2004, installation view 140

Fig. 97, Discussion Frames, 2004, installation view

Discussion Frames was a very early experiment during the research. While it did not contribute essential knowledge to the project, it did provide an opportunity to explore active social engagement through art production, an approach I developed in relation to later video works and installations such as the write/here project.

Projected Conversations, 2005 Approx. 9:00 min video and light installation Stereo sound

Projected Conversations was a site-specific video installation that presented an imagined meeting between an anonymous architect and developer. The conversation, featured in the video as subtitles, is entirely fictional, but informed by recent debates on local waterfront development. This conversation never reaches a particular resolution; instead the meeting revolves around discussion about architectural integrity, culture versus commercial interest and ‘the bottom line’. The site where the video was presented is also significant; the large – then empty – building in Salamanca Square previously housed an Antarctic interpretation centre. After the business went bankrupt, the government gutted the building and sold it to a private developer. Public speculation on the building’s new purpose was rife, and Projected Conversations intended to extend and elaborate on that speculation. 141

Fig. 98, Projected Conversations, 2005, video still

Developed soon after Arberg Bay, 2004, Projected Conversations was a way for me to continue exploration into constructing narratives that are informed by real situations and events. I wanted to present a temporary work that would initiate discussion through an open-ended narrative. I sought to implicate the viewer/passer by within the artwork, by incorporating them in the scene – perhaps even unwillingly.164

Fig. 99, Projected Conversations, 2005, video still

Developing the work involved constructing character profiles for a developer and an idealistic architect, then writing a script for the interaction that would take place in a private meeting room. The conversation reads as being awkwardly contrived, partly

164 There was an ATM installed directly next to the projection screen, the project’s documentation reveals how use of the ATM became an extension of the work. 142 because I scripted a situation where relationships are one-dimensional and fragile, and partly because the script is arguably still unresolved.

Projected Conversations signified an end to my compulsion to film ‘inactive environments’ such as empty, architectural spaces and structures, which came earlier works and research, particularly concerning my Honours work in 2003.

Although Projected Conversations is not included as a work presented for submission exhibition, its inclusion as support work demonstrates a development in my use of constructed narratives which respond to different social and geographic situations.

Big Green, Big Blue, 2005 5:30 min DVD loop stereo sound

Big Green, Big Blue is a single channel video which explores ideas of contemporary displacement through a micro-performance filmed at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. The video was a ‘sketch’ that helped develop ideas for the later work, Altered State.

The performer in the video is Alfred, a young man from Sierra Leone who also performed in Altered State. Alfred first came to Tasmania several years ago as a refugee. He writes rap in competent but awkwardly naive English as well as French, about his transition from Africa to Australia. Big Green, Big Blue was the first video I made that incorporated an actor or actual person as subject matter – and this was something I found very difficult to ‘control’ at the time. By directing Alfred’s performance in a colonial, garden environment I aimed to make visible the, sometimes contradictory, relationships that exist between people, place and history. I knew about Alfred’s rapping through a number of friends, and was able to meet with him and ask whether he was willing to perform one of his songs for me, while being filmed at the Botanical Gardens. He seemed vaguely interested in the idea, and quite happy to appear in front of the camera, but on the condition that I helped him direct and film a video clip for his latest song. Over the following weeks, we worked together to realise both projects – my video and his video clip. 143

I initially intended this work to be presented as a two-channel projection, so I filmed the performance with two cameras (one in close frame and one shooting wide angle). After working through different options during the editing, I decided that incorporating two screens that depicted the same moment in time – from different angles – seemed unnecessary. I used the two parallel shots to give two different options and viewpoints to use in editing the single channel video.

Fig. 100, Big Green, Big Blue, 2005, production documentation

As I mentioned above, most of the process behind this video involved building trust and a relationship with Alfred, then planning the shots I wanted to film. The experience of spending time with my subject made me aware of the time required to allow a video, or the content of the video, to evolve and develop. Later projects such as Unstable Ground and Saturday Nights benefited from this experience, especially while I was spending months of time in research and development before actually filming any scenes. By making this work I also realised the extent to which I wanted to involve myself in directing future projects. Despite having complete control over the shots and the aesthetic structure of the video, I found I had little control over the actual content and the way Alfred performed in the video. The space between me, the camera and Alfred was uncomfortable, and I later felt my position behind the camera was too passive, I wanted to develop a more engaged and active role in future projects.

With the advantage of hindsight, I see that my work with Alfred and Big Green, Big Blue, was the start of an idea that would evolve and eventually form the video work Altered State, which was filmed in early 2006. During making both Big Green, Big 144

Blue and Alfred’s video clip, a relationship of trust and exchange was established and this eventually allowed me to film Alfred dancing in his mother’s living room, totally unencumbered, to his own soundtrack – as one of the performances that comprised Altered State.

Some Other Place, 2005 Approx. 4:30 min, 2 channel video installation silent

Some Other Place was a video projection onto buildings and structures – proposing a virtual connection between two different places and times through the journey of an anonymous character. Some Other Place is presented as video and still image documentation of that projection.

In Some Other Place, A connection is drawn between places in the Botanical Gardens at 6am and places in the city at 6pm. An anonymous character walks along three different routes through the city at dusk – from out of sight, to full view – eventually passing the camera. Conversely, the character is filmed walking in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens at dawn – walking from directly behind the camera – along three different routes until he is out of sight. After filming these walks, I projected the character onto different environments during opposing time of day, i.e. the footage of the character walking alone in the Gardens at dawn is projected onto buildings in the city at dusk, and the city footage at dusk is projected in the Gardens at dawn. This mirroring of spaces and times creates virtual connection between time and space, in which the character passes through – over and over again.

Fig. 101, Some Other Place, 2005, production stills 145

Some Other Place, was an experimentation in methods of projection which was informed by artists such as: Pierre Huyghe and his reinterpretation of Gordon Mata- Clarke’s Conical in, Conical Intersect; Doug Aitken and his multi-screen projections within architectural environments, especially his recent work Sleepwalkers, that appeared on the façade of the MoMA in New York early in 2007; Philippe Parreno and his one minute film El Sueno de Una Cosa, that was projected on a one minute timer in different contexts; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and her Butterfly Pavilion at Documenta X; and Douglas Gordon and the 5 year Drive In, shown in the Californian desert.

Some Other Place was also an exploration into notions of Situationist International psychogeography.165 I wanted the casual passer-by to be confronted with the possibility that a place can exist in the mind as much as it can in reality, and the use of video projection within different natural and architectural structures was a subtle way of pursuing the meeting of real an imagined places.

Fig. 102, Some Other Place, 2005, production still

Some Other Place also seeks to make visible the kind of isolation that can exist in different urban spaces. Individuals isolated in their cars, navigating peak hour traffic, might catch a glimpse at another isolated individual – projected onto a building, navigating the empty space of the Botanical Gardens at dusk. Paradoxically, no one is

165 Guy Debord describes Psygeographical research as a, “study of the exact laws and precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, acting directly on the affective deportment of individuals.’ Debord, Guy, op.cit. ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, p. 45 146 present in the Botanical Gardens at dawn when the character is projected onto different surfaces, navigating through peak-hour traffic and different urban walkways.

The work added to the development of the PhD project through the process of documenting a temporary event. Through making Some Other Place, I came to realise that I needed to confront the issue of effectively capturing and recording temporary actions such as this, in a way that would allow them to be re-presented in different situations and formats.

come with me… 1 – 9 April, 2006 Curated exhibition of commissioned artworks and an afternoon of sound and music performance at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens come with me… was an exhibition I curated at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens during the first week of April, 2006. I was originally motivated by the idea of encouraging the visitor/viewer to move through the Gardens and connect different experiences and artworks in order to form new interpretations of the site and gain a deeper understanding of the conditions under which it currently exists. I was also motivated to present artwork that responded to its immediate environment and, in different ways, changed over time. The work in come with me… moved, disappeared, grew, died, or got stolen. come with me… brought together 16 artists working as individuals or in collaboration to intervene with the Botanical Gardens and create points of differentiation within an already well interpreted and constructed environment. These artists consisted of architects, sound artists, video artists, sculptures, text-based artists and hip-hop artists. Some of the work in come with me… appears as objects, but in many ways the objects were secondary to the interaction that the objects initiated or inspired.

The exhibition ended with an afternoon performance of sound, spoken word and hip- hop. As well as marking the end of the exhibition with a celebration, the performance presented an alternative way of interpreting and responding to the environment. Hip- hop artist Morganics and Kenyan hip-hop group Sinpare, interacted with the crowd and the surrounding environment through constructing spontaneous rhymes mixed with rehearsed song and beats. 147

Fig. 103, come with me…, 2006, video still of performance come with me… was a way for me to explore ideas about the presentation of temporal and spatial artwork, in a specific environment that was already the subject of much historic and geographic interpretation. The exhibition allowed me to explore different approaches to art practice through the mediation of a particular site, and to draw connections between independent approaches to art making. come with me… was also an important development in my facility to work as a director or coordinator of an event. Later video projects involved the coordination of multiple individuals and situations in order to construct a film or scripted situation; come with me… was a testing ground for developing these later works.

Fig. 104, James Wilson and Nisha De Jong, Playscape (rhizome), 2006 148

Fig. 105, Justy Phillips, quiet days, 2006 come with me… signified an endpoint to a relationship with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens; I have spent significant time establishing and pursuing a number of projects and working relationships, some of which, have become less relevant to my central concerns. Early in the project I established a relationship with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens as a way for me to develop new work in relation to an existing site and public institution. As my project developed, I realised that the Botanical Gardens was not a site or context I wanted to focus on. The conditions that define a botanical garden left insufficient room for the sort of critical encounters and environments I was interested in investigating further. come with me… allowed me to actualise some of the ideas and approaches I was developing in relation to the Botanical Gardens before moving on to develop new work and discover different situations/environments. come with me… was a successful experimentation in its own right, but ultimately the exhibition has not contributed essential knowledge or material to my final submission. It has however provided me with the facilities to undertake subsequent projects with confidence as well as significantly expanding my knowledge and ability to realise methods of artwork installation and event organisation. 149

APPENDIX 5 Project Timeline (selected details)

Mid 2004: - Early experimentation with video and collecting material - Initiated and developed Arberg Bay, 2004 - Initiated Discussion Frames

Late 2004: - Presented Arberg Bay, 2004 - Initiated and developed Projected Conversations - Developed and installed Discussion Frames at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens - Developed a space in-between for INFLIGHT art - Develop early works and experiments with text and video

Early 2005: - Presented Projected Conversations at Salamanca Square - Presented a space in-between at INFLIGHT art (solo exhibition), Hobart - Initiated and developed public artwork 5 Points of Change for the IXL Redevelopment, Hobart - Reviewed and refined Projected Conversations

Mid 2005: - Developed and exhibited Isolated Places in shop front in North Hobart with Justy Phillips - Initiated and developed Some Other Place - Initiated and developed Big Green, Big Blue - Initiated come with me… an exhibition of art, sound and words at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens - Initiated the write/here project, with Justy Phillips - Initiated and developed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11 Architects 150

Late 2005: - Developed come with me… - Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips - Developed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11 Architects - Presented Big Green, Big Blue at INFLIGHT art, Hobart - Reviewed and refined Some Other Place - Initiated and developed Altered State

Early 2006: - Presented Altered State at the Next Wave Festival, Melbourne - Installed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11 Architects at Latrobe High School - Presented come with me… during April, at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens (14 artists and 10 sound artists/musicians) - Presented Some Other Place at come with me… - Presented process ideas for the write/here project and launched project website at ‘Design Island’, Mawson’s Place, Hobart, with Justy Phillips - Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips - Initiated and developed Arberg Bay, 2006

Mid 2006: - Presented Arberg Bay, 2006 as part of ‘Quote’, at the Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre - Initiated and developed Familiar Strangers - Initiated and developed Unstable Ground - Initiated and developed Saturday Nights - Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

Late 2006: - Reviewed and refined Familiar Strangers - Developed Unstable Ground - Developed Saturday Nights - Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips - Developed Intermission 151

Early 2007: - Presented Familiar Strangers as part of ‘Made Public’, at the Carnegie Gallery, Hobart - Presented Intermission as part of ‘a room with a view’, at CAST Gallery, Hobart - Presented the write/here project, with Justy Phillips across 27 advertising billboards throughout Hobart, during the 2007 ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival - Presented Saturday Nights as part of the Port Arthur Project, during the 2007 ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival - Reviewed and refined Arberg Bay, 2004 - Reviewed and refined Arberg Bay, 2006 - Reviewed and refined Unstable Ground

Mid 2007: - Presented Unstable Ground as part of ‘Eternal Beautiful Now’, at Sherman Galleries, Sydney - Reviewed and refined the write/here project for presentation

Late 2007: - Reviewed and refined the write/here project for presentation - Reviewed and refined Saturday Nights - Developed and presented the project exhibition 152 APPENDIX 6 DVD contents

DISK ONE: Works in the project exhibition

Saturday Nights, 2007 10:30 min video, stereo sound

Unstable Ground, 2006-07 8:30 min video, 2-channel mock-up, stereo sound

Familiar Strangers, 2007 Video documentation of 25 channel sound installation, approx. 5 min

the write/here project, 2005-07 Documentation of installation using 27 advertising billboards, silent

Altered State, 2006 14:00 min video, 2-channel mock-up, stereo sound

Arberg Bay, 2006 8:00 min video, silent

Arberg Bay, 2004 5:30 min video, silent

One-minute previews of all video works

DISK TWO: support work

come with me…, 2006 Documentation of curated exhibition and performance Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, 3:00 min

Some Other Place, 2006 Video documentation of 2-channel projection, approx. 4:00 min

Isolated Places, 2005 Video documentation of 2-channel projection, approx. 4:50 min

Big Green, Big Blue, 2005 6:00 min video, stereo sound

Projected Conversations, 2005 7:40 min video, stereo sound

Discussion Frames, 2004 Documentation of installation, 8 Perspex frames and permanent markers, 1:50 min 153 APPENDIX 7 Curriculum Vitae

Education 2007 PhD, Fine Arts, University of Tasmania 2003 Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours), University of Tasmania 2001 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Tasmania

Upcoming Projects 2008 Handle With Care, 2008 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, curated by Felicity Fenner, (the 14:00 min, 2 channel video, Altered State, 2006, was selected for inclusion)

Selected Exhibitions 2007 Eternal Beautiful Now, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, curated by Tania Doropoulos, 9 – 26 May, 2007 2007 the write/here project, billboard project as part of the 10 Days on the Island, in collaboration with Justy Phillips, throughout Hobart, Tasmania, 23 March – 1 April 2007 Port Arthur Project, video installation as part of the 10 Days on the Island, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clark, 16 March – 15 April 2007 a room with a view, CAST Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 4 March 2007 Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula de Silva, 11 January – 1 February 2006 Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery 2006 Quote, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, curated by Colin Langridge, 13 August – 10 September 2006 text me… work from INFLIGHT art, Devonport Regional Gallery, curated by Ellie Ray, 5 August – 3 September 2006 Next Wave Festival – container village, International Youth Arts Festival, Melbourne (representing INFLIGHT art), 15 – 26 March 2006 Beneath the Surface, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, in collaboration with Justy Phillips, 6 – 21 May 2005 and then some…, INFLIGHT art, Hobart, 7 –28 October 2005 Isolated Places, site-specific installation, Tasmanian Living Artists Week, with Justy Phillips, 26 August – 4 September 2005 a space in-between, INFLIGHT art, Hobart (solo exhibition), 11 – 26 March 2005 Young Designer’s Month, IXL Atrium, Hunter Street, Hobart, 11 February – 6 March 2004 Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery 2004 Hatched 04: Healthway National Graduate Show, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, 21 May – 4 July 2004 Young Designer’s Month, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, 14 February – 14 March 2003 IXL Art, Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, 23 December 2003 – 25 January 2004 2003 Young Designer’s Month, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, 14 February – 7 March 2002 Palimpsest, Entrepot Gallery, Hobart (solo exhibition) 2001 Transistor, Entrepot Gallery, Hobart 154 Selected Screenings 2007 Intermission, screened at, ‘From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)’, Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Sydney, 17 January 2006 Altered State: Big Green, Big Blue, screened as part of ‘Electroprojections – The Doco Hour’, Electrofringe Festival, Newcastle, Australia, 27 September – 1 October 2006 Altered State: Big Green, Big Blue, screened at the1st International Film and Memorialisation Conference, University of Applied Sciences, Germany, 14-15 October

Selected Commissions 2007 Port Arthur Project, video installation as part of the 10 Days on the Island, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, 16 March – 15 April 2006 Public artwork commissioned for the Latrobe High School, in collaboration with Room 11 architecture, opened 10 February 2005 Public artwork commissioned for the IXL Redevelopment, Hobart 2005 Projected Conversations, video and light installation commissioned by the Hobart City Council, 10 January 2004 Discussion Frames, installation at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, 15 – 20 December 2004 Public artwork commission for Nubeena Community Centre 2004 Signage installed for commercial tenants for the IXL Redevelopment, Hunter Street, Hobart 2003 Signage policy for commercial tenants for the IXL Redevelopment, Hunter Street, Hobart 2003 Foyer Installation for Arts Tasmania, show casing the work from the Young Designer’s Month 2003 2002 Rendering Site, installation, University of Tasmania, School of Art 2002 Stencil artwork and signage design for TAFE Tasmania Clarence Campus, (in collaboration with JAWS2/JAWS architects) 2002 Rendering Site installation, Tasmanian School of Art 2000 – 2005 Graphic design and artwork for the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music

Exhibition and event curation 2006 come with me… an exhibition of art, sound and words, outdoor exhibition and music performance at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart, 1 – 9 April 2004 sight and sonic, electronic music and video art event at INFLIGHT art, Hobart, 6 May

Awards, Grants and Professional Recognition 2006 Tasmanian Artist Award, Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery 2006 Arts Tasmania project grant, with Justy Phillips for the write/here project 2006 Australia Council Community, Cultural Development grant, with Justy Phillips for the write/here project 2006 Hobart City Council, Cultural Development grant, with Justy Phillips for the write/here project 2005 Short course certificate in tertiary teaching 2005 Semi-finalist in the Young Tasmanian of the Year, Arts category 2005 Arts Tasmania grant to assist in establishing an art and design ‘cluster’ 2004 Semi-finalist in the Young Tasmanian of the Year, Arts category 155 2004 Awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award for research at the University of Tasmania 2003 Received First Class Honours 2001 Transistor E-Media category winner, (University of Tasmania, showcase of student artwork)

Community/Professional Service 2002 – 2007 Founding Board Member of INFLIGHT artist run space, Hobart 2004 – 2006 Chair of INFLIGHT artist run space 2003 – 2005 Founder of Cluster, group of young Tasmanian artists and designers 2002 – 2005 Vice president AGDA Tas. (Australian Graphic Design Association) 2002 – 2005 AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association), National Councillor

Employment History 2002 – 2007 Sessional lecturer, Visual Communication, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania

Articles and citations 2007 Tracey Clement, ‘Eternal Beautiful Now’, Artlink, vol. 27, no.3, p.88 2007 Margaret Woodward, Eye, ‘Messages From the City’s Soul’, No. 64, 2007, pp.84-85 2007 Judith Abell, Landscape Architecture Australia, ‘the write/here project’, No. 114, May 2007, pp.34-37 2007 Judith Abell, RealTime, ‘the write/here project: signs of the times’, No. 78, April/May 2007, p.13 2007 Meryl Naidoo, The Mercury, Wednesday 21st March 2007, p.5 2006 Briony Downes, RealTime, ‘words as art’, No.76, Dec/Jan 2006, p.53 2006 Jess Atkinson, Typotastic, issue 2, 2006, pp.41-42 2005 Jane Rankin-Reid, The Sunday Tasmanian, Sunday 17th April 2005 p.9 (Sunday Arts) 2005 Jane Rankin-Reid, The Melbourne Age, Wednesday12th January 2005, p.42 2004 Case Study: Collaboration, National Association for the Visual Arts, December 2004 newsletter, pp.6-7 2004 Nurshahidah Syed, The Mercury, Flying High, Friday 29th October 2004, p.46

Presentations and conferences 2006 ‘come with me… interventions in the Botanical Gardens’, Senses of Place conference, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 5 – 8 April 2005 ‘a space in-between: constructing situations of interpretation’, refereed paper, artists, designers and creative communities, 2005 ACUADS (Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools) conference, Perth, 28 – 30 September 2005 ‘Constructing Narratives and Connections in Everyday Space’, 10 x 10 x 10, National Architecture Week, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Hobart, 23 – 29 October