See+ Gallery, Beijing, China

December 05, 2015–January 30, 2016

Organizer: Hua’er, Director of See+ Gallery

Moderator: Antonie Angerer

Translator (Chinese): Zwei Fan

Date: December 04, 2015

Q (aka Kyoo Lee, hereafter Q): Thanks, everybody, for being here. Special thanks to Hua’er for organizing this event, Antonie and Zwei for moderating and translating, and Gabriela for creating this beautiful work so that we can all come here talk photography and philosophy! We will have a general conversation first and then open the space up for you all to participate later.

When I first saw Vanishing Deconstructions, I asked Hua’er: “How did you get to meet Gabriela, how did this encounter happen?” Hua’er told me this micro-story of their first meeting—she walked into a photo exhibition in Paris, saw this wonderful work, and spoke with the artist, who ended up saying, “we don’t need words because images connect us.” Indeed, images somehow travel in such a way that we become connected by what we see before or without what we say.

In this show, we encounter so many images. In particular, what we encounter photographically is not only intersubjective in itself but perhaps the inter-subjective itself, as in an inter-view. A communication happens in such an interim space, between the viewers, that is, through this work: now then, how? I will ask this first question, against that background.

As the title of our conversation today indicates, we begin by reflecting on the philosophical and poetic aspect of photography, a kind of philophotopoetics, on a photograph that makes itself or herself: what does this photographic scene see and show? Gabriela, as a photographer, you take or create a photographic image, you create something you saw or something you see, and you make the work show that seeing. How is this act of photographic seeing different from the usual seeing? What is a photographic vision?

Gabriela (Morawetz, hereafter G): That is a great question. I think that the first important thing for me is to get pictures which are not perfect because in that case there is a new field, an open space. I don’t consider myself a photographer in the usual way photographers define themselves but it’s important to note that indeed my point of departure is photography. While I am working with my camera, my negatives, and my chemicals in my darkroom in a very usual way, the approach is still paradoxical because I would like to get out of this photographic kitchen, to cross its boundaries. For me, the point is how to see what I want to see.

We can also start from that paradoxical affirmation of the moment we see (something) we don’t see. This is because we mostly see what we know already but we don’t understand it even when we can see it. My approach would be like to get close to some kind of feelings or thoughts, and following the path like it is Ariadne’s thread. So the question, the challenge, is how to get this thread to get to the place you want to get in. I always try to do this by observing elements from nature, the sphere of being, along with material particularities there.

Q: A great way in. Now then, we have this cliché, our usual metaphor, almost dead, that a photograph “captures a moment.” This phrase is very intentional—almost like animal hunting—and it’s a fairly universal concept, or at least universalized. What Gabriela is saying is countering that notion of intentional framing, right? Intentional in the sense of getting at what you want to see or have already seen in the form of knowing. The point Gabriela is highlighting is rather to let the images appear in such a way that we will be able to see what is left to see instead of what we intend to see. Such elements of contexts and accidents, those otherwise invisible or visible, become very important, “elementarily” significant.

I like to link this counterpoint on “envisioning the invisible” to the very concept of the “photographic.” Photographia or photography, in its Latinic sense, is light-inscribed, something via or with light. Photo-graphy uses light to have or keep an image appear … almost like the command “let there be light.” Just a while ago, Zwei and chatted about the Chinese notion of photography, which is more like “shadow-tracing (摄影shè-yǐng, trace-shadow).” These two aspects complement each other—light and shadow. Curiously, we use different faculties to approach the same thing: the “photo-graphia” looks at the light while “shadow-tracing” turns to the shadow.

Now, to turn to the very idea of inscription or re-presentation too: there is a subtle yet significant difference between representation and re-presentation, about which Vanishing Deconstructions says a lot. If you think about all the tracks, like animal tracks and things left behind, the artistic animals like us—many in this room—also tend to track them again.

So here is my second question. One of the things that captured my imagination and attention in the first place was the very title of the show, Vanishing Deconstructions. As a scholar of contemporary French philosophy where the word “deconstruction” is one of the key terms, I have my own sense of what de-construction usually means or has come to mean in more “academic” senses. In this context of a photographic gallery aptly named “See+,” some other lively meanings of “deconstruction” do appear too, and yet, to remind ourselves, it is about and performing Vanishing deconstructions. So now, it’s your turn, Gabriela, to explain what it could mean.

G: I understand your question on the dichotomy between vanishing and deconstruction. When we use the concept of deconstruction we should be conscious of Derrida’s theory. But what I want to explore is just more of the idea of vanishing, disappearing. I use no words, but instead images. To make images, there is a combination of elements, some well-known objects, sometimes human bodies or nature. They compose an environment which eventually can be interpreted by each of us in a different way. That construction of the world, which is individual, is vanishing through the perception from each one of us. When I do “deconstruction” I am trying to construct my own system of understanding.

“Deconstruction” sounds a bit like “destroying,” but also like constructing something else through the elements of what was “destroyed.” In that flurry of words, there are many meanings of “deconstruction.”

From my point of view, that title is based on the construction of something like spaces which would contain a possibility of metaphor—something that complements. I start with a very minimal material, almost nothing. If you put only one point in an empty space, it is something very important. If you contextualize it through other elements, some kind of narration emerges.

Framed images in my work look very rational because of the geometrical forms, but, at the same time, they are absolutely intuitive and the inner structure is reflected outward.

Q: Again, your description vividly points to this paradox you talked about: the ability of the photographic surface to indexicalize this co-existence of moment and movement. The moment becoming movement and vice versa—such a layered imposition and exposition, each time, becomes Gabriela’s signature “move” or “moment.” Each time, we see what we might call a kinetic photograph, always moving. Something is becoming almost nothing and nothing is becoming something. We have a fairly clear and distinct, semi-Cartesian “rational” moment of focus, and then it goes out of focus at the same time. Such a layered vision in and of space and time is also richly explored in the 20^th century contemporary French philosophy, phenomenology in particular, where this dialectic crossing of the visible and the invisible—I am also thinking of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular—produces a constant and productive tension.

And before we invite questions and comments from the audience on what is “photographic seeing” or work, I want to ask you, Gabriela, if you could talk a little about how you would contextualize this exhibition in relation to your works in the past and something you will do in the future. Where do you think you are with your work, the one we see in the gallery today?

So my question is about the philopoetic “spatiotemporality” of your work, your meta-and or intra-photographic focus, so to speak. Martin Heidegger says that everybody has one thought they try to figure out all their life, just like one body, one body of thought. What is that one thought you have, if there is one, any “one”? That one, of course, doesn’t have to be strictly “one,” which has many meanings, itself richly layered and resonant. So what I mean by “one,” especially in your case, would be something like Adriane’s thread of yours we talked earlier: where is that thread, where does it come from, where does it leave, what is its trajectory?

G: I am searching for the way to get into the very inner space which we cannot describe just with words. It is about a desire to enrich the essence of what is impossible to get. The concept of Das Ding is probably something to define and be defined constantly.

Let’s say that I am interested in the mental sphere and in the energy of the unknown.

Q: What or where could be that core that keeps unfolding?

G: I think the creative process is like a destiny. You must continue and search for all kinds of possibilities but it is not a linear process. Once you get into the work, the material character of the things will suggest other dimensions and it is important to be sensitive to those signs. It is like trying to listen to some shimmering voices.

Q: This is a perfect moment to let some other waves to intervene.

P1 (a person, an unidentified interlocutor from the audience): You mentioned the idea of light and shadow, which is obviously the main matter in photography. There is a comparable pair of concepts: emptiness and play. It’s coming to me because just before our meeting we were talking with a group of students of photography. It appeared as a concept because I was talking about the idea of emptiness and its generosity as mirrored in this series of work.

Does the generosity of emptiness mean that emptiness is producing more emptiness, like feeling emptier? Or does emptiness generate plenitude, a plane?—the idea being that, in your culture and art, emptiness is an essential part of the image. I would say that from the occidental point of view emptiness is a kind of fear and we have a fear of emptiness, so we deal with that.

Q: It’s like we want to avoid the void. If I may add, the “cultural” or intercultural point aside, what you’re talking about touches on the absolutely essential, irreducible space in and of art. There is a space for art that cannot be filled in but must be kept empty. A space of freedom. For instance, modern mathematicians and physicists including the “foundational” philosopher Descartes, they debated on the existence of a vacuum. Our ability to imagine the world beyond the visible frame of space is reflected in our avoidance or fear of emptiness. In some sense, then, the photographic reproduction of worldly materials in the form of images, along with its differential constancy, is a fascinating counter-example of this plenitude, the fullness of this life.

G: I think about the image, what it should tell us about the emptiness or fullness. Should it show emptiness as a physical space or rather as a mental state of mind? Should it suggest something like the idea of emptiness? But how? Should that be like a white page? Why white instead of black? It’s obviously not about representation but rather a metaphor of the void. Creating emptiness is creating a possibility of filling it with something which has never been before and is not, either. Then, in order to find that “nothing” we must see through the screen of reality, which is hiding all kind of other spaces.

Q: Through the physical do we access something like the metaphysical. For the sake of comparison, in traditional Chinese paintings the empty space is not simply vacant. The empty space is part of the composition. To give space to that empty space is part of the artistic imaginary. We must bear that point in mind when discussing the importance of the empty in a photographic reproduction of the present. One example from mythology is Pandora’s Box, where the first evil woman was condemned. There is an interesting group of theorists writing about how the camera is like that box. It captures everything, anything (Pan-dora); if you unlock it, everything comes out. It’s a reproduction machine into which emptiness is built, as a condition for the possibility of reproduction. In other words, it itself has to be empty—or to empty itself (or herself) out.

G: It’s a very nice metaphor for the ancient type of Camera Obscura. But does it work for the digital type?

Q: So, has Pandora now gone digital too!

That is about machines, about how they capture the present and how they affect the way we think about photographic materials too. There is a very interesting book by Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, looking at photographic reproduction from “maternal” viewpoints. It’s a mother-metaphor, a mother’s womb, for instance. It itself, its “self,” is empty, through which figures get reproduced. This is a classical model of the camera. What is the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction? And how does she “figure”? That’s another, endless line of philosophical debate that touches on not only aesthetics but philosophy of and around the “sexes.” We have to pay attention to the material and maternal metaphor because literally this is how the mother’s body is employed and deployed as a camera. It itself should remain empty, pregnant with emptiness—also meaning potentiality.

Another point of interest, even the word, concept, suggests that: to conceive is to get pregnant. So light-writing and shadow.

P2: What I like about this conversation is that it concerns the negative. It is not about making a beautiful image but trying to show the background, an opening that sets your emotion, a certain condition of attentiveness toward something beyond any pre-conceived ideas; these days we are constantly bombarded with pictures. So instead, I wanted to stress the practice of setting yourself into an emotional stage, into a certain mood, through staging the thing. Or even just getting up brings you into a position of being able to be empty without feeling empty.

G: The idea is how to make emptiness radiate in a positive way. Usually its meaning is associated with some kind of negative feeling. While we are talking, I also sense how the process and series of work, so rich with all kinds of elements, maybe even too many, also illustrate my own fear of emptiness. There are two opposite states: emptiness and fullness. But the question could be the “emptiness or fullness” of what? What is the vessel which contains them?

There is poetry by Gherasim Luca who wonderfully developed that concept.

But the process I am interested in is the transition between the state of emptiness and the moment of taking a creative action.

Q: And not just what this emptiness means but how emptiness functions.

G: It’s very important, probably for everybody, but especially for the artist to arrive at that moment of “floating states.” Take on those eternal questions such as: Where are we? Who am I? What am I doing? Where is the sense of the existence? All of those questions are essential and they are coming from the anxiety in front of the emptiness of the universe.

Q: Running with this theme of paradox, this show offers an intriguing example of how remembering and forgetting are paired. In order for us to remember anything, we should almost be able to forget, so to speak. To re-member is to be able to make it a member of something. The human beings are those animals who keep promising because we have a sense of future and of failure. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 o’clock! I promise! I owe you $5, I will pay you back! I will do this and that—a promising animal. But that requires us to be able to forget, to get beforehand. Nietzsche, too, saw that jagged paradox coming: if we do not forget, we cannot remember. The process you relate to resonates with that. An example of this emptiness in a more performative sense would be: you reset yourself through a happy new year, or shall we say, “empty” new year. Likewise, there is a kind of existential dynamic in a photographic vision: something else gets freed when an image freezes (the moment)—in a sort of serial syncopations.

P2: I like the concept of the camera as the mother’s womb. But then, what is the image? In the end, the image is not a reality. The image is also flattening things. The three dimensionality of a certain body is described by the shadow that is moving, so the kinetic aspect is very important. When Gabriela’s images offer a view, they perform the viewing in an objective way.

This is a motherly emptiness, the actual ritual of taking the camera, putting it in position where you could get into those in-between moments. What are the different aspects among the camera, the body, the image, and the woman? What are the parallels in these metaphors?

Q: Precisely! What you’re pointing to is the mystery of photographic transition, transposition, transference, anything that moves. Something is on a plane of consciousness, carried along and over (also as in meta-phor). Like a mother’s womb, we think about the metaphor, we think about generosity in the gene, genre, gender … as Derrida also points out. It is what it is, what we cannot see.

P2: And its potential.

Q: Yes, so that’s why there’s a constant repetition of that which re-appears and re-presents. It’s a series of mediations at the heart of which is the mother’s body. I joke to my students in my gender philosophy class or dis-seminar that the word “reproduction” should be banned! It’s not re-production, it’s production.

G: That’s why I want to defend the idea of uniqueness even while using a technology of reproduction. A unique piece in photography means that it returns to its materiality. It becomes also an object—the image’s own materiality. There is only one “product” related to the mother’s body as a unique child.

Q: The mother’s body is not a Xerox machine! But somehow patriarchal politics treats the woman’s body as if it were or could be just that. The idea here is to honor and value the uniqueness of each being, in the sense of and with respect to its potentials.

P4: I believe the standard of the arts is measured by their philosophical quality. I just came to see the exhibition and I also see how the highest standard of the arts is met by these philosophical questions!

I hear wonderful metaphors, especially the photographic kitchen. In the kitchen it’s always a lady, that’s always the one reproducing also as in “social reproduction.” I see the connection you mention between the mother’s womb, the reproduction and the kitchen—it’s a lady that links.

In Chinese, we have a clear sense of an artistic birth, the birth of a work. Even a male artist, we do not tell if it is female or male. In Chinese even when we talk about a male artist, if the talk is about a creative moment, we would say that the baby is “stuck” at the moment or in the process of birthing, something to be “pulled out of the womb.” All artwork is like giving birth to a baby.

I see this connection across different cultures. In terms of that emptiness, in the Chinese context, the “hundreds” of everything coming together as a unity is also in a state of emptiness. Everything comes together and gets integrated. This state of emptiness is also Wu—there is something and nothing. Emptiness is related to nothing as in Wuwei (non-striving, inactive activity), so in the time-space, it has an original time and also the end of time. Emptiness is a background to consciousness; beginning of time, end of time, through lines.

G: I was also interested in the idea of the term, “in illo tempore.” It’s a Latin term which can be translated as “in that time” and Myrcea Iliade develops that idea of archetypes. That time means time without any time. It could be in the beginning of time, throughout, or in the end. It’s about the vision of the receptacle which contains emptiness but is not really empty. It’s filled with concepts, symbols, metaphors…from the beginning of time.

Q: It’s also about a bodily immersion, as we say in the middle of.  Of doing things, of being, so the ego has to be evacuated. I’m thinking of the Chinese notion, Zhong (middle), which for me also means something like a quietly orchestrated con-temporaneity of the concurrent.

Now, I want to loop back to the beginning of your talk, how you say you are trying not to frame things in advance. To let things be in the middle. That’s the magical, soft “catch” we are looking for. This emptiness and nothingness or middling. Middling without meddling. It has ancient resonances, both Greek and Chinese. “Middle Voice’ is like that in ancient philosophy—it is neither this nor that. In your work, I see it happening as a quiet, photographic pitch in the middle (of nowhere). You pay closer attention to where the baby’s head is stuck. A labor of meta-or intra-photographic midwifery, this kind of visual poetry, philosophy, artistic creation, that’s really helpful. The emptiness there also enables an inner shift of focus from the negative to the positive, trans-generating a sphere of creativity. That requires a certain resignation of agency, literally the agent, the “one” doing this or that or rather dying this way and that…you have to let the work work.

P5: The first word that comes to mind is an egoless perspective. All the past, present, future, design—they all start dissolving. I would see it as quite positive, similar to chemicals that lots of members from British art world take to gain emptiness, to gain exploration and space. Complete emptiness, an extreme state from which to create a new art of painting or music. So that’s another perspective on emptiness. Emptiness could be quite abstract, so I’m wondering: from your experience, how do you visualize that part of the visual layers of emptiness?

G: If I understand, you would like me to tell you the process, how this work of mine happens that way. I could answer like this: At the beginning of all, there is nothing, then some small element appears, which becomes a central point of the construction of the space. At that point, the empty space is not empty any more. It is already constructed, designed with lines, squares or circles. The objects can be really very ordinary, but at the same time I care about and take care of the emptiness of their own. Their shape should also express emptiness.

Such a constructed space at that initial stage is a kind of envelope for the other, an inner-theater. So talking about materials, there is still a symbolism of emptiness because of the in-betweeness of both layers. The idea is to convince the space to become symbolic at that point. Earlier we were just talking about it, comparing it to the fruit or an object from which you are taking out its mass. Then, the container is getting empty and gets filled again with new images, new realities. I don’t like to use the word “image” because it is flat. Rather, reality has all kinds of forms.

P5: Your remark illuminates how you construct layers, which is quite hard, and it is why, I think, your work creates distortions, using different tools to strike a new reality, an image’s own reality.

Q: So the procedural dynamism of emptiness is also quite literal, right? Such kinetic connections between pictorial spacing and photographic timing we have been exploring also help us move onto the next and final phase of our discussion, which is to look at some specific examples of Gabriela’s work. Let us see how those themes we discussed materialize, how they matter there.

Following on that question of emptiness, the life itinerary, your biography, exhibitions and locations where you worked, if we look at your work, so far it involves a lot of travels, moving around. You have various experiences in different locations. There are also artists who literally never leave their nest, but as you lived and passed through various spaces, I am interested to hear your thoughts on the role of memories, experiences and travels in your art. I imagine that these series of forms of life would force you to empty yourself out of your comfort zone. How does that “produce” your mind? Well, to experience is to live OUT OF the limit, to ex-perience.

It means you have to trust that emptiness, that space you are jumping through and sometimes into. It’s a fascinating image. You have to allow space in your lifeboat. For those of you who travel a lot, every time you travel, you must pack the absolute minimum and then you have to empty it out. Or at least that’s how I try to travel. When you leave for a new place, you must also leave some room in your luggage. If your suitcase is full, you won’t be able to add anything else when moving to a new place. Again, the wisdom of leaving some space is about underdetermination. From the way I experience your work, that kinetic, convex mirroring, that space works like a slightly empty suitcase. So the photographic kitchen itself is on the move. It enables a constant mirroring so that you won’t lose that inner eye, that inner core space, as you’re going on a space-trip, too.

So how does this literalized movement of ex-periencing impact the way you produce work? I ask this question because the work you produce is almost ritually layered and materially evocative in ways that seem to reflect and even stress various traces of time and space. There is an allegory.

G: I really agree: you have to trust that emptiness, that space we are jumping through. It is an essential feeling in every displacement and a real experience as in crisscrossing the sky. It means also: don’t be afraid, go ahead.

I don’t feel that I belong to some particular space. Although I have been living in France for a long time, enough to feel home there, it doesn’t mean that it produces something like lightness. Yet, not being attached to some particular space or community in a very tight way doesn’t produce strength, either. Still, my main working studio is in Paris where I live, and I must say that that is the material space where my ideas are taking shapes.

When traveling, being somewhere else, on the move, open to understanding others as well as others’ understanding of you … such is always a huge invasion of your own comfort zone. But this is exactly that idea of emptiness. You become the vacuum space in order to receive all kinds of new experiences—you must make space for that. Coming back to my own space, I see there is an issue of how to classify all those experiences and how to absorb all of that space, of emptiness-fullness.

Q: From what we’ve heard so far, along with many wonderful images and ideas, I feel like I am beginning to have a photographic memory of what you have been describing on that space of emptiness and that emptiness is an envelope of the other.

P3: An envelope is a space, so actually it offers a particular space and fold.

G: Something I think about is the concept of not knowing. There are moments in life and particularly in every artist’s practice of getting to the point of doing something without knowing why and what it is. How can you understand it? You probably become very afraid of that unknown object created by yourself, and you just need to follow that work. The idea of getting deeply inside this unknowledge is very interesting.

P4: Your idea of unknowing is about self-consciousness or lack thereof?

G: No, it’s really about not knowing. Something appears in front of you because you are going forward but you don’t understand why, what its real content is, what the real meaning of that object is. There is a paradoxical situation in that because if you are doing that it means you know but you don’t know why. It seems like the two sides of the brain get disconnected at that point. It is important to consider that space-time of not-knowing as a fully valuable process. It is probably something related also to emptiness as a condition of creation.

P3: I have a friend who immerses herself in a room or a strong force gives her an inspiration, so she is somewhere just writing, and unconsciously producing, whether it’s writing or not, in a state where she create something because she us possessed or emptied, I’m not sure.

G: There is something like a third thing, a third space, which is AVIDIA, something to study more about. It’s about space, this particular space in between where you can see the shape of things but you don’t know what’s inside and what it means.

Q: I think it is linked to the question of the exteriority of the envelope, the difference between bribery and the present, for instance. Consider the notion of gifting: when you give someone a gift and also when you are “gifted.” You don’t know what it is you’re given when gifted, and what you’re gifted in. It’s a kind of pure thanking, and, as with Heidegger, Danken, to think is to thank. The difference between bribery and a gift is this: I give you ten yuan so you do something nice to me, you know what you’ve given and are receiving in return; but, I give you a gift in an envelope, you just take it, just receive it, don’t question it, and you don’t actually or fully know what could be inside, metaphorically and literally or both, even after you’ve opened it or think you have. It could be a bomb, too, including a time bomb you don’t see now; Derrida talks about this in the classical Greek, “pharmakonic” parable of writing as a gift given and to be disseminated as such, as both a medicine and a poison. That’s the limit and risk of it. That’s the aporia of gift-giving. It’s also an artistic notion, an artistic “gift” inseparable from the notion of freedom. An artist as one who responds to a call, you just follow it but you don’t know what it is.

That ties back into beginning of our discussion of not trying to do this or that, but the question then comes down to framing. All the frames in these photographs, as you say, are not very intentional. It’s there to leave the space of not knowing, leaving it active and let it speak. That seems to be the ethos, character and the momentum of your work of “shadow-tracing.”

This notion of passively powerful “gift” is very important especially today. What is the space for the arts in this hypercapitalized world of micro-transactional calculations? We talked about reproduction, some people will produce something with the preexisting model of what is acceptable, what is popular, what “sells,” what is “catchy,” etc. There is something about unknowing as a value of and vehicle for irreducible freedom no one can take away from us, which is really real. This also reflects, it must be said, a discursive tension as well as reciprocal tie between the critic and the artist, where the critic wants to know everything about a piece, taking it apart, wanting to know every move, every sign, while rendering it more visible.

G: The idea of freedom and space tied to unknowing is very intriguing. There is a great freedom for all the interpretations when there are no any instructions for understanding but it becomes also a source of anxiety because you cannot access the essential and hidden meanings.

Q: Oh, don’t worry, I will sign and seal your envelope! I can sell it for you! (Laughter) So, leave that envelope sort of half-open so that it can interact with this otherness you also describe through your own experiences.

Speaking of such deconstructive “framing,” I’m also intrigued by the geometrical figures in your work, the free-floating, naked bodies, and the very mathematical, superimposed work. It’s also your own body. Are we seeing images of your body sort of naked or semi-naked? If you are interested, would you mind talking a bit about what you have given us in that regard?

G: Maybe I am thinking about this particular idea of geometry; or maybe I am thinking against the geometry? Once again, I am in the opposite side of what it looks like! Explored here is a sensitive approach to geometrical shapes which are by definition rule-bound. But how to construct such a space with minimum elements and without mathematical calculations: my approach is a bit random without any particularly sophisticated structures and necessary systems, and it is also an autobiographical process because all those elements used here belong to my familiar environments, as they also become part of other works or part of collected objects. Why do I collect things? I am like a magician always surrounded by some artifacts to play with. Sometimes human beings take sensual approaches to the question of existence, which are important to them. And there are shadows of all those elements, another space inside the image. We have been talking about deconstruction and its meanings, all those elements penetrating one another and all those things even include something that does not exist in fact since it is an illusion or ephemeral effect, basically light and shadow.

About the process: it’s very important for me to be emotionally creative and to be able to arrive at the synthesis of everything at such emotional moments.

Q: Listening to you, I realize your work is also about the unframeable richness of framed ambiguities. We all carry our coffees or cages around, which could also be a window that frames and frees you, all sort of portals into another world within a world, both portable in themselves. In that connection, something about the rectangular, the surface of life that annexes itself, is really interesting, its inherent metaphoricity: I mean, it is and carries its own frames. That self-reflexive or self-referential tension is what remains so arresting, what forces us to look. Look! And shadows are this photographic work … another layer of ambiguity.

G: Maybe the next exhibition could be the installation of emptiness and its shadows!

P6: I want to ask about the glass you have, also the mirror. Did you deliberately choose your own materials?

G: Yes, the materials are important—it’s all about my approach to photography. It’s not only the matter of image. The image is absolutely connected with the surface because each material is producing a perception of what we can see, each time differently. It can be cold, warm, soft, pleasant, or unpleasant to touch, and so on.

P6: I notice you use a mirror a lot. Can you speak about that?

G: You are right and there are other reflecting materials like water or the black surface of shining glass, etc. There is something about something (else) being reflected inside but it’s mostly about creating another possibility of perceiving the real. Also there is certainly something from the myth of Narcissus, which always appears when we talk about the mirror. When you are reflected in something, you still see the surrounding world, so you are included in the whole image and sometimes it is much stronger to show that through a mirror than to show it frontally. It’s kind of turning everything upside-down and inside-out.

P7: I have one final question and then we can go for dinner! It is about the perception and moment of illusion or irritation. I remember the first time I saw your works on the wall and thinking: is it a shadow, is it not a shadow? We talked a lot about how the works are expressions of your inner emptiness and how your creative unknowing of what you see creates a kind of original moment that is this emptiness where you, without thinking, constantly get and get out of such images. So, I wonder how much of this is part of your working process.

G: I’m always searching for the magic moment. An important thing in general is the emotion of being close to some new, unknown point where the habitual perception reaches another level. The motion between the matter and the psyche generates those emotions, the main elements in my creative process. So such a material emotional translation has a big influence on the image that results, along with the clear and confused perception of it. This moment is crucial.

Q: Most importantly then, this is the moment for us to say: thank you! 

Kyoo Lee, a member of AICA-USA,the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press) and a forthcoming book on visual culture (The MIT Press), is a transdisciplinary philosopher, writer and critic, who currently teaches at the City University of New York where she is Professor of Philosophy. A recipient of fellowships and visiting appointments from Cambridge University, CUNY Graduate Center, KIAS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Seoul National University and Yanbian University among others, her philopoetic texts have appeared in AICA-USA Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, PN Review, Randian, The Volta and the White Review as well as various standard academic venues.

An editor active in various fields, she is the chief co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, and serves on the editorial boards of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics, Derrida Today,Open Humanities Press, Simon de Beauvoir Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is also on the board of directors at Litmus Press. Her Mellon-funded anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity, with contributions from 50+ poets, musicians, theorists and performance artists from across the globe, has recently been published (2020).

Throughout her site-specific cogitographical practices and collaborative projects, Q Professor Lee explores co-generative links and zones between critical theory and creative prose.

Gabrieal Morawetz, born in Rzeszów, Poland, is a photographer and visual artist based in Paris, France, who also works in painting, graphic design, sculpture, installation, and video. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the Instituto Nacional de la Cultura in Caracas, Venezuela, her works that are richly liminal, metaphorical, and dynamically intercultural, have been exhibited internationally at prominent art institutions such as Chicago Cultural Center, San Antonio Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Art Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (MACSI), Fotomuseo in Bogota, Te Papa Museum, and Art Museum in Kathmandu, as well as art fairs such as Art Paris, ARCO Madrid, Art Bologna, Paris Photo, Photo Shanghai, Aipad, and Photo London. In 2011, Descartes Et Cie published Gabriela Morawetz: Ne faire qu’un (PUBLICITÉ) as part of its celebrated AREA series, documenting her pieces from 1992-2011, with text by Anne Tronche, Marek Bartelik, Serge Fauchereau, Edward Glissant and Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle.

“I suppose it’s like porno”, the artist Ashley Bickerton chuckles at that day’s handful of surfers, mostly novices of middling ability; “you’d rather not watch somebody who can’t perform.” We are having a solitary walk at Balangan beach in late July 2020. It is the middle of our summer lockdown in Bali, part of the Indonesian island’s effort to stem the surge of Covid-19. “I’ve surfed here for 30 years,” declares Bickerton, “sometimes on its biggest days ever…but, also, on the smallest days because I love to ride long boards.” My interlocutor is showing me around the coastal strip he considers his home turf.

Born in Barbados in 1959, Ashley Bickerton had a peripatetic childhood across four continents, from Guyana to Ghana, on to the Balearic Islands and England, then finally Hawaii. His upbringing followed the career of his Anglo-American father, the eminent linguist Derek Bickerton, who researched creole languages and theorised on the formation of human language. The younger Bickerton admitted that his father’s work gave him a sense of “the amorphousness of language”. On one hand, he says, “nothing exists without being named”, while on the other “there’s a slipperiness to all meaning…Wording is about things trying to be held down and pinned which are always in a state of flux.” Much of this thinking colours his life and work. While there is a firm conceptual agnosticism in his art, there is also a recognition of the impulse to name: our attempt, artificial though it be, at creating meaning.

The author with Ashley Bickerton, Bali, 2020 (image Kinez Riza)

Bickerton completed his studies in 1982 at the California Institute of the Arts, then moved to New York to take part in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He shot up to prominence as part of the so-called ‘Fab Four’, a group consisting of Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman. Their show at Sonnabend Gallery, in 1985, was hailed by many as the beginning of the Neo-Geo movement. The art critic Roberta Smith, reviewing the show in the New York Times, suggests it heralds “the return of an art that is certifiably American and firmly rooted in the Pop-Minimal-Conceptual tradition. It clearly replaces Neo-Expressionist excess with cool calculation…[and] a bumptious, youthful aggressiveness.”

When applied to him, however, Bickerton has always thought the appellation ‘Neo-Geo’ misleading. He explains, “We were put together…[art dealer] Jeffrey Deitch invented that term.” For him, the unwelcome tag reflects neither his creative vocabulary then, nor his immediate personal affiliations. Conceptually, only Halley was truly Neo-Geo in his exploration of geometric forms and structures. The moniker, moreover, fails to represent Bickerton’s circle at the time accurately: “I was actually much closer to a lot of younger artists because I, myself, was younger, but I’d gotten stuck with the Sonnabend grouping.” A plethora of other labels materialized to describe the supposed movement, from Simulationism to Neo-Conceptualism; from Post-Abstract Abstraction to Smart Art. Perhaps, the most descriptive of these terms in elucidating Bickerton’s early output is Commodity Art.

Ashley Bickerton
Good Painting (1988)
mixed media construction with neoprene covering
90 x 69 x 18 inches
228.6 x 175.3 x 45.7 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity II (Cowboy Suit) (1992)
Cowboy suit, glass, aluminum, wood, caulk, fiberglass, enamel and canvas webbing
22 x 92 x 81 inches 55.9 x 233.7 x 205.7 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Wild Gene Pool: Ark # 2 (1989)
Wood, anodized aluminum, rubber, rope, leather and wild seed
76 x 76 x 121⁄2 inches
193 x 193 x 31.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

His commodity-related works are often box-like pieces, strapped with buckles and brackets. Many of them are covered with an array of consumer logos and symbols, created painstakingly by hand, but so as to look mass-produced. In effect, these art objects are presented à la Warhol in a manner that recalls consumer goods. Among them are works branded ‘Susie’, which mimic how the trophies of ostentatious consumption are trademarked with luxury branding. Early Bickerton is an irreverent meditation on the interface between art, commodity culture and consumerism. It touches upon our impulse to name and valorise. Although the artist flirts with meanings, he seems happiest sitting on the fence, listening in on his crowd’s inferences and, maybe, laughing a little. In these different layers of communication, some might like to see cool irony or a witty tease; others may find a detached critique of consumer culture and capitalism. One intriguing layer is characterised by art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau as being “the central role of fetishism or, alternatively, the insistence on the fetish character of the artwork”. The artist calls this his “iconisation” of consumer products, his way of investing a kind of apotheosis to the materialist spirituality of America.

As first proposed by Karl Marx, one might look at commodity fetishization as spirituality in a materialist, capitalist guise, perhaps with America as its heartland. If so, the unveiling of a commodity good could be seen as almost a sacred ritual in an otherwise mundane existence. Are such occasions America’s moments of high mystery? Bickerton implies so: “something arrives in a box, and you open it, and take it out, and before it’s put to use, before it becomes something utilitarian and gets scratched up or used, it’s just this perfect thing.” This unboxing – the unveiling – is something akin to the moment when, in a Hindu temple, the doors of the Holy of Holies are flung open to reveal the idol within. Any kind of fetishization demands the suspension of reason and the projection of meaning onto an object. Any act of naming calls for a momentary pause, however temporary, in the unceasing flux of meanings around us. At the same time, all theories aside, there is a visceral, childlike joy in actually suspending thought and time: in distilling a moment of perfection in even the most humdrum of manufactured commodities – fetish pleasure, perhaps, but not without a quality of spirituality. Bickerton’s commodity art pokes fun at the artificial nature of cultural production, all the while illuminating the very human impulse to name and create meanings.

Ashley Bickerton
Landscape With Green Sky (2002)
Photo collage, acrylic and objects on wood 72 x 96 x 14.5 inches
182.9 x 243.8 x 36.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton LARGE
Open Flotsam Painting
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Green Waves (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Dawn Estuary (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
171.5cm x 227cm x 14.7cm
67 1/2″ x 89 3/8″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Unless seen as a cultural critique, the artist’s move to Bali in 1993 seems to be a world away from this discussion. By then, he had become increasingly disenchanted with the fashions and politics of New York’s art world or, in his own words, its “different degrees of fawning”. Moreover, as an artist, he was no longer in vogue. Bickerton could probably have worked his way back into the good graces of the fickle market. After all, he had been offered the enviable platform of a full-time teaching position at Harvard University which, to the chagrin of his academic parents, he ended up turning down. He reasons: “I was always a surfer; and I’d given it up to pursue art. So, I just figured, screw that! I’m not going to hang out here.” As a matter of fact, having grown up and lived by the sea for most of his life, his twelve years in New York were something of a wintry, geographic aberration. Now, a different vision of life beckoned. He envisioned more familiar, tropical surroundings – a place far away from the din of New York’s art scene, where he could dedicate himself to his twin passions of art and surfing.

Thirty years on, we are wading through the island waters of his chosen home grounds. The Indonesian island of Bali, he clarifies, “is a huge part of the surfing world with some of the best waves anywhere.” Knee-deep in the sea, he is leading me along a rocky promontory, just off Balangan beach. Banyan-covered limestone cliffs rise up above us until we end up in a grotto, overlooking the Indian ocean. Here, the artist married his fourth and current wife, Cherry, a bright, young Balinese eco-entrepreneur. “It’s my temple,” he professes, “a point of alignment.” From surfing mecca to the wedded contentment of home life, the deep connection he feels to the sea here is palpable: “I don’t really believe in too much outside of the realms…of empirical reality, but right after we got married…while trying to paddle out to surf on a big day, a wave washed my feet out from underneath me, and then I hit the reef and tried holding on as the wave washed me back. It tore both my wedding and engagement rings clean off!”

The author with Ashley Bickerton, Bali, 2020 (image Kinez Riza)

The conventional reading of Bickerton’s career sees his expatriation as a profound change of direction in his conceptual trajectory. The art critic Calvin Tomkins, writing in the New Yorker in 2007, goes so far as to claim that Bickerton “dropped out of the art world”. A succession of clichés come to mind, of escapism, of his supposed life as a privileged, expatriate artist on a tropical island paradise, in short of a latter-day Gaugin. In a similar vein, but with an attempt at empathy, the writer Paul Theroux speaks of Bickerton as “a connoisseur of not belonging”. For Theroux, expatriates like himself and Bickerton, “travel from culture to culture…from one preposterous belief system to another, always teetering just outside it. The challenge of their quest, and their entanglement, is how to represent this profusion of images and beliefs…and more than that, the mass of tactile sensations and smells…the world as wreckage” – both victors and victims of rootless globalisation.

On the surface, the visual vocabulary of Bickerton’s works in Bali certainly departed from their commodity art antecedents. There was a notable shift towards figuration with extravagant, salacious references to Gauginesque life on an island-paradise. At one level, it is the artist’s playful response to other people’s acts of naming, of him as Gaugin-like, of migration as escapism. He himself looks with disdain at exoticism qua exoticism. For him, most of its practitioners “have airs and aspirations that go beyond…the parameters of their actual accomplishments.” Anything bucolic or decadent in his rendering of tropical life invariably serves a purpose: asking probing questions, but with a firm, resolute agnosticism as to their possible answers. During this period, the recurring, grotesque figure of the Blue Man emerged. He is a macabre personification – sometimes an exaggerated self-parody – of much that one finds confronting in contemporary Bali: from the white, male gaze upon Asian femininity, to so-called Orientalist othering, besides the excruciating cultural and environmental effects of crass, mass tourism.

Ashley Bickerton
The Preparation With Green Sky (2007)
Acrylic and digital print on canvas in carved wood, coconut, mother of pearl and coin inlaid artist name
72 x 86 x 7 inches
182.9 x 218.4 x 17.8 cm
(image courtesy the artist)

As pointed out by Solomon-Godeau, these references to “forms of exoticism…possess neither more nor less authenticity or authority than do the corporate logos with which Bickerton earlier adorned his works.” In other words, the artist in Bali quotes from a more comprehensive dictionary of world cultures, but in “the same postmodern syntax that informed the so-called Neo-Geo production of the 80s”. Solomon-Godeau further suggests that Bickerton’s “shift to figuration in no way diminishes his preoccupation with the protean forms of fetishism, in either its commodity or its psychic manifestation (or both).” He humorously drew a parallel between ‘human being’ and ‘commodity’, then proceeded to play with the naming and fetishization of both. Viewed thus, there are persistent, conceptual commonalities between his oeuvres in New York and Bali. His move to Bali merely enlarged the scope of his references, moving beyond the East Village art scene to an ancient culture in the throes of globalisation and modernity – a rapidly urbanising island of five million, rich in the many permutations of contemporary tropical life. Through it all runs an abiding fascination with the ambiguity of cultural production. This extends, perhaps, to his treatment of the reductive reading of his move to Bali as Orientalist escapism tout court.

Ashley Bickerton
Night Sky Over Fallow Field (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton
Balangan Cave (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

All too aware of appearing the Orientalist escapist, Bickerton initially removed Bali from his creative identity here. His first studio on the island was a plain, nondescript space that could have existed anywhere in the world. Today, however, he is probably the first to acknowledge that over the decades, through the tiniest cracks and crevices, “the seams in closed windows”, despite his own initial misgivings, ideas from Bali, maybe even Indonesia at large, have seeped in. The most obvious local influences, such as the elaborate carvings on his frames or the conflicted references to expatriate life, are identified aptly by Solomon-Godeau as “citations” with “implied quotation marks”. Other, equally fascinating echoes of Bali and Indonesia suffuse the artist’s output. To start with, his low opinion of most expatriate art – unconsciously or not – mirrors the inaugural position of his adopted country’s postcolonial modern art. This was asserted by one of its leading masters and pre-eminent theorist, S. Sudjojono. As early as 1939, Sudjojono dismissed what he judged to be languorous, overly romanticised representations of colonial Indonesia as the ‘tourist art’ of the ‘Mooie Indië’ [Beautiful Indies]. Unwittingly, Bickerton began his career in Southeast Asia with a mind-set not too dissimilar from the foundational premise of modern art practice in Indonesia.

Ashley Bickerton
Lagoon With Storm Front (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
133cm x 176cm x 14.7cm
52 3/8″ x 69 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

For me, though, the most thought-provoking echoes of Indonesia in the artist’s body of work are in its unfolding dialogue with the art and artists of Bali. Similar to the typical layout in Bali’s Batuan school of painting, Bickerton’s creations are often crowded to the brim with characters, objects and events – the world as a bustling, maddening mandala-marketplace of commerce and spirituality, of quotidian nightmare and dreamlike reality. An admirer of Batuan style, Bickerton appreciates how it “brought the traditional formal spaces into their own form of modernity.” He confesses: “that earth and sky binary I’ve got in my paintings definitely comes from looking at both Surrealism, like Miro, even Dali, with their mass and emptiness represented by brown and blue, but also at Batuan, where grey-greeny browns and green-browny greys give it its tone.” Batuan artists reconfigured ancient spaces as a contemporary universe. Here, modern life, pulsating with energy, confronts sinister demons, both old and new, among whom the Blue Man himself would not be out of place.

There are also traces in Bickerton of the singular master from Ubud, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad. Over the course of a long life and career from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1978, Lempad produced a canon of powerful, psychologically prescient, figurative drawings and sculptures. “His understanding of human sexuality”, notes Bickerton, was “so ahead of his time, so liberating, so complex, and with a gorgeousness of line and warmth.” In Red Scooter Nocturne, the Blue Man plonks himself with unseemly heft, flabs overflowing, on his tiny scooter, while the elongated, twirling, silver-skinned, snake-like females of Temptation in the Banjar, gyrate and hiss. The sensibility and line of their movements recall those of Lempad’s characters. In the output of both artists, there is a similar sense of humour, resigned but smirking at the world’s many contradictions.

Ashley Bickerton
Orange Shark (2008)
Polyurethane resin, nylon, cotton webbing, stainless steel, scope, distilled water, coconuts, rope
60 x 108 x 60 inches
152.4 x 274.3 x 152.4 cm
Edition of 3
(image courtesy the artist)

The contradictions in Bickerton’s art, with its underlying conceptual agnosticism, sit comfortably with Bali’s hybridised metaphysics. The artist reflected in a recent interview: “It’s not that I want to define what is dark and what isn’t. I simply think that we must acknowledge that it all exists and get off it”. Here, there are shades of the Balinese worldview. Part-Hindu, part-Buddhist, part-animist, it makes no unequivocal pontifications on either good or bad, sacred or profane. Unlike Abrahamic systems of belief, Balinese spirituality considers ambiguity as part of the natural order. There are, then, tantalizing echoes of Bali and Indonesia in Bickerton’s works. To me, the insistence on seeing him as a latter-day Gaugin is untenable in light of both the nature of his interaction with his adopted home and the conceptual commonalities in his entire corpus.

Rather than seeing Bickerton solely as a “white, male artist, living in the South Seas” – that is to say, through the perspectives of a politically correct, apparently metropolitan and mostly white American monoculture – it might be less parochial to regard him in an Indonesian context. To an Indonesian, the artist is a ‘totok’, or a first-generation migrant, behind whom ‘Peranakan’, or mixed-race, culture thrives. His Indonesian-born children encapsulate this process of creolisation: his youngest is a half-Balinese girl from his fourth and current marriage; and the older a half-Jakartan son from his third marriage. The latter comes on his mother’s side from a cultured and influential Peranakan family, founded in the last century by another totok, the pre-war, French intellectual Louis-Charles Damais and his aristocratic Javanese wife, R. A. Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo. There is a certain charm to the Peranakan identity of the younger Bickertons given Derek Bickerton’s study of creole languages and Ashley Bickerton’s upbringing among creole societies. The artist has found a home in a country where creolisation forms part of its national identity. Unlike America with its apparent multiculturalism of monocultures, forever weary of cultural misappropriation, Indonesia is defined by cultural hybridization. The very idea of Indonesia is a cultural and linguistic construct: etymologically, the country’s name is Greek from Ἰνδός [Indos] or Indian and νῆσος [nesos] or islands. For an artist so obsessed with the artifice of cultural production, it is fitting that he has ended up in a country that, according to historian Benedict Anderson, epitomizes the nation-state as an “imagined community”. Almost by accident, Bickerton has become a co-creator in this act of cultural production. It tells how an ancient society with a long history of civilizational, religious and ethnic hybridization, adapts to new forms of modernity.

Ashley Bickerton
Balangan Sunset (2020)
flotsam, ocean borne detritus, oil paint, acrylic paint & rocks on wood and cardboard
95cm x 126cm x 14.7cm
37 3/8″ x 9 1/2″ x 5 3/4″
(image courtesy the artist)

Ashley Bickerton, Balangan Sunset (2020) (detail)
(image courtesy the artist)

From this vantage point, a lot of Bickerton’s art elicits conversations about the varied forms that this much-mentioned cultural production might take. “Culturescapes are fun,” he avows, “but ultimately too hectic and too noisy. I long for great silence and great emptiness.” In keeping with this meditative turn, as noted by writer Anthony Haden-Guest, the artist’s current practice is “now undergoing further development, and a striking one”. I notice this, too, at his studio before we drive up to Balangan beach. His most recent creations have a quieter, contemplative quality to them, reminiscent of some of his earlier commodity pieces. The Flotsam Series are boxed-in, three-dimensional snapshots of simplified landscapes of sky-earth binary. These are overlain by whirling, circulating currents of sea-borne, man-made debris. For Bickerton, this all conjures up “borderless oceanic detritus, seascapes, culturescapes, swirling cosmologies of micro plastics, fragments of human narratives, residues of lives lived, of vestiges of human presence now swirling in great molecular vortexes.” These snapshots are fixed in a sky-earth setting that is almost sculptural, textured with thick layerings of cardboard, clothing and other miscellanea. Presented in his signature crates, the new works are in dialogue with the artist’s commodity creations – as if to commodify nature itself and transport it in containers on ships across the oceans. One might detect here, again, the fetishization of nature as commodity, or of commodity detritus as nature, or most likely both. “I’d ran away from certain parts of my past,” Bickerton owns up, “and I felt it was time to…circle back, embrace everything and move forward from there.”

Ashley Bickerton
Seascape: Floating Ocean Chunk No. 1 (2017)
resin, fiberglass, oil paint, enamel, aluminum & plywood
57 x 74 x 21 inches
144.8 x 188 x 53.3 cm
(courtesy the artist)

Standing with our feet in the sea, I comment that his Flotsam Series is topical given our preoccupation with plastic pollution, the pandemic, and man’s impact on nature. “Well, hold on,” the artist shoots back, “I’m not an environmentalist. Environmentalism labours under the presumption that we’re saving the planet for human habitation. We’re just one infinitesimal chapter in the enormity of the history of the biosphere; and the planet will eat us up and spit us out.” He explains: “I consider the great gyres of plastic in the Pacific as much a part of the natural order as the migration of wildebeests in the Serengeti. It’s the majesty of molecules…you’ve got great swirling vortexes of molecules as things wash and slush around the planet, and geological time moves on. And the blip of humanity’s imprint is wiped out. Gone!” Bickerton’s insistent agnosticism continues with his proffering that he is “just recording a moment and creating a dark kind of poetry. I don’t know what I’m doing it for. I don’t have much faith in what artists are…we’re perfumed, dancing poodles for the plutocracy. But the point is, if I can get into this place and inhabit that for a second, then I can forget that I’m a poodle. And I can get at a darker and deeper poetry.”

As we look at the horizon, I try recalling our earlier conversation, realising that the crashing waves will render our recorded interview inaudible, washed out – so to speak – in a puddle of salt water. I look at my bullet points: Neo-Geo, Post-Conceptual Conceptualism, Craig-Martin, Susie, Culture Lux, Koons, Gaugin, Mooie Indië’, primitivism, Spies, Batuan, Covarrubias, Lempad, postmodern, postcolonial, Peranakan. I think of the running thread in the artist’s canon, the ad-hoc artifice of cultural production, fetishism in its psychic and commodity forms; and of the quiet he longs for. Across the horizon now, with the sea-sky binary before us, I imagine whirling vortexes of seas, slowly gyrating round the planet as if in a Sufi dance, and in it, the remains of civilization: our flux of meanings, the artist’s wedding rings here, and bits of plastic there. This vision possesses a dark, trance-like kind of beauty. If you suspend time and thought, and inhabit that space for a second; then, before we turn to molecules and return to the swirling ocean, you might just hear Ashley Bickerton’s great silence.

Adi Hong-Tan is an Indonesian historian, writer and social activist, working in art and heritage conservation. He read Law at Christ’s College, Cambridge University, and now sits on the Committee and Advisory Board of Yayasan Mitra Museum Jakarta [Friends of Jakarta Museums Foundation].

Dr Alex Burchmore is Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 2013-14 Alex lived in Beijing after receiving a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Postgraduate Award.

Exhibitions of Chinese art outside China tend to confirm certain assumptions about the country’s history, culture, politics, and people. At first, ‘XU ZHEN®: Eternity Vs Evolution’ at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, seems no exception to this rule, promising viewers a proven combination of two enduring preconceptions about China’s past and present. On one hand, the ‘Eternity’ of the title evokes fantasies of a civilization distinguished not only by antiquity but by an apparently unbroken lineage of cultural florescence, inspiring flights of fantastical chinoiserie as well as stereotypes of Oriental despotism and stasis. ‘Evolution’, on the other hand, evokes the ceaseless metamorphoses that have come to define contemporary China for many of those who have made a career of watching the country’s transformation from afar. In the eyes of these ‘China Hawks’, those who rule the People’s Republic have betrayed an ancestral birthright in their relentless pursuit of profit, degrading the environment in the name of industrial advancement, denying human rights to those disenfranchised by their rule, and destroying architectural and material heritage in their efforts to remould the face of the country.

XU ZHEN®
Shouting (stills) 2009
single-channel video, sound, duration 3:42
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ could be compared in its juxtaposition of these assumptions with the comparable pairing of ossified antiquity in ‘Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality’ and contemporary metamorphosis in ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape’ at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, in 2019. In contrast to the artefacts of China’s early imperial rulers showcased in ‘Guardians of Immortality’, however, remnants of classical civilization on display in ‘Eternity Vs. Evolution’ are visibly artificial, culturally ambiguous, and irredeemably compromised by the artist’s creative manipulations or distortions of history. In Melbourne, the First Emperor’s sentinels and the ‘gunpowder-paintings’ of one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists were shown in proximity but remained self-contained. In Canberra, no such separation has been enforced. Present and past are inextricably combined in Xu’s intentionally contradictory and confounding installations, paintings, textiles, and mixed-media assemblages. Additionally, while ‘Guardians of Immortality’ grew from an ongoing partnership with a provincial arm of the Chinese government, and ‘Transient Landscape’ comprised a series of commissions from Cai Guo-Qiang himself, ‘Eternity Vs. Evolution’ has been drawn almost entirely from the collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney. As such, a closer comparison could be drawn with ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times: Works from the White Rabbit Collection’, also at the NGV in 2019.

In his analysis of the role that White Rabbit has played in mediating Chinese culture for Australian audiences since opening in 2009, David Bell attributes the gallery’s success to its ‘accommodation of the challenging, discomfiting, and dislocating.’ White Rabbit’s exhibitions have become known for their strategic use of ‘shock, humour, gaudiness, or subtlety [to] transport viewers beyond their … comfort zones,’ compelling a reassessment of assumptions derived from prejudice or preconception and thereby challenging the frequently clichéd representations of contemporary China found elsewhere. The gallery has been greatly enabled in this mission, Bell explains, by its independence from conventional sources of patronage in the Australian arts community as a not-for-profit charity financed entirely by founder Judith Neilson, whose appetite for Chinese art has been guided since her first purchase in 1999 by a taste for the provocative.(1) Neilson’s fortune and the formidable size of her collection, now estimated to contain over 2000 works by almost 700 artists, have also allowed the gallery to avoid cooperation with state-owned arts institutions and therefore to openly critique government agendas.

XU ZHEN®
Dah…Dah…Dah…Dah… 2009 (ed. 1/5)
steel
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney © the artist

XU ZHEN®
In Progress #180×131 2012
plywood, inlaid wood veneers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

Nevertheless, while challenging prejudice and preconception, the works represented in Neilson’s collection can also serve to confirm other prevailing assumptions about the art of contemporary China. Their frequently controversial or subversive content, for example, supports a view of such art as an inevitably oppositional statement on adverse socio-cultural and political conditions. This is especially true when these works are shown, as at the NGV, alongside artefacts of a past China – many visitors to the gallery in 2019 may have found their assumptions confirmed as they moved from the promise of ‘Eternity’ in the display of Terracotta Warriors on the ground floor, to the visions of contemporary ‘Evolution’ furnished by White Rabbit on the top floor. ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times’ also illustrates the extent to which the transposition of Neilson’s ambitions to a state institution presents curators with something of a double bind. It is perhaps inevitable that some of the transgressive potential of her collection is lost, while works deemed too controversial or inflammatory are rarely shown beyond White Rabbit’s walls. Yet institutional affiliation also has its advantages, foremost among which are the benefits of increased space, a larger install team, and a broader audience. The challenge for exhibitions like ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ and ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times’ therefore lies in the need to strike a balance between these competing objectives: to cultivate blockbuster appeal while overturning convention and stereotype.

XU ZHEN®
Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land 2012
real and synthetic fabric, leather, feathers
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

XU ZHEN®
Spread b-041 2010
synthetic fabrics, cotton, faux fur
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney
© the artist

Entering ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’ from the NGA’s Asian Art galleries, visitors are introduced to (or initiated into) the exhibition with ‘Rainbow’ (1998), one of two videos that stand as representative expressions of the first of three phases in Xu Zhen’s career. Philip Tinari, art historian and director of Beijing’s UCCA, has identified Xu’s work of the 1990s as a product of ‘the tail end of the underground era’ in Chinese art, when ‘a sense that art could challenge … mainstream values’ remained possible.(2) The four-minute video shows the exposed back of an anonymous performer against a stark white background that accentuates the gradual reddening of skin when struck repeatedly by an unknown assailant, the impact of an open hand heard but not seen. No context or reason is given for these blows, yet the immobility of the performer suggests complicity and implies that what seems to denote punishment, torture, or abuse may signify the fulfilment of a masochistic pleasure or a playful test of endurance.

The choice of this as the opening work for the exhibition is equally ambiguous. On one hand, it could be a rite of passage, a transformative shedding of the self through ritualised exposure to pain that simultaneously initiates the performer into a heightened awareness. On the other hand, it could merely be a display of bravado, a time-honoured hazing that must be endured to join a secretive and hedonistic fraternity. This blending of slapstick and sincerity reappears in ‘Shouting’ (1998) in the first gallery, the second video representing this phase in Xu’s career. In this work, rather than a voyeuristic observer, we take the cameraman’s perspective, sharing his mirth as the crowds occupying the lens turn around in surprise at the sound of his repeated exclamations, quickening their steps as they return to their aims. The NGA’s caption explains Xu’s screams as ‘a way of asserting his individuality in a society that prioritises community and conformity,’ enlisting the work as a combatant in the struggle of democratic values against authoritarianism that many critics outside China identify as the primary content of the country’s art.(3) Like ‘Rainbow’, however, ‘Shouting’ might also represent little more than an expression of youthful exuberance, a prank or dare between friends.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013-14

In the context of the exhibition, these works introduce a theme of noise, alternately contained and released, that also appears in ‘Calm’, ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’, and ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’ (all 2009), installed opposite ‘Shouting’. Rather than human cries of pain (or pleasure) and excitement (or anxiety), these works embody the aftermath of what we are led to believe would have been deafening blasts of rhetoric and explosive detonation, made eerily silent by entombment within mute metal and rock. The caption for ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’ and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ identifies these jagged sheets of corroded steel as material records of gunfire and ‘the soundwaves of a speech made by a politician or terrorist … a visible echo of the violent reality that those words can create.’ Yet the onomatopoeic title of the former is a deliberate misnomer, likely intended to heighten this sense of violence – both pieces are ‘voice-graphs’ taken from political figures associated with conflict in the Middle East.(4) ‘Calm’, a mass of twisted metal and stone on the gallery floor, also invites association with conflict, recalling the ruins that war inevitably leaves in its wake. In contrast to the lifelessness of the latter, however, the almost imperceptible, undulating motion of a concealed waterbed imparts Xu’s wreckage with a tenuous vitality marked by the rasp of stone against stone.

The solemn dignity of these conflict-laden works may seem antithetical to the sardonic abandon of ‘Shouting’, despite a shared emphasis on the containment of sound. Yet their apparent sincerity and ideological rigour, like that of the earlier video, is not as straightforward as it seems. As some of the earliest products of MadeIn Company, an ‘art corporation’ that Xu founded in 2009, these works also stand as representatives of a second distinct phase in his career. The trading name of this corporate entity is a nod to the ubiquitous label ‘Made in China’ stamped on mass-produced commodities across the world – an ironic statement, perhaps, on the quantity of contemporary art from China saturating the market when Xu decided to incorporate. The Chinese transliteration for this term, on the other hand – meiding (没顶), meaning ‘without a head’ or ‘without limit’ – implies both ‘[a] submersion of the ego and individuality … a sacrifice of the self in favour of the final product,’ and the infinite extension of this production ad nauseam.(5) The transformation of his independent artistic practice into a corporate endeavour therefore allowed Xu to disguise his personal investment in the process of creation while at the same time multiplying the range of identities that the products of this process could represent.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view featuring European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture 2014 (ed. 2/3)

This capacity for masquerade and multiple identity found clear expression in MadeIn’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East’ (2009), for which ‘Calm’, ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’, and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ were created. The central conceit of this exhibition, as the title indicates, was the misleading assertion that works included had been created by young Middle Eastern artists with the intention of ‘dissolving any monolithic views’ about the art of this region and assembling ‘a representative – if never comprehensive – sample of what Middle Eastern art wants to be about today.’(6) Those who visited the show found a range of stereotypical motifs on display, from chadors and mosques to oil derricks and razor wire, ‘generically evocative forms spiced with enough ethnic detail to make their consumption feel like a border crossing, albeit a very smooth one.’(7) The aim, as the accompanying text makes clear, was to ‘provoke the viewer to think about issues of cultural perception’ and to expose ‘the tendency of the West to create a neat package for art from other cultures.’(8) Hence the apparently missing preposition: we are not expected to see with our own eyes, drawing back the veil to bear witness to the unadorned truth, but to recognise that our vision is always already compromised by prejudice and preconception – we see what we want to see. Impartiality is an impossibility.

For those unfamiliar with Xu’s artistic career, this subtext in ‘Calm’, ‘Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah…’, and ‘You’re Going to Heaven Tomorrow’ is not immediately apparent in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’. A clue to their contrived exoticism is provided, however, by the inclusion of ‘In Progress #180×131’ (2012), a Persian rug recreated in plywood that both confirms the Middle Eastern theme while exposing its fabrication. The implied substitution of soft woollen fibres for a more inflexible medium also draws attention to another unifying theme in the exhibition: an attention to material contrasts. This is evident as well in the combination of masonry and silicon rubber in ‘Calm’, but especially in the pairing of the steel ‘voice-graphs’ with ‘Under Heaven 20121018’ (2012) and ‘Under Heaven – Black Light 0302VS0137’ (2013). Xu (or rather his staff at MadeIn) created these and other works in the ‘Under Heaven’ series by using a chef’s piping bag to apply oil paint in icing-like swirls and daubs so thick that they can take months to dry and must be rotated when hung to prevent slumping. The visceral effect of this application has been diminished at the NGA by their display behind glass in a poorly lit corner of the gallery, preventing a full appreciation of their three-dimensionality. Nevertheless, the contrast of voluptuous excess and unyielding rigidity created by their juxtaposition with the other works in the room remains in evidence.

The material contrasts continue in the third gallery, in which sculptural and textile works of monumental proportions imbue the recurring tension between hard and soft with an air of faded luxury. The excess of the ‘Under Heaven’ canvases finds an echo here in the visually and materially ostentatious tapestries ‘Spread B-041’ (2010) and ‘Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land’ (2012). The former is a variation on a series first shown in ‘Seeing One’s Own Eyes’ in which European and North American caricatures of Middle Eastern politics are combined in feverish collages of fear, hatred, and prejudice. The eclectic cast of characters populating this tapestry, on the other hand, are drawn from popular cartoons and animated series, their garish and crudely embroidered forms overlaid to the point of illegibility. ‘Immortals’ Trails in Secret Land’ is equally unintelligible, juxtaposing a haphazard assortment of figures, motifs, and symbolic objects drawn from various cultures with marine animals, birds, and a writhing serpent. The spectacle and inscrutability of both works are heightened by their installation above eye-level and their overwhelming scale, enticing the viewer to search for some key to unlock the mystery of their composition, only to discover that this mystery lies entirely in their resistance to any attempt at understanding. There are no complex allegories here waiting to be uncovered by a worthy initiate, only an absurd and vacuous palimpsest calculated to mislead and deceive.

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
installation view

The same fusion of vacuity and spectacle animates the final three works in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, imposing sculptural assemblages that dominate both the exhibition design and branding. These works exemplify a third phase in Xu’s career, created following the inauguration in 2013 of his XUZHEN™ brand among MadeIn’s growing range of art-products. For Monika Szewczyk, this most recent self-commodification signals a final metamorphosis of the individual into the corporation, ‘[devoid of] biography, personhood, or personality [yet acting] as a kind of super-subjectivity.’(9) David Elliott has identified a resemblance between this super-subjectivity and the incarnations of Daoist and Buddhist deities, the diversity of which both embodies and obscures the multiplicity of the divine.(10) Once again, Xu is demonstrating his capacity for infinite transformation – with Walt Whitman, he celebrates the ambiguities of his artistic practice: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).’(11) Characteristically, however, the artist himself has dismissed his self-branding as little more than another stage in MadeIn’s development as a business, driven by market demand: ‘Over the years we have found that people want a person to focus on rather than a group.’(12)

The three monumental sculptural works included in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, marketed under the XUZHEN™ brand, exemplify this apparently contradictory combination of the divine and prosaic. ‘European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture’ (2014), when viewed head-on, conjures an illusion of unity – or perhaps of super-subjectivity – in which a procession of sculptural icons embodying European and North American deities or allegorical figures are incorporated into a composite facsimile of Guanyin, the thousand-armed bodhisattva of compassion. The unity of this figure immediately dissolves, however, as soon as the viewer moves around the sculpture and discovers the fractured artificiality of its construction, a material echo of those equally fragile and contrived dreams of geopolitical harmony or universal syncretism of belief to which so many idealists have dedicated their lives. ‘Eternity – Longxing Temple Buddha Statue Part Three, Tang Dynasty Buddha Statue, Longxing Temple Buddha Statue part Five, Northern Qi Amitabha Statue, Vairochana, the Cosmic Buddha, Hebei Northern Qi Dynasty Standing Buddha Torso, Parthenon East Pediment’ (2013-14) embodies another fusion of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the decapitation and reassembly of sculptural icons standing in for classical Greece and China, inexplicably fused at the neck.

These works appear, at first, to confirm the conventional separation of these regions as distinct spheres of cultural development, home to diametrically opposed forms of religious and political civic life. Xu’s use of the Parthenon pediment as a sole support for the inverted Buddhist figures in ‘Eternity’ can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the enduring association of the West with a grounded materialism and the East with groundless spiritual fantasies. Yet in the context of Xu’s broader artistic practice, and especially in conjunction with the other works in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, their fusion of sculptural vocabularies speaks instead to his desire to transform material artefacts of the past into ‘information objects’ or carriers of coded ‘cultural genes’. When shown in unison, Xu explains, ‘their relationship seems very natural, as if they were meant to be together … re-determined and re-combined.’(13) Speaking with Philip Tinari in 2015, he associated this recombination with a breakdown of singular cultural identification in the post-internet era, to the extent that ‘it becomes … difficult to distinguish who made which work, or … if a work was made by a Chinese or a foreign artist.’(14) Ornamented with these ambivalent icons of transcultural (con)fusion, the Brutalist architectural void of the NGA’s galleries takes on the universalizing proportions of a conqueror’s vault, where trophies of the vanquished jostle for attention, stripped of all previous meaning and specificity.

Keeping watch over this motley hoard, the voluptuous coils of ‘“Hello”’ (2019) take pride of place in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, towering over the viewer and following their every move with a baleful gaze that threatens consumption by the emptiness of the void (and note the inclusion of quotation marks in the title). The caption for this work draws attention to the historic prestige of the Corinthian column that Xu has chosen for the body of his serpent, ‘first created in ancient Greece [as] a symbol of power, prestige and western civilization.’ Yet the flaccid immobility of this automated guardian, save for the hesitant and creaking sway of its pediment-head when activated by the approach of the viewer, inspires more pity than dread. Carved in soft and yielding Styrofoam, this is a column devoid of all function, a structural support incapable of supporting its own weight, spectacular in scale but hollow within. As such, ‘“Hello”’ offers a clue to the underlying message of the exhibition: that which seems invulnerable and eternal is often little more than an artfully contrived illusion, while the evidence of our own eyes is rarely as straightforward as it seems and inevitably colored by the assumptions that structure our view of the world. The eager insistence with which Xu’s column forces viewers to look upon its hollow face seems to mark an impatient desire for us to join in the joke – to realize that the spectacle of this exhibition and the archetypal narratives of Chinese eternity and evolution on which this spectacle rests are contrived, reductive, and devoid of substance. The responsibility for this realization remains, however, as always in Xu’s work, on our personal commitment to the questioning of our most cherished values and our readiness to admit that we are all complicit in the upholding of certain stereotypes.

Alex Burchmore

Alex Burchmore

Notes

1. David Bell, ‘White Rabbit, Contemporary Chinese Artists and Soft Power in Sydney’s Chippendale,’ in China in Australasia: Cultural Diplomacy and Chinese Arts Since the Cold War, edited by James Beattie, Richard Bullen, and Maria Galikowski (New York: Routledge, 2019), 136-40.

2. Philip Tinari, ‘Moving in a Bigger Direction,’ Parkett, no. 96 (2015): 149.

3. In this respect, it seems telling, that both works were chosen to feature in the Venice Biennale – ‘Rainbow’ in the 49^th Biennale in 2001 and ‘Shouting’ in the 51^st Biennale in 2005 – where they would undoubtedly have served to reinforce such assumptions for many viewers.

4. Chris Moore, ‘Chris Moore on MADEIN at ShanghART, Shanghai,’ in MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Contemporary Art from the Middle East (Shanghai: ShanghART Gallery, 2009), unpaginated.

5. Travis Jeppesen, ‘Art, Inc. Shanghai,’ Art in America (April 2013): 91.

6. MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes, unpaginated.

7. Monika Szewczyk, ‘MadeIn Heaven,’ Parkett, no. 96 (2015): 164-5.

8. MadeIn, Seeing One’s Own Eyes, unpaginated.

9. Szewczyk, ‘MadeIn Heaven,’ 166.

10. David Elliott, ‘In the Face of History: Chaos and Rectitude in the Work of Xu Zhen,’ in Xu Zhen, edited by Chris Moore (Berlin: Distanz, 2014), 35.

11. This line appears in Whitman’s magnum opus, ‘Song of Myself’, first published in Leaves of Grass (1855).

12. Xu Zhen, cited in Michael Young, ‘Where I Work: Xu Zhen,’ Art Asia Pacific, no. 88 (May/June 2014): 185.

13. Xu Zhen, in Rajesh Punj, ‘Information Age: A Conversation with Xu Zhen,’ Sculpture 37, no. 3 (April 2018): 27-31.

14. Xu Zhen, in Tinari, ‘Moving in a Bigger Direction,’ 154-5.

Werner Büttner, Wild Painter in Germany who changed the 1980s.

The eponymous artist Werner Büttner has been the intellectual figurehead of one of Germany´s most successful artists groups in the 80s. Together with Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen he was shaking up postwar complacency (and complicity) in Germany at the end of Germany´s Wirtschaftwunder (economic wonder) and the cusp of the Cold War period between the USA and the USSR. The three-member boy group ripped apart comfortable truths and false convictions with their acerbic commentaries, radical ways of painting and their performative clout. They were the inventors of what became known in Germany as the “Bad Painting” movement (“bad” as in “bad-ass”, of course).

Recently the artistic work by Werner Büttner, who has been the teacher of many successful artists like Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, has been receiving surging interest in the market. Marlborough Gallery has given Büttner a lot of exhibitions and catalogs since 2016. CFA gallery in Berlin recently held two solo back-to-back exhibitions and Simon Lee Gallery has just announced its collaboration with Werner Büttner in the British market.

Thomas Eller met Werner Büttner in October in the artist´s studio in Geesthacht outside of Hamburg to talk about art, life and the un-sublime. In essence the question: Why make art?

Werner Büttner, Self-Portrait Masturbating at the Cinema (Selbstbildnis im Kino onanierend), 1980
59,1″ × 45,3″ / 150 cm × 115 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Thomas Eller: Dear Werner Büttner, I’m afraid we need to begin at the very beginning. Let’s start not with Adam and Eve though, the first humans created by God, but with Cain and Abel, their first two sons, who have been a reoccurring motif in your paintings. According to the Bible, the brothers got into a fight over God’s favor. Cain, who was a farmer, was jealous of God’s apparent preference for Abel, who was a shepherd. So, Cain took a club and murdered Abel. Much has been read into this story, not least the sinfulness at the core of the human condition. But also, the ancient cultural struggle between hunter-gatherers and farmers with their different and conflicting lifestyles. Which are you, hunter-gatherer or farmer?

Werner Büttner, Bautzen Canteen Kantine Bautzen, 1993,
59,1″ × 47,3″ / 150 cm × 120 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Bathing Russians II Badende Russen II, 1984
59,1″ × 74,9″ / 150 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner: I’m like the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field. I do not sow, nor do I reap, I tend no livestock, and yet the heavenly Father feeds me. According to the teachings of the Gnostics, this God is a bungling god. With his arbitrary rejection of Cain’s sacrifice, he incited him to murder his brother, plunging him into an existential depression that culminated in a fitting disaster: God doesn’t love me, ergo I shall kill my brother. Since then, many have followed this line of argument, and many brothers have been killed. And before you ask me if I’m a Gnostic: I merely admire their technique—the rebellious reinterpretation of common truths.

Werner Büttner, Thirst Durst, 1989,
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Is Humour a Concept of Nature? (Ist Humor ein Konzept der Natur?)
1992, 94,6″ × 74,9″ / 240 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: Lilies and birds—you’re quoting a famous Biblical verse where Jesus calls on people to lay up treasures in heaven and not on earth: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” And, to explain this to our readers: Gnosticism was an early Christian movement that was excluded from the orthodoxy of the church. In the practical and spiritual life of the community, for example, women played a far greater role than in the usual patriarchal societies of the time. As I understand it, in your life and in your art, you have combatted orthodoxy and sought out other paths wherever possible. But knowing that you never went to art school, that you studied law—the rules that provide a binding framework for our social life, defining what we may and may not do if we wish to avoid prison—knowing that this is what you studied raises the question: How do the two fit together?

WB: I studied law for two reasons. At the time, there were no admission requirements, and I had graduated from high school with poor grades. I would always miss the first two classes in the morning because I worked at the post office from 5 to 11 pm. I had left home at 16 and I had to earn money. And secondly, I thought law was philosophy applied in practice that would allow me to help underprivileged people out of tight spots. That was adolescent naivety. Then came the reality, with five thousand law students at the Free University in Berlin, most of them arrogant little bastards whose fathers and grandfathers had already been lawyers. That wasn’t the right company for me. And the professors were authoritarian cynics with dubious pasts. In the early 1970s, German universities had yet to undergo denazification. But this experience is not one I would want to be without. My three semesters of law reinforced my mistrust of human agreements, showed me how time-bound and arbitrary they are, be they laws, traditions, or customs. My engagement with ethnology also encouraged me to take a skeptical look at this. Max Stirner, who wrote the book The Ego and Its Own and founded individualist anarchism, put it like this: “I have set my cause on nothing.” In other words: only rely on things you’ve checked for yourself and found to be fit for your own use. Sometimes, that might be something unorthodox.

Werner Büttner, Everything Is So Wonderful to See, So Terrible to Be …
(Alles so herrlich zu sehn, und so schrecklich zu sein …), 2011,
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: As we know, you didn’t become a lawyer. Now for another question about beginnings: what was the path that brought you to art?

WB: It all began with a one-night stand. I was young, in my mid-twenties, in Berlin, and a woman took me back to her place. She lived in a shared flat and the next morning she opened the door and a billiard ball rolled slowly and menacingly across the floorboards. That was their in-house code and it meant: “Throw this guy out, Gunda, we want to have breakfast.” One of the people living there was Albert Oehlen and we became friends. We renovated flats together, and we spent three years talking about what remained to be done in art. Then we got down to work. In 1977, we moved to Hamburg together where Albert was accepted to study with Polke at the Academy. At the time, we saw Polke, Immendorff, and Beuys as the milestones. We talked about how to develop on from that, about what hadn’t happened yet. And then we got down to work.

THE: That sounds almost like a five-year plan. First talk, then act. Or as Martin Kippenberger, who you also collaborated with, once put it: “Think today, finished tomorrow.” But it can’t have been that easy. At the time, you were part of a “boy band” as it would be called later in the 1990s. What was it like with Oehlen and Kippenberger?

WB: Yes, I met Kippenberger in Hamburg, where Oehlen and I had moved to—Kippenberger just started to have his Berlin space, “Kippenberger’s Büro.” He had inherited money and bought work and put on shows. We knew we could shout louder if we were together, a group of young men exhibiting together was more powerful than just individual painters.

Werner Büttner, March Fever (Märzfieber), 2011
59,1″ × 47,3″ / 150 cm × 120 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: This was a difficult time in Germany. The NATO Double-Track Decision pretty much installed nuclear weapons in Germany. The ecological crisis, zero economic growth. The peace movement and the founding of the Green Party tried to find answers to this. But that wasn’t enough for some. There were communist splinter groups in every city, Maoists, anarchists. Some even took to violence like the Red Army Fraction (RAF) that began terrorizing the softened souls of West German TV audiences by actually killing politicians. At the same time, Nazi perpetrators still held office in the judicial system, in politics, and in academia. How was art an option for a group of young men at this time?

WB: What other options were there? Abandon hope, conform, go underground? None of that suited my brooding, contemplative, anti-active disposition. I preferred to comment on the mindlessness of it all from the comfort of my own home, from my studio. So, art was a perfect match for my apathy. At last, my loathing for human entanglements had found an acceptable outlet.

THE: With slogans like “Via Puberty To Success” and “Skilled Worker Fucking,” you stirred up the newfound ills of a post-fascist society. It seems to me that at the time, you had a daily competition with Kippenberger and Oehlen to see who could capture the absurdities of the world in the most effective form …

WB: Kippenberger called it “be smart, take part.” Not a bad understatement on his part, and free of pathos” At the time, sections of the youth were gripped by a frenzy of new departures, presumably as a result of silence concerning the Nazi dictatorship. Music and fine art were the worst affected, as brazen amateurs successfully assaulted the canon. Sustained by an arrogance that found its justification in the guilt of the old and all those who sailed with it, the new was punched blinking into the world. Some resorted to guns and were punished. Others cried “Back to concrete!” Others still said, “No thank you!”(1) to this and to that. And some contented themselves with sedatives from Amsterdam. Irreparable damage was done to the nuclear family, obedience to authority, and the Humboldtian model of higher education. Using grammatical forms of politeness also became suspect. At the time I, too, wanted nothing more than to be heard and seen and to be put to bed by the right persons. What drew Kippenberger and me to each other? At some point in the 1980s we realized that we’d put people like Harald Schmidt (a German TV personality of questionable ethical standing) into positions of power, and that it was time for us to think of something new.

Werner Büttner, Singing Men (Singende Männer), 2005
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: “We read the newspapers in the morning and paint in the afternoon. The results are the responsibility of the state.” This sounds like caustic irony. The art you were making at the time was fast and furious. The pictures had to be finished within a single day.

WB: Back then, I painted as best I could, so yes, there are bold, rough parts. A lot of it was hastily done, I didn’t want to spend all day in front of a canvas, I had better things to do. I worked a lot in alla prima, painting wet-on-wet. I also hated signing pictures, so I tried to create elements that made my work recognizably my own. The dribbled paint, the use of black, so that people would spot my work and say: “This is a Büttner.” And it worked! But I was very much concerned with what I was painting. Take a look at my painting Bathing Russiansfor example. Here I show the soldiers’ uniforms, neatly folded near the seashore. You don’t see the soldiers. They’ve gone swimming. In German we have the expression baden gehen, literally to go swimming, meaning: you lose touch and become unsuccessful. And that was what was going to happen to Russia. I made the painting in 1982 and three years later they were dead in the water. In my opinion the Soviet Union collapsed on May 17, 1985—the day Gorbachev attempted to ban alcohol. That was the breaking point.

THE: You were born in the German Democratic Republic but grew up in West Germany. How was life under the dictatorship of the proletariat?

WB: The policemen were friendly, as were the informers, and I was a socialist bundle of joy. Sometimes I think if we’d stayed in the GDR, if my mother hadn’t kidnapped me and taken me to the West, then in 1989 I’d have been Egon Krenz (East Germany’s last head of state) and I’d have been a bit tougher about selling off the GDR. However, two months before the Berlin Wall was built, in June 1961, my mother kidnapped me. My father had already fled. He wanted to be rid of us, which my mother couldn’t accept, unfortunately. She took three helpless children and followed him. That was more or less the greatest achievement of her life. After the little family was reunited, my parents terrorized each other and she was the first to die, aged 52. So it was a shabby misalliance from which I emerged.

THE: You even made art about this, didn’t you?

WB: The picture On Thrownness and Entanglement shows me aged two on a pony against the background of a blown-up postcard of my hometown, Jena. Definitely a biographical statement. But the title points to the calamities of any existence. According to Martin Heidegger, we are thrown into being by an unknown power, into a “being-toward-death.” In such an existence we are perpetually afraid, and this fear becomes a being-toward-nothing. Heidegger’s rather touching way out of this human dilemma is, in short, the freely designed life plan of each individual. He overlooks the fact that one is also thrown into entanglements that seriously impede the being-towards-life-plan. One is thrown into a family, into a historical period, and, worse still, into a zeitgeist, into political and social orders of uncertain quality and duration, plus, if one is really unlucky, into an ice age or a global economic crisis. The freedom to plan one’s life is thus intrinsically occasionalist. And this is an insight one must endure. But I don’t go to Jena anymore, as it looks like any other city now. Everything’s the same, same petrol stations, same shopping malls. I have no relatives there anymore, either. Now I’m a widower and an orphan and that’s it. As Schopenhauer said, you have to love your solitude, it’s the only way to happiness.

Werner Büttner, For They Know How to Behave I (Denn sie wissen was sich gehört I), 1981,
49,3″ × 70,9″ / 125 cm × 180 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: But can we come back to “read in the morning, paint in the afternoon.” There’s more …

WB: No, there’s nothing more than opening your eyes, really opening them. And when you do open them, it keeps you awake at night. What you see hurts, and you want to strike back. And, to put it cryptically, you become a sieve through which your surroundings are shaken. Information from your environment gets stuck in the sieve in pieces of precisely the size you ordered. And now you can work, now you can strike back …

THE: “Truth Is Work” was the title of the exhibition you did in 1984 with Kippenberger and Oehlen at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Was it a book or a manifesto.

WB: It was everything. Zdenek Felix, then director of the Folkwang Museum, had a great deal of faith in Albert and me. We were able to realize the book entirely on our own, and right to the end he didn’t know what he was going to get. For two thirty-year-olds putting on their first museum show, that’s a risky leap of faith. And of course, we understood “Truth Is Work” as one long manifesto, as a cry of “here we are, ready to take over.” A ruthless commentary on the world and the art of the time in crude pictures and texts. Work was not yet on the red list of endangered species. But Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were already letting financial capitalism off the leash. Due to the lingering illness and subsequent death of socialism, there was then allegedly no alternative to capitalism. And being without any alternative is probably the best thing that can happen to you. As a young person at that time, one was “genetically” left-wing, with a vague romantic love of the working class and of “the downtrodden and the slighted.” Maybe due to a guilty conscience, because as an artist one was exempt from hard, alienated labor, having exempted oneself from it. And artists suddenly started talking about their artistic “labor.” In the United States and Britain there were bloody miners’ strikes, and Martin Kippenberger’s father was the director of a mine. Perhaps that’s why we had the miner’s hammer and pick on the cover of “Truth Is Work,” although they were surrounded by flies. And flies always gather wherever there’s a strong smell. It should probably say: “We’re still not through with what we have to do.”

Daniel Richter, Werner Buettner and Jonathan Meese 2020

THE: In the catalog, you write: “We hate the truth because it is one of the dirtiest birds in the world.” After the Death of God (Friedrich Nietzsche) there’s not much left. And back to Max Stirner, the ego-anarchist. What always interested me most in your early work were the self-portraits: The Artist Takes A Chamomile Steam Bath (Der Künstler beim Kamilledampfbad) or Self-Portrait Masturbating At The Cinema. Eckhard Gillen describes you as a “modern Cynic,” a figure described in the late 1980s by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as someone who is “as modest in needs as a dog.” This school of philosophy founded by Antithenes strove for a humble life free of needs that despised all culture and public morals and was thus viewed as shameless.

WB: The Cynics certainly were a remarkable bunch, probably the earliest known performance artists. “Diogenes the dog” masturbated in the marketplace and then said, “If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly!” This is a magnificent piece of theatre, well worth passing down to future generations. In a small action, many explosive elements are concealed. At the same time, beauty and the sublime are given a passing slap in the face.

THE: In this context, you have spoken of “non-sublime motifs.” What do you mean by that?

WB: Painting has always had clear subject categories: religion, landscape, history, hunting, still life, nude, self-portrait, et cetera. And the artistic avant-gardes of the last century continued to accept some of them. The only new subject they added was worldlessness. The irrefutable founding formula of this category was: “Art is art and everything else is everything else.” This led to an elegance that was risk-free, unassailable, and insufficiently complex. The vain shabbiness of the human condition was bypassed – [it was just] extra -terrestrial wallpaper. And in some cases, overwhelming in its lofty ignorance. But that was not my path. I preferred to remain in the world. And I expanded my range of subjects via behavioral research and sociology. Kaspar Hauser Ducks Follow A Decoy or Strangely, The Hate Of The Lumpen Proletariat Is Directed Towards Telephone Boxes are examples. Bathing Russians and Storming The Bastille were farewells to bombastic history painting. Every morning, I’m amazed at the funfair of earthly phenomena and I feel obliged to manically comment on them…

THE: In other words: La condition humaine. I’m still not sure if you’re being ironic or whether you’re just good at hiding behind an ironic position. Kippenberger was someone who could make fun of everything with his swift wit.

Werner Büttner, On Thrownness and Entanglement (Von Geworfenheit und Verstrickung), 2017, 74,9″ × 94,6″ / 190 cm × 240 cm, oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

WB: Kippenberger didn’t choose irony as his survival strategy. Free of ideology, he hit out in all directions in search of fun, love, and family connections in the art world. His work has improved with age, becoming a valid handbook for the eternal return of the banality of human beings.

THE: A number of people have said that you were the intellectual in your boy band with Kippenberger and Oehlen.

WB: You said that, not me.

THE: I think you know it came from a major collector. But to return to Cain and Abel and the beginning of our conversation—that’s a story about brothers competing for recognition.

WB: It wasn’t genuine competition because the great film director (God!) had already decided how the story would end. Ultimately, this ironie majeure was pure treachery, which is why the Gnostics called the “director” a fool and a bungler. By contrast, human irony is a sharp instrument of aesthetics. No one would criticize the plays of Aristophanes or In Praise of Folly (1509) for their use of ambiguity and their inherent laughter. Irony has the greatest distance to its object of inquiry. It is the stylistic device of the productively alienated. Only those who feel out of place in the world can be productively astonished. Those who are too close, involved, in agreement, can neither see clearly nor paint a clear picture.

END NOTES

1. “Atomkraft – Nein Danke!” – “Nuclear energy – No thank you!” was the slogan of the green movement in Germany

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 3
(Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 3), 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / 100 cm × 50 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 2
(Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 2), 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / 100 cm × 50 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 1
Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 1, 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / (image courtesy the artist)

Thao Nguyen Phan ‘Becoming Alluvium’
Chisenhale Gallery (64 Chisenhale Rd, Bow, London E3 5QZ) Sept. 26, 2020 – Dec. 6, 2020

Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium, comprising a single-channel video and a series of lacquer and silk paintings, arrives at the Chisenhale Gallery in London after exhibitions in Brussels and Barcelona. In these European cities, Phan scoops up the voyeuristic gaze of the European tourist, sweeps it into the all-mighty Mekong, and washes it downstream in a mythic and lyric journey. Along the way, Phan interrogates French colonial travelogues and re-imagines them by passing a corrective lens over distortions of Vietnamese culture, past, and present.

Six stacked blocks confront us as we enter the dark, cavernous room. Delicate white strands trickle from the top left corner and collect in a in the bottom right corner. They look like the relics of lightening or the fossilized sinews of some great beast. ‘It’s an aerial view of the Mekong river’ Ellen Grieg, the curator tells me, ‘The white lines are eggshell. The slabs aren’t the compressed sediment of the river, either, but Lacquer, or ‘Son Mai , a traditional and laborious art form. This work, titled ‘Perpetual Brightness’, was made in collaboration with Truong Cong Tung — a Vietnamese artist who majored in Lacquer Painting.  Shiny and severe, they demand the entrant’s meditative attention. In the vastness of our planet’s time and space, am I too, a tiny fragment of eggshell trickling into some collective pool?

‘Power and fragility’  is the dichotomy Phan interrogates. The whirring of a boat’s engine booms from grey paneled speakers. Three-legged silver stools constellate the space before the screen. These stools were designed by Architect Anh Cuong Nguyen of NhaBe Scholae to mimic the flimsy, plastic stools Vietnamese shop-owners perch upon. These stools, with their shiny spindling legs, would look better placed on the moon than the streets of Ho Chi Minh.

The ‘First Reincarnation’ begins. In one section, the camera’s gaze lingers over the limp bodies of two brothers, lain across felled logs on a riverbank. They blow whistles. The sound is labored, as if they have whistled for eternity. In this scene, Phan lavishes the touristic gaze with a feast of luscious greens and dappling water. Then, for a moment, a shot of a tomb, encased in glass in a stale red room, breaks the fecundity and expanse of the Mekong.

In this fictional myth, these boys are victims of a dam collapse who reconcile in the next life as an Irrawaddy dolphin and a water hyacinth. In real life, two years ago in Laos, a hydropower dam collapsed. 40 people died, 1000 disappeared, and the tragedy displaced 6,600 others. Hydropower dams ravage the ecosystem of the Mekong, the river’s integrity already undermined by sewage and plastic. The piercing whistles of these young ghosts, which overheard might be mistaken for the cries of birds, is Becoming Alluvium’s most emphatic alert to the Mekong ecological crisis.

This dam collapse, besides other ecological and current affairs in South East Asia, failed to pique the interest of western, European media. ‘Who does, and doesn’t, get to be a part of the ecological revolution?’ Ellen asks. Despite a growing expression of concern and anxiety about the environment, northern-hemisphere eco-activists are mostly detached from the real-life, current effects of climate change upon the south-western hemisphere. The only exception to this rule is the widespread horror at the Australian bushfires, a nation more familiar to Europe.

So how does western media frame the south-eastern hemisphere? Through which frames of references do European viewers situate and contextualize Becoming Alluvium? In Britain, South-east Asia is packaged through the panoramic lens of big-budget travel documentaries, or the cropped and filtered Instagram squares of gap-year back-packers. Phan’s film may employ majestic, sweeping shots, and concern real and serious environmental and economic issues, but Becoming Alluvium is not a documentary.

As the cultural critic and artist Trinh T. Minh Ha asserted ‘there is no such thing as documentary’: any ‘objective’ documentation of real life just asserts the subjective gaze of the filmmaker. Taking up her baton, Phan resists and revises reductive documentations of Vietnam, and evades any closed didactic solution to the ecological and cultural issues she poses.

It is in the film’s ‘Last Reincarnation’ chapter that Phan most powerfully achieves what Toni Morrison might term a ‘re-memory’ of Vietnamese colonial past. Phan retells a Khmer folktale: the story of a princess who demands a man produce jewelry as beautiful as dew. Painted animations accompany the tale, which Phan intersperses with a slideshow of photographic stills and engravings — records from French explorer Louis Delaporte’s voyage to find the source of the Mekong.

Thao Nguyen Phan does not allow this colonial record of history to present itself as an isolated historical truth. Phan traces over Delaporte’s monochrome engravings with her own reinterpretations. She replaces Delaporte’s images of acquiescent, native servants, with beheaded, colored illustrations — the sensuous exoticism of Delaporte’s image undercut by Phan’s violent visualization of sublimation and stolen  identity. These beheaded specters also reference decapitated Khmer statues, taken from Cambodia by the colonial French, and which remain “saved” in the Musée Guimet in Paris.

Phan’s recurrent beheaded figures help visualize how the Mekong’s colonial past continues to write over its present, and how colonial travelogues and narratives write out the history and perspective of their conquests. By doing so, by fictionalizing these non-fictional, black and white archives through the prism of vibrant myth and metaphor, Phan achieves a recreated reality closer to the truth. As the French filmmaker Georges Franju said, ‘You must re-create reality because reality runs away; reality denies reality’.

The final frame brings us back, pans out, to the trickling lines of the Mekong which first greeted us on the lacquer slabs. Only now, Phan has illuminated how these vast sinews intertwine the threads of many lives and stories; of the present, past and future. The destructive and chaotic power of the Mekong belies a beautifully fragile and radical interconnectedness. It is only through realizing this interconnectedness that present and future generations can save and steward the planet.

The video loops, the film is reborn, new spectators trickle in and out and yet, Becoming Alluvium’s lyrical celebration of the Mekong, and ecological warning, lingers.

Thao Nguyen Phan, Becoming Alluvium, is at the Chisenhale Gallery from 26 September 2020 – 6 December 2020. Book an appointment to see Becoming Alluvium on the Chisenhale Gallery website. Photos courtesy of Chisenhale Gallery.

NOTE: This article was updated on November 9, 2020 to attribute the contribution of artist Truong Cong Tung and architect Anh Cuong Nguyen of NhaBe Scholae.

Han Feng studied at the Art Institute of Harbin Normal University and the Art Institute of Shanghai University. In 2010 he won the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize (China). Han Feng lives and works in Berlin.

By Alice Gee

Rachel wrapped the final frame, laying it down in the double-walled box marked FRAGILE. Mugs, candleholders, figurines, everything reduced into shapes of thin white foam and tape. She folded the cardboard lips, seated herself, and waited for the box to collapse beneath her. When it didn’t, she pulled the card from her back pocket. The cut on her fingertip caught on the crisp envelope.

Glue glinted beneath the painted rice paper. Snowbells from the kitchen window. Watercolor and ink. Next time, her father wrote inside, she should expect bluebells. On the top fold of the card, printed in neat strokes, were lines from a poem her mother wrote.

Rachel read the poem, loaded the car, and left. Andy arrived back at the apartment two hours later and emptied her grief into each newly blank space.

Rachel had planned the trip to Bavaria to celebrate the completion of a high-profile commission for the re-design of a penthouse. After two months working on top of each other, ‘an intimate and traditional lakeside cabin’ was not Andy’s idea of a holiday. During the long drive down from Berlin, something forgotten fidgeted in Andy’s mind. An object? An obligation?

UMLEITUNG. 

The diversion would delay them by at least an hour. ‘Let’s investigate. We need a break.’ They left their car in a lay-by and pushed their way up the road’s sharp incline. The road was lined with pastel-colored homes with dark shutters and empty flower boxes.

Rachel pushed through the crowd to the pavement’s edge. Jumping and whooping, men swept by in costumes covered in fabric petals, their bodies thawed into fluttering colors. It took Andy a moment to realize that their swollen, red features and black, hollowed eyes belonged to wooden masks.

Plump, hunched creatures spun across the cobbles in tall black hats. Figures with long, woolen faces tossed slack hessian bodies into the air. Cheering. Howling. Screeching. A band of turbaned minstrels pranced through the town in a din of flutes. Rachel searched anxiously for Andy’s hand. Andy’s reached for her phone. ‘We should leave now’ she said.

The directions did not specify which ‘leafy right-turn’ to take. As Rachel made the corner on the most-‘leafy’ turning, she did not notice the small boy crouched in the roots of an oak. Dusting his cropped hair of earth and snatching a handful of gravel, he leapt from the hollow and began pelting the car with stones. Rachel shouted at him as her window rolled down as she sped away. Andy watched the boy vanish in the wing-mirror as Rachel sped down the track. ‘Feral. It’s like they’ve put something in the water here’.

The track opened into a clearing. A lake gleamed through a thicket of bare pines. They pulled up beside a grey, tiled home with green shutters and a wall of neat, chopped wood. Rachel got out and checked the car’s paintwork. Unmarked. Andy trudged towards the house. A note on the door read, Looking for my son. Cabin behind hause. Key under plant pots. Make yourself a home, with a sketch of the grounds and a flowerpot. Lugging their bags, Rachel unlatched a gate with her elbow, and they arrived at a porched cabin shrouded by trees.

The scent of pine and cinnamon welcomed them. Andy felt for a light switch. A basket of star-shaped-biscuits waited on a table. ’Tastes like sawdust’ Rachel said, biting into one as she set her bag down on the neat double bed.

The cabin contained one large room and a bathroom. The ornate bed, side tables, wardrobe and chest of drawers looked barely 10 years old. Andy’s fingers curved along their wooden carvings. Rachel began to unpack. Woolen, moth-eaten blankets crowded the wardrobe. Andy noticed rings on surfaces where coffees had gone cold, and spaces marked by hooks where pictures once hung.

Andy was showering when the host dropped by. Clothes, hair ties and toiletries cluttered the cabin. Would she notice the void of masculine objects? Or would the host see what she came to find? Some vapid, foreign girl with too many shoes, too many things. Would these spools of thought wind the host’s focus away from Rachel’s eye? Or would these judgements ravel imperceptibly?

Andy listened to Rachel falter over German phrases. It would be easier if she just spoke English, Andy thought. Three months in Berlin and one of the few words Andy immediately recognized – after two months of overestimating her popularity – was ‘Handy’. She tried to picture the provincial woman’s expression as Rachel handed her their business card.

‘Zenith Designs: Re-orienting Spaces.’

In bed that night, the glare of Rachel’s phone broke the darkness.

‘This is it: “The Maschkera.”‘

Lying next to her, Andy ran her fingertip across Rachel’s arm. Her skin was golden, warm, clear of blemishes save from a small cluster of moles on her right shoulder. Long ago they had mapped Guǐ, the Ghost of the Vermillion Bird, in this constellation of five freckles. In the dim light she struggled to re-connect the dots.

After ‘Epiphany’, when nature hibernates and demons menace the valleys of Upper Bavaria, locals band together to scare away the ghouls and awaken spring. At noon on ‘Crazy Thursday’ the ‘Maschkera’ parade through towns in their outlandish costumes. Traditionally, these costumes – including the hand-carved masks – pass down from generation to generation.

As Rachel dozed off, Andy whispered, ‘We are the demons.’

‘What?’

‘The boy. Didn’t he try to chase us away?’

‘Maybe the boy is a spirit. Maybe we are Spring. Fresh life.’ Rachel said, and kissed the back of Andy’s neck.

Rachel lay flat on her back, in a dreamless sleep. She seemed to pass through life like each new place had a Rachel-sized hole waiting to be filled. Andy arranged the crumbs of Rachel’s half-finished biscuit into a star on the side-table. How different would she have been if she had grown up somewhere like this? If she had filled into spaces left by her ancestors?

By the time Andy was 15 and her family had settled in Shanghai, she had lived on four continents and attended five different schools. She pulled her knees to her chest and bound herself in. She sucked the split ends of her bleached hair together. Demons haunt a wanderer; Rachel had said. What demons haunted her?

One of the few consistencies in her childhood was a large Chinese watercolor. Retreat in the Bamboo Grove. By the third or fourth move, rehanging the picture in their new home had become a ceremony, a ritual of relocation. Her parents gifted Andrea the privilege of choosing its position. Something to occupy her. The arrangement had suited her. The lonely girl could lose herself in the enchanted, unchanged landscape. As the family settled, and playdates were arranged, the picture would fade into the crowd of decorative objects and await the next beginning. By now it had waited 8 years.

Andy’s eyes, adjusting to the dark, imagined the watercolor in the void above her.

Foggy strokes washed over the ceiling. Next, in delicate, black lines, she traced the outline of a town. She gave the homes shutters and tiny parading stick-figures – neat and insignificant, she thought, in the rocky expanse. With quick, sharp brushes, pines surrounded the town. In the furthest, eastern corner – just visible through whispering mist – she traced the outline of a building. From this distance, Andy could not distinguish if the timber cabin was more Chinese or Alpine.

Color draped the rocky hills. Grey clouds lulled into pale blues and jagged branches of teal. She raised her fingertips against the sky. Her fingers pushed deep, deeper into a mouth of cobalt blue. Slowly at first, an emptiness crept from the West.

The void relinquished a moan and hailstones bit into the earth. The cobalt mouth engorged in a howl as a sea poured out and swallowed the people and their little homes. You took it! You stole it! The sea roared as it flooded into crevices and tore through empty spaces in its desperate search. She ran, her feet pounding against the hail-like rocks, to the distant cabin.

She was the boy and his voice purled inside her.

Light.

‘You’ve been talking in your sleep again’ Rachel said, forcing her feet into knotted trainers. Andy sprawled on the bed and reached for her phone. ‘Shit’. It had long gone 11. ‘I’m going to have a cigarette and nose about’, continued Rachel. ‘Leave in 10?’ Bitter air gnawed at Andy’s toes. She murmured agreement beneath the duvet. A zip fastened and the door closed. Andy kicked the covers onto the floor, hauled herself onto all fours, and stretched her back. Her legs swung off the bed and propelled her towards the sink. Two minutes to brush her teeth. Two minutes to clarify the dream by daylight, then drive it away.

Rachel’s parents moved to Oxford in the ‘80s before Rachel was born. They had returned to Changsha only once, for her grandmother’s funeral. It had been easier to leave 9-year-old Rachel behind. 12 years later, in a moody London bar, Andy told Rachel her stories of Shanghai. The shade of plain trees, the sun’s heat on her changing body, a first kiss on steps behind Nanyang Road: ‘my lips burning from the spice of Sichuan-skewers’. ‘I’m more Chinese than you are!’, Andy teased, and rocked the Star Anise in her G&T round and round.

Andy spat the toothpaste into the sink. She reached for a flannel and smeared toothpaste on the soft, cobalt towel.

‘So, after 3 hours hiking up a mountain, you buy kitsch you could get in Berlin?’ Andy said slamming the car door. Rachel tied the novelty apron over her jacket. On its front a man’s belly bulged in tight lederhosen. She wobbled comically over the stony path. ‘You only bought yours because he was cute’, countered Rachel. Frustrated she had forgotten to charge her camera or bring blister plasters, Andy had impulsively blown €40 on a decorative beer mug. ‘Well it will make a nice vase’. The sun fell through the bare trees and encased the clearing in soft, pink light.

‘Actually he fancied you’ Andy said.

‘What?’

‘The store owner, he fancied you. You bought it to prove a point’

‘To whom?’

Andy kicked the gravel. ‘To me’.

Rachel moved in long strides towards the cabin door and swept her black bob into a knot, flung the apron on the bed, and faced her. She would not blunt herself against Andy’s edge.

‘Something’s missing. Not lost, missing. Under the sofa–missing. You’re meant to help me look.’ Rachel said and dug her nails into the bedpost. If she gripped it tight enough, she might become sturdy, robust too. ’I don’t think you want to find it. In fact, I think it’s you who kicked it away’ she continued. Red blotches collected on the skin below her neck.

‘What the hell are you on about?’

The dim lightbulb idly brightened but the room was cold.

Rachel left for dinner. Andy told her she had a headache, to go without her. For a few hours this lie slackened the knots that tightened their stomachs. Andy lit candles and sat on the porch, shuffling through music on her phone. At first the crunching of biscuits and a thrumming guitar drowned out the faint call. Then it held her attention.

Mewing came from the clearing’s farther side. She unlatched the gate and passed by the house. Glass-panes framed warmly lit domestic scenes, though she resisted the urge to peer in. Max, in his spider-man pajamas, saw her and watched the stranger closely.

She envisioned herself fading into the dim forest, called away by an endless woodland night. The night breeze snuffed her candle out, and she switched on her phone’s torchlight. A warning displayed – 30% battery.

Among the trees the sound crystallized. The call was sharp and short, too confident to belong to someone lost. There! Peeking through the nook of an oak, was a fluffy owl, no larger than a paperback novel. Startled by the phone’s glare, it dived into the darkness, its wings tipped in moonlight. Following its flight, Andy’s eyes landed upon a shadowy outline in the distance, a grander, older cabin between tall pines.

A mossy heap of off-cut wood obstructed the arched, double door. Her hands hurried to remove the planks which blocked her passage. They hurried as if Andy had no choice but to anchor her body to an action whilst blood swelled through her like helium. A woodlouse scuttled between her fingers and moths accumulated in the torchlight. She flinched from the mossy static of their wings as if disease textured them.

She hoped a locked door would reprove her to go to bed. But the iron handle seemed wrought to the curve of her palm and the door opened silently. Darkness ate her light.

As her eyes adjusted, on the walls knives and axes nicked through choking dust. Spiders whispered their legs over the glinting glass of lamps hanging from ceiling beams. Moonlight through dirty windows reflected off white sheets cast over expansive tabletops, shielding dormant landscapes beneath. She walked to the largest table. Her hands ran across the fabric, over unfinished work, invisible objects hinged between being and non-being. She fingered the corners of a sheet hesitating. Then she began to tug.

Hanna was washing up when she heard the scream.

He had suspected the women from the moment they arrived. They had taken the annex but his grandfather’s workshop had to remain uninvaded, unspoilt. Max thought he was brave and strong but when he rammed into the tall woman’s side, he had not foreseen that his form, small and strange, would elicit this much terror. He had never heard an adult scream like that, at least, not since that night. The night Max was trying to forget.

Max ran out of the barn, tripping over gnarled roots, back to the house, falling into the arms of his mother. He burrowed his face into her chest. ‘Opa’, he exhaled as his chest rose and fell and relented to her heartbeat. Hanna exchanged looks with Andy.

‘Sorry, sorry, Entschuldigung.’ Andy offered.

Max’s glared at Andy and fled inside. The woman was petite, younger than Andy had imagined, and wrapped in a fuchsia dressing gown. ‘It’s OK’. He is very sad because his Grandfather died. Max loved being with his Grandfather in his workshop. Carnival was their special time.’

Close to the house the owl continued crying.

Andy slunk into the empty bed, relieved her host had been understanding. She tensed and relaxed her sinewy limbs, tracing a line of focus about herself like a silkworm winding a cocoon.

Rachel would be back any minute. It would be easier to be asleep. Hours later Andy awoke but Rachel was still gone. Her silk thread kept snapping.

Last month, Rachel had invited Andy to spend Chinese New Year with her family.  One evening, Andy found herself alone in the kitchen with Rachel’s mother, Lili. As Lili stirred her wok, she recounted to Andy the legend of Nian, the beast of Spring Festival. Hungry Nian, the child-eating monster, would emerge from the mountains and tear through villages. To intimidate him, locals banged drums, plates and saucepans and doused their homes in red paint. ‘Gou Nian’. Lili pressed the shape of the words into the girl’s mouth like a ginger candy. The cadence soured under her lips. How had this girl ‘gotten away with’ learning so little? Rachel’s friend knew even less Mandarin than Rachel. ‘Pass-over of Nian, the year-beast’, Lili translated.

Translucent snowflakes caught on the window. Outside, the boy played in the garden. He threw something, retrieved it, threw it again. Snow blanketed the panes until she could only hear him. It’s gone! It’s gone! Where is it? As he shouted, the object bulleted through the glass and into a sideboard. Blue and white China splintered into triangular shards. Andy tried piecing them together as snow rushed through the window. But as she grasped them, the painted details smeared together winding blue trails across the snow. The boy plunged through the window, searching the snowdrift until he lifted the object to his face and a spirit summoned in the window.

Andy wailed. Rachel held her in her arms. ‘I’m here now, I’m here now’.

It was their final day in Bavaria. Rachel had overslept. If they wanted to visit the Castle and Weiskirchen then they should be passing the Tegernsee right now. Andy slammed the wardrobe door. Rachel groaned. What had the revelers taught her? Saufen wie ein Loch: Drink like a hole! Saufen bis zum Verlust der Muttersprache! Drink until you forget your mother tongue!

‘Have fun?’ Andy said, refolding a red turtleneck. She lay it in the empty suitcase, stared at it, then retrieved it and pulled it on.

Rachel swallowed an aspirin. ‘I wasn’t grumpy with you yesterday, why do you have to be so…’

‘—so what?’

‘I don’t know…’ Andy parted the curtains and Rachel grimaced ‘– fragile.’ Her voice was measured but the still word roared. Rachel went into the bathroom. Makeup had collected in the corner of her eyes. ‘You feel things deeply, and that’s fine…’ she said, pulling out threads of mascara from her eyes, ‘…but are you sensitive to your surroundings, or expecting the world to accommodate, you?’ Andy watched the spitting rain collect on the windowpane. ‘I’m not saying this is deliberate, just…’ Rachel tried to collect Andy into her arms, but Andy stiffened.

‘Is this why you brought me here? A trap?’

Tears pricked at the raw skin beneath Rachel’s lashes. ‘No. A retreat.’

Andy threw the beer mug against the wall. She began crying. Not knowing what to do Rachel collected the shards. A trail of blood bloomed on her finger.

Max belted his papier-mâché monster into the front seat of the car. As Hanna reached for the gear stick, she knocked against one of the creature’s flailing arms. Craftsmanship must have skipped a generation, she thought. She did not expect to meet Rachel’s car pummeling down the narrow track. Rachel pulled up on the verge and rolled her window down. She had to leave, but Andy would check out tomorrow. Rachel fumbled for her German. The cabin was wonderful, and the biscuits were delicious. And could Hanna provide Andy with a taxi number? Dark smudges around Rachel’s eyes appealed to Hanna for silent understanding.

As Hanna scooped Max’s limp body from the pool of television light, she thought she heard something move across the gravel path. Carrying Max up to bed, she pulled on a blind’s cords with a fore and middle finger, but the blind just gave way to unmoving darkness.

She lay her son down on his cabin bed and prayed for undisturbed sleep. He was right, it was too soon to rent the annex out. His room felt too warm. Hanna loosened her dressing gown and went outside. She thought of Rachel. What if her father – voicing his objections – had jinxed the strange couple lying in his bed, splintered them, burrowed into them, whilst they slept? Maybe this young couple offended her father. All that infinite, celestial perspective, now, yet his ghost remained in the past. She chuckled. So much rot beneath that veneer of tradition and pride. Hanna turned inside and missed the light thrown towards her across the thicket from the workshop.

His eyes and mouth gaped open. Hanna rushed up the stairs to dam Max’s pouring screams,

Another nightmare. The psychologist said Max would relive the trauma in his unconsciousness for some time, though she assured Hanna he was doing fine: ‘Well, when you consider how Max found the body’.

On Sunday Mornings, Hanna would prepare small parcels of rolls and salami, and two flasks of hot chocolate. Max would scurry with this breakfast to the workshop where his Grandfather would already have begun work. He would set his tools neatly down, and share with his Grandson in their silent communion, whilst heaters whirred and burnt dust. For two hours each week, Max was permitted entry into this precious, masculine world.

Milk congealed on Max’s mug of chocolate. He lay in the hollow space of morning with no routine to fill it. Pulling a hoodie, then a jacket, over his pajamas, he scampered out into the cold. He reached the lake’s edge where grassy blades met still water. Reaching into his coat pocket, he found the sharp gravel stones. He crushed them into his palm. They did not skip across the lake’s surface like the pebbles his mother threw. They sunk, he could hardly make out where – the ripples left behind were so fleeting. If Max threw himself into the water, would the sound fill the valley? Would it knock birds from tree-tops, wash plastic debris to the banks? Or would he sink, as simply and quietly as these stones? Max searched about for something heavier. A second reflection collected in the pool of water.

Andy thought she was always going to put them back, and really, she had not known what she would do with them anyway, other than examine their terrifying, appealing depravity, passing their weight between her hands. Now they clunked in her cloth bag as she moved through the thicket to the lake to return them to the workshop.

Max rummaged through the tall grasses. When he emerged she was standing there. They stood, each mirroring the other, waiting for their reflection to flinch. His tight gaze loosened into ambivalence, and Max slumped onto the dirt, his back turned to Andy. Andy watched as the boy fed rocks to the lake, its water leaping to engulf each morsel. She approached the water’s edge and sat down with her bag beside him.

Entranced, they watched the stones fly and fall, and listened as they hit the surface and each splash subsided. The mouth of the cloth bag slumped open. Inside were two masks. One had prized itself free with its long-curled horns that squirmed out of the darkness like centipedes. Last night Andy’s fears had writhed in its hollow eyes. Now it lay, childish, almost benign under the pale, grey sky. Now she looked through those holes to the face beneath. Another face, pink and flushed and red, propped the monster up.

Max reached for the mask by its horns, a lump of wood chiseled and painted into the image he had given his Grandfather. The wooden ridges curved about his face exactly. Bitten, grubby fingernails twitched over the dog-grin. Max pursed his lips and yelped. The sound, unsteady at first, evolved with each cold breath until an eldritch howl punctuated the valley.

The face in the bag watched her. The familiar face Andy had taken in kinship now grimaced menacingly in the periphery of her vision. She had cradled his face. Now it grinned gleefully in her hands. When she put him on, she could not see him.

The small wooden mouth moaned. Andy tried again, her ungainly cries merging with Max’s. At first furtive, the sounds grew stranger, wilder, louder. The tawny, slicked moustache twisted over gaunt cheeks which hollowed into a stiff, gaping jaw. Pale pink lips engorged with every mangled cry, every screech, and from bulging mounds chartreuse eyes sneered at the crying child.

Max tore off her face, his grandfather’s mask, and threw it into the water. A hollow briefly opened in the surface, then the turbid water stilled. Max and Andy stared at each other blankly, then watched as the mask stole across the water towards the wood.

‘Wir haben ihn verjagt.’

*
Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure;
And spring comes green again to trees and grasses
Where petals have been shed like tears
And lonely birds have sung their grief.
Du Fu

国破山河在
城春草木深
感时花溅泪
恨别鸟惊心

杜甫

Alice Gee on Huangshan mountain, Anhui Province, December 2019

Ugo Rondinone, black and green nun, 2020 Photo by Stefan Altenburger

The nuns + monks sculptures express in turn this dialectic from within and without. From opening up onto the world and from turning inward on oneself. From an introspective gaze combined with an exteriority receptive to nature’s elements of which these sculptures bear the traces. The imprint. Rondinone’s works have never stopped oscillating between extremes, entangling, suspending them. Aufheben…. The sculptures of nuns + monks possess a natural beauty. An “archaic” beauty that evokes other sculptural ensembles by the artist: Human Nature on Rockefeller Plaza in 2013 and Seven Magic Mountains in the Nevada desert in 2016. They manifest visibility yet at the same time seem to avoid the gaze of those to whom they are shown. Their features are indistinct. And in this era of multiple gender identities, they are divested of sexual characteristics, even though their titles allow us to differentiate them. It would certainly be extremely difficult to distinguish the nuns from the monks based on their mere appearance. Wrapped and protected in their cloaks, they seem, like his 1995 self- portrait and the ensuing clowns and nudes, absorbed, in the same way that Diderot characterized the figures depicted in certain paintings by Chardin. Absorbed in what? In whom? In the spectators wandering around them? In the architectural space that serves as the backdrop for their paradoxically motionless choreography? Unless, as is extremely likely, the space in question is mental. Meditative. Transcending the matter that still seems to determine their heft. Or, more than transcended, one could say the matter in nuns + monks is transfigured, revealing a radiance reinforced by the chromatic contrasts, the harmony generated by the juxtaposition of different body parts—the head and the cloak—and by the sculptures, perfectly integrated from one to the next, the abovementioned radiance evoking medieval statuary serving the same religious and spiritual purpose to which the artist is deeply committed. It should be explained that the creation of these works was nourished by Rondinone’s assiduous frequentation of the medieval sculpture department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in addition by a powerful confrontation with Giacomo Manzù’s cardinals, whose own particular modernity, permeated by a classicism that defies time and categorization, inevitably corresponded to his interest.

Between matter and its negation, these sculptures invest a polarized field. Amphibological. Made in bronze, they were conceived from limestone models, scans of which were “three-dimensionalized” with digital tools. In response to the friable limestone, the solidity of the bronze. In response to the stone’s natural, ancient origins, the here and now contemporaneity of the polychrome castings. Of course, we must, as is often the case in Rondinone’s work, seek the response, ineluctably unstable, inherent in his propositions in the interpenetration
of the extremes and intervals they bring about. In a game of equivalences. Opening up onto the world, to nature, and turning inward on oneself. In matter that is as embodied as it is disembodied. And given its elevated spiritual coefficient, so remarkable these days and, in a manner of speaking, absent from contemporary art, in an anagogical principle that re-transcribes and accompanies the process of transfiguration underlying this group of sculptures.

Erik Verhagen
Translated from French by Laurie Hurwitz

Opening: Thursday, September 3, 2020, 5.30–7.30pm
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday, 10am–6pm
Saturdays: Visitors welcome, please schedule an appointment

Galerie Urs Meile takes great pleasure to announce the opening of Empty / Not Empty, Qiu Shihua’s (*1940, lives and works in Beijing, Sacramento and Shenzhen) first appearance since his last show seven years ago in our gallery in Lucerne. The most comprehensive exhibition of his works in our Swiss gallery to date displays oil on canvas as well as paper works spanning 25 years of his oeuvre with earlier pieces he painted in Beijing and Shenzhen until very recent ones from Sacramento.

In the 1980s Qiu Shihua visited France and studied the works of the Impressionists. Qiu underwent an incredible development in the course of the 1990s, moving from traditional landscape painting to find a very personal style. An un-trained eye might find in his work little more than an almost unmodulated white, but his minimalist style of painting has nothing in common with the forms of expression from Western art history. The paintings seem Impressionist, but the Impressionists’ ideals – the view from out-side, the pure appearance of the outside world on the retina – are the opposite of Qiu’s. Rather, he represents the landscape – or what is left of it – as an expression of the soul. Nor are his white paintings obligated to abstraction or monochromatism. Qiu certainly abstracts from reality, goes to the limits in reducing the recognizable world, but it is always there somewhere; all his pictures remain figurative. They are radical within the category of landscape painting. They follow no systematic, conceptual search for the fundamentals of painting, of the kind Robert Ryman pursues in his works, for example. Qiu Shihua’s paintings originate in traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Qiu Shihua, Untitled, 2009, oil on canvas, 70 x 110 cm

The painting seems to be behind a veil. The landscape reveals itself gradually to the concentrated and patient viewer. Like classical Chinese landscapes, Qiu Shihua’s pictures are exempt from the laws of central perspective. There is no recognizable center, neither a horizontal nor a vertical axis, no left or right, perhaps not even an up and a down. In a few brief sentences the artist describes his “philosophy” – and in this case the term really is justified. “For me north, south, east, or west count for nothing, nor do red, yellow, or blue, and certainly not past, present, or future. With endless emptiness in the heart there is neither coming nor going; they are one and the same. So are my works too: simple and pale, calm and empty. All being and non-being is hidden in them, completely self-contained. In the zero condition the original countenance of the soul reveals itself.”1

Like the old Chinese masters, Qiu paints an inner world. The atmospheric perspective invites the eyes to roam over emptiness; a roving that permits nothing more than a diaphanous, mystical presentiment of another world. “According to Qiu, his working process grounds on the premise of forgetting about such painterly matters as motive, technique, emotion, thus achieving pure sensuality in the void space from which the image must emerge rather than construct itself.”2 In their method, Qiu Shihua’s white paintings follow a tradition that goes back more than a thousand years, but in their appearance they seem radically modern, even provocative. They are timeless, offer a wealth of perceptive possibilities, and can be regarded as one of the most interesting and certainly least expected contributions to painting in the past decades.

________________________________
1 Qiu Shihua, from a text supplied to the author in January 2005.
2 Max Wechsler, “The Image as an Epiphany: On the Paintings of Qiu Shihua,” on the website of Galerie Urs Meile, http://www.galerieursmeile.com

Simon Mordant is one of Australia’s most prolific art collectors and philanthropists. As chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and as Australia’s past Venice Biennale Pavilion Commissioner, Mordant has been one of the major forces driving modernization of Australia’s visual arts scene. Simon and his wife, Catriona, live in Sydney. Chris Moore spoke with Simon via video conference during the Covid19 lockdown.

Simon Mordant is sitting in his office at his beach house. He is thoughtful in his responses but also fairly relaxed, defensive only when criticisms of Australia are raised regarding his adopted country (his voice has also adopted some monotone Australian drawl). Born in 1959 in England, aged 23 Mordant emigrated in 1983 to Australia. Since then Mordant has become the picture of the browned, successful Aussie. In 2010 he and Catriona donated AUD 15 million (at the time, around USD 12 million) towards the AUD 53 million redevelopment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and in doing so also brought State and Federal governments to each contribute AUD13 million too. In 2012, Mordant was awarded Member of the Order of Australia for services to the arts and cultural community. In 2020 he was knighted in Italy. This week Simon was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia, the country’s second highest honor, for services to the visual arts. We begin our conversation with the question of why he became an art collector.

“We’ve never thought of it as collecting. We love being around creative people, whether that’s visual artists or performing artists. We enjoy being around people making excellent things, and along the journey we’ve been able to acquire works that hit us emotionally in the heart and are works that we’ve loved at the time that we bought them. We’ve never sold anything that we bought. There are a number of works that we’ve acquired over 35 years, and some no longer have that same emotional response. So, we don’t show those works in our homes or offices, and increasingly works that we know we’re not going to show, we’re gifting to public institutions, rather than have them gathering dust in a warehouse. But every single thing we’ve bought has had an emotional impact on us at the time of purchase. And in pretty much every case we’ve got to know the artist or maker subsequently, and in some cases, we’ve supported the artist for 30 years and in some cases have 30 or 40 works by that artist over their particular career.”

The Hangman’s House

I ask whether there are particular art works that have maintained their interest over a long period of time? “I still have on my desk in the city the first work of art that I bought. When I was 22, I wandered into the Royal Academy Summer Show and saw this work in my lunch hour. It had a really significant personal impact. It was a picture of a house in a field of flowers. It was unusually beautiful, but it had a very odd title. The work was called “The Hangman’s House”. I couldn’t reconcile the beauty of the picture to the title. I wrote to the artist and asked her to explain to me the context of the picture. The artist wrote back and her letter is stuck on the back of the picture and that picture sits on my desk and I look at it every day.

J. Feaney, The Hangman’s House Salzburg, Aquatint, 6/75 collection Mordant Family, Australia

“We often open our homes to international museums and collectors who are visiting. Often people will ask us, in the event of a fire, what would you take? We always answer the same way: there are some sculptures that our son made at kindergarten, when he was 4 or 5 years old, and they would be the things that we would grab in the event of a fire.”

‘The Hangman’s House’ was the first artwork you bought. How did it develop from there? “I continued to buy works that I loved, that were beautiful, that had an impact on me through my early 20s. And then I chose to emigrate to Australia by myself, left my family, and came to Australia with maybe 8 or 10 pictures that I’d bought and some clothes. What I quickly realized was that for whatever reasons, those artworks didn’t work in Australia. The light was different. My state of mind was different. They no longer resonated with me. I started to learn a little about Australian contemporary art. There were no museums dedicated to contemporary art when I arrived, and the state-owned institutions were full of dead art and were very unchallenging for me. I mean, I love van Gogh and Renoir, but I can’t sit down and talk to them about what was on their mind when they were creating a particular work. I can read books or letters or correspondence but with a living artist, you can sit down and have a discussion with them about what was on their mind. So, I quickly gyrated towards contemporary art and started to learn about Australian contemporary art, and visited galleries and institutions, and then started to collect Australian contemporary art.”

Leaving England

What prompted you to move to Australia?

“In 1977, when I finished school in England, Margaret Thatcher had just been elected Prime Minister after a long period of Labour governments. The country was under general strike. The IRA were very prevalent. I can remember my father looking under his car every day before he went to work in case there was a bomb. [a common practice for business people at the time] My best friend at school’s father was killed by the IRA. I was in Harrods when the bomb went off. I was pretty disillusioned with England. I didn’t like the class structure. There was no meritocracy. I felt I needed to go somewhere that spoke English, because I didn’t have other languages. And I needed to go somewhere that my family had never been before, to be able to prove to myself that I could make a go of something myself.

Simon with his parents

“At the time I emigrated, my parents thought they’d wasted their money on my education. They’d made significant sacrifices to put me and my brother through boarding school. I was the eldest of two and I shot through as soon as I finished school and never really lived at home, because I was at boarding school from the age of 7. My brother went to boarding school at the age of 6. He had a similar reaction, albeit a little after me; he moved to South America and subsequently, about 25 years ago, settled in Bali, where he [has] lived ever since.” – I remark these are examples of successful education. “Subsequently my father apologized for criticizing the decision to emigrate and my parents loved coming to Australia. They came for a couple of months each year, and my father came here to die 16 years ago, and he’s now scattered off our jetty. They fell in love with the place subsequently, before I emigrated they had a very 1950s perception of what Australia was…until they got here and saw it for themselves, they didn’t understand why I had chosen to move here.”

Catriona

You moved to Australia and started working as an Chartered Accountant. “Yeah, I didn’t really last long as a chartered accountant. I used that to get my emigration and sponsorship by an employer. Within 6 months I’d left the profession and moved into investment banking, then in its relative infancy in Australia. This was early 1984. Every summer in Australia there’s something called the Sydney Festival for the month of January. There’s a lot of art and public performances. Every year I used to go to Opera in the Park, which was a free opera for about a hundred thousand people in the Domain [a park in central Sydney]. I used to get there early and take a big picnic rug and friends would come and join me through the day until the opera performance in the evening. In the summer of 1988 one of the people that was joining me was a very dear friend, who was a single mum. I was an early adopter of technology, so I had one of those military-style mobile phones, with the handset sort of glued to a car-battery, with a 6-foot aerial. I was sitting down in the park and the phone rang. It was this friend to say that her young daughter was sick, and she couldn’t come but she had planned to bring a friend and she was going to come anyway, and where was I located so she could find me. I said, ‘Of course! There’s going to be about 20 of us here… I was wondering back to my car to get another Esky [cooler box] of beer and wine, and I recognized this person who’d been described to me. We went back to the picnic. We talked all the way through the opera and subsequently arranged to meet for dinner together. We were married six weeks after that dinner.

Simon and Catriona Mordant

“Catriona grew up in the theater. So, she had been surrounded by creative people. Her mother was a dancer. Together we had a shared creative interest. She had some art works artists had given her in return for staying in her apartment or just gifts from friendships. We started this journey together. It started as a hobby, it became a passion, and then it moved into an obsession.”

At this point it is hard to tell whether Mordant is talking about art collecting or Catriona. Possibly both.

“For the last 30-plus years we’ve been on this journey together, which we’ve absolutely loved. Because we travel a huge amount, we’ve seen art in many different places. We generally find that places going through significant change are producing the most interesting art. Whether it’s the Middle East, or Korea – given the tensions between North and South or Africa, we find that art coming from places going through change is more impactful upon us. In more recent years, the relatively safe economies of Australia and North America aren’t producing work that has the same level of emotional impact on us. Maybe post Covid this will change. Yes, we have continued to buy Australian and North American art, but our main focus is on markets going through significant change.”

Venice Biennale, 2015

***

The conversation moves on to how Simon began to be involved in the Australian art scene. “In 1983 there was no institution focused on contemporary art. The state museums had eclectic collections, mostly of dead artists, a lot of colonial Australian art – interesting but certainly not emotionally appealing. So, I started to ask around: where were the commercial galleries? But there weren’t many commercial galleries in Sydney then. I started to meet the gallerists and go to openings. If I saw something I liked and I could afford it, I’d buy it. I then heard – this must have been the mid-80s – that there was an initiative to start a museum of contemporary art. A guy called John Power (1881-1943, an Australian artist) had died at the end of the Second World War and he’d left a bequest […in which] he had stipulated,

“…to make available to the people of Australia the latest ideas and theories…of the most recent contemporary art of the world and by creation of schools, lecture halls, museums and other places for the purpose…of suitably housing the works purchased so as to bring the people of Australia in more direct touch with the latest art developments in other countries.”

That bequest had been left to Sydney University, who had not completely fulfilled the terms of the bequest as there was no museum. A few people unearthed this bequest and put the university under some pressure to meet the obligations that had been stipulated. I became quite close to Leon Paroissien, who was driving that initiative and who subsequently became the first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art when it opened in 1991.(1) I can remember in the late 80s going through this shell of a building with my wife, looking at this ambitious desire to turn a building on Circular Quay into a museum. I joined the inaugural board of the foundation of the museum, and subsequently in the mid-90s joined the Board of the museum and chaired the finance committee. At that point the museum was in significant financial strife. Annual attendance was under 100,000 people and the institution was close to bankrupt. Bernice Murphy, the second director of the museum had resigned. A search was begun for her successor. I was in London on business and I met with a short list of candidates to potentially succeed Bernice. I met Liz Ann Macgregor and realized that she was going to be the most outstanding director, and I wasn’t going to leave the room until she had agreed to take the job. She came out in 1999 as the third director of the museum and very quickly transformed it.

Catriona and Simon Mordant, with Pipilotti Rist (center) and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

“She lifted the admission charge, which, given it was our key source of income, was a pretty brave move… for an institution that was effectively bankrupt. She found a sponsor, Telstra, who was prepared to give the funds for free admission, and over the next 15 years the audience grew exponentially to 500,000 people.  In that period, Board chair, David Coe and his wife and Cartriona and I supported the museum buying Australian contemporary art. In 2008, I recognized that the place was bursting at the seams and, in the absence of change, we were going to lose Liz Ann, because she was not being challenged and had taken the place as far as she could. I proposed re-establishing a foundation to raise money to redevelop the institution. The museum had a vacant carpark on the northern end of the building at Circular Quay and with architect Sam Marshall we came up with a design concept that would solve many of the issues that we faced.”

The first firm to win an architectural competition regarding the MCA was Tokyo’s SANAA in 1997. The project to add a cinematheque was ultimately abandoned (SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa subsequently won another competition to design the Sydney Modern annex to the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Another competition held in 2001 by the City of Sydney was won by Berlin firm Sauerbruch & Hutton, first for an annex to the existing building and then for an expanded concept replacing the old building, and again including a cinema complex. But Sydney has seen many notable old buildings obliterated, particularly on Circular Quay, so there was great public outcry at the risk to a relatively bland 1930s Art Deco sandstone building being destroyed. Plans to expand the museum were abandoned. (2)

Like many cultural architecture projects in Sydney whose designs are drawn from competitions (most infamously, Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House), Sydney Modern is also controversial, with an construction budget of AUD 450 reduced in 2017 to AUD 344, necessitating a substantial redesign, which ultimately also caused the construction contractor to withdraw. Former Australian Prime Minister and art collector, Paul Keating, who frequently comments on urban planning, described the Sydney Modern plan as a “swollen lump of [a] megaplex on the bridge across the expressway.” (3) Frankly, getting any cultural building off the ground in Sydney is extraordinary, however ill suited.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

The discussion with Mordant continues. By late 2008 the MCA building’s problems were becoming acute. “We decided to design something that would solve our problems. Firstly, circulation. Secondly, creating a world-class education center. Thirdly, improving the gallery spaces. Fourthly, making the building more welcoming. The existing building was…quite an austere building, so the extension needed to ‘smell’ of ‘contemporary’. And finally, to create spaces to enable the institution to be financially sustainable. We built two massive rooftop function spaces, which have been the most popular venue spaces in Australia, for weddings and corporate events and there are also office tenancies. We included a couple of cafes and bookshop, which also created significant income. We then went out and started to fund raise for that in 2010. With Liz Ann I led that campaign.” This was the same year Simon was appointed Chair of the MCA Foundation. “The GFC hit [the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08] when we were halfway through, which caused obviously a significant headache, but ultimately the building opened in 2012, on time and within budget, and since […then] visitors have exceeded a million a year. Last year we were announced as the most visited contemporary art museum in the world.” The Art Newspaper reported that the MCA beat other renowned institutions such as the UCCA in Beijing (905,000), the Serpentine in London (770,000), and the New Museum in New York, the MCA Chicago, and the Hammer and MoCA in Los Angeles, all three of which had fewer than 350,000 visitors each in 2018. (4) As Simon says, “which was completely extraordinary for a city the size of Sydney.” (Mordant’s comment is true but it no doubt helps that Circular Quay is the most visited tourist destination in Australia, although 60 percent of the MCA’s visitors are locals, not tourists).

Simon Mordant with Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia, Lucy Turnbull, and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (photo Anna Kučera)

“Now we’re closed because of the Covid situation [MCA reopens on June 16]. We’re fortunate that we’ve built a prudent level of reserves to help weather the storm. And the storm’s been fierce, because all our function revenue [events] evaporated.” Projected revenue for the museum dropped from 22 million to 13 million. “We’ve had to dramatically reshape the place during this period of closure and that coincides with my 10 years as Chair of the Board, finishing in July. Last week we announced my successor from amongst the board members.” Lorraine Tarabay, the new Chair, is also a collector and former investment banker, whom Simon has known for almost half her life.

Museum of Contemporary Art entrance hall, Mordant Wing

The Tate

I ask Simon about how the Australian art scene has changed in the last 20-30 years and mention my personal feeling that the visual arts still lag behind other areas of Australian cultural endeavor, such as film and music. In my view there are reasons for this situation. Australia is isolated compared to Europe or America but it is very wealthy, well-educated, well-travelled, extremely multi-cultural, so we have connections everywhere, not least of all to our neighbors in South East and East Asia, including China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, each amongst the most influential countries in the international art world. Does Australia do enough to take advantage of that more than superficially? “I’m not sure you’re entirely correct. I think part of the problem is the perception that Australia’s a very long way away. Therefore, curators in Europe and North America, who are reluctant to spend 24 hours on an aeroplane, would rather go to things that are more familiar to them. But when they come here, and then go on artist studio visits, and meet artists, and see collections, they come away completely inspired and recognize that they made a mistake by not having invested the time before.

One of the things I am most proud of is an initiative that the MCA entered into with the Tate in London 5 years ago. Qantas (the Australian national airline) was winding up its foundation and was looking for a way to increase the profile of Australian artists internationally with the remainder of the funds, which came from selling its collection. I was concerned that institutions like the Tate had very little Australian art in their collections. With Liz Ann Macgregor we commenced a discussion with the Tate about a joint acquisition program. There’s never been a joint acquisition program like this in the world. There have been examples of institutions jointly buying individual works but there’s never before been an initiative where two institutions together buy works over many years. We persuaded Qantas to gift AUD 2.5 million to a joint acquisition program, over five years, of Australian contemporary art, that would be jointly owned by the Tate and the MCA, and which would acquire living Australian artists to show in a global context in the Tate and MCA collections. We’ve now had every year since 2015 the Tate curators come down to Australia. They visit 30 or 40 artists and with that money, they bought, together with the MCA, a large body of works that are now being shown in an integrated way in the Tate collection. That’s been fantastic for the Australian artists, who’ve never really been able to have a profile in international museums. In fact, the Tate has historically thought of indigenous art not as art, notwithstanding indigenous art is the longest continuous culture – 60,000 years. They thought, like most institutions, that that type of work belonged in encyclopaedic museums like the Met rather than museums of modern art, but as a consequence of the curators visiting Australia over the past 5 years on a continuous basis, they now absolutely turned upside down the way they think about First Nations art. They have recently appointed the inaugural First Nations curator and they are now putting First Nations art from Australia and Canada and South America central to the way they think about art making today. Although the works they’ve been buying together with us have been both indigenous and non-indigenous, the impact of the curators getting to understand indigenous art has been transformational for the Tate. That’s something I’m particularly proud of having achieved for Australia.

Venice Biennale

In 2013 Simon was appointed Commissionaire of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Since 1988 the site had been occupied by what had been intended to be a temporary building, designed by prominent Australian architect Philip Cox and situated in the western edge of the Giardini.

“Australia was the last country to be granted a permanent site in the Giardini in Venice. In 1988, which was our bicentennial year, following extensive lobbying by Franco Belgiono-Nettis,(5) we were given a block of land, the only waterfront block, in the gardens. A temporary pavilion was built very quickly to enable Australia to have permanent representation.” The first artist to be shown in the pavilion was painter Arthur Boyd (1920-1999).

Cate Blanchett at the opening of the opening of the Australian Pavilion, Venice, May 2015

“I’ve been involved in Australia’s activities in Venice for 30 years and it was clear to me, that the temporary pavilion was no longer optimal for showing great Australian art. Venice is a very important window for any country, because it is the only biennale that has national pavilions. In the vernissage week you have 30,000 curators and art critics from around the world descending on Venice to look at what is considered each country’s best contemporary art of the time. If you have a suboptimal piece of infrastructure, you’re not able to present your artists in the best way. I made a proposal to the Australian government that we should look to redevelop the pavilion into something that was more reflective of contemporary Australia and was better placed to position Australian contemporary art in a global context.

“Together we commissioned a feasibility study and were surprised to find out that the temporary pavilion that was constructed in 1988 was the only non-heritage listed building in the gardens….As a consequence of that, we were able to get Venetian authority approval to redevelop that site. Fortunately the original architect, Philip Cox, was still alive and he was willing to consent to his temporary building being removed. Denton Corker Marshall won the architectural commission and I drove the campaign to raise the money to build the pavilion, which opened six years ago to enormous acclaim. The other countries that are represented in Venice were extremely jealous that Australia had built this extraordinary building. I think the combination of the Tate partnership, a world class building in Venice, and the extraordinary success of the MCA significantly enhances Australia’s position internationally in the arts.”

“There are a small number of very strong commercial galleries that exhibit at international art fairs and represent the key Australian living artists. Because we’re all able to travel – pre Covid – a lot more than people used to do 50 years ago, and because we’re able to go to international art fairs and biennales, we see non-Australian art in a different way and many collectors find seeing something new more exciting than seeing the same art that all your friends have at home. There are some great Australian living artists. There are a number in our collection that we’ve supported for 30 plus years like Shaun Gladwell, Janet Laurence and Lindy Lee.. There are a number from whom we own multiple works over their career but generally we’re finding non-Australian art to be more challenging at the moment.” I agree on this but disagree on the Australian commercial gallery scene, which I think is weak compared to other places around the world. In my view, this partly is a function of environment but there is a big difference between exhibitions being held in commercial galleries in Australia and other places. Berlin is smaller than Sydney and nowhere near as wealthy. This is an extreme example because Berlin is an art center for other reasons, not least, rental, milieu, opportunity and history, but we could also look at Beijing, which can be a very difficult environment to hold exhibitions now. I suggest to Simon that the Australian commercial gallery scene could be much stronger, certainly in terms of the international art market. They have almost zero input into Art Basel for instance or the galleries that select exhibitors for Art Basel or Fiac in Paris, which incidentally is run by Jennifer Flay, a New Zealander. This is something that has to get much stronger because you can’t have museums doing all the heavy lifting for an entire art market, it is impossible and not desirable either. A broad, transparent market with lots of talented professionals makes a big difference and that’s something that is still missing in Australia. “I’m not sure that you’re correct. We spend a huge amount of time travelling. Whilst we get challenged by things we see in other places, whenever we come home, we realize what a great group of independent galleries we’ve got. It’s not like New York where you’ve got Zwirner, Gagosian and Pace, which really are museum-like equivalent institutions. But we have a very strong group of independent galleries who are doing a great job, domestically supporting their artists and investing in things like the Hong Kong art fair and the New Zealand art fair, which are very expensive things for independent galleries to do, but they are constantly seeking to broaden their collector base…I think the Australian galleries are doing a pretty good job.”

Simon Mordant in the Kimberley, Northern Territory, 2014

What would you like to see develop in the Australian scene? What still requires support or a new direction? How would you like to see things develop in the next ten years? “I’d like to see a broader commercial network, but I also recognize the economics of running a gallery are extremely challenging. You need to sell a lot of art to be able to cover your overheads, particularly if you’re playing the international art fairs as well. And the price points of most Australian art make that extremely challenging. A living Australian artist that is selling work for six figures would be very unusual. A living Australian artist that is selling work for seven figures – I can’t think of one; and recognizing our currency is about half to the US Dollar, you can quickly see how the economics of a gallery are very hard, but I’d like to see a deeper arts ecology, including universities taking art schools more seriously. We’ve got a strong museum base but finding more commercial galleries, encouraging artists and supporting artists, that’s something I’d love to see over the next ten years.

“What surprises me is the number of homes we go into, usually designed by great architects, have cost a huge amount of money and the owners have nothing on the walls. The commercial gallery space can be quite intimidating when you first embark on that journey and having people who can hold your hand and give you comfort is a help. If you go into a car showroom you don’t get challenged if the BMW or Mercedes Benz is costing you 50,000 dollars, you pay the price. You might haggle a bit, but you pay the price. If you go into a commercial gallery, and the artwork costs 50,000 dollars, the first thing you want to know is whether you’re getting value or not. And I find that quite surprising. If you are buying a car for 50,000 dollars and not being concerned whether that’s value or not, why should it be any different if you see something beautiful like an artwork? Why should you be intimidated by that?”

“I’m surprised by the number of my contemporaries who have no art, who when I ask them why they don’t have any art; say they don’t understand the value. And when I point out that they have no concerns buying a car or a boat, where there is no value other than what’s on the pricetag, they really don’t have a response. They’re just anxious that they don’t know enough, and they are going to be buying something that’s going to be worth less in the future.”

***

“If we love an artwork and can afford it, and it has an emotional impact on us, we’ve never questioned the value. We obviously seek a collector’s discount, but given we’ve never sold a work of art, people [artists and galleries] aren’t worried about us flipping…We’ve often signed contracts to agree to gift works to institutions, which we’re very happy to sign, because we don’t have any intention to trade.”

5 May, 2020

Sydney and Saigon

Cav. Simon Mordant AO was chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney from 2010 to July 2020. Besides his close work with the MCA, Mordant is also Board Member of MoMA PS1, New York, a member of the  International Council of MoMA, New York, a member of the Executive Committee of the Tate International Council, a director of MOCA in Los Angeles and a board member of the American Academy in Rome, as well as a former director of the Sydney Theatre Company, Opera Australia,and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was Australia’s Commissioner at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2015.Simon is an investment banker during the day. 

Simon Mordant at the American Academy Gala, New York, 2017

Notes

1. Leon Paroissien (b.1937, Ghisborne, Victoria) was director of the MCA from its inception in 1989, through its opening in 1991, until 1997. He had been Curator of the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney from 1984-1989. Co-curator at the university and then Chief Curator at the MCA was Bernice Murphy, who succeeded Paoissien but resigned in November 1998, ostensibly to run an art magazine but it was thought, “the move was at least partly a response to the chronic state of financial crisis in which the museum had been operating for several years and which had created a level of stress on the staff that was simply too much to deal with. The MCA has never been properly resourced; as the prophetic article by Joanna Mendelssohn in Art Monthly (July 1998) explains, unlike the AGNSW and the Powerhouse Museum which receive a large portion of their funds from the NSW governenment, it receives almost no government money. The Power Bequest, upon which the Museum was founded, only provides 6% of the annual turnover of around $7.5m.” MCA Sinking Fast, Edblog, Artlink, December 1998 https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2540/artrave/

2. Louise Schwartzkopf, ‘In Utzon’s shadow: the other architects shunned by the city’, July 3, 2009, Sydney Morning Herald https://www.smh.com.au/national/in-utzons-shadow-the-other-architects-shunned-by-the-city-20090702-d6k8.html

3. Paul Keating, ‘Michael Brand’s plan for the Art Gallery of NSW is about money, not art’, November 24, 2015, Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/paul-keating-michael-brands-plan-for-the-art-gallery-of-nsw-is-about-money-not-art-20151124-gl6j7x.html

4. Jori Finkel, ‘Topping a million visitors: how MCA Australia broadened the appeal of contemporary art’, The Art Newspaper, April 4, 2019.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/broadening-the-appeal-of-contemporary-art

5. Franco Belgiorno-Nettis (20 June 1915 – 8 July 2006) was an Italian-Australian industrialist and philanthropist. After migrating to Australia in the 1950s he established Transfield. Belgiono-Nettis was an avid art collector and cultural philanthropist, in 1961 establishing the Transfield Art Prize, which became one of the most important art prizes in Australia. In 1973 he helped establish the Australian Biennale, later renamed the Biennale of Sydney).

Claire Kerr is an Irish artist living in Dublin. Claire’s paintings are apparently factual and resolved, yet the verisimilitude belies the intense contemplation and conceptual games at play in her small-format pictures, which frequently concern idiosyncratic trains of thought, the act of looking and an unobtrusive weirdness.

On Going for Walks and Taking Photographs, by Claire Kerr

William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Alfoxden in Somerset in 1797 to be near Coleridge, then living at Nether Stowey. When the three of them took to going for walks in the surrounding country (sometimes, God forbid, at nightfall to see the stars), the locals were suspicious. Purposeless walking was for people who had nothing better to do – criminals or poets, for example. For all the reasons we know, it is again frowned upon; as far as possible, we must stay at home.

Kitchen at nightfall

Kitchen at nightfall © Claire Kerr 2020

Nevertheless, I have a government roaming allowance of two kilometres a day, as if tethered, with at least one of those kilometres disappearing into the Atlantic to the North. I’m used to the city and like being indoors, especially when it’s sunny. I was on holiday in the West of Ireland when travel restrictions were announced at the end of March and stayed. Since then, unusually, I’ve been for a walk every day.

Some days I am in a Historical Documentary mode. Here in Cloonagh, County Sligo, I am a few miles from Lissadell, the childhood home of poet, suffragist and social worker Eva Gore-Booth, the equally interesting but less well-known sister of Constance Markievicz. Eva wrote affectionately about the landscape here, the ‘little roads of Cloonagh’.

One of Eva’s Little Roads

One of Eva’s Little Roads © Claire Kerr 2020

A Woman dressed as Eva Gore Booth (original photo by Maeve O’Beirne) © Claire Kerr 2020

Attractive weeds

Unused to grass underfoot, I am enjoying the springtime. Primroses and violets are everywhere.  There are some lovely weeds, Albrecht Dürer style. Every morning and evening until mid-April, overwintering Barnacle geese commute to and from the offshore island, Inishmurray, to feed here on the mainland. Every day I tried to photograph those distant specks. Then they flew back to Greenland.

Attractive weeds © Claire Kerr 2020

Distant specks

Distant specks © Claire Kerr 2020

In Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’, the narrator finds that his interest in or connection with people and places is in proportion to his imaginative engagement with them. He is initially disappointed in the church at Balbec, which he had imagined on a cliff battered by waves but which is in fact 12 miles inland, on an unprepossessing town square. He tries to grasp that this is the actual, real Balbec church – but unlike in his imagination, it is now competing with a distracting context and in the shadow of his picturesque expectations.

Three picturesque trees

Picturesque Trees © Claire Kerr 2020

Three picturesque trees behind a picturesque septic tank

Three picturesque trees behind a picturesque septic tank © Claire Kerr 2020

Abandoned cottage

Like the fictional Balbec coast, The West of Ireland is a wild and storied landscape. There are so many layers of history still visible it can be overwhelming: beaches where every pebble is a fossil, ringforts, passage tombs, old rundale-system fields in narrow strips. Everywhere there are abandoned cottages, overgrown walls. Sometimes, though, the West of Ireland looks like the South of France, or the African Savannah.

Abandoned Cottage © Claire Kerr 2020

African Savannah at Ballyconnell

African Savannah at Ballyconnell © Claire Kerr 2020

Expansive landscapes are difficult to photograph – not enough room on the viewfinder. Nearby Ben Bulben, or the high Donegal cliffs on the opposite side of the bay, come out as small and distant. Other landscapes are difficult to see free of our mental store of landscape paintings. Where there are trees under a cloudy sky in a northern light, there’s a Ruisdael. Elsewhere, sheep graze in the evening sunshine in the best 19^th century manner. Twilight biblical illustrations are common. I haven’t taken many photos with a view to my own paintings although I do sometimes need specific images – the sea with a distinct horizon line, for example. Most things I set up indoors.

Sheep in the best 19^th Century style

Sheep in the best 19th C style © Claire Kerr 2020

Bible illustration

Bible illustration © Claire Kerr 2020

Sometimes, with decision fatigue, or because there seem to be so many versions of one thing, I move into categorization mode. Gates. Signs. Gates with signs.

Gate

A gate © Claire Kerr 2020

Sign

A sign © Claire Kerr 2020

Gate with Sign

A gate and a sign © Claire Kerr 2020

Sunset

Some things are irresistible – sunsets, moonrises, blue skies, stormy skies, rainbows. We like to collect them.

Sunset © Claire Kerr 2020

Moonrise

Moon Rise © Claire Kerr 2020

Blue sky

Blue Sky © Claire Kerr 2020

Stormy Sky

Stormy sky © Claire Kerr 2020

Rainbow

Rainbow © Claire Kerr 2020

Another sunset

Another sunset © Claire Kerr 2020

Another stormy sky

Another stormy sky © Claire Kerr 2020

A photo

I have a folder of things which look as if they should have their photo taken. A folder of accidental photos, too.

A photo © Claire Kerr 2020

An accidental photo

An accidental photo © Claire Kerr 2020

Claire Kerr is represented by Purdy Hicks gallery, London. Her most recent show was at Bravin Lee in New York

Biography – Claire Kerr (born 1968 Wallsend, UK) lives and works in Dublin. She studied at Wimbledon School of Art and Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally. www.clairekerr.art