Relational Perspectives:

A Visual Investigation Into Social and Cultural Relationships With Place

by James Newitt

BFA (Hons, First Class), University of Tasmania

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of Tasmania, December 2007

Signed statement of originality:

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by

the University or any other institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, it

incorporates no material previously published or written by another person except

where due acknowledgement is made in the text.

James Newitt

Signed statement of authority of access to copying:

This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the

Copyright Act 1968.

James Newitt

Acknowledgements:

Firstly I would like to acknowledge the generous support and assistance of my

supervisors Noel Frankham and Justy Phillips throughout this project. I would also

like to acknowledge my family and friends for helping me throughout the ups and

downs of the research process.

I would like to extend gratitude to the following individuals for the valuable

discussions and input they shared with me throughout the research: Tania Doropolous,

Andrew McGowan, Paula Silva, Phip Murray, Anthony Johnson, Tom Burton,

Amanda Davies, Colin Langridge, Christine Morrow, Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Sean

Kelly, Aaron Roberts, James Wilson, Nathan Crump, Megan Keating, Heather Newitt,

Tim Noonan, Reg Newitt, Raef Newitt, Jayne Dyer, Michael Edwards, Philip

Watkins, Pippa Dickson, Elizabeth Walsch, Julia Clarke, Scot Cotterell, Liz Sadler

and Jack Robins.

I would also like to acknowledge the support of Lesley Kirby, Andrew McGowan,

Mark Fountain and the staff at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, especially

during the development of the come with me… exhibition, 2005-06.

There have been many people who made this project possible and I wish to

acknowledge the contributions of individuals in relation to each work included in the

project exhibition:

Arberg Bay, 2004

Ian Fee, Pete Fee, Tom Burton and Mark Dixon.

Arberg Bay, 2006

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

Altered State

Aurelia Nyandeng Ngor, Alfred Cauker, Fabio Chivhanda, and Laura Chapman for

introducing me to Aurelia and Moses Iten for first introducing me to Alfred and Fabio.

the write/here project

Firstly I would like to acknowledge Justy Phillips for our ongoing collaborative

relationship and her contagious enthusiasm. To all the people who contributed stories

and experiences to the project; students at the Elizabeth College E.S.L. Program;

inmates at Mary Hutchinson Women’s Prison; clients at the Mary’s Grange Nursing

home; students at Elizabeth College, Hobart College and the Tasmanian School of

Art; people who visited the $1 Story Shop and the Design Island exhibition; people

who contributed through the website; and those who came to the BBQ at the

waterworks just before Christmas, 2006. To the organisations and institutions who

assisted us in organising workshops and conversation groups; Ben from Elizabeth

College, Tony Waller from the Migrant Resource Centre, John Holley from Risdon

Prison, Greg Lehman from the University of Tasmania, Rebecca Coote and the

Mary’s Grange Nursing Home and Karen Clarke from Hobart College. Thanks also to

the support of the Australia Council, Arts Tasmania and the Hobart City Council and

all the businesses who supported the project, especially Mike Elliot and Geoff

Matthews from the Claude Group; Anthea Pritchard from J. Boag & Son; and Julie

Payne and Robert Morris-Nunn.

Familiar Strangers

Thanks to all the people who responded to my request and shared stories, as well as

those who read transcriptions. Kevin Leong and Scott Cotterell for their technical

support and equipment loans. To Paula Silva for her valuable feedback and numerous

conversations.

Unstable Ground

A very special thankyou to Gordon and Stewart for their patience, generosity and

friendship during the development of this work. Thanks also to the staff at the Peacock

Centre, especially Eve and Jill and to the staff at the Theatre Royal, Hobart.

Saturday Nights

Special thanks to the performers, Barbara Clifford, Betty Wylie, Mervyn Magee and

The All Ordinaries, also to all the people who were willing to be interviewed. I also

gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the historians James Parker and Peter

MacFie.

Finally a very special thankyou to my mother Heather, father Reg and to Jasmin for

always being supportive and for helping me make sense of what I was doing.

Relational Perspectives:

A visual investigation into social and cultural relationships with place

Abstract

This project uses visual art to investigate the relationships between people and place.

Here I investigate social engagement as a form of production within contemporary art

practice and seek to expand on aspects of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics

and Hal Foster’s essay on the ‘Artist as Ethnographer’. While Relational Aesthetics

discusses the capacity for artworks to explore connections between people, this project

focuses on a situational aesthetic to investigate connections between people and place.

The project’s concern with defining a situational aesthetic is informed by the practices

of a number of contemporary artists who, working since the early 1990s, construct

various narratives forms using temporal and spatial media such as film, video,

installation and sound. These artists continue a lineage from earlier conceptual artists

of the 1960s by using non-object-based forms to demonstrate an active relationship

between artist and subject, a participatory relationship that is extended through the

artwork to involve the viewer in constructing meaning. The project’s theoretical

foundation is based on critical theory by writers such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal

Foster, Paul Arden, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau.

The six videos and installations that comprise the project exhibition seek to identify,

describe and elaborate specific personal histories and events that bind people into

communities and to place. The project’s form and content have been shaped through

research and personal experience with sites and situations specific to Tasmania.

Methodologies including observation, interviewing and facilitated performance have

been incorporated to expand documentary representation through video, sound and

text installation. The videos and installations focus on viewer engagement and are

produced as a result of extended research within a place(s) or situation(s) – in some

cases over two years. Through a process of discursive engagement, I have collected

stories, histories, experiences and information and filtered them into artworks. Each of

the videos and installations translate actual conversations and stories into narrative

structures that exist somewhere between fictional constructs and documentary

observation – thus creating a space for viewer subjectivity and interpretation.

This project concludes that the connections that bind people to communities and to

place are precarious, subjective and in constant change. Furthermore, these

connections are expanded and multiplied through the artist’s relationship to place and

subject, and the subsequent relationship between viewer and artwork. The project

identifies means to navigate these complex and changing circumstances by

constructing situations, creating narrative fragmentation and by incorporating

elements of fiction into the artwork. It argues that, by incorporating fictional devices

within documentary form, the work can engage with a specific place or situation

without resorting to social commentary or ethnographic documentation. Instead, the

resulting work remains subjective and universal, allowing for connections to emerge

with other places, people and situations.

Contents

Introduction 10

Chapter 1: Project Description 13

Aims and Motivation 13

Central Research Questions 15

Project Background and Previous Work 16

The Parameters of the Project 19

Chapter 2: The Project in Context 24

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement 28

Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives 37

Constructed Situations: using elements of the world to construct narratives 50

The ‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices 64

Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition 70

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

Experimentation and Methodology 80

Development of Individual Artworks 83

Exhibitions and Presentation 112

Chapter 4: Conclusion 121

Appendices

Appendix 1: Bibliography 125

Appendix 2: Illustrations 129

Appendix 3: List of Works Included in the Project Exhibition 138

Appendix 4: Description of Selected Support Work 139

Appendix 5: Project Timeline 149

Appendix 6: DVD Contents List 152

Appendix 7: Curriculum Vitae 153

10

Introduction

Within this project I have explored relationships and connections between people and

place via different narrative forms, including video sound and text-based installation. I

investigated experiences of isolation, displacement, connection, belonging and

memory specific to particular site and situations. Through literal and visual narrative

forms, I present internal, psychological relationships between people and the external

world. The artworks that comprise the project exhibition have been published at

different stages throughout the candidacy and progressively refined for submission.

Early in the project I examined contemporary forms of production within visual art

practice and the relational nature of much of this practice.1 Questions about the artist’s

position in relation to their subject, the social implications of an artwork and the

nature of collaborative practice started to arise early on in the research. These

questions were gradually developed into a series of central research questions that

subsequently provided a set of criteria from which I would assess individual artworks.

The project exhibition brings together a selection of these artworks to demonstrate a

consistent methodology and a conclusion to the central research questions.

I employed documentary approaches across different time-based media to make a

series of artworks that elaborate and describe individual and community sense of

place: each artwork in the project exhibition is created from encounters established

with my subjects over periods of time.2 These extended periods of engagement are an

important aspect of the research and allow personal, psychological perspectives and

experiences to emerge. The artworks included in the project exhibition and identified

in chapter 2: The Project in Context are fluid, situational, conversational, performative

and collaborative. Central to the documentary approach behind this research is Nicolas

1 Throughout the exegesis I discuss Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing on Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud,

Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002). I focus on relational practice thatincorporates time-based media such as video and film. Even if the term ‘new media’ seems somewhatobsolete in this context, high quality digital video equipment and editing software is becoming more andmore affordable. The size and affordability of this equipment results in greater portability and lessobtrusive filming – giving artists the freedom to make work in isolated or distant places as well asallowing them to get closer to their subjects without the obtrusiveness of full-scale film equipment andfilm crews.2 The length and nature of these encounters varies with each project from several months to two years,

they are reflected on individually in chapter 3: Research and Process. The length of this research projecthas afforded the opportunity to establish several long-term relationships and develop artworks with timefor reflection and exchange.

11

Bourriaud’s definition of Relational Aesthetics, and Hal Foster’s critical reflection on

documentary methodology in his essay ‘Artist as Ethnographer’.3

Relational Aesthetics provided a theoretical sounding board for identifying the nature

of contemporary practice, especially practice which involves social engagement.

Crucial to Bourriaud’s theory is a questioning of artistic form; namely, he presents a

compelling discussion about socially engaged and time-based practice, asking, ‘What

is a form that is essentially relational?’

In observing contemporary artistic practices, we ought to talk of “formations”

rather than “forms”. Unlike an object that is closed in on itself by the

intervention of a style and a signature, present day art shows that form only

exists in the encounter and in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic

proposition with other formations, artistic or otherwise.4

Bourriaud extends on the concerns of earlier conceptual artists from the 1960s and

1970s. As Victor Burgin identified in the 1960s, many artistic practices of that time

were changing focus from the material form of an artwork to the relationship between

different materials, artworks, behaviours and experiences:

Many recent attitudes to materials in art are based in an emerging awareness

of the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth. The

artist is apt to see himself not as a creator of new material forms but rather as a

coordinator of existing forms, and may therefore choose to subtract materials

from the environment. As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behavior so

materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than of quality.5

This project continues a lineage of non-object based practice, where the works

exhibited in the project exhibition and discussed in the contextual chapter evolve out

of conversations and other forms of encounter. Although each work addresses

different situations and contexts, their conversational form connects them in a

narrative ‘formation’ where different stories intersect and merge. Through a process of

discursive engagement, stories, histories, experiences and information are collected

3 Foster, Hal, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’, Return to the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.Cambridge: October Books, 19974 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 215 Burgin, Victor, ‘Situational Aesthetics’ (1969), 20 June 2007

< http://www.ubu.com/papers/burgin_situational.html>

12

and filtered into artworks. Each of the videos and installations in the project exhibition

translate actual conversations and stories into narrative forms that exist somewhere

between fictional constructs and documentary observation – creating a space for

viewer subjectivity and interpretation.

Chapter 1: Project Description, identifies the aims, motivations and central research

questions behind the project. This chapter provides a brief overview to the research by

describing a background to the project, as well as the parameters of the research.

In chapter 2: The Project in Context, specific artists and artworks are discussed in

relation to: Partnerships and Participation, Real Fictions, Constructed Situations, the

‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations and Viewer Engagement. This chapter describes how

discursive engagement, experimental narrative forms and installation methods have

expanded documentary forms into new areas of visual art practice. The structure of

this chapter is informed by the central research questions identified in chapter 1.

Chapter 3: Research and Process, provides an in-depth description of the process and

methodological approach behind the works included in the project exhibition. This

chapter discusses the Experimentation and Methodology behind the research, the

Development of Individual Artworks and the progressive Exhibition and Presentation

of artworks throughout the research.

The final chapter provides a conclusion that summarises how the project has explored

relationships between people and place through its specific research questions and

aims. The conclusion discusses some of the ethical responsibilities of artists who

incorporate other people’s stories within their work, the function and use of social

engagement and constructed situations within contemporary practice, and the

relationship between viewer and artwork or exhibition. This chapter also describes the

outcomes of the project and how this exploration has added to the field.

13

CHAPTER 1

Project Description

Aims and Motivation

My primary aim is to investigate the capacity for visual art to identify, describe and

elaborate relationships between people and place. By focusing on relationships that

are fragile, subtle, complex or in a state of change I aim to reveal micro-histories and

subjective experiences that bind people into communities and to place. Essential to

these aims is an investigation of social engagement as a form of production. This

investigation is informed by theorists such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster and

Michel de Certeau. As is intrinsic to the use of social engagement, the project also

seeks to question the ethical responsibility of artists who create artwork in relation to

‘others’.

During past 15 years or so, socially engaged art practice has received much attention.

In the book Art as Experience, Paul Arden seeks to define art practice that engages in

the production of social situations. Like Bourriaud, he describes how artists use and

manipulate aspects of everyday life to establish an active participation between artist,

subject, context and viewer:

When artists break out of their role as simple producers of images and objects –

which are never immune to a blunting of their critical (or even subversive) edge

by consumer reflexes – they become, as it were, smugglers who give viewers the

tools they need to seize control of the means used to produce the visual,

acoustic and mental images of their world. The actualisation of the various

levels of reality contained in daily life, a development brought about by citizens

transformed into transmitters and receivers, would make such citizens veritable

participants in the real. It would then become possible to move beyond passive

consumption toward a shaping of the experience of the real, in close contact

with its material density.6

Arden and Bourriaud have provided critical discussion of many of the artists who

contribute to the context in which I place this research. My secondary objective is to

6 Arden, Paul, ‘Experimenting With the Real’, Contemporary Practices: Art as Experience. Paul Arden,Pascal Beausse and Laurent Goumarre (eds.), Paris: Dis Voir, 1999, p. 93

14

demonstrate a field of art practice that contextualises the work included in the project

exhibition. Within chapter 2: The Project in Context, I discuss the work of artists who

use narrative forms to represent an active relationship between artist, subject and

place, a relationship that is extended through the artwork to involve the viewer in

constructing meaning.

During this project I engaged with specific social or geographical contexts with the

specific aim of encouraging viewers to question and develop new readings of that

context, rather than to provide answers and didactic information for the viewer. These

investigations spawned new encounters and artworks, revealing connections between

different places, people, situations and experiences. Some of the artworks discussed in

this exegesis initiate a specific social activity, conversation or narrative that extends

beyond the period of the work’s presentation. These artworks exist as part of a

continuum and their material form is just one aspect of a series of experiences,

narratives and ideas. Bourriaud suggests that this mode of production extends on the

work of earlier conceptual artists:

The setting is widening; after the isolated object, it can now embrace the whole

scene: the form of Gordon Matta-Clark or Dan Graham’s work can not be

reduced to the ‘things’ those two artists ‘produce’; it is not the simple

secondary effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like to

advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs,

objects, forms, gestures […]. The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading

out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic

agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line.7

Finally the artworks discussed within this exegesis and included in the project

exhibition aim to visually, emotionally and conceptually engage the viewer through

strategies such as immersion, aesthetic experience and fractured narrative. Viewer

engagement is discussed in chapter 3: ‘Research and Process’ as well as chapter 2:

‘The Project in Context’.

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

15

Central Research Questions

The PhD project addresses the following questions:

1. What is the capacity for contemporary art to identify, describe and elaborate social

and cultural relationships with place within different individuals and communities?

2. What events, experiences and memories bind people into communities and to place,

and how can an artwork elaborate these?

3. What is the function and use of constructed situations within contemporary art

practice, and how are these situations transferred from one context to another?

4. How does the artist reconcile their position in relation to their subject and what are

some of the ethical responsibilities of using other people’s stories as content for

artwork?

5. How is the viewer implicated within the space proposed by an artwork or exhibition

and what are the some of the strategies used by contemporary artists to encourage

viewer engagement and interpretation?

16

Project Background and Previous Work

This PhD project developed in 2004 from earlier work that investigated relationships

between memory and historic sites. My earlier work was based in visual

communication and interpretation design. During this time I was concerned with

notions of site-specificity and interpretation of place and I was interested in the

potential for narrative forms to communicate events, histories and places in non-

didactic ways.

A personal frustration with what I saw as being a ‘passive’ mode of practice within

interpretation design inspired the direction of this research project. I was originally

drawn to visual communication by the ideals of communicating issues to a broad

range of people as well as collaborating with clients and other practitioners. But the

reality of much of the commercial work that I undertook seemed to move further and

further away from these interests. I craved a mode of practice that critically confronted

different social, cultural and geographical contexts through active participation and

engagement. Investigating the work of several artists including Thomas Hirschhorn

(who had previously worked as a graphic designer) helped to articulate my feelings at

that time and develop ideas to address those concerns. Hirschhorn noted that:

I realised that I had to make the choice to be an artist because only as an artist

could I be totally responsible for what I did […] I realised that to be an artist is

not a question of form or of content, it’s a question of responsibility.8

To background this research project, I will briefly reflect on the project I undertook as

part of my Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Tasmanian School of Art in 2003.

This project focused on re-interpreting the historic IXL Jam Factory buildings and the

redevelopment of the site on Hobart’s waterfront. The Honours project was

contextualised within the field of interpretation design, although it also incorporated

artworks such as video projection (footage captured on 8mm film), architectural

installation, signage, signage development proposals and concepts for ‘place

identity’.9 The Honours project engaged with oral history research as the main source

of collecting content for the individual works: I interviewed and recorded

8 Hirschhorn, Thomas, ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn’,Thomas Hirschhorn. London and New York: Phaidon, 2004, p. 119 While working on the artworks and signage I developed a proposal to ‘brand’ the new development thatwould serve as a style guide for the body corporate and maintain a consistent identity across the differentbusinesses.

17

conversations with six people who had previously worked at the IXL Jam Factory

before it was liquidated in the early 1970s.10 The stories I recorded revealed personal

experiences of factory life: feelings of animosity towards the closure of Tasmania’s

biggest private business at the time; and opinions on the changing nature of the site’s

170 year European history, which was about to be transformed into a five-star hotel

and retail complex. The stories provided an intimate knowledge of the past, which I

then used as material to construct design and artworks.11 Despite their appeal as

private and sometimes humorous memories from the IXL Factory, the stories

resonated with persistent nostalgia.

Fig. 1 (left) Conserve, 2003, video still

Fig. 2 (right) Untitled, 2003

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

18

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

Fig. 4 (right) IXL Redevelopment signage (detail), 2003

By the end of the Honours project, I realised I was facing a question of commitment, I

had become interested in being more directly implicated within situations and

circumstances in the present, rather than passively interpreting the past. During the

honours project, issues and associations such as memory, place, weather as a metaphor

for passing time, derelict architecture and palimpsests had been central to developing

my work. At the end of that process I realised my interests were increasingly

changing: issues of collaboration, community discourse, public and private space and

being personally implicated within the situations I was investigating; became central

concerns to the development of new work. The social science research methodologies

of interviewing and collecting oral histories that informed the Honours project was

valuable to the development of this research project. The Honours research also

required University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee approval – a

process which informed the structure of artworks developed during this research.

Finally, the Honours project initiated my interest in the relationships between text and

image, specifically the ways they can be used to explore fracturing and displacement

between what is heard or read and what is seen rather than simply illustrating or

describing information.12

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

19

The Parameters of the Project

To define the parameters of the research project, here I will briefly address some of

the legacies of early conceptual art and the influences this movement has had on the

development of my research. I will then outline the parameters for the artwork

produced during the research. Finally, I will summarise the parameters of the

contextual field within which I locate the research project, by also outlining the

structure of chapter 2: The Project in Context.

The practices of several artists from the 1960s and early 1970s – Dan Graham, Bas

Jan Ader, Ed Ruscha, Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren and Gordon Matta-Clarke have

particularly informed the research in the early stages.13 However these artists are not

discussed in chapter 2 as it focuses on contemporary time-based artwork as the key

contextual material. However, it is important to briefly acknowledge the parallels

between the spatial/‘sensorial’ form of the work of Graham, Buren, Matta-Clarke, et

al. and the spatial/narrative artwork of the contemporary artists who comprise the

contextual field in which I place this project.

The ‘openness’ of the artwork created by the above-mentioned conceptual artists

allows for subjectivity, where the viewer interprets the connections and relationships

between objects and images rather than seeing them singularly and in isolation. The

active ‘piecing together’ of images, objects and information is continued by the artists

discussed within this exegesis, where through their work the viewer is encouraged to

fill in the gaps between text, image and other narrative elements. Victor Burgin

reflects on the viewer’s participation in experiencing conceptual artworks, where the

mind ‘reaches out’ to imagine or interpret ‘distant objects’:

In moving through real, “ssensorial”, space we may touch immediately near

objects. Distant objects in real space are “touched” in the mind (we say the

mind “reaches out”). The manner, therefore, in which we make our mental

13 I am especially interested in the photo-conceptual artists from this period and the documentary-stylephotography of Dan Graham and his Homes of America and Ed Ruscha’s multiple photo essays such ashis series on empty car parks. In writing about the relationships between Anri Sala’s practice and earlierconceptual artists, Lynne Cooke observed that the radical approach of the photo-conceptual artists wasthe way their documentary style artwork was a way to, ‘[…] respond to the particulars of the everyday

world in a direct or even “dumb” fashion, a lineage that privileges the finding of an image over anytechnical finesse involved in its representation.’ Lynne Cooke and Anri Sala, ‘From Silence to Languageand Back Again’, Parkett 73, 2005, p. 75

20

approach to a distant object of attention is styled through analogy with, and

expectation of, the bodily experience of near objects.14

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

Dan Graham and Daniel Buren created work that relies on context and viewer

participation to be complete. Dan Graham is widely recognised for his two-way

mirror, glass pavilions which are often installed outside traditional gallery or museum

environments. These pavilions, which Graham still produces today, make inter-

subjective, perceptual experiences physical by creating situations where the viewer is

able to observe an environment or situation while their image is simultaneously

reflected on the glass structure. Graham’s glass pavilions thus solidify the meeting of

Burgin’s real and ‘sensorial’ space. While these works respond to, and activate, the

places they are installed, they are not site-specific sculptures that seek to describe

particular histories or information about place. In a recent article in Parkett, Nicolas

Guagnini, for example, comments on the way Graham’s pavilions continue to trigger

new associations and experiences within familiar environments:

Designed with extreme rationality and attention to physical, urban and

historical context, these works trigger irrationality inside the quotidian as they

allow for an altered perception of familiar places. They free the spectator from

established reality and awake the play impulse. In group situations people

perceive each other perceiving each other, permitting alternative definitions of

self and community. They are objects that activate the subject and are activated

by the spectator-participants. They dissolve the split between the reality

principle and the pleasure principle, allowing us to be children again.15

14 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag15 Guagnini, Nicolas, ‘Quasi Schizophrenia: Notes for a Liberated Condition’, Parkett 68, (2003), p. 100

21

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

Where Dan Graham’s glass pavilions inspired social interaction and active

participation, Daniel Buren, since the 1960s, has consistently incorporated a striped

motif in his work to subtly alter the viewer’s perception of various architectural and

urban environments. In a recent, published conversation with Pierre Huyghe, Buren

speaks about his striped motif as an empty sign that activates the surrounding

environment and allows the viewer to make connections and new associations with the

space rather than neutralising it through repetition and pattern.16 As with Graham,

Buren’s work is not site-specific; rather he makes work in-situ, which he explains as:

Work in situ could be translated as a transformation of the space of reception.

This transformation can be made for the space, against the space, or in osmosis

with the space, just as a chameleon changes colour on a green leaf, or becomes

grey on a stone wall […] in situ means that there is voluntarily accepted link

between the space of reception and the “work” that is made, presented and

exposed there.17

The relationship between artwork and its context or ‘place’ is explored by these

conceptual artists through perceptual and sensorial means, by creating work that relies

on the viewer’s activation of multiple, interrelated elements. The artwork presented

within the project exhibition, and the artists discussed within this exegesis continue

this lineage by creating artworks that respond to place or context through social and

narrative means. The key differentiation here is that, rather than using a physical

intervention in place to initiate interpretation or social interaction, this research

16 Buren, Daniel, ‘Conversation between Daniel Buren and Pierre Huyghe’, Parkett 66, (2002), p. 10717 Buren, Daniel, cited in essay by Alison M Gingeras, ‘The decorative as Strategy’, Parkett 66, (2002),p. 92

22

focuses on social engagement as a mode of production and both the process of making

work and the material form of the artwork is time-based and ephemeral.

The artworks discussed in this exegesis are connected by the way they navigate both

external, social space and internal, psychological space. A transition between external

and internal space also connects my research with the concerns of earlier conceptual

artists. Burgin notes that, ‘This mode of appreciation, learned in exterior, sensorial

space, is applied when we negotiate interior, psychological space.’18 Within this

exegesis I discuss how the relationship between these external and internal spaces

creates potential for new narratives to emerge.

My exhibition comprises six discreet artworks that come together as an interrelated

narrative. Although a methodology of discursive engagement was utilised across all

the artworks, each was structured individually, depending on the scope and particular

circumstances surrounding them.

Two basic parameters define the production and content of artwork within the

research project:

1) Creating artwork informed by situations and places specific to Tasmania.19

2) Constructing narrative forms using time-based media.20

Despite the significance of place to this research, the artworks made within the project

are not about particular places. The conditions ‘here and now’ of different places are

used as means to create narratives which can be interpreted from multiple perspectives

and relate to universal conditions of belonging, isolation, displacement and

community. Being immersed in places and situations informs the development of

artwork that suggests connections to other places, situations and people. Personal

18 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag.19 The artworks made during the research project and selected for the exhibition are not defined as ‘sitespecific’ (as they are not ‘grounded’ to a particular site), however, they are all created from personalengagement and immersion with places and social situations. The artworks created during this project

confront and personalise aspects of localised history, memory and cultural experience. Being personallyimplicated within specific places and situations allows for a more intimate interpretation of the subjectsthe artworks address.20 Narrative formats are discussed in depth within chapter 2: The Project in Context and chapter 3:Research and Process. Within these two chapters I focus on various narrative relationships, especiallynarrative fracturing between text and image. Video is the main form of production utilised within thisproject and by the artists who comprise the contextual field. Despite this, video is not discussed inrelation to the material form of the medium itself, but rather for the medium’s narrative capacity and

ability to translate and transport temporary experience from one context to another. Throughout theexegesis, questions are discussed as to whether video represents the ‘artwork’ itself or if, in some cases,the video is simply a documentation of the artwork that materialised as a temporary event.

23

engagement within place and social situations is an important aspect of this process

and as Nicolas Bourriaud observes, ‘… an artist invents new ways of swimming, he or

she does not spend time sitting on the shore deconstructing the wakes of the boats, as

if it were somehow possible to step outside human society.’21 Chapter 3 provides a

detailed reflection on the development of each work included in the project exhibition

and the processes of engagement and immersion behind these works.

While Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics contributed to the theoretical parameters of

this research and informed the production of individual artworks, the project seeks to

expand the criteria of Relational Aesthetics to define a contemporary situational

aesthetic. As I discussed earlier, the difference between this contemporary situational

aesthetic and that described by Burgin in the late 1960s, is the contemporary version’s

concern with social engagement as a mode of production, and incorporation of time-

based media and interrelated narratives rather than interrelated objects. Bourriaud’s

Relational Aesthetics can be defined as, ‘art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm

of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an

independent and private symbolic space.’22 This project visualises a consistent

situational aesthetic by incorporating human interactions and its social context within

the expanded context of place. The definition of a contemporary situational aesthetic

also considers the ethical responsibility of artists who work with other people (and

their stories), and the social and cultural context of these encounters. I reflect on the

issues surrounding artist, subject, place and representation in detail in the following

chapters.

21 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 4422 Ibid, p. 14

24

CHAPTER 2:

The Project In Context

The contextual field in which I locate this project is defined by contemporary artists

who, construct time-based narrative artworks that address social, cultural and

geographical conditions specific to place. This chapter is therefore divided into five

sections that provide reference points for individual artworks, represent the parameters

of the contextual field, reflect the central research questions and establish an argument

to asses the artwork included in the project exhibition. The context sections are:

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement:

Here I discuss the practices of Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing and Dominique

Gonzalez-Foerster for the ways they incorporate documentary strategies to enter into a

discursive relationship with their subject. This section identifies how social

interactions such as encounters, conversations, meetings, and various forms of

collaboration between people have become formal devices readily incorporated into

an artwork.

Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives:

Here I examine works by Anri Sala, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe and Doug Aitken to

provide a breadth of examples into ways artists use film, video, sound, text and

fractured narrative to incorporate aspects of real places and encounters with real

people within fictional or semi-fictional narrative structures.

Constructed Situations (using elements of the world to construct narratives):

I this section I discuss artworks by Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller and

Anri Sala. These artists work as director or facilitator in constructing situations that

are enacted in collaboration with other people and documented on film or video.

The Other and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices:

This section examines the ethical responsibilities of artists who work with other

people to incorporate elements of their personal history within an artwork. As well as

using critical writing by Hal Foster and Nicolas Bourriaud as theoretical reference

points, I return to the work of Kutlug Ataman and Gillian Wearing to provide material

examples of such practices.

25

Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition:

The final section identifies different ways the viewer is implicated within the space of

representation, and how the artist’s engagement with a place or situation is transferred

from an external context (place) to a gallery environment. Here I describe the work of

Pierre Huyghe, Anri Sala Kutlug Ataman, Doug Aitken and Sharon Lockhart.

I collected information for this context by visiting relevant exhibitions during the past

three years;23 reviewing documentation of relevant artworks published in magazines,

artist monographs, exhibition catalogues and books; collecting comments and

reflections by the artists on their work; and reviewing writing by critics and theorists.

This material also provided data and methodologies against which to consider my own

artwork.

Quite early in the research I discovered the work of French artist Pierre Huyghe.24 I

first came across Huyghe’s artwork through investigating a number of contemporary

artists who use narrative structure within their work and with whom Huyghe often

collaborates, including: Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

and Rirkrit Tiravanija. I began by investigating several of Huyghe’s significant

collaborative projects: ‘Anna Sanders Films’, No Ghost Just a Shell, and the

Freed–Time Association.25

23 The most significant exhibitions include: Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers, Museum of ContemporaryArt, Sydney, 22 June – 4 September 2005; 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, 8 June – 26

August, 2006; Centre Pompidou Video Art: 1965-2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 14December – 25 February, 2007; and Gillian Wearing: Living Proof, Australian Centre for ContemporaryArt, Melbourne, 7 October – 3 December, 2006.24 At that time I was having difficulty defining a field in which to clearly locate the research project.Reading about Pierre Huyghe’s work provided a significant step towards constructing a valid contextualframework to locate my individual works and the research project as a whole.25 ‘Anna Sander’s Films’ is a film production company, founded by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, PierreHuyghe, Charles de Meraux, Philippe Parreno, Xavier Douroux, and Franck Gautherot. Huyghe and

others have released several short and feature-length films and videos under the production of ‘AnnaSanders Films’.No Ghost Just a Shell was a collaborative project by Huyghe and Parreno (1999-2003) where they usedthe ‘shell’ of a manga character as an empty sign into which they would imbed multiple narratives andpersonal histories, collaborating with other artists to produce films, installations, events and images.The Freed-Time Association was initiated in 1995 by Huyghe and Parreno, its members include: AngelaBulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Holler, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, DouglasGordon, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Xavier Veihan. ‘The collaboration brings

together the participants in a group exhibition and gives it a social reality. Its aim is to extend the durationof this operation and to be the starting point for a series of projects of indeterminate length.’ Huyghe,Pierre, op.cit. p. 282

26

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

Looking more deeply into Huyghe’s practice helped to identify and define approaches

central to developing an appropriate methodology within my project, including the

narrative impulse within contemporary practice; the nature of collaborative practice

and different means of collaboration between artist and subject; viewer engagement

and expanded approaches to the exhibition format; and the potential for an artwork to

actively engage with different places and social environments.26 Huyghe’s

methodology signifies an approach to art practice that is fluid, situational and

responsive, and that avoids categorisation – approaches shared by other key contextual

artists. Huyghe’s ambitious and varied artworks borrow elements of real life, fusing

them with fictional situations and representations. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

describes this form of production as representing a dramatic shift in contemporary

practice:

By the end of the [20th

] century, however, new artists from all parts of the world

[…] were looking at micro-events, both within ourselves and in the world at

large. This meant moving away from History with a capital ‘H’, towards the

more apparently limited and modest notion of story. They became interested in

all the forms through which story can be told, from literature to film.27

Paul Arden defines the notion of experience as something that, ‘[…] can be

concentrated into one phenomenological principle: the practical, theoretical and

26 Expanded exhibition formats are exemplified by modes such as evolving and changing exhibitioninstallations, works in-situ, film distribution, media intervention, viewer participation, etc. These

strategies are discussed later in this chapter.27 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, ‘Pierre Huyghe: Through a Looking Glass’, Pierre Huyghe. Italy:SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 401

27

cognitive trying out of reality’.28 The artists who have informed my research work in

the ‘in-between zones’, not just in terms of defying traditional modes of art practice

(painting, sculpture, installation, etc), but also through the encounters or situations

they negotiate, establish and construct in order to make artwork for the viewer to

‘experience’. They work individually and collaboratively, predominantly utilising

time-based media such as video and film to translate and transport temporary

experiences and relationships from one context to another (from a remote site or

private environment to a gallery or exhibition space). The focus of the artwork is not

its formal treatment alone (although high quality production typifies most of the work

discussed); the works are characterised by an ability to communicate a particular

situation or scenario by actively engaging the viewer within the space of

representation.

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

28

Partnerships and Participation: building discursive engagement

Over and above the relational character intrinsic to the artwork, the figures of

reference of the sphere of human relations have now become fully-fledged

artistic ‘forms’. Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration

between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all

manner of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic

objects […] 29

As Bourriaud notes above, encounters, conversations, meetings, and various forms of

collaboration between people have become formal devices readily incorporated into

an artwork. A documentary approach within contemporary art practice has flooded

recent exhibitions; perhaps the most notable local example of this was the 2006

Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact. There are a number of artists working today

who continue to expand documentary form to open new relationships between artist

and subject and by extension explore relationships between reality and fiction; here I

will focus on the work of Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing and Dominique-Gonzalez

Foerster.

Such artists establish a level of intimacy with their subjects – producing artwork that

has the ability to bind artist, subject and viewer within a space of personal revelation.

Different levels of discursive engagement are established over long periods of time,

through chance encounters, by scripting and ‘setting up’ situations, or through

fictionalising and elaborating conversations. The works discussed in this section

emerge from the subject speaking in close proximity with the artist, on apparently

equal terms and without obvious direction.

Given my use of documentary strategies to investigate relationships between people

and place, and interest in experimental narrative form, I was very interested to

discover the filmic works of Kutlug Ataman through the large survey exhibition of his

videos at the Museum of Contemporary Art in early 2006 curated by Rachel Kent.

This comprehensive exhibition (which was the first major survey of Ataman’s work in

Australia) offered an opportunity to experience Ataman’s investigation into

conversational relationships with his subjects as well as his experimental approach to

video installation. The willingness of Ataman’s subjects to confess, reveal and

29 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 28

29

elaborate elements of their personal lives in front of his camera extends from a mutual

trust that is established over extensive periods of time:30

Ataman’s formal subversion lies in the ways he seduces his subjects into

revealing and staging the innermost fantasies of their personal lives which are

then laid bare in almost unbearable frankness, revealing an intimacy and

familiarity with its subject which is difficult to achieve in the programmatic

television-hour genre of documentary television.31

Possibly Ataman’s most ambitious work to date, Küba (2004), is also the best

demonstration of his commitment to building a discursive engagement with his

subjects.32 Küba consists of over 40 interviews with different members of the shanty-

town by the same name, which is located on the outskirts of Istanbul. Ataman lived in

Küba over a period of two years, and the honesty and openness with which his

subjects speak to his camera attest to the intimate relationship he established with the

place and the people who live there.33 In her catalogue essay, Rachel Kent describes

the context of the town of Küba and its inhabitants:

Not featured on any official map, this locale is home to impoverished Kurds and

Turks, Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists, and disparate individuals who

have fallen foul of the law or of drugs […] Established during the 1960’s as a

rough conglomeration of shacks which were swiftly bulldozed by the

authorities, rebuilt and then added to, its persistence as a landmark is mirrored

by the remarkable tenacity of its inhabitants […] 34

The confronting, confessional nature of Küba comes in part from the space Ataman

gives his subjects in which to speak openly and honestly. As well as remaining

invisible behind the camera, Ataman edits each video so it is only his subjects that can

be heard speaking, although their stories have obviously evolved through extended

periods of conversation and prompting. Rather than manipulating his subjects to

inhabit narratives he plans to construct, Ataman enters into a deeply personal,

30 Curator Rachel Kent, notes that Ataman’s videos are made‘[…] featuring only individuals with whomthe artist has a prior relationship...’ Kent, Rachel, ‘Reality at the Service of Fiction: the Film Art ofKutlug Ataman’, Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum ofContemporary Art, 2005, p.831 Nash, Mark, ‘Kutlug Ataman’s experiments with truth’, Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibitioncatalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 4232 Küba was funded by Artangle and completed in 2004.33 Kent, Rachel, op.cit. p. 1334 Ibid, p. 13

30

conversational partnership with each individual. His apparently genuine interest in and

empathy for their lived experience is given expression through each video, and

collectively the interviews draw a portrait of a place made up of subjective stories of

isolation, dislocation, loss and hope. Kent identifies the broader issues behind this

collective portrait, ‘geography and location also become silent yet persistent currents

in these works. Seen collectively Ataman’s film work is like an impressionistic, ever

changing portrait of modern day Turkey and its wider position within the world.’35

Fig. 8, Kutlug Ataman, Küba, 2004

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

35 Ibid, p. 9

31

Ataman’s skill as an artist lies in the way he manages to balance his concern for

individual lives and personal histories while also maintaining a level of critical

distance from his subjects.36 Through his interviews, Ataman addresses broader issues

of human identity in relation to place and culture:

The individuals who live in Küba are very important, but my main point was

never Küba. It was an experimentation. Up until now I have worked with

individuals fabricating identities, and I filmed that process: how they fabricate

this role, how they make themselves stars, heroes.37

Gillian Wearing is another artist who seeks to establish private and confessional,

discursive connections with her subjects, connections that are transferred to the viewer

through video installation and documentary photography. Although, like Ataman, she

is obsessed with extricating other people’s stories, Wearing says that, ‘[she] can never

forget that [she is] always outside the inner experience of another person.’38

Wearing constructs her videos by arranging meetings with strangers or through chance

encounters on the street. Her works incorporate a documentary style similar to Kutlug

Ataman’s elaborate video portraits and interviews, although they are derived from a

vastly different place and cultural context. Wearing implicates herself within different

social situations by prompting strangers in the street to write on an empty sign the first

thing that comes into their minds. She also places advertisements in popular

newspapers asking for people to ‘confess all on video. Don’t Worry, You Will be in

Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian’; another advertisement asks for participants to speak

of childhood trauma; ‘Negative or traumatic experience in childhood or youth and

willing to talk about it on film. Identity will be concealed’.39 Wearing uses deceivingly

simple means to encourage her subjects to communicate their most intimate thoughts

and personal experiences – although her subject’s are often disguised and there is no

way of confirming the validity of such experiences. As with Ataman, Wearing

incorporates elements of other people’s lives to indirectly address broader issues of

human identity and subjectivity; unlike Ataman she predominantly engages with total

36 The issue of critical distance will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.37 Ataman, Kutlug and Politi, Gia, ‘Kutlug Ataman and Atom Egoyan: and the world will be as one…’,Flash Art, May/June 2006, p. 9438 Wearing, Gillian, cited in essay by Barry Schwabsky, ‘The Voice Estranged’, Gillian Wearing: Mass

Observations. London: Merrell, 2003, p. 3839 Molon, Dominic, ‘Observing the Masses’, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell,2003, p. 14

32

strangers with whom she has had no prior contact.40 Similar to the way Jeremy

Deller41 reflects on the unexpected contributions his collaborators can bring to his

projects, Wearing identifies the value of the partnerships she establishes with her

subjects, ‘I’m more interested in how other people can put things together, how

people can say something far more interesting than I can.’42

Fig. 10, Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what

someone else wants you to say, 1992-93

The subtlety of Wearing’s social surveys encourages the viewer to watch for longer or

look more closely, opening space in which the viewer can inhabit and expand the

seemingly objective work beyond didactic documentation. As Dominic Molon

observes, ‘[Wearing’s] aesthetically structured techniques of ethnographic observation

and representation create a picture of mundane existence that reveals human frailties

without judgement, putting the onus of empathy or rejection on the viewer.’43

Wearing’s video works, Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise.

Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994) and Trauma (2000) reveal her negotiation of the

territory between documentary and contemporary art, real and fictional dialogue. For

these two works Wearing relied on the participation of strangers and their willingness

to speak to the artist and her camera. The stories resemble the therapeutic,

40 Wearing’s engagement with strangers is exemplified in one of her earlier and most well known works,

Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say. Thisartwork is a series of documentary-style photographs, showing everyday people posing in everydayplaces (shopping malls, street corners, train platforms, etc) holding their sign without expression towardsWearing’s camera. Signs… presents the experiences of strangers in a carefully structured but objectiveand non-judgemental way, thus allowing the viewer to consider their relationship to the messagespresented and the people Wearing has encountered. She presents these stories and experiences as acollective condition, suggesting common anxieties, traumas, hopes and regrets that connect differentindividuals in London.41 Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave is discussed on page 58 of this exegesis.42 Wearing, Gillian, cited in Burn, Gordon, ‘The Encounter With Reality’, Parkett 70, 2002, p. 11043 Molon, Dominic, op.cit. p. 23

33

conversational interviews of Ataman, but the origins of these stories are distorted

through Wearing masking the identity of her subjects. By covering and altering her

participant’s faces, Wearing makes a simple intervention that shifts the video from

being a factual documentation of individual confession, to a strangely anonymous

series of stories, that’s origins are obscured and distorted. The stories no longer have a

familiar and recognisable basis, they seem real through the conviction in each person’s

voice but with personal identity concealed – they become a form of fiction left open to

interpretation. Barry Schwabsky notes that, ‘Confess all…, through its separation

between the face and the voice, is about the possibility of confession without

confession – a confession that is neither true or false because it is authorless.’44

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

Intrigued? Call Gillian, 1994

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

34

Fig. 12, Gillian Wearing, Trauma, 2000

Wearing navigates a slippery territory between creating works from genuine

encounters on the one hand and exploiting her subjects on the other (works such as

Drunk45

have been criticised as exploitative and opportunist).46 Exploitative or not,

Wearing’s works are a collaboration between artist and subject which evolve from a

discursive engagement that is driven by a subject’s compulsion to talk and share

stories and Wearing’s acute awareness of the malleability and fragility of human

identity.

In the works discussed above, Ataman and Wearing initiated a discursive exchange

with their subjects, while also remaining invisible, participating outside the ‘frame’. In

the subtle, filmic works of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster both artist and subject

remain outside the frame, and it is the actual place of encounter that is depicted. Riyo

(1999), Plages (2001) and Central (2001) are a trilogy of short films shot in Kyoto,

Copacabana beach and Hong Kong Harbour. Each film is an obsessive yet detached

study of the relationships between people and place.

45 Gillian Wearing’s Drunk is discussed on page 68 of this exegesis.46 In his review of Wearing’s solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Nov. – Dec.2006), Sebastian Smee isolated Drunk as a work that ‘crossed the line’ to become voyeuristic and

exploitative. Smee wrote that, ‘It [Drunk] may be intended as an accusation against those who pass bypeople like these on the street without doing anything to help. But it goes nowhere. There is not art, justvoyeurism.’ Smee, Sebastian, ‘Mind the Gap’, The Weekend Australian, November 18-19, 2006, p. 18

35

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

Gonzalez-Foerster’s films allude to passing encounters in exotic places, using subtitles

to create a narrative context for her melancholic observations. Each film reveals a

conversation or monologue from an unseen and possibly fictional character. In Riyo,

for example, we hear and read a nervous conversation between an adolescent couple

who have presumably only recently met. The conversation unfolds as the camera

tracks slowly along a riverside at night, filming social activity in the bars and cafés on

the opposite bank. Similarly, in Plages, Gonzalez-Foerster surveys the social activity

unfolding at Copacabana Beach during sunset from the bird’s eye perspective of her

hotel room. As night falls and tropical rain disperses the crowd who run to seek cover,

a voice-over with subtitles describes the myth of Copacabana. The film concludes

with the voice of an old man, ‘Copacabana is wonderful, it is a wonderful town.

Copacabana does not exist.’47 These open and suggestive narratives are continued in

Central, where we see the silhouette of a woman waiting at the Ferry Terminal at

Hong Kong Harbour, a subtitled monologue reveals she is waiting for her brother to

arrive. The stories in Central, as in Riyo and Plages, remain distant and ambiguous:

are these real people and real stories being told, or has Gonzalez-Foerster scripted

these narratives to elaborate the place-portraits?

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

36

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

Through different terms of encounter and participation, Ataman, Wearing and

Gonzalez-Foerster construct narrative works that are connected through an aesthetic of

proximity and intimacy. Whether the encounter is established through building trust

over time, allowing strangers to confess, scripting actions or recording and

constructing elusive conversations, a close relationship between artist and subject

opens the space for individuals to speak and construct their own personal histories.

Working in this way, these artists have established fluid, relational practices that

respond to different social, cultural and geographic contexts. The nature of this

fluidity means these artists must also negotiate constantly changing circumstances, a

situation Bourriaud has identified as being particularly unstable, ‘Precariousness is at

the centre of a formal universe in which nothing is durable; everything is movement:

the trajectory between two places is favoured in relation to the place itself, and

encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them.’48

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

37

Real Fictions: text, image and fractured narratives

I see the notion of a documentary as a starting point in reality. For me, these

works have been transformed into fiction. They’re all very much fiction […] the

idea of a history – an event or a situation – has drawn me in, but simply as a

departure point, an open door; what happens thereafter can often create its

own pulse.49

This discussion investigates how the displacement of real and fictional narratives

invites the viewer to become an active participant, operating within the narrative space

created by the artwork. Previously I reflected on the documentary approach

incorporated into contemporary practice, in this section I will discuss how forms of

documentary and linear narrative are manipulated, expanded and fractured through

investigating the complex relationship between text and image.50 ‘Documentary’ fails

to accurately describe much of the work identified in this chapter, instead real fictions

is a more accurate term to define artworks that incorporate elements of real places and

encounters with real people within fictional or semi-fictional narrative structure.51 The

veracity of incorporating lived experience and real encounters may be crucial to the

work’s success, giving it a rawness, precariousness and immediacy that would not

exist otherwise. In an interview with Chrissie Ile, Eija-Liisa Ahtila confesses her

compulsion to develop fictional films from real situations and encounters:

All the stories and characters are fictional but based on research. When I start

thinking about a work I like to be certain about the facts – I need to know that it

49 Aitken, Doug, ‘Amanda Sharp in conversation with Doug Aitken’, Doug Aitken. London and NewYork: Phaidon, 2001, p. 1350 Within this discussion I focus on fractured narratives through contrasting two consistent elements: textand image. In the works of several artists, image appears as video, photography or even the urbanenvironment, while text appears as subtitles, sound, printed text or voice-over narration. Fracturing occursthrough strategies such as subtitles that conflict or create other interpretations of the images they support,

voice-over narration or subtitles that are created from multiple voices and compressed into one invisiblenarrator, and spatial fracturing through separating or multiplying sound and image within video and filminstallation.51 The term Real Fictions has been used by artists, critics and curators in several contexts with slightlydifferent meanings, although always relating to incorporating elements of fiction within ‘real’ situationsor places. Rachel Kent talks about ‘reality at the service of fiction’ in relation to Kutlug Ataman’s work;Nancy Spector talks about ‘real fictions’ in her article ‘All the World’ in Frieze, issue 98, April 2006;Doug Aitken speaks about reality as a starting point in his work; Elizabeth Fisher wrote an essay ‘Real

Fictions’ for her exhibition Sodium Dreams, at the Barb College in Hudson, June 29 – September 7,2003; Nicolas Bourriaud, called his interview with Philippe Parreno ‘Real Virtuality’ for Art Press

no.208, Dec. 1995 pp. 41-44.

38

could have happened and that it’s believable. Then again, the knowledge that

you gain through research gives you the freedom to invent things.52

Chance discoveries and encounters lie at the heart of much of Anri Sala’s video work.

He combines documentary aesthetic with a fascination for the obscurity of language,

while simultaneously resisting didactic narrative. Most of his work begins without a

script, requires little or no direction and is constructed through a subtle manipulation

of situations happened upon by chance. One of the first pieces to bring Sala

international attention was Intervista, a video made in 1998 after Sala found an old

role of film while cleaning out his apartment in Tirana during a short return from

studies in Paris. The film revealed a communist party meeting, with hundreds of

participants enthralled in a speech by their leader, Enver Hoxha. Standing next to

Hoxha was a young woman who was later filmed giving an interview with a journalist

– the woman was Valdet Sala, Anri Sala’s mother. Finding this footage was the

impetus to Sala making Intervista, but there was a crucial missing element to the film

– there was no sound track accompanying the images. In Intervista Sala used

documentary form (a single channel, 30 minute video) to reveal the story behind the

found footage and search for the missing sound. Rather than a detached observation,

Intervista provides a personal account of Albanian history and its changed political

circumstances while also being a complex video portrait of Sala’s mother and her

relationship to a place with a tumultuous political history. Sala’s video is not an

attempt to construct a factual document in order to educate the viewer about his native

Albania. Rather he uses the chance finding of a slice of history to highlight the

flexible relationships between memory and history, truth and fiction, text and image.

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

39

Fig. 15, Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998

In the video Sala shows his mother the footage of the meeting and interview as she

laughs at the images of herself from an earlier time. She comments that she can

remember that the footage of the meeting is from the Albanian Youth Congress in

1977, but can’t recall anything more of the soundless interview. The rest of Intervista

describes Sala’s journey to find the missing sound and words from the interview

footage. After locating the journalist and sound-man from the original interview, Sala

learns that sound and vision were recorded separately and the search for the original

sound track would be futile. Sala then visits a school for the deaf, where he

commissions help to lip read the footage and transcribe the interview which he then

adds as subtitles to the images of his mother speaking to the journalist. The actual

process of making Intervista, which was driven by Sala’s fascination with his

mother’s earlier life in Albania, therefore begins to determine its structure.

Intervista personalises public history and presents a subjective experience of a past

communist regime that seems alien to the ‘Western World’. Mark Godfrey identifies

that in this video Sala communicates the, ‘impossibility of an “objective” approach to

a historical subject and also admitted that everyone was implicated in Albania’s

troubled past.’53 There is no suggestion in Intervista that the communist approach was

‘wrong’ per se or that contemporary Albania is ‘right’ – during the interview, which

continues throughout the film, Sala’s mother openly worries about recent events in

Albania and remarks that she still lives by many of her ideals from that time. In its

apparent simplicity, Intervista confronts issues that are central to the works discussed

53 Godfrey, Mark, ‘Articulate Enigma: the works of Anri Sala’, Anri Sala. London and New York:Phaidon, 2006, p. 36

40

in this chapter, such as the obscurity and schism that can exist (or be created) between

text and image, language and meaning, experience and representation.

In making real fictions, artists like Sala embrace or actively construct a ‘void’ within

the narrative structure. They open a space for the viewer to inhabit the scenario,

allowing for a subjective reading of the narrative. Tacita Dean also engages with place

to investigate links between memory and history. A subtleness and distinct lack of

‘action’ typifies her evocative films. For Dean, actually occupying and experiencing

the places where she makes her work is hugely significant, and like Sala, she

embraces chance in the process of directing and capturing the content of her films. In

a short essay in Artforum, Dean speaks about imagining her journeys to distant places

as she ‘sits in urban safety’:

Maybe getting lost, or rather disappearing out of sight, has become an

anachronism in our communication-crazed world. Is this why being hostage to

such remoteness is so attractive to me when, truth be told, I am a coward to

such loneliness?54

Fig. 16 (left) Tacita Dean, Bubble House (exterior), 1999

Fig. 17 (right) Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000

Works such as Teignmouth Electron (2000), Bubble House (1999), Disappearance at

Sea (1996) and Sound Mirrors (1999) illustrate Dean’s fascination with stories of

isolated places and forgotten ambition. These works obsessively trace past

monuments, failed adventures and lost heroes creating narrative voids that lightly

touch historic context while remaining unresolved, leaving the viewer with persistent

54 Dean, Tacita, ‘Tristan Da Cunha’, Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 275

41

questions: ‘where is this place, what happened here?’ In these artworks Dean fractures

and expands their narrative capacity through the combination of sound and image.

Dean incorporates simple devices to change the viewer’s perception of the content of

the films and reveal the hidden stories and histories behind the places she investigates.

Mark Godfrey observes how sound is used in Dean’s films to evoke further

consideration of seemingly ordinary places:

Sound operates in complex ways in all these works, but precise information

about the locations is not supplied in the soundtracks, and the works charge

often comes from the contrast a viewer makes between the banality or apparent

innocence of the portrayed location and the history associated with it.55

Dean’s artwork Boots (2003) comprises three, 20-minute films about an old man and

an empty mansion. Without revealing details or background information about either,

the film creates an atmosphere of emptiness and subtly describes an unfolding

relationship between the movement of the old man, his strangely melancholic

observations and the vacant spaces within the building. The setting for the film is an

aristocratic villa in an expansive garden. The villa is the Casa Serralves in Porto,

Portugal.56 In researching the history of the villa, Dean noted some of the aspects that

added to its atmosphere, especially the observation that the lady of the villa, ‘pined for

Paris, and even today the house retains a sort of melancholy. It was already a stage set,

but for me it was the shabbiness and slight neglect that held its atmosphere.’57 The old

man in Boots also holds a rich and complex history that Dean chose to allude to rather

than explain through her films. Dean explains the significance of selecting Boots as

the co-subject of her film:

Boots was my sister’s godfather […] His real name was Robert Steane, but we

knew him as Boots because of his orthopaedic boot, which he would have

elegantly handmade in the style of his other shoe by a top London craftsman.

Multiple car accidents added to his rather baroque appearance and left him

blind in one eye, but his charm transcended everything. His father was almost

certainly the illegitimate son of King George V who left England to become a

silent movie star in Germany in the 20’s […] One of the many things that

55 Godfrey, Mark, ‘Artist as Historian’, op.cit. p. 14356 The Casa Serralves was completed in 1940 by the architect Charles Siclis and was commissioned by

the Second Count of Vizela, Carlos Alberto Cabral and his French wife, Blanche, who was a model fromParis. Greer, Germaine, ‘Boots’, Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 10757 Dean, Tacita, ‘Tacita Dean: talks about Boots’, Artforum, October 2003, p. 102

42

attracted me to Boots was exactly this undateable urbanity that he carried

around with him without conscious nostalgia. He was somehow the perfect

anachronism.58

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

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

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

I saw Boots installed in a huge structure at Artspace as part of the 2006 Biennale of

Sydney Zones of Contact. The three interrelated films were projected in three

connected, darkened rooms. What initially seems to be the same film projected three

58 Ibid, p. 102

43

times, gradually revealed itself as a triptych of films, each with a slightly different

structure. At first it is difficult to differentiate the slippages between these three

parallel narratives, moving between the rooms only seems to make the house and the

anonymous figure of the old man, even more elusive and expansive. It’s not until

Boots quietly mutters commentary that we realise there is a difference in the three-

stream narrative: Boots speaks in German, English and French, a separate language

for each film. My lack of both French and German made it difficult to compare syntax

and descriptions between the languages, but the disjointed nature of the English

version led me to presume that each commentary is more a collection of observations

and fractured memories – seemingly by a fictional character who Boots temporarily

inhabits – than a clear and flowing narrative. Dean explains the background to Boots’

multi-linguistic narration:

I wanted to animate the house very specifically. So I got fixated on the idea of

asking Boots to be in the film. He was an architect, and I wanted a fictional

architectural account of the peculiarities of the villa […]

Boots took a dislike to the villa and refused, even for the sake of fiction, to play

the architect. Instead he took the part of Blanche. He picked up on the

atmosphere of the house quickly and was unscripted.59

Dean embraces slowness, inaction and prolonged observation within her films, a

structural device that occasionally verges towards painful tedium. But films like Boots

incorporate this observatory structure as a strategy to test the limits of viewer

perception and attention. What appears to be a passive documentary of a man walking

through a house reveals itself as a narrative experience that is more complex and

difficult to define. Every aspect of the anamorphic film is manipulated; the man is

actually a symbol for an aristocratic French model from another time; the colour of the

film is pushed and pulled, shifting between melancholic soft tones and dream-like

vibrancy; the sound is also manipulated and carefully constructed from actual and

artificial effects; and, through editing, the film uses three different languages to

carefully map the villa through three different routes, each beginning and finishing at

a specific point, ‘each is a valediction that ends at night.’60

59 Ibid, p. 10360 Ibid, p. 103

44

Pierre Huyghe also obsessively explores the emergence of fiction within reality,

resulting in elaborate narrative structures that expand documentary representation to

experiential and immersive film and installation environments. Huyghe manipulates

the sites and circumstances around his experience of place to form fictional models

and time-based narrative protocols. For Huyghe, using real places is simply a means to

solidify his fictional constructs, a process opposite to Dean’s approach. Huyghe finds

places to tell his stories rather than discovering stories through particular places.

Huyghe explains, ‘I’m interested in constructing the condition of emergence of a

fiction – we invent a hypothesis, and give ourselves the real means to verify it.’61

Fig. 22 (left) and 23 (right), Pierre Huyghe, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating

Expedition) A Musical, Act 1 (left) and Act 3 (right), 2002

Almost every project in Huyghe’s oeuvre could be discussed in relation to the idea of

real fictions, here I will focus on the recent project A Journey That Wasn’t (2005).

Huyghe has a long running fascination with Antarctica, stemming from his earlier

project, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating Expedition) A Musical, (2002),

which consisted of a three-story exhibition at the Bregenz Kunsthaus in Austria.

L’Expèdition scintillante is an exhibition that, ‘provides the scenario of an expedition’,

rather than a representation of a place as elusive as Antarctica.62 Huyghe uses place as

a context or stage to act out his narrative inventions and social experiments. Instead of

directly confronting the history of these places, he seeks out sites that he calls ‘no

knowledge zones’, allowing him to write new cultural narratives and construct open

scenarios without the burden of historic fact.63 L’Expèdition scintillante was a

precursor for the actual expedition Huyghe took to Antarctica several years later with

a group of artists in order to make the artwork A Journey that Wasn’t (2005). Huyghe

articulates his interest in Antarctica and its ‘emptiness’ by commenting that:

61 Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, Frieze 100,August 2006, p. 21762 Huyghe, Pierre, Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art,2004, p. 9263 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, p.218

45

In my case, the issue of the ‘remote’ place is not exactly the point. The

movement that brings you to the outside is as important as the outside itself. It’s

a question of displacement. What’s interesting is how you create this conceptual

displacement, the journey that brings you to this elsewhere, not the destination

itself. I’m less concerned about place than the production of situations and

complex, heterogeneous territories.

Our journey to Antarctica had nothing to do with going far away per se. A boat

is a temporary habitat moving toward the unpredictable, a collective moment, a

social time. Then it becomes how you translate the experience. The

displacement is in the constant renegotiations that takes place between the

people engaged in the journey […] Going somewhere like Antarctica is an

attempt to produce a place without pre-existing protocol, a no-knowledge zone.

It might be easier to find this in a place that’s not overcrowded with meaning,

rules, culture, even longitude and latitude.64

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

As with most of Huyghe’s work, A Journey That Wasn’t was created in several

distinct stages. The artwork began with the hypothesis or outline for a fiction, that

there was a new island which had emerged in Antarctica as a result of climate change,

and that this island is inhabited by a mythical creature, something resembling an

albino penguin. The film revealed the two main aspects to the story; one screen

showed scenes from the actual expedition, including the artist’s boat stranded in ice

and the group of artists navigating a small iceberg/island. The other aspect was a

64 Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Remote Possibilities: a roundtable discussion on Land Art’s changing terrain’,Moderated by Tim Griffin, with Claire Bishop, Lynne Cooke, Pierre Huyghe, Pamela M. Lee, RirkritTiravanija, Andrea Zittle, Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 290

46

documentation of an opera Huyghe facilitated and directed in Central Park in New

York. Huyghe was interested in translating the experience of a journey (fictional or

not) through the non-literal and performative mode of opera. Huyghe saw the opera as

being, ‘an equivalent experience to encountering the island without being a

representation of it.’65 The opera was a form of ‘text’ which describes the physical and

experiential nature of the island, and Huyghe speculated that the time-based nature of

the performance could reflect the geographic nature of the island.

The premise or fictional structure for A Journey that Wasn’t seems somewhat far-

fetched (that the artist somehow encountered a mythical albino penguin on a frontier

island). But Huyghe’s concern was not with the veracity of the story, rather it was

with how to create new forms of fractured narrative. He saw the operatic performance

as an effective and legitimate way to describe a collective experience of a place. He

also aptly describes the shift this form of representation constitutes from earlier forms

of artistic interventions with place. Huyghe speaks about the change from the concerns

of land artists of documenting interventions in place to the contemporary artists’

concern with creating narrative protocols which become imbedded in place:

Smithson was asking himself how you deal with an experience and translate or

transport it. What happens in this kind of movement? The film Spiral Jetty, for

example, exists at an intersection of science, fiction, document and travel. The

film becomes a thing in itself. It has this double effect. And I don’t think I see

that so often in the many ‘documentary’ artworks today. For me, documentation

really has something to do with the problem of the trace. I think some of the

people of my generation are trying to get around the problem of the factual

report by introducing a fictional parameter into the account, the real and the

unreal dialogue. A coefficient of fiction has infiltrated the pre-production of a

project itself, in its narrative protocols as well as in its mediation. The place of

representation is real, but it incorporates fictional elements. The fiction is a

reality principle…66

Without going into further depth on the particularities of specific projects, Doug

Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Stan Douglas, Gillian Wearing and Janet

65 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’, p. 21766 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. ‘Remote Possibilities: a roundtable discussion on Land Art’s changing terrain’,p. 366

47

Cardiff have also influenced my research into the ways contemporary artists

incorporate fictional elements within documentary approaches.

Aitken immerses himself in places to collect material which he manipulates into

multi-screen, video installations. Sounds and images are fractured and interwoven to

create impressionistic portraits of empty landscapes. Aitken constructs real fictions by

travelling to a place and filming according to strict conceptual parameters. In works

such as Monsoon (1995), Aitken waited at the site of the Jonestown mass suicide in

Guyana in 1978 for a monsoon to arrive. The resulting film captures evidence of the

site’s tragic history as well as the subtle changes in atmosphere and the darkening sky.

Monsoon ends before the rain falls, leaving the film in a continual state of becoming.

Diamond Sea (1997) was filmed in the diamond mines of the Namib Desert. To make

this work, Aitken filmed the landscape and details of the mine’s elaborate surveillance

system for as long as he was allowed to stay. Finally, Eraser (1998) documents the

island of Montserrat, almost annihilated by a volcanic eruption a year earlier. To make

this work Aitken and his crew simply attempted to navigate a straight line across the

island, capturing images of the ‘erased’ landscape as they went.

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

48

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

These three works exemplify Aitken’s, ‘attempt to create a narrative out of

topographical parameters’.67 The places Aitken explores have been erased, hidden or

repressed from collective memory; erased due to natural disaster, left to peace after

human tragedy, or controlled and restricted from ‘external’ access. Aitken’s narrative

forms are influenced by the experience of actually being present in these places, and

new narrative experiences emerge through editing and the reconfiguration of those

experiences. Reflecting on Aitken’s practice has been important to the development of

my project – as well as artworks evolving through facilitation or direction, narrative

structure has also emerged through being immersed in different situations and

environments (as in the Arberg Bay videos or Unstable Ground). Allowing a narrative

to emerge through unexpected circumstances such as ‘topological parameters’ or

social encounters was at times confronting, but this process also lends the works an

immediacy and energy that I isolated and refined through the editing processes.

As I have discussed, the real fictions exemplified in this section have been created

through scripting and facilitating performances, creating real and imagined dialogues,

or by re-configuring reality through complex editing techniques. Documentary

strategies are used a starting point in this process, but the intention is not to create

documentary artworks that educate the viewer or explain the circumstances of a place,

situation or piece of history. Through expanding documentary form and creating real

fictions, more questions are proposed than answered, opening room for viewer

67 Aitken, Doug, op.cit. p. 12

49

interpretation and engagement. The following section ‘Constructed Situations’

continues discussion of real fictions by examining ways artists facilitate collective

activity or construct events in order to produce artworks that aim to modify social,

cultural or historic circumstances.

50

Constructed Situations: using elements of the world to construct narratives

In this section I focus on four projects that use constructed situations to actively

engage with a place and its social, historic and geographic context; Pierre Huyghe’s

Streamside Day (2003), Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Jeremy

Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001) and Anri Sala’s Long Sorrow (2005). These artists

continue a Situationist International legacy, especially Guy Debord’s ‘Report on the

Construction of Situations’. In this report Debord describes the situationist premise:

Our Central purpose is the construction of situations, that is, the concrete

construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher,

passionate nature. We must develop an intervention directed by the complicated

factors of two great components in perpetual interaction: the material setting of

life and the behaviours that it incites and that overturn it. 68

In many ways, Debord’s unofficial mission statement remains particularly relevant to

the works of Huyghe, Alÿs, Deller and Sala, as well as some of my own artworks,

especially write/here and Saturday Nights. Through constructing situations, artists

create events, collective action, and shared experiences – rather than objects or images

– as a way to modify everyday life. Debord alluded to this participatory mode of

production in his idea of unitary urbanism – a means of, ‘cooperating in an integral

composition of the environment […] Unitary urbanism must control, for example, the

acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of food and

drink.’69

This section identifies how contemporary artists engage with varied cultural and

geographic contexts to create ephemeral, constructed situations which are

subsequently transferred from one context to another through re-presentations as films

or project documentation. The artworks discussed here involve working with other

people, responding to changing social and geographical contexts and establishing and

maintaining relations, all of which have unexpected influences on the outcomes of

such projects. The artist task in this context is to manage a level of authorship while

68 Debord, Guy, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, Mc Donough, Tom (ed.), Guy Debord and

the Situationists International, Cambridge: MIT/October, 2002, p. 4469 Ibid, p. 44

51

also harnessing diverse influences to create artworks that may have life possibility

beyond the period of presentation in an exhibition.70

The idea of the ‘story’ and its relationship to reality is a central focus of Pierre

Huyghe’s practice. Streamside Day (2003) uses all the elements of a real situation

(real people, a real community, a real place) to construct an elaborate scenario that

reveals the experiences behind the establishment of a new community called

Streamside Knolls in New York State. Huyghe was commissioned by DIA Centre for

the Arts in 2002 to make a new work; he was drawn to the notion of a new American

community being constructed on the edge of the forest – literally representing the

point where culture meets nature. Rather than criticising the homogenisation inherent

in America’s expanding suburbia,71 he sought to represent the ways in which

communities establish a sense of place and shared ritual, in this case Streamside

Knolls.72

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

70 Within Relational Aesthetics Bourriaud argues for the necessity or art to expand and elaborate theconditions in which we live today. The life possibility of an artwork is the means it creates, ‘ways ofliving an models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist’.Bourriaud, Nicolas, op cit. p. 1371 And the financial risk of home ownership, as has become apparent with the sub-prime mortgage crisisthat swept the United States in 2007. Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose, ‘US mortgage crisis goes intomeltdown’, The Daily Telegraph, (2007),5 October 2007

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/24/cnusecon24.xml>72 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, op.cit. p. 405

52

Huyghe’s two-part film Streamside Day is intended to be a tale of contemporary

migration, and an instructional film for a community celebration. The following

synopsis by Huyghe outlines the multiple intentions and issues behind this constructed

situation:

In a forest along the Hudson River, future inhabitants progressively arrive at a

real-estate development that is still under construction. A new custom will be

invented to celebrate the birth of this community. We are in year one; it is the

first anniversary of this new kind of village. A date will appear in the calendar

that will be celebrated in subsequent years. Streamside Day is a story that will

produce an “addition” of reality. The event takes the shape of an annual

celebration and a project for a community centre that will be built in

collaboration with the architect Francois Roche.

The celebration is based on two themes – environment and migration. A parade

followed by a welcoming speech by the mayor and the developer, a meal with a

birthday cake, children dressed up as animals, who make houses out of

cardboard boxes, a folk song – the hymn of the event – and a balloon of light in

the shape of a moon, constitute the main rituals. The tree and the cardboard

box are the signs for this tradition, just as a pumpkin stands for Halloween.

Draughtsmen, photographers, writers, a musician and an architect capture the

event. A film is made, which will serve as a guideline for the yearly replaying of

this new tradition, as if it were a score for the celebration.

The film is in two parts. The first shows the facts that lie at the source of the

custom; the second is a re-interpretation of the same facts in the form of a

celebration.73

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

53

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

Streamside Day is intended to be a project with life possibility, Huyghe worked in

partnership with the Streamside Knolls community to construct a situation based on

collective celebration that can be re-interpreted and re-enacted over subsequent years.

The partnership was mutually beneficial in that the community helped Huyghe

construct the story for the film, and Huyghe helped the community organise a day of

celebration to mark the creation of a new place. Despite this mutually beneficial

relationship, there is a lack of criticality to Huyghe’s project, and one cannot but

wonder that if the community would have held a similar celebration regardless of the

artist’s intervention. In her review of Streamside Day, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

references anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1920-83) observation of the potential for

celebration to exist beyond a public ‘get together’ and become a valid socio-political

force:

Celebrations and their attendant symbols are interpreted as dynamic vehicles of

transformation in which accepted socio-cultural forms can be remodelled.

Rituals and holidays, he [Victor Turner] argues, are never completely codified

because they continuously adapt to new contexts. Societies change and develop

through processes of ritualisation.74

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

54

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

Within his practice, Huyghe sees acts of community celebration as a valid socio-

political forces and a means of allowing people to shape their own reality and

localised history. Despite the slightly romanticised, uncritical tone with which Huyghe

describes his project, it could be argued that creating a new holiday within a

community’s annual calendar is an action that has a lasting effect beyond that of a

sculpture installed in a public square. Huyghe’s project also introduces questions

about the ‘form’ of an artwork. Is Streamside Day a temporary event experienced by

the people present at the celebration and is the film a simple documentation of that

event? Or, was the event a means of producing a film that exists independently as the

artwork? I believe that both of these are true; Huyghe constructed a situation that

served as a genuine celebration for a group of people who were coming together

(presumably for the first time) to form a new community. At the same time he also

directed a film that featured elements of fiction (especially the first part of the film

which describes a family’s migration to the new suburb). The dual process of

constructing an event while also considering its representation as film or video (which

may incorporate elements of fiction or elaborated narrative elements) informed the

development of artworks in my project exhibition, especially Saturday Nights.

Projects such as Streamside Day incorporate community participation and celebration

as formal elements. Through this research I began to see ways of organising these

formal elements into an artwork which is both a video and a participatory event.

Francis Alÿs is another artist who facilitates large, participatory events as artworks.

Alÿs is also well known for his video documentations of discrete, performative, urban

55

interventions. Like Huyghe, Alÿs negotiates the fluidity of everyday life by capturing

and elaborating common activities such as walking, playing an instrument or digging.

One of Alÿs’ most celebrated works resulted from an invitation to participate in the

third Ibero-American Biennale in Lima in 2002. Alÿs orchestrated a monumental

community gesture which was documented and circulated through different media.75

Alÿs responded to the social, political, environmental and economic instability he

witnessed in Peru by facilitating When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Alÿs enlisted

500 local Peruvians and asked them to stand in line across the peak of a 600-meter

sand dune on the outskirts of Peru’s capital, Lima. Each person stood, dressed in jeans

and white t-shirt, with a shovel in hand, Alÿs’ then asked them to dig at the dune,

throwing sand a few inches in front of them as they went.76 Alÿs’ premise was that by

joining together and working in unity, the community could effectively shift a

mountainous sand dune (if only by a couple of feet). The event was captured on video

and the images of 500 people digging at a sand dune in such a desolate landscape is

captivating. Alÿs speaks of the situation that inspired the work:

There were clashes on the street and the resistance movement strengthened. It

was a desperate situation, and I felt that it called for an epic response, at once

futile and heroic, absurd and urgent. Insinuating a social allegory into those

circumstances seemed to me more fitting than engaging in some sculptural

exercise.77

75 Alÿs made postcards (that were distributed beyond the context of the Biennale and Peru) and a threechannel video installation (which was subsequently purchased by the Guggenheim Museum in NewYork) Doherty, Claire, ‘The New Situationists’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. ClaireDoherty (ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 876 Ibid, p. 877 Francis, Alÿs, ‘A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves Mountains’, Artforum

Summer 2002, p. 148

56

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

Alÿs distances his work from other projects associated with land art, as its significance

remains in the transitory moment of the event and its subsequent re-telling through

oral transmission, and not in the actual modification of the place.78 Through his

constructed situation Alÿs aimed to create a contemporary fable, an addition to

Peruvian mythology.79 In this sense Alÿs shares a common interest with Huyghe, an

impulse to create stories and ephemeral experiences; transitory moments that can be

retold and re-experienced through other media. Clearly the sand dune wasn’t actually

moved – at most a small, temporary trough may have formed through the collective

activity – therefore the project’s core value is allegorical, contained in the movement

and transmission of its representation, whether through oral history, post cards, or

video documentation. Most likely the modification to the sand dune was erased long

ago by shifting sand and wind; only the memory of the event along with the postcards

and film remain. These narrative ‘artefacts’ are subjective and open to elaboration and

modification, allowing for a sort of shared ownership of the project.

78 The Tate Online Glossary provides the following definition of land art: ‘also known as Earth art. It canbe seen as part of the wider Conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Land artists began workingdirectly in the landscape, sculpting it into earthworks or making structures with rocks or twigs […] Landart was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a

gallery.’10 October, 2007, <http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=151>79 Ibid, p. 148

57

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

The fact that Alÿs describes his own project as ‘at once futile and heroic’

demonstrates his foresight of the process, especially in terms of the distribution and

circulation of the memory of the event.80 Alÿs saw beyond the few hours in which the

actual activity of shovelling sand took place, the gesture itself is just the beginning of

the story, the full body of the project will continue to take form through the recounts

and re-telling of the time when a group of people moved (or attempted to change) a

600 meter-long mountain of sand. In an article for Frieze, Nancy Spector speaks about

artists such as Huyghe and Alÿs in terms of creating real fictions.81 She identifies how

these artists use elements of everyday life (from vastly different places and cultures) to

create new cultural narratives that circulate and change over time. Spector writes

about the viewer’s relationship to these narratives by observing that:

Once presented and documented (as video, film or photography), the work is

then replayed through other media, ones that are largely oral in transmission,

such as storytelling, gossip or myth. This re-telling over time allows for creative

(mis)interpretations, exaggeration and fragmentation – a kind of

incompleteness that allows the audience to take ownership of the art.82

As well as constructing situations inspired by a place and its current social conditions,

historic events may also provide the context to make artworks that aim to modify

collective experience and memory. Jeremy Deller’s, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), is

80 Alÿs, Francis, op.cit. p. 14881 Frieze 98, (April 2006)82 Spector, Nancy, ‘All the World’, Frieze 98, April 2006, p. 33

58

a remarkably ambitious re-enactment of the violent clash in 1984 between Yorkshire

mineworkers and police. Nato Thompson observed, in writing about the historical

context of Deller’s project, that the 1984 clash was, ‘a moment when the Thatcher

government sent a clear and brutal message to organised labour regarding its future in

England’.83 The 1984 strike still lives clearly in the memory of many people who were

adversely affected by the Thatcher government’s policies on the modernisation and

privatisation of industry. In an interview in 2001, Gordon Brown (1951–) reflected on

the severity of the 1984 strike by observing that:

The coal-mining strike of the early 1980s was a tragedy for so many of the

mining families that were involved in it. They were denied proper benefits for

a year. Many were arrested. Many families never recovered from this dispute,

and it was a human tragedy.

[…] the Thatcher government at the time gave people the impression that they

didn't care whether there was a mining industry at all.84

In organising The Battle of Orgreave, Deller set the framework for the re-enactment to

happen, negotiated with external parties and then allowed the project to expand into its

own form.85 Like Huyghe and Alÿs, Deller’s Battle of Orgreave was a constructed,

scripted event that relied heavily on elements of chance and unpredictable

circumstances. Deller remarked that for him, ‘the best moment is when you are

surprised by what someone can do to your ideas, though I’m sure many artists would

be offended if someone deviated from what they expected.’86

83 Thompson, Nato, ‘Jeremy Deller: for the Love of the People’, Parkett 74, 2005, p. 15084 Gordon Brown cited in interview, (2001), 10 Oct 2007<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_gordonbrown.html>85 For this work Deller collaborated with historians, veteran miners, family and friends of miners, re-

enactment societies, Artangel and a film crew.86 Deller, Jeremy, ‘Jeremy Deller and Claire Doherty’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. (ed.)Claire Doherty, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 94

59

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

From the numerous interviews Deller has given about his work (especially since

winning the Turner Prize in 2004 for another project, Memory Bucket), there is a sense

that for him the Battle of Orgreave is about creating the possibility of re-occupying

history in order to reconsider the present cultural landscape – in this case constructing

a situation that allows for a cathartic expulsion of a darker time. This is especially

evident as Deller integrated ex-mineworkers within the re-enactment, thus providing

the opportunity for them to revisit and readdress repressed memories and traumatic

experience.87 These concerns have been addressed with equal emphasis to the

direction of a re-enactment in order to produce a work of art. In a similar tone to

Huyghe and earlier situationist ideals, Deller has commented that for him; ‘Art isn’t

about what you make but what you make happen.’88

In contrast to the collective activity that typifies the works discussed above, Anri

Sala’s Long Sorrow (2005) is an artwork that indirectly addresses the social and

historical conditions of an area of Berlin through the performance of a lone saxophone

player.

To make Long Sorrow, Sala directed the American saxophonist Jemee Moondoc to

play free jazz while perched precariously on a platform suspended from the top floor

87 I make the point of revisiting and readdressing traumatic experience considering that Thatcher’s legacyremains influential in contemporary British politics even today; current Prime Minister, Gordon Brownrecently welcomed the Baroness into 10 Downing Street was quoted as describing her as a ‘convictionpolitician, much like myself’. Carlin, Brendan, ‘Baroness Thatcher visits Gordon Brown’, Daily

Telegraph, (2007)15 October 2007 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/13/nbrown313.xml>88 Deller, Jeremy and Doherty, Claire, op.cit. p. 94

60

of the Long Sorrow building.89 Long Sorrow is filmed to show Moondoc playing from

various angles without revealing the platform he is standing on, giving the impression

he may be balancing on a window ledge, high above the street below. Sala’s direction

brings the viewer in intimate contact with Moondoc’s performance; just watching the

film can overwhelm the viewer with a sense of vertigo as if standing there next to him.

Long Sorrow takes a social and historical context as a framing device, from which

Sala has created a situation that floats and avoids didacticism. The construction of

Long Sorrow involved elaborate organisation despite its relative subtlety as an

artwork.90 The film is edited so that we feel we have literally stumbled across a chance

performance happening on the top story of a seemingly abandoned building.

Long Sorrow proposes to be a public performance as much as it is a film, although

witnessing the event in reality would have been a vastly different experience.91 The

image of the crane, cameramen, lights and suspended platform reduce the scene to a

film set rather than an spontaneous jazz improvisation; the viewer in reality witnesses

the recording of a performance, whereas the viewer in the gallery witnesses the

performance independent of its recording, Sala’s preference here is clearly to produce

an artwork for exhibition, rather than a shared event. Bourriaud argues that a

‘constructed situation’ does not necessarily involve social interaction, he states that, ‘It

is possible to imagine “constructed situations” for private use, and even intentionally

barring others’.92 In this sense Sala’s constructed situation is not based on a social

exchange as with Hughe, Alÿs and Deller; and his relationship with his subject

(Moondoc) is clearly that of employer/employee.

89 Sala reflects on his chance discovery of the Long Sorrow building which initiated the idea for the film,‘One day I was visiting a neighbourhood in Berlin called Märkisches Viertel and I came across a verylong building nicknamed “Langer Jammer” or “Long Sorrow” […] The expression kept the notion of“long” as a space rather than a time feature’. Sala, Anri, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with AnriSala’, Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 1890 Sala flew the saxophonist from New York to Berlin; he hired an apartment in the Long Sorrow buildingand built lighting rigs and support platforms for the saxophonist; he also hired a huge crane in order tofilm the scenes of the saxophonist caught in suspension which also required permits from local council

and authorities. Godfrey, Mark, op.cit. p. 9691 Sala, Anri, op.cit. p. 1892 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. p. 84

61

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

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

62

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

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

In this work jazz is used as a communicative device that exists outside language and

conventional narrative – in a similar way that organising a community celebration,

moving a sand dune, or staging a mass protest create stories outside of standard

narrative form. Through constructing situations, these artists use filtered and

manipulated elements of everyday life to modify, elaborate and describe relationships

that exist between people and places. The artworks included in my exhibition

63

demonstrate a capacity to construct situations in order to create works that exist both

as temporary events (such as Saturday Nights or Gordon’s piano performance in

Unstable Ground) and as artworks presented in a gallery context.

As well as the complexities involved in constructing situations through social

encounters and in partnership with different subjects, ethical complexities arise when

artists actively seek out subjects identified as ‘outsider’ or ‘other’. The following

section will explore some of the ethical implications behind the encounters between

artist and subject.

64

The ‘Other’ and Ethical Obligations: seeking alternative voices

Mapping in recent art has tended towards the sociological and the

anthropological, to the point where an ethnographic mapping of an institution

or a community is a primary form of site-specific art today.93

Many of the artists discussed in this chapter seek out stories and experiences from

peripheral places and communities; this is an approach also taken throughout my

research. In this section I question what draws artists to work within such varied

cultural and social contexts, often involving dislocated and isolated communities and

individuals.94 I also ask why these artists go to such lengths to construct ambitious

surveys, observations and performances with people and places that were not

previously part of their lives. Perhaps most crucial to this discussion is an

investigation into how an artist reconciles their own position within a work that is

constructed from someone else’s personal history.

The issues have remained at the forefront of my mind throughout the research,

influencing the methodologies and outcomes of the work in the project exhibition. In

his essay ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ Hal Foster calls attention to issues surrounding

artworks that engage with the social or cultural other, arguing self-promotion and

search for new subject matter are often more important for an artist in this paradigm

than a genuine concern for social change.95 Nicolas Bourriaud, on the other hand,

champions art practices that engage varied social and cultural issues, arguing for the

necessity for contemporary art to incorporate everyday space and open new inter-

human relations between artist, subject and viewer.96 So where do the artists I discuss

sit within these arguments, and how do I locate my own project within these issues?

Are these arguments mutually exclusive?

Foster draws parallels between contemporary art practice and ethnographic research

and methodology, ‘artists and critics aspire to fieldwork in which theory and practice

seem to be reconciled. Often they draw indirectly on basic principles of the

93 Foster, Hal, op.cit., p.185.94 Huyghe is drawn to a new community built on the edge of a forest; Alÿs is drawn to an isolatedcommunity in Peru; Ataman works with social, political and sexual outcasts and displaced communities;Wearing seeks out people who are willing to confess repressed and traumatic experiences; Salaorchestrates micro-performances in social-housing estates and tells forgotten stories from Albania’s

repressed history; Deller also revisits repressed and marginalised histories.95 Foster, Hal, op.cit., p.185-199.96 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit.

65

participant-observer tradition […].’97 Foster contextualises this paradigm with

comparisons to Walter Benjamin’s earlier identification of the artists as ‘producer’.98

Foster describes the commonalities between the two paradigms – each concerned with

the social function of art practice – although he identifies ways in which the subject of

association has changed from interrogating economic relations (in the producer

model) to cultural identity (in the ethnographic model).99 Foster then identifies some

reasons why contemporary artists and critics are so readily enticed by ethnography:

First, as we have seen, anthropology is prized as the science of alterity…

Second, it is the discipline that takes culture as its object… Third, ethnography

is considered contextual, the often automatic demand for which contemporary

artists and critics share with other practitioners today, many of whom aspire to

fieldwork in the everyday. Forth, anthropology is thought to arbitrate the

interdisciplinary, another often rote value in contemporary art and criticism.

Fifth, the recent self-critique of anthropology renders is attractive, for it

promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer at the centre even as it preserves a

romanticism of the other at the margins.100

Throughout his essay Foster is openly concerned with the nature of this ethnographic

paradigm, especially with the terms of engagement between artist and subject. His

concerns revolve around issues of seeking the right amount of distance between the

two; that by creating too little distance and over sympathising with the other, the artist

may indulge in ‘self-othering’.101 Conversely, when the artist creates too much

distance between themselves and their subjects, and thus constructs an ideological

patronage or social condensation where they speak for their subjects, or use them and

their cultural traditions as material context for artwork (ignoring or disregarding the

consequences for the subjects). Foster also observes a ‘horizontal’ approach to

practice that is particular to many artists he locates in this paradigm. He cites a trend

of artists moving from issue to issue or site to site, developing a project specific to

each cultural context as they go, moving horizontally without delving into significant

historical (vertical) depth (both in terms of art practice and the history of the particular

issue). Foster notes the cyclic nature of this situation, ‘the shift to a horizontal way of

working is consistent with the ethnographic turn in art and criticism: one selects a site,

97 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 18198 Ibid, p. 17299 Ibid, p. 174100 Ibid, p. 182101 ‘For then as now self-othering can flip into self-absorption, in which the project of an “ethnographicself-fashioning” becomes the practice of narcissistic self-refurbishing.’ Ibid, p. 180

66

enters its culture and learns its language, conceives and presents a project, only to

move onto the next site where the cycle is repeated.’102

Common to all the projects discussed within this chapter is the idea of the artist giving

a voice to their subjects, rather than forcing a dogmatic approach of speaking for

others. It is the openness with which the artist relates to their subjects and the

mutually agreeable terms of this relationship that determines the ethical implications

of each project. Are the subjects incorporated into the production of the work or are

they manipulated to unwittingly perform for the artist? Are they given the space and

opportunity to tell their story, or are elements of the story taken out of context and re-

configured to suit the artist’s intentions? Does the relationship established by the artist

expire once the work is completed or is the relationship part of an ongoing encounter?

This brings us back to Ataman’s video installations, especially Küba; where he uses

ethnographic video-survey to establish a relationship between artist and subject which

is as much about allowing different individuals to share their stories as it is about

Ataman constructing his work. Examining Ataman’s work, Mark Nash identifies this

relationship as being more therapeutic than scientific or ethnographic:

In his practice he exhibits an exceedingly refined attentiveness to the ethical

obligations and constraints involved in maintaining a relationship with those

who agree to speak before his camera. Indeed Ataman gives each speaker so

much time that one realises his role is less ethnographic – concerned with

exploring or producing some kind of knowledge about a group of people – than

therapeutic. Ataman and camera, and by extension members of the audience

take the position of psychoanalyst, allowing members of the Küba community a

space to speak about issues of concern to them, and to present their hopes and

fears for themselves, family and community before the camera.103

Ataman’s process of interviewing and filming is at times paradoxical. He approaches

his subjects with both critical distance (by capturing subjective stories in order to

address broader social and cultural issues), and extreme intimacy (where he is often

personally implicated within the space of conversation and exchange). The proposition

of engaging with subjects from either a critical distance (objective) or a personal

(subjective) perspective is passed on to the viewer. As with almost all of Ataman’s

102 Ibid, p. 202103

Nash, Mark, op.cit. pp. 44-45

67

video installations, the viewer can choose to either stand back and survey the

collection of voices, faces and stories from a detached point of view; or they can enter

each person’s intimate world, and share a private space of confession and trust. By

facing these issues of subjectivity and objectivity, Ataman’s ethnographic

methodology remains open, unresolved, reflexive and precarious. He is not attempting

to produce ethnographic documents that survey a group of people he finds obscure or

foreign, rather, he implicates himself in the same space as his subjects, revealing their

stories as they gradually open up to his camera:

There is a moment in the experience of Küba when you realise that you are

being presented with something other than an ethnographic document, however

sympathetically presented by Ataman the informant. It is the moment when you

realise the difficulty of finding the appropriate critical distance, that you risk

being drawn into this sea of voices, but on the other hand, however indirectly,

the work has the potential to return the audience’s gaze.104

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

Gillian Wearing’s Drunk (1999) provides a stark contrast to the sensitivity of

Ataman’s Küba. For Drunk, Wearing provided all the necessary resources for a group

of people to become fully inebriated. Wearing stood back and captured the event on

video, translating the unfolding action into a three-channel video that revealed the

resulting arguments, fights, loss of co-ordination and passing out of her subjects in

excruciating detail. From her detached, observatory vantage point (which we share as

104 Nash, Mark, op.cit. p. 46

68

viewers), Wearing uses a common point of social frailty as material for an artwork

that presents the other as weak, pathetic and vulnerable. In contrast to Wearing’s other

works such as Signs…, Confess all… and Trauma, Drunk is made without exchange or

empathy, rather than extending from active participation and interaction between artist

and subject, it is the result of detached observation, a voyeuristic gaze. Drunk seems to

be an experiment in seeking the line between objective observation and exploitation of

human ethics. Drunk is presented to us without judgement, but the nature of the

interactions unfolding before our eyes and the hopelessness of her subjects leads

Wearing and the viewer to judge the hopeless and incapable subjects.

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

Empathy, exploitation, distance and the artist’s relationship to the ‘other’ are not

easily defined or reconciled in any of the works discussed above. Foster’s

observations on the similarities between contemporary art and ethnographic research

help to categorise a relational mode of practice that seeks to engage diverse

communities and voices. However this relationship to ethnography implies a type of

scientific study that is concerned with observing ‘others’ in order to learn something

of ‘their’ behaviour and collective history – creating a picture of the artist who

conducts social science fieldwork in order to collect and publish information about

particular groups of people. The artworks discussed in this chapter and included in the

project exhibition are not ethnographic documentaries made to ‘educate’ an audience

about social and cultural ‘issues’. Ethnographic methodology may certainly be

incorporated to help build discursive relationships with different subjects, and many

contemporary artists indeed use strategies such as surveys and interviews within their

work. However the artworks produced and discussed through this research are not

intended to produce factual documentation of the other. The definition of these works

as ‘artworks’ lies in their visceral nature, and the way they propose open and

69

ambiguous narratives that require the viewer to actively piece elements together and

interpret the space between text and image. Ambiguity, interpretation, hesitation,

anxiety, tension, intimacy, sensitivity, time, space, etc. typify these works. Common to

most of the works discussed above and within this research project is a situation where

the artist frames themselves as they frame the subject,105 implicating themselves

within the space of discussion rather than presenting a detached perspective of ‘us’

and ‘them’.106 When the subjects speak directly to the artist they also speak directly to

the viewer. This relationship between subject, artwork and viewer is further extended

through the immersive structural and narrative devices incorporated within production

and post-production. Although derived from real people, real place and real situations,

ethnographic parameters are expanded through editing, scripting, structural

manipulation and paring back – the local and familiar is thus transformed into the

ambiguous and universal.

105 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 203106 Although the artist is often invisible, working from behind the camera where they facilitate discussionor provide directions off screen.

70

Viewer Engagement: the expanded exhibition

A landscape is something to travel through, it is not a panoramic view to simply

look at. Each one of us travels through it differently, collects evidence and

connects it together, thus forming a narrative.107

We could replace ‘landscape’ in Huyghe’s quote above, with ‘artwork’ in order to

describe the experience of viewing much of the work discussed within this chapter.

The practices of these artists put a ‘chain of engagement’ in motion which connects

each artist’s engagement with a place or situation, the artist’s subsequent engagement

with people/subjects within that place or situation, the subjects’ engagement with the

artist, and, finally, the viewers’ engagement with the resultant artwork. Each level of

engagement is intended to be open, responsive and in some cases, discursive. In this

section I focus on the final stage of this chain, the engagement between viewer and

artwork, and briefly discuss ways in which the artists who form the contextual field

for this project are expanding the exhibition as much as they expand the narrative

capacity of an artwork.

In chapter 1, I drew comparisons between Victor Burgin’s observations on the way

conceptual artists connect near and distant objects and the way my project investigates

ways of connecting different narrative elements. Burgin’s reflections are also useful

here to introduce ways in which the viewer is involved within the space of the

artwork, although, once again, the notion of ‘object’ could be exchanged for

‘narrative’. Burgin identifies that:

Because of the emphasis placed upon the perceiver’s role in the formation of

the “object” the specific nature of any such “object” is highly subjective. The

required mode of attention would involve a mind “out of focus,” a self-induced

suspension of cognition in which experience is emotive but meaningless.108

The intention behind the project exhibition is to actively engage viewers by

encouraging them to piece elements of information together, filling in the spaces

between text and image, thus shifting their position from that of ‘beholder’ to

‘interpreter’ of the artwork. To quote Bourriaud, ‘the exhibition becomes one big film

107 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. p. 33108 Burgin, Victor, op.cit. n.pag

71

set… a set in which we can mount our own sequence of meanings.’109 Within his

theories on Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud argues artists’ practices establish a model

of participatory viewing. Artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija construct exhibitions based

on modes of social exchange, such as cooking, eating and talking. Social engagement

is a fundamental aspect to my research project and provides a methodological

approach that connects almost all of the works that comprise this chapter – but here I

am not discussing artworks or a form of exhibition that rely on the viewer’s

participation in a social exchange. This section discusses participation in terms of the

viewer becoming implicated conceptually within the content of an artwork, as

opposed to the viewer forming the work through eating, talking, cooking, etc. In

reflecting on his installations, Thomas Hirschhorn identifies his concern with

implicating the viewer:

Rather than triggering the participation of the audience, I want to implicate

them. I want to force the audience to be confronted with my work. This is the

exchange I propose. The artworks don’t need participation; it’s not an

interactive work. It doesn’t need to be completed by the audience; it needs to be

an active, autonomous work with the possibility of implication.110

Similarly, the viewer engagement I have sought through my research and identified

within this chapter is based on a time-based protocol: exhibitions that incorporate

time-based artworks, works that require the viewer to move through a city or an open

space, artworks that reveal connections between text and image, artworks that are

open to viewer interpretation, and exhibitions that change over time. One of the

questions I ask through this research concerns: how the viewer inhabits the space

proposed by an artwork or exhibition and what strategies are used by contemporary

artists to encourage viewer engagement and interpretation?

Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day became Streamside Day Follies when he exhibited

the film of the celebration at the DIA Centre for the Arts, New York. In this context

Huyghe confronted the process of translating and transporting a constructed situation

from one context to another by creating a temporary ‘folly’ or pavilion to project his

film within the gallery space. Huyghe is acutely aware of the viewer’s presence in

relation to an artwork, and Streamside Day Follies creates an experience that

109 Bourriaud, Nicolas, op.cit. Relational Aesthetics, p. 46110 Hirschhorn, Thomas, op.cit. ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with ThomasHirschhorn’, pp. 25-6

72

incorporates the viewer within a changing, theatrical space. Huyghe aims to create an

environment that involves the viewer within the celebration and the conditions

surrounding it, as if they were experiencing the event in the present, and not just

watching a documentary of a celebration that happened in some other place at some

other time. Huyghe describes the format of the gallery space and the incorporation of

the film by noting that:

The gallery is empty. Walls situated in different rooms slowly begin to move

towards the main space, almost suggesting a ballet. Their migration ends when

they form a new territory in the centre of the space.

The temporary pavilion, a folly, appears in the exhibition space, which has now

become the “outside”. The folly remains in this form for as long as it takes to

project the film. When the film ends, it comes apart and the walls go back to

their original position. This pavilion prefigures what will be the mechanics of a

community centre.111

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

Similarly, as I explain in chapter 3, I have confronted issues of translating and

transporting a constructed situation from one context to another with several works in

the project exhibition. The installation of Saturday Nights, for example, reflects the

intimacy and sense of celebration which permeated the Koonya Hall where the

country-dance was held. Likewise, the camera position and selection of scenes in

Saturday Nights as well as Unstable Ground and Altered State, attempt to capture a

perspective of the event which provides the viewer with a sense of ‘being there’ rather

than watching a passive documentation of an event. The following video installations

111 Huyghe, Pierre, op.cit. Pierre Huyghe. p. 147

73

by Anri Sala, Kutlug Ataman, Doug Aitken and Sharon Lockhart, are selected for

discussion due to the various ways they sensitise viewers to their physical presence

within the space of an artwork.

Although not a film or video work, one of Pierre Huyghe’s earlier projects explored

the viewer’s physical and conceptual relationship to an artwork which was discretely

installed in public spaces throughout Paris. For the work Huyghe used billboard-

advertising space to present a series of posters that investigated subtle fractures

between reality and representation. Huyghe scouted Paris and selected a number of

vacant billboard sites, rented them, and hired amateur actors to enact an improvisation

of the activity that would be likely to happen in these places. He captured the

performed interactions on 35mm film and printed the images at billboard scale.

Through this action, Huyghe manipulated spaces devoted to marketing and media

advertising by installing his images within the very places from which they were taken

– thus creating a mirroring or doubling of reality where the viewer is unwittingly

implicated in the expanded artwork.112 The anonymous images where then installed

for a month, with visible indication that they were part of an artwork. Huyghe’s

project incorporates a relatively simple strategy to explore relationships between

viewer and artwork, and proposes possibilities for these relationships to be expanded

outside of a gallery context.

Fig. 45, (left) Pierre Huyghe, Little Story, 1995

Fig. 46, (right), Pierre Huyghe, Chantier Barbès-Rochechouart, 1994

Compared to Huyghe’s spatial interventions, Anri Sala has directly confronted the

viewer’s experience of navigating a gallery while also considering means of

112 The artwork remains permanent through the documentation of the billboard sites featuringspontaneous street activity. These images are made all the more interesting by the images of the casualpasser-by who seems to ignore or not notice the anonymous billboard nearby.

74

presenting individual artworks within that space. In two recent, separate exhibitions in

Paris and Warsaw, Sala manipulated and modified the gallery space to activate both

his video works and the viewer’s experience of encountering those works.113 During

the exhibition Entre Chien et Loup/When Night Calls It a Day, Sala reconfigured the

viewer’s sense of time by creating a permanent state of twilight within the gallery.114

As well as prolonging this period of ‘in-between time’, the computer-controlled

lighting also provided optimum conditions to display video projections without

relying on a projection within a separate ‘black box’.115 Sala commented that most of

his videos were also filmed at night and he was interested in projecting images of

night onto a space suspended in twilight:

The space should be one installation, not many, because for me the walking

from one video to the next is as important as watching them. The mental image

of the show for me was to be a landscape, an archipelago at dusk (or maybe at

dawn)?116

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

2004

113 Anri Sala, Entre Chien et Loup/When Night Calls It a Day: ARC/Musèe d’art Moderne de la Ville deParis, Paris, 2004. Anri Sala, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2005.114 In speaking about the title for the exhibition, Sala notes that; ‘“Entre chien et loup” (between dog andwolf) is a nice idiom for twilight in French, the moment of the day when forms cannot be seen well andeverything could potentially be something else, when one can no longer tell a dog from a wolf.’ Sala,

Anri, op.cit. ‘Interview: Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Anri Sala’, p. 17115 In the sense that both dawn and dusk are in-between day and night.116 Ibid, p. 17

75

The formal strategies incorporated in Entre Chien et Loup were expanded the

following year at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw when Sala redesigned

the exhibition to include sloping floors, ambient lighting and strict instructions for the

installation of the video projectors. Sala commented that he approached this exhibition

by disregarding the narrative content of each video, instead seeing them only in terms

of light, movement and sound. He intended to trigger subtle association for the viewer

by lowering the floor towards some works and creating an incline towards other

works, inducing a sense of weight or lightness in the viewer as they approached the

work.117 Through using strategies of creating atmospheric lighting and physical

sensations (of weight and weightlessness), Sala seeks to implicate the viewer within

the narrative space of his videos, perhaps compelling them to watch for longer and

become fully immersed.

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

Castle, Warsaw, 2005

Both Doug Aitken and Kutlug Ataman create spatial narratives through multi-screen

video installations. Ataman’s approach differs to Aitken’s in the way the viewer is

117 Ibid, p. 28

76

given an opportunity to ‘witness’ elements of the confessions and interviews of

different subjects. In Ataman’s installations, personal histories become merged and

multiplied through the combination of voices and faces on projection screens or old

television monitors. Ataman’s installations present a series of interconnected, singular

narratives and portraits, where Aitken creates spatial environments that are open for

the viewer to navigate. Both approaches create a spatial narrative and produce a

situation where the viewer participates in a process of physical editing, piecing

together images, stories, text and sounds as they move through the space created by

the artist. Unable to see all the images at once, viewers are compelled to make choices

as to where they focus or move, resulting in a subjective edit of the artwork each time

it is viewed.

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

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

77

Just as the configuration of a gallery space can be an important element in presenting

video or film works, viewer experience can also be affected by the context of the

video or film’s presentation. Sharon Lockhart’s Teatro Amazonas (1999) – which was

filmed in a colonial theatre in Manaus in Brazil – is a 30-minute film made in a single

take, using a static camera angle from the stage of the theatre. The film is captured

looking back at the audience comprising a cross-section of the town’s one-million-

plus population; the audience in the film serves as a visual representation the town’s

Indigenous and European population and history. The crowd (in the film) sits and

listens to a minimalist, live performance by the Choral do Amazonas, performing out

of camera sight. The score gradually becomes silent over twenty-four minutes,

resulting in the final 6 minutes of the soundtrack consisting of shuffles and coughs

from the audience. Lockhart has specified that the film be shown in cinemas rather

than gallery spaces, thus mirroring the audience in the film and the audience in reality

in a similar way to Pierre Huyghe’s billboard project. Lockhart speaks about the

significance of this effect:

It [Teatro Amazonas] wouldn't function if it didn't have the social space of the

cinema. Strange things happen. I really liked it when someone in the film was

walking out and someone in the cinema from the same side, did the same thing.

Things like this make it complete.118

Fig. 51, Sharon Lockhart, Teatro Amazonas, 1999

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

78

Within this chapter I have discussed ways social engagement is transformed into time-

based artworks. Activities initiated by the artist, such as facilitating collective activity,

directing individual performance or building discursive relationships with their

subjects (through interviews, questionnaires, confessionals, etc) are all used to

construct narrative artworks. As well as discussing the methodologies behind these

works, I considered the ethical complexities when working with others. The ‘field’

identified in this chapter, however, is not autonomous; instead it comprises formal

techniques, methodological strategies and collaborative partnerships from other fields

of research. The openness of this field makes it responsive, fluid and adaptable.

Bourriaud notes that:

As one of the driving spirits behind the Fluxus movement, Robert Filliou said

that art offers an immediate ‘right of asylum’ to all deviant practices which

cannot find their place in their natural bed. So many forceful works of the last

three decades only arrived in the realm of art for the simple reason that they

had reached a limit in other realms.119

The heterogeneous nature of the artworks discussed in this chapter does not mean that

evidence of the artist’s ‘hand’ is lost in a democratic ‘free-for-all’. A consistent

aesthetic connects all the works discussed in this chapter and is defined through the

artist’s filtering and manipulation of the everyday. My research project exists within

the here and now of particular places, and a situational aesthetic emerges from the

relationships between my subjective position within the places I hone in on; the

conditions (geographic, social, political) surrounding those places; the people or

subjects that I engage with; and my strategies for translating experiences of encounter

to the viewer.

In the following chapter, I describe the various contexts in which I have presented the

work included in the project exhibition. These presentations and exhibitions were a

way for me to progressively test strategies of viewer engagement through

experimental installation techniques.

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

79

CHAPTER 3

Research and Process: the development of the project

The ‘body of work’ included in the project exhibition has been resolved through a

process of reflection and refinement and is supported by this exegesis. Together with

selected ‘support material’, the exhibition in conjunction with this exegesis form the

project thesis.

During the project I have made approximately twelve artworks as well as many related

visual experiments.120 In this chapter I discuss the six artworks included in the

exhibition by reflecting on both the methodology behind the artworks and the process

and conceptual concerns of each. These artworks are: the two-channel video

installation, Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006 (presented as one work); the

two-channel video installation, Altered State (2006); documentation of the write/here

project (2005-07); the 25-channel sound installation Familiar Strangers (2007); the

two-channel video installation Unstable Ground (2007); and the single channel video

installation Saturday Nights (2007).

Throughout the candidacy, individual artworks have been included in several

significant publications and exhibitions, and here I reflect on these exhibitions and

their overall contribution to the project. Presentation of the works contributed to a

process of continual refinement – this process is discussed in the section Exhibitions

and Presentation. Included in the exegesis appendices is a description of the artworks

made during the candidature but not included in the project exhibition. These works

are presented as support material to demonstrate their contribution to the development

of my research.

Over the course of the project I worked with hundreds of people, either through

communities or as individuals. Each artwork involved different levels of social

engagement, such as encounters, meetings, observations, discussion and facilitated

performance in sites throughout Tasmania. Some of the artworks evolved fluidly by

incorporating elements of chance, while other works required extensive organisation

and facilitation. As the research project took form, individual artworks became more

ambitious, complex and demanding – a process I discuss in detail later in this chapter.

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

80

Experimentation and Methodology

My interest in experimental narrative forms, coupled with research into particular sites

and situations, shaped the project at an early stage. My methodological approach

progressively took form through visual experimentation and research, and thus

became more refined as the research developed. Early experimentation with video was

used to combine text with image, in some cases overlaying narrative conversations

with images of empty landscapes and documentary observation. Earlier artworks are

more passive and observatory in style. As the project developed, later artworks reflect

a gradual increase in skill and confidence that helped to shift my role from observer to

facilitator, demonstrating a more controlled active engagement between artist and

subject.

Early experimentation also included text installation that encouraged viewer

participation and various installations with controlled lighting and video projection.121

Different formal approaches were later refined and used to inform the final works

included in the submission. Social science research methodology such as interviewing,

questionnaires and observation were also incorporated early in the research and

refined for use in later projects.122

My research process has been additive, in that each artwork expands on the concerns

and processes of earlier works.123 Individual artworks are discussed in detail below,

but here I will briefly outline the common methodological strategies including:

discursive engagement, narrative displacement, and viewer engagement.

Discursive engagement:

The artworks included in the project exhibition involve extensive oral history

research, written questionnaires, interviews, and conversations, as well as in-depth

background research into particular sites, local histories and personal relationships.

This discursive or conversational relationship established through the artworks sets up

an exchange where I both speak to my subjects and they speak back to me. Becoming

121 For example, the support work; Discussion Frames, 2004, asked people questions so they would writeon blank transparent panels installed in public space.122 The underlying principles behind human research ethics remain present throughout each project’sstructure. These principles include: integrity of the researcher and the research to be undertaken; respectfor people, their dignity and rights; beneficence, which means the obligation to maximize possiblebenefits and minimise possible harms; justice, which means asking who ought to receive the benefits of

research and bear its burdens. From the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) NetworkHandbook, Research and Development Office, University of Tasmania, January 2005, p.9)123 A timeline for the overall project is included in the appendices.

81

personally implicated within the situations I investigate is an important aspect of this

engagement, and I (and my camera) become closer to my subjects over time.

This process of working in relation with various subjects also involves an element of

chance and risk. Implicit risk-taking came into clear perspective after months of

setting up certain situations, events or relationships, and then relying on chance and

uncertainty during the actual production of the work. For example, I didn’t know if I’d

be stranded on the West Coast while hitchhiking and filming Arberg Bay, 2006; or

whether Justy Phillips and I could reveal the ‘right’ stories or even raise the necessary

funding to realise the write/here project; I didn’t know who I’d meet while visiting the

Peacock Centre, or later if my subjects would be willing to let me film them in

personal situations while making Unstable Ground; and I wasn’t sure if anyone would

turn up to the dance in Saturday Nights. Ethical responsibility was a bi-product of this

methodology of discursive engagement. Each artwork required close consideration of

human ethics and clearance from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania)

if it was to incorporate other people’s stories and images within the production of the

artwork.

Narrative displacement:

Throughout the project I incorporated documentary approaches to create a series of

artworks that elaborate real situations into fictional or semi-fictional narratives. I

approached fiction as a product of manipulated reality (even subtly manipulated) and

these works involved manipulation such as; creating real and unreal dialogues;

scripting and choreographing interactions and events; using real stories as the script or

content for new narrative works to emerge. I also investigated formal experimentation

with multi-channel video projections, subtitled video narratives, sound environments

and billboard-scale text installation for their potential in creating narrative experience.

Viewer engagement:

I pursued experiments with viewer engagement through strategies such as creating

fractured narrative, immersive installation, and by using time-based media. As the

project developed, I became less concerned with notions of physical viewer

participation and instead focused on strategies to implicate and engage the viewer

within different narrative structures, using combinations of text, video and sound.

Although I found it difficult to quantify and evaluate the level of viewer engagement

with each artwork, contextual research and progressive experimentation focused on

viewer experience as a key aspect of the project. In some cases engagement was

82

gauged through public feedback (especially concerning the write/here project), critical

reviews, or simply observing interactions between the viewer and the installed

artwork.

83

Development of Individual Artworks

The six videos and installations that comprise the project’s exhibition were

predominantly developed during the later half of the candidacy. Most of the projects

required clearance from the Human Research Ethics Committee from the University

of Tasmania, obviously necessitating negotiation and organisation with other

individuals, communities and institutions.124

This chapter aims to represent the additive nature of the research and articulate the

progressive development of ideas, formal resolution and scale of the artworks that is

evident over the period of the candidacy.

Arberg Bay, 2004

5:30 min, DVD loop

Silent

Arberg Bay, 2004 is a semi-fictionalised documentary that describes the relationships

between a group of young surfers and an area of the West Coast of Tasmania. The

short video presents first, second and third person memories and experiences of youth,

surfing, people and the changing conditions of place.

The video traces the changing landscape – from post-industrial mining towns to

remote coastal environments – overlayed with transcription of the group’s

conversation. The video was predominantly filmed from a moving car, using a camera

fixed to the passenger’s window. The conversation in the video is represented as

subtitled text and reveals personal perspectives on real estate, friends, future

aspirations and memory. Like the fleeting images of a passing landscape, the subtitles

provide a hazy transcription of real and imagined conversations. I came across the

idea for Arberg Bay, 2004 almost by chance – a close friend’s father had died in a

fishing accident at Arberg Bay, and it was with my friend that I began to talk about his

relationship to growing up on the West Coast. He had since moved away from the

area, but still visited regularly, although his relationship with the area was growing

more distant.

124 The ethics process required that I resolve the questions I intended to ask participants and, as such,

helped to articulate the intentions behind individual artworks. The other side to this process was the pre-emptive nature of the ethics process; having to predict the process and outcomes of the work before anyresearch was undertaken sometimes seemed overly speculative and contradictory.

84

Fig. 52, Arberg Bay, 2004, video still

Arberg Bay, 2004 was a means to investigate tensions of using video as a form of art

making, while also avoiding categorisation of video as documentary. It incorporates

tracking shots as a device to provide the viewer with an immediate experience of the

landscape – as if sitting in the front seat of a moving car. Jean-Christophe Royoux

notes the relationships between the tracking shot and the viewer in Mèlik Ohanian’s

work:

It [the tracking shot] is essentially a shot that has duration, an empty vessel, as

it where, that create the conditions of expectations and immerses the spectator

in a passivity peculiar to what Mèlik Ohanian calls “suspended moments of

unfettered perception”.125

While filming, I began to build a script for the video over several weekends of visiting

the area. The script took form through recording the conversations of a group of

friends by placing a microphone in the car, asking questions and taking notes. I felt the

video needed to be informed by an intimate knowledge that comes from lived

experience, not a removed, purely fictional speculation. Once I collected the recorded

data I worked through an extensive editing process, refining the material to minimal

125 Royoux, Jean-Christophe, ‘Mèlik Ohanian; the tracking shot, or revealing the world’, Biennale ofSydney 2004: On Reason and Emotion. Exhibition catalogue, p. 166

85

form, in effect ‘distilling’ what I felt to be the essence of the conversations along with

the video footage.126

Fig. 53, Arberg Bay, 2004, video still

Arberg Bay, 2004 is a small but important element of the final submission. Although it

isn’t as technically refined as later projects, the video represents early investigation

into the shifting relationships between people and place. The video also signifies a

gradual development of implicating myself more closely within the production of an

artwork, both through the personal encounters and experience that inform the video

and through my scripting of the semi-fictional narrative that underlies the work.

Arberg Bay, 2006

8:00 min, DVD loop

Silent

Arberg Bay, 2006 re-creates the experience of navigating an area of coastline on the

West Coast of Tasmania, as explored in Arberg Bay, 2004. Using the same

documentary-style video recorded in 16:9 format and incorporating subtitled

conversation, Arberg Bay, 2006 extends on the relationships between people and place

I investigated in the earlier version. Instead of producing the work based on a familiar

126 Shot on 16:9, the format of the video reflects the vastness of the open landscape. While editing thefootage I resisted an urge to represent a documentation of the entire journey, instead creating a suggestion

of a journey. This involved continuously editing the footage and refining the story to a stripped-down,distillation of the events as they unfolded over real time.

86

group of people, Arberg Bay, 2006 uses elements of chance conversations and footage

taken while hitchhiking along the same route as the earlier work. As with the 2004

version, Arberg Bay 2006, doesn’t seek to define a particular place; rather, it examines

the conditions under which different people experience and understand place.

Fig. 54, Arberg Bay, 2006, production still

Informed by Francis Alÿs’ filmed, walking ‘performances’, Arberg Bay, 2006

describes my journey (hitch-hiking and on foot) through post-industrial mining towns

and remote coastline. In writing about Alÿs’ process, Michele Theriault reflects on the

use of walking within contemporary practice:

The walk is his [Alÿs’] privileged space of operation. It attests to and intersects

with, a multitude of presences: the acts and gestures of unknown people, local

and marginalised histories, coincidences – in all, with everything that partakes

of the intimacy of life and makes up its imagery…127

Arberg Bay, 2006 is a means to both extend on and re-interpret an earlier work, as

well as create a piece where I was directly implicated within the scene. Arberg Bay,

2006 is intended to be exhibited together with Arberg Bay, 2004 to make visible the

shifts and slippages between the two videos – slippages of time, place, narrative and

experience.

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

87

Using subtitles in both videos allowed me to compress and filter a collection of

experiences and stories into one anonymous voice. Questions thus inevitably arise as

to whether the voice is mine, an actual account from an invisible narrator, or a

collection of different voices, brought together through the video. This displacement

of voice, narrative and image is something I explore further in later artworks.

The process of making Arberg Bay, 2006, provided me with content and perspectives

that informed the video’s narrative. I avoided articulating a clear plan for shooting the

content of the video, although the fact that I was making a video of the four-day

journey was in the forefront of my mind the whole time. This was at times a strange

experience: being genuinely concerned about getting to a camp site or the changing

weather while also maintaining focus to keep filming the environment and chance

events that happened around me.

Fig. 55, Arberg Bay, 2006, production still

I spent more time editing the 2006 version than I did with the 2004 work. Many of the

shots were long takes – up to 10 minutes each – because of the time taken to record

myself walking along certain paths. While I was walking I became acutely aware of

the passing of time, much more so than when I was filming from a moving vehicle

with a group of friends. I found it difficult to reconcile and respect these extended

moments of time, without making the video impossibly long. I also struggled to

reconcile the manipulation and refinement of the broader collection of stories in the

later Arberg Bay video.

88

Arberg Bay, 2006 is the only work in the submission where I am actually visible in the

work, although this visibility renders me no more present than in later video works.

The action of walking in Arberg Bay, 2006 was a way to create a connection between

places, experiences and the earlier work, Arberg Bay, 2004, rather than a self-portrait.

Altered State, 2006

14:00 min, 2 channel DVD loop

Stereo sound

Altered State is a two-channel video that reveals a series of orchestrated performances

that were filmed in private residences in Hobart. The video shows three people (all

appear to be African), singing or dancing in different, private, domestic spaces. In

each performance the subject waits with neutral expression – occasionally shifting

position, then sings or dances directly in front of the camera. The performers act out

their song and dance, surrounded by suburban, 1960’s Australian architecture or

decorated interiors. This contrast of people, place and experience defines the idea

behind the video – that of people existing in an ‘altered state’. Altered State reveals

three separate but related situations of contemporary displacement. Each of the

subjects in the video already performs publicly in Hobart; but such performances are

usually acted within the context of celebration or community events. For this video

their actions are re-contextualised and introverted, as each person sings or dances

alone at home.

Fig. 56, Altered State, 2006, video stills

89

This video is an early exploration in mixing video portraiture with socio-political

concerns. While making Altered State, I began to confront and juggle two – seemingly

oppositional – directions that Hal Foster suggests, ‘still plague the reception of art –

aesthetic quality versus political relevance.’128

The video incorporates two projections (see documentation of exhibition at Next Wave

Festival: Container’s Village) as a strategy to implicate the viewer between the active

and waiting performer. Only one screen can be seen at a time, resulting in a spatial

experience in which the viewer is compelled to turn or move between the two screens

– in the process creating a subjective version of the artwork. Through the installation

of Altered State the viewer is implicated within a psychological space of memory and

displacement, standing as a witness to the unfolding performance.129

The three performers I chose to work with in the video are Alfred Cauker, Fabio

Chivhanda and Aurelia Nyandeng Ngor. Alfred is a young refugee from Sierra Leone

who dances to his own hip-hop (I had previously worked with Alfred in the earlier

video Big Green, Big Blue130). Fabio is an immigrant to Tasmania from Zimbabwe

who plays the mbira and sings in Shona. Aurelia is a Sudanese elder who came to

Tasmania as a refugee several years ago – she sings her song (which has no title) in

Dinka. Once the performers were confirmed, we worked together to choose and

developed the songs and dances that would fit the structure of the video. Different

locations were also scouted for the separate shoots, despite eventually filming each

performer in their actual home.131

Making Altered State involved developing an atmosphere of familiarity and trust

between, my subjects, me and the camera; and we had to decide whether it was better

to capture this in one sitting over multiple takes or, alternatively, if the same scene

was to be re-shot several times over a period of weeks. In each performance, two

cameras were used to capture the same action from different angles, allowing me to

work with more footage while also minimalising re-shoots. The performances required

four to six takes to achieve the desired result; Alfred and Aurelia were completed in

one day each and Fabio was re-shot over several weeks. Aurelia was especially

128 Foster, Hal, op.cit. p. 172129 Ataman, Kutlug and Politi, Gia, op.cit. p. 93130 Big Green, Big Blue is included as ‘support material’ and a description of the work is included in theexegesis appendices.131 Originally I intended to take Alfred, Fabio and Aurelia to a ‘foreign’ environment as a way to drawattention to ideas of displacement. After working through different options, I realised that each person’shome communicated this sense of displacement better than any contrived situation.

90

difficult to film as conversation had to be translated through her daughter. Somewhere

in the translation Aurelia developed the impression I wanted to film her singing a

traditional song of celebration. After hours of encouragement and discussion about

loss, Aurelia sang a mournful song which communicated experiences of living as a

refugee, being in transition between countries and escaping Sudan with her family.132

Fig. 57, Altered State, 2006, production still

During editing Altered State I concentrated on creating a portrait of each person, while

utilising the two screens to create a relationship between both performer/performer

and viewer/video. Through the editing process I was able to create virtual

relationships between the three people and connect different times and spaces which

incorporated the viewer as they stood between the characters on two opposing screens.

I had concerns that the video may illustrate relationships between these three people

that they might not agree with – that is, impose a pre-determined narrative on their

personal histories. Experiencing the video installation work successfully was very

satisfying, and discussions with Aurelia, Alfred and Fabio confirmed their support for

the work.

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

91

Fig. 58, Altered State, 2006, production still

Through making Altered State I learnt a lot about the anxiety of working with ‘others’.

I found the co-ordination of multiple subjects difficult, and realised the importance of

establishing trust with my subjects (and, by default, their acceptance of my camera).

Through producing this video I began to see my subjects as collaborators in the

making of the artwork and not passive ‘subject matter’. This level of collaboration not

only involved me establishing trust with different people, but also tested my

willingness to ‘let go’ and trust that their contribution would help produce a

meaningful work of art. Altered State contributes to the project exhibition by

indirectly speaking of particular social issues – specifically that of displacement,

migration and changing notions of home.

the write/here project, 2005-07

Installation using 27 advertising billboards throughout Hobart during the Ten Days on

the Island, March 23 to April 1, 2007

Inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, dimensions variable

the write/here project appeared across twenty-seven advertising billboards throughout

Hobart, and presented posters (white text on a bright red background) that explored

public and personal relationships with Hobart.133 write/here was a collaborative

project with Justy Phillips, and individuals and communities throughout Hobart.134

133 In this report, ‘project’ refers specifically to the write/here project and not the research project as a

whole.134 To varying degrees, most artworks included in the project exhibition involved elements ofcollaboration or participation. write/here expanded the experience of working with others to include

92

Developed over a two-year period, write/here was part community event, part

temporary public art project and part media intervention. The project represents

Phillips’ and my motivation to transform billboard-advertising space from

representations of materialist aspirations and ideals into intimate revelations that

represent individuals’ everyday stories and micro-histories. Due to the scale of Hobart,

we were able to utilise most billboard space in the city (as well as one at Hobart

Airport).135 Texts for the billboards were sourced from approximately twenty

facilitated writing workshops and recorded conversations with different social groups

including: recent arrivals to Tasmania from Iran, Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Congo;

female inmates at Risdon Prison; clients at nursing homes; college students;

Aboriginal elders; and anonymous general public submissions.

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

collaboration with another artist (Justy Phillips who was also my PhD co-supervisor), collaboration withother practitioners (early on we developed ideas with a professional writer), collaboration with an artsfestival (Ten Days on the Island), collaboration with local businesses (who either donated billboard sitesor helped fund the printing of the posters), and collaboration with vastly differing communities andindividuals whose thoughts and stories contributed text. write/here clearly displayed evidence of ourfiltering process, but the work’s content and reach had evidently extended to include a broad number ofpeople, organisations and businesses.135 We worked with the signage company Claude Group to secure every billboard under their

management. Even though the Claude Group manages billboard advertising in Hobart there were still afew billboard sites we weren’t able to occupy including several privately owned and two extremely large-scale sites.

93

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

Although the project required over two-years research and development,136 the actual

billboard installation occurred during a two–week period in late March to early April

2007.137 write/here used vernacular aesthetic to realise a temporary, site-specific

work.138 While developing the project, Phillips and I were conscious of other artists

also using billboard space to present temporary projects outside of the gallery

environment such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzner; and more recently, Felix

Gonzalez-Torres and Pierre Huyghe; as well as locally, Peter Burke, a.k.a. Shelly

Innocence, and Lisa Anderson. The project was not a ‘community artwork’ per se, but

it did evolve through in-depth conversations and workshops with particular

communities and individuals that we either sought out, or who approached us.

Our aim with this work was to collect intimate reflections on individual relationships

with home and place, and then present these through a public platform that is usually

dedicated to generic, mass-media messages. We wanted to transform something

private into something public, which, in turn, would be interpreted privately. The

project is obviously manipulated in the way we ‘filtered’ every piece of information to

construct our own distilled version of the tens-of-thousands of words we collected and

136 This period included: applying for funding through federal, state and local council funding bodies; in-kind and cash sponsorship from local business; facilitating writing workshops and conversation withcommunity groups and individuals. Basically, the planning involved two main activities: organisingsponsorship and in-kind support on the one hand, and facilitating discussions, workshops and interviews,on the other.137 the write/here project was included as part of the Visual Arts program for Ten Days on the Island,

2007.138 We received many comments that the white text on red background was mistaken for a new ‘Virgin’,‘Vodophone’ or ‘Coke’ advertising campaign.

94

transcribed. We negotiated ethical issues through maintaining the anonymity of the

stories submitted, and even though images from the conversations and workshops are

used in the project exhibition, the direct connection between particular people and

stories is not revealed. The stories on the billboards existed as a city-wide narrative,

raising questions as to whether this was some sort of artwork; part of an arts festival;

or, perhaps, a new, subversive marketing campaign by Virgin Blue:

In every city, printed words tell us that to live out our dreams, we need to

consume more. Even if the messages we take in through advertising do not

entirely obscure the truth, they are at least a euphemism for it.139

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

Individually, the texts read like fleeting encounters or bytes of conversations, but

viewed collectively (even over a period of time) they became more like a script to an

anonymous story, where the viewer/pedestrian/driver becomes a chance actor –

piecing together elements of a script and constructing a subjective story as they move

through the urban environment. The strategy of involving the viewer within the

artwork relates to Pierre Huyghe’s 2002 billboard project, discussed in the previous

chapter, where the viewer/passer-by is encouraged to question their relationship to the

scenario being played out on the billboard nearby. Huyghe comments on this viewer

relationship:

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

95

When you enter into the show you become an extra yourself. You can be the

viewer of the poster and compare it with the reality being played out nearby,

with the context of the image in which people move, just as you can

unknowingly become an extra in the scene, or even, more rarely, you can

become its agent – an actor.140

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

To build the content for the project we collaborated with a professional writer to

facilitate a number of writing workshops that were open to the general public. After

several workshops we acknowledged the relatively contrived and formal nature of the

responses collected through this strategy, as well as the limited demographic

representation attending the workshops. We wanted to include people who were

willing to share stories and experiences of displacement, isolation, belonging,

incarceration, transition, aspirations, doubt, loss and depression, in order to reveal less

visible perspectives on Hobart’s social climate. After working through an extensive

process of accessing appropriate community groups and individuals (such as prison

inmates, young migrants, college students, people in age-care homes and Aboriginal

elders), we constructed specific questions and conversation topics relative to the

project’s background. Each encounter initiated an open discussion – but we aimed to

guide every conversation in a particular direction that would relate to the overall

project, while still encouraging subjective perspective. Every written response and

recorded conversation was transcribed into a series of anonymous thoughts, memories

and responses.

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

96

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

Justy Phillips and I worked individually to select possible texts for the billboards. This

was an intuitive process and we wanted to work through the approximately 900

responses separately in order to instil our individual perspectives on the content we

had collected. We were conscious that this filtering process would be critical as it

reflected our presence within the project. We attempted to view the stories from a

critical distance, taking into account the anonymity of the subjects, so that we could

select texts without relying on prior knowledge of the subject or the context of the

broader conversation. We compared our separate selections considering narrative

content, relationship to billboard site and to other texts, and length of text, eventually

culling them to a final 27.

97

Fig. 64 and 65, the write/here project, 2005-07, process documentation

write/here incorporated methodologies and working processes that were consistent

with other time-based artworks included in the project exhibition.141 I consider

write/here ‘time-based’ because of the transient nature of its development process and

the manner by which it was encountered by viewers.

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

98

Familiar Strangers, 2007

25 channel sound installation

Approx. 5:00min loop

Speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVD players, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers

Familiar Strangers is a sound installation that presents personal and intimate stories of

isolation as a collective experience. Presented on twenty-five small, discreet speakers,

voices can be heard telling moving, revealing, mundane, humorous and depressing

accounts of isolation – either about extended periods of time or just brief moments of

being alone. Presented together, these voices sound like a collective hum of human

activity which resonate from any active, public space. Individually each speaker tells a

private story specific to Hobart; memories and experiences of personal relationships

and loss that have been transferred and shared between different people.

Made during the final months of write/here, Familiar Strangers extends the process of

drawing connections between subjective experiences by transforming private

memories into public material. For several weeks I collected stories by calling family

and close friends and recording prompted responses. After collecting approximately

fifty stories, I then transcribed all the conversations into scripts, including instructional

notes on the cadence, intonation and pause in each person’s speech. Using these

scripts, family and friends (most of whom had contributed stories to the original

recordings) were then recorded reading someone else’s story, effectively transferring

personal experience between strangers, while also ensuring anonymity for the original

story-teller.

Presented together as a sound environment, the audience is encouraged to walk

through the almost schizophrenic collection of reflective, melancholic and hesitant

voices – creating an additional narrative made up of fragments of stories heard.

Multiple processes of interpretation underlie this work: my interpretation of the initial

recorded stories as scripted text; the readers’ interpretation of the script as their voice

is recorded while reading out loud; and finally the listeners’ interpretation of the

individual and collective stories that surround them in the sound-scape.

99

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

Similar to write/here, the process of making Familiar Strangers involved a strategy of

engaging in a discursive survey with different subjects as a means to gather content

and define the project’s direction. The content of this survey was filtered through a

process of re-interpretation (both my own and the people who read the scripts), which

opened questions to whether these were real or imagined memories and, by reading

them, if it is possible to occupy someone else’s reality – even if only for a moment.

Using speech to fracture the relationship between truth and experience runs parallel to

some of Gillian Wearing’s videos, especially, 2 into 1, and 10-16, where she displaces

the voice of her subjects between people of vastly different ages. In writing about this

fracturing, Dan Cameron observes:

100

To truly feel someone else’s emotions and sensations in place of our own, to

open one’s mouth to speak and have another’s voice emerge, would involve

such a profound displacement of one’s sense of self that afterwards it might be

impossible to fully regain perspective as a unified self. Worse still, we might

never again be satisfied with staying within the confines of our individual

shells.142

Gathering the content of the work depended on developing clear, direct and open

questions or conversation prompts. Each conversation had to be independent and

open, while still revolving around the same focus on individual stories of isolation. I

developed a relatively simple strategy of locating people who were willing to talk

through explanatory emails and word-of-mouth. I then called each person, informing

them that the conversation would be recorded but they would remain anonymous due

to my transcription and exclusion of any names.

To record the stories, each person read the transcribed script two or three times. Often

the second recording was the most natural, but the multiple recordings also provided

more material to construct a sound file from sections of each recording. I then had to

allocate each voice to a separate speaker. Technically, this involved resolving a series

of problems, such as how to best present one voice per speaker, without having to

install twenty-five CD or DVD players and amplifiers. These issues were resolved by

combining five separate voices on one DVD; the DVD player then plays each of the

five channels on a separate speaker in the space.

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

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

101

Each of the stories in Familiar Strangers provides a personal perspective on a

situation of isolation. These stories are significant in the way they reveal the

complexities and commonalities of everyday moments or life-changing events.

Beyond the tangibility and intimacy of these stories, it is the process of re-

interpretation that defines this work. Initially I was unsure whether reading a script of

someone else’s experience would be convincing; but the commonalities between

people’s experiences provided a familiarity that lent empathy and conviction to the

way people read each script.

Unstable Ground, 2006-07

8:30 min, 2 channel DVD loop

Stereo sound

Unstable Ground is a two-channel video, made over a nine-month period in

institutional, public and private spaces in Hobart. Unstable Ground is both a portrait

of people and place, using documentary style video, semi-fictionalised narrative and

ambient sound to reveal aspects of the lives of two men who suffer mental illness as

they interact with different private and public spaces throughout the city. Unstable

Ground began through my interest in a local mental health care facility, the Peacock

Centre, visited by both men.

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

102

The Peacock Centre had previously been the family home of the influential Peacock

family.143 I was initially drawn to the changing purpose and meaning of the mansion. I

visited several times a week, usually during lunch and began to involve myself within

and initiate social activities as a way to meet and engage with people who were

visiting there. After several months of visiting and filming, I began to focus on the

lives of two clients, Stuart and Gordon. Both maintained a level of stability in their

lives through different artistic pursuits: Gordon often played the piano to himself in an

empty room in the centre, while Stuart spent countless hours creating abstract,

colourful drawings. Stuart and Gordon both knew of each other but had no social

contact, despite the connections between their interests and personal histories. I began

to focus on establishing a parallel existence between the two men through the

choreography of two-channel video – creating a virtual connection between Stuart and

Gordon by constructing a semi-fictionalised narrative. The video is presented on two

screens and follows Stuart and Gordon through public, private and fictional spaces.

Various interactions and conversational exchanges appear on both screens – some

directed and scripted, other moments filmed through chance encounters or long

periods of conversation. Curator Tania Doropoulos writes about the structure of the

video by observing that, ‘Newitt places his protagonists in multiple contexts,

confusing reality with fiction and vice-versa, until we are trapped in a space that is

neither reality nor fiction, confused and disorientated.’144

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

143 Bequeathed to the Tasmanian Government in the 1940’s, the family specified that the building must beused as a place to care for people with incurable illness. After its use as an old-age care home, thePeacock mansion became a mental care facility, providing respite and services for people suffering

various mental illnesses – particularly schizophrenia.144 Doropoulos, Tania, Eternal Beautiful Now, exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Sherman Galleries, May2007, n.pag

103

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

The video progresses through three untitled chapters: beginning with images of the

Peacock mansion, where after a series of observations and architectural studies, Stuart

and Gordon are introduced; it then cuts to close-ups of the two men in their private

environments, observing personal idiosyncrasies over long periods of time. Finally the

video moves to a fictional space, made actual through subtle choreography. From the

initial objective, observatory nature of the video, the narrative gradually becomes

increasingly intimate; psychological space is externalised with images of Gordon

playing a grand piano to an empty theatre, while Stuart opens the blinds in his dark

room and stares at the world outside.

I wanted to implicate my camera (therefore myself) within multiple contexts in order

to act as a conduit to reveal interactions, conversations and events that connect these

two men to the surrounding environment and to each other. Reflecting on Kutlug

Ataman’s films, Rachel Kent identified that, ‘the camera becomes a mediator between

artist and subject and the audience its witness and collaborator.’145 A literal and

conceptual space is created between the two screens for the viewer to inhabit; it is

within this space that the viewer may empathise with – or at least observe – Stuart and

Gordon, connecting with a sense of anxiety and isolation through negotiating the

space between the images on screen and the subtitled narrative. Doropoulos notes that:

As an audience, we are allowed to connect with them in a very real sense, as we

discover their personalities and quirks. Through the artist’s connection with

them, we too connect. When the video cycle finally reaches their dream-space,

we reach our own dream space with them, imbued with a sense of justice or

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

104

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

viewer.146

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

Unstable Ground involved spending the longest period of time within a particular

situation. The nine months or so in which I developed friendship and trust with Stuart

and Gordon added a level of complexity to the video and a new level of social

engagement within the research. The social processes behind making Unstable

Ground (such as baking cakes for weekly lunches, spending long periods of time in

conversation, setting up particular situations) informed subsequent projects, including

write/here and especially Saturday Nights. For a long time I was unsure about the

social processes behind the work, I was particularly concerned that I could be using

significant time on a video that lacked direction or actual subjects. I was clear from

the beginning that I was visiting the centre to make a video, and rather than imposing

my camera in different situations, I waited and watched as different interactions

emerged, eventually asking if I could film. During the last three months of filming and

editing I stopped visiting the centre, partially because I was focusing on filming

Gordon and Stuart outside of the Peacock Centre, and partially because the centre

changed management and its operational structure became much more restrictive to

visitors and clients.

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

105

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

I spent more time editing Unstable Ground than any other work in the exhibition. I

was conscious of the need to create a specific atmosphere through the work, while also

avoiding a didactic representation of two men’s psychological instability. I

approached this problem through several different strategies: using subtitled text

rather than recorded conversations to provide an underlying narrative (creating a

fracture between text and image); using the subtitled text on both screens to open

questions about which voice is telling which story – the stories may have come from

Gordon or Stuart or me or another client from the Centre; creating an ambient

soundtrack (recorded from real situations) that connects different spaces and times and

adds to the sense of possible fiction behind the video; and finally by ending the video

with a series of constructed situations and scripted actions – both Gordon and Stuart

106

are obviously interacting for the camera – raising questions as to whether the whole

video was, in fact, a construct.

Saturday Nights, 2007

10:30 min, HDV DVD loop

Stereo sound

Saturday Nights is a single channel video about a country-dance that I facilitated in

early March 2007 at the Koonya Hall on the Tasman Peninsula. Saturday Nights

combines documentary observations and scripted actions to reveal aspects of the

personal histories and relationships within a community involved in country-dances.

Saturday Nights was commissioned as part of the Port Arthur Project during Ten Days

on the Island, 2007.147

Over the period of making Saturday Nights I used previous experiences of building

relationships to inform the production of a participatory event aiming to create a new

narrative layer to the cultural landscape of the Tasman Peninsula – a landscape which

has been scared by the events at Port Arthur ten years ago.148 I discovered that a

country-dance and the micro-rituals associated with the event (preparation, rehearsal,

music, supper, dancing, etc.) would be an appropriate means to represent and

interrogate the present cultural experience of the Tasman Peninsula area – and to

visualise paradoxical isolation and connection. Although Saturday Nights incorporates

aspects of nostalgic memory and historic re-enactment, the artwork equally seeks to

address the present conditions and issues of a country community. In his essay ‘Artist

as Historian’, Mark Godfrey identifies methodologies used by contemporary artists to

connect present experience through historic perspective:

Though research on these subjects often begins with an invitation to make work

in a particular location, [Matthew] Buckingham’s work does not really reflect

on his own personal biography as a mobile artist travelling to these locations.

His subjects tend not to be particularly esoteric or quirky or obscure.

Buckingham rather initiates his historical research because of the urgency of a

147 Port Arthur Project was curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clark, involved 25 artists and continuedbeyond Ten Days on the Island, running from March 16 to April 15, 2007. The exhibition was ‘alandmark series of commissioned site-specific installations that engage with Port Arthur's history and

culture.’ (From the Port Arthur Project press release)148 2007 was the 10th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, an unplanned but powerful associationwith the timing of Port Arthur Project.

107

particular idea in the contemporary moment, and his research produces a

politicised reinterpretation of the present.149

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

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

Saturday Nights investigates contemporary art as event or constructed situation, and

modifies everyday experience to reveal a perspective on a place that is often seen only

through its past. Given this premise, the following questions by Carolyn Christov-

Bakargiev regarding Pierre Huyghe’s practice also seems appropriate, ‘Must the space

of ritual always be defined in terms of the backwards gaze as a form of inanimate

reception? Can the artist initiate the production of a new reality, thus creating a form

of public art that truly modifies shared space, rather than temporarily occupying it?’150

149 Godfrey, Mark. op.cit. p. 147150 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, op.cit. p. 405

108

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

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

As a participant in Port Arthur Project, I wanted to avoid engaging with the convict

history of Port Arthur, and the limited perspective of only seeing Port Arthur through

its colonial past. I also wanted to avoid further sensationalising the Port Arthur

massacre – an event which received a flood of international media attention. Instead I

aimed to find ways of working with the current community from the broader Tasman

Peninsula area, to develop a project that reflected the Tasman Peninsula as a living

place, not just a relic of the past. This was a difficult task from the position of an

‘outsider’, although over time I managed to meet and interview approximately 30

people from the Tasman Peninsula area. Conversely, I found my position as ‘outsider’

also privileged me with an objective perspective that allowed me to film with the clear

109

intention of making a video work and not an overly familiar ‘home movie’.151

Through organising a country-dance, I wanted to make visible the relationships and

connections that binds a community together, especially a community that has a recent

history of violence and trauma.

Saturday Nights is the final artwork produced as part of the research project. Here I

used high definition video to capture footage that was of a better quality than previous

video works. I wanted the images of the dance and the decorated hall to be rich, clear

and almost tangible, creating an atmosphere of both connection and isolation, a sense

of the past and present colliding, of individuals coming together and relating through

the dance, but also speaking from an isolated and ‘removed’ place, leaving questions

as to whether the dance was actually imagined or had indeed occurred in reality.

Saturday Nights was developed over a six-month period during which I worked

between Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula. The project began by investigating a large

number of oral history transcripts from members of the Tasman Peninsula community

recorded in the 1990s by local historians.152 Through this process I came to identify

country-dances as important community events. I was also drawn to the changing

nature of social activities in the area.153 I undertook several months of interviews to

gain a better understanding of the history and people involved in country-dances on

the Tasman Peninsula; this process also allowed me to make connections and

introduce myself to different members of the community, and to gauge the potential

for organising an event of my own. Parallel to the interviews, I worked to locate the

best place to hold the dance and find appropriate musicians who would be accepted by

the audience as well as willing to be directed for the video.

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

110

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

Up until the night of the dance I had no certainty – just general indications – that

anyone would turn up to the event. Therefore, my outline for the video had to be left

open – either to incorporate scenes of a social activity or, alternately, to reveal

melancholic images of a band playing to an empty hall. I was pleased to see people

attending the event, and therefore directed and edited the video to reflect the

experience of a shared social event. At the beginning of the night I made it clear to the

crowd attending that the entire event would be filmed and incorporated into an

artwork, I also indicated that I would be directing certain shots during the dance. In

editing Saturday Nights, I incorporated narrative collected from earlier interviews,

observatory footage of sites around the Tasman Peninsula, scripted scenes of

preparatory activity, and finally selected scenes from the facilitated country-dance. I

made no distinction between directed scenes and spontaneous observations. The

openness of the work’s narrative structure thus maintained the universality of the

video, and its relevance outside of the context of Port Arthur and the Tasman

Peninsula. In essence, the video aims to give the viewer the sense of bearing witness

to a contemporary fable.

111

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

Saturday Nights was a project that involved building relationships within a tight-knit

community and facilitating that community’s participation within an artwork. On a

more ambitious scale, Saturday Nights also aimed to contribute to the collective

memory of the community by creating the template for an event that can be elaborated

on and re-interpreted over time – an intention also speculated by Huyghe in

Streamside Day. It is difficult to gauge the success or otherwise of such projects,

without somehow being able to map, evaluate or quantify the discussion or the

circulation of these collective memories. Several subsequent visits to the Tasman

Peninsula since filming the dance suggests the intention of producing a work with a

‘life possibility’ have occurred.154 Producing life possibility or not, my main interest

and motivation in making the artwork was to create an event that represented the

connections and relationships that bind people to a community.

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

112

Exhibitions and Presentation

Throughout the candidacy I have presented artworks within group and solo

exhibitions, providing the opportunity for experimentation and critical feedback.

Testing possible installation methods also allowed me to refine and modify of each

work. The works included in the project exhibition are connected by my exploration

of relationships between people and place through narrative structure. I have

approached this research as an open and additive investigation. The project exhibition

demonstrates the heterogeneous, additive nature of the research by visually and

conceptually revealing common ideas, concerns and aesthetics.

While earlier artworks such as Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006 were not

originally made to fit within the structure of a particular exhibition, I tested exhibiting

them together in Quote, by presenting the two videos as back-to-back, medium size

projections.155 Exhibited in this way, the viewer’s action of walking from one screen

to the opposite side dramatically compresses the two-year time lapse between the two

videos. I sought a simplified version of the physical editing Kutlug Ataman describes,

especially in relation to his multi-screen installation Küba.156 I refined the Arberg Bay

videos for this exhibition by progressively editing each work into a ‘tighter’ narrative

format. For example, I re-edited Arberg Bay, 2004 after making the 2006 version, in

order to avoid repetition of images and narrative text.

155 Quote. Curated by Colin Langridge, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, August 2006156 Politi, Gia and Ataman, Kutlug, op.cit. p. 183

113

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

Gallery, Hobart

In contrast to the progressive development of the Arberg Bay videos, Altered State

was produced with a clear installation format in mind. It was exhibited as part of the

2006 Next Wave Festival: Containers Village and also as part of the exhibition Text

Me… at the Devonport Regional Gallery. The theme for the 2006 Next Wave Festival:

‘Empire Games’157 clearly connected with some of the issues and approaches behind

Altered State: especially displacement, identity and performance. During the Next

Wave Festival, Altered State was installed on two facing panels, within the restrictive

space of a shipping container.158 In Devonport, the work was presented on two

157 The 2006 Next Wave Festival: Empire Games coincided with the 2006 Commonwealth Games inMelbourne. Much of the work included in the festival sought to give an alternative voice to the mass of

advertising and ‘games fever’ that infiltrated Melbourne at the time.158 The images of people projected within a shipping container also drew connotations of migration,displacement and asylum seeking.

114

adjacent monitors with the sound heard through headphones. Both installation

methods were successful, although the immersive, spatial experience of standing

between two projections (as presented at the Next Wave Festival) proved far more

effective. By testing these two approaches, I came to realise that the important aspect

of the presentation is to involve the viewer within the subject’s performance and gaze

as they stand and watch moments of action and reaction.

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

2006, Melbourne

115

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

Unstable Ground also incorporates two-screen projections, although within a different

format. Presented as part of the exhibition Eternal Beautiful Now at Sherman

Galleries, Sydney, Unstable Ground was projected onto two adjacent screens that

were linked to create a corner space. Projected this way the video creates a space for

the viewer to become immersed in the two video-portraits. The corner projection also

visually connects the conversation and exchange between the two, isolated subjects.

The claustrophobic presentation of Unstable Ground is intended to heighten the sense

of introversion and anxiety that permeates the video. Unstable Ground has also been

progressively refined for the project exhibition. The process of making the video

resulted in a body of work that included a series of production stills and the video

Intermission, an extended version of Gordon’s (one of the video’s subject’s), Theatre

Royal piano performance that features at the end of Unstable Ground.159 These related

works helped to inform the content and installation of Unstable Ground; Intermission

was an especially valuable experiment in creating an immersive, structural video

installation.

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

116

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

Galleries, Sydney

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

Works such as the write/here project were conceived as a temporary event and remain

permanent only through their documentation and the used, vinyl poster skins. The

experience of seeing the scale of the billboards, the changing light and weather

conditions, the urban activity and the act of moving through the city to encounter

different (sometimes almost hidden) messages provided unexpected and varied

experiences of the project that are difficult to reproduce within the exhibition. The

selected documentation of write/here and its development (including workshops and

conversation groups) reflects the depth of our research and engagement behind the

project.

117

The integration of the write/here project and Familiar Strangers within the project

exhibition also reveals connections between the two artworks, especially their mutual

incorporation of collected voices through methodologies of surveying and

interviewing. The collection of melancholic voices in Familiar Strangers provides an

aural layer to the visual experience of the write/here project documentation.

Fig. 91 and 92, the write/here project, 2005-07, project documentation, installation view

Boag's Beerlovers Centre, Launceston

Both Familiar Strangers and Saturday Nights were originally produced in relation to

an exhibition or event: Familiar Strangers as part of the exhibition Made Public and

Saturday Nights as part of Port Arthur Project.160 While these artworks were made to

160 Made Public was curated by Paula Silva, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, January 11 – February 1, 2007.Port Arthur Project was curated by Noel Frankham and Julia Clark, as part of Ten Days on the Island, thePort Arthur Historic Site, March 16 – April 15, 2007.

118

directly address aspects of the research project, they also responded to the exhibition

themes. Involvement in both Made Public and Port Arthur Project proved a positive

experience, and producing work for the exhibitions was helped by critical reflection

and discussion with other artists and the curators.

Familiar Strangers is a complicated work to install, and participation in Made Public

afforded the opportunity to resolve several technical issues. Installed in the Carnegie

Gallery, the speakers produced a clear but very discreet sound; they were small

enough for the visitors to hold one next to their ear and listen to individual stories,

while they could also hear the overall chatter from the other twenty-four speakers.

Installing the speakers in a grid formation created a visual field while also leaving

space between each for the viewer to walk through without becoming tangled. This

grid formation has been utilised within the project exhibition, although I have refined

the installation so the equipment behind the work is not as clearly visible as in the

Carnegie Gallery.161

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

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

119

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

Saturday Nights was originally shown in the Asylum at the Port Arthur Historic Site

as part of Port Arthur Project. My choice of the Asylum was significant as it was

reputed to be the best dancing hall in Tasmania.162 Projecting Saturday Nights in the

Asylum was a way for me to re-introduce the living Tasman Peninsula community to

a site that had been lost to them, temporarily re-establishing the hall as a place of

celebration. Projected onto a single, anamorphic screen, Saturday Nights is a more

cinematic installation than the other multi-screen video works. I have included the

same festoon lighting in the installation that was used during the dance; the single

screen of the projection is transformed into a theatrical space, creating an environment

that reflects the atmosphere of the dance depicted in the video.

162 The Asylum was used as the town hall as well as an occasional dance hall after the penal settlement

closed in 1877. Through my interviews with the community I discovered a degree of animosity towardsthe controlled nature of the Port Arthur Historic Site and its management, especially towards thetransition of the Asylum from community space into a museum.

120

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

Since presenting Saturday Nights within the Port Arthur Project, I have refined the

video through progressive editing and, have also resolved problems of inconsistent

sound quality. I was conscious of sound production while making the work (especially

as sound quality had been an issues with earlier works), but found that sound was still

an element that needed resolving during its presentation at Port Arthur. As well as

making the sound clearer and more consistent, I re-edited the video to further refine its

narrative structure so it is less descriptive and more openly suggestive – creating a

video that speaks of relationships and place rather than a documentary of a country

dance.

121

CHAPTER 4

Conclusion

In conclusion, I address my initial research questions and aims as well as considering

some of the outcomes of specific artworks included in the project exhibition and their

relationships to these questions.

As well as summarising the outcomes of the project and the knowledge it adds to the

field, it is satisfying to reflect on the shift in practice that has occurred through this

research and to realise that methods and formal skills learnt through earlier works

(previous to this PhD project) have significantly informed and contributed to its

successful completion. Throughout my research, I have sought to challenge my

approach to art practice by activating various participatory situations and encountering

different people and places. During this process I felt a level of anxiety and

apprehension about my research methodologies, and was also unsure how such

methodologies would be consolidated to form a physical artwork. In hindsight, the

changes and developments within my practice have been significant in terms of

production, methodology and subject matter, and my sense of apprehension seems

most likely a result of working through those changes.

From the beginning, I sought to incorporate a situational aesthetic to identify, describe

and elaborate social and cultural relationships with local places through time-based

narrative forms.163 I questioned contemporary art’s capacity to fulfil that objective by

developing a series of interrelated artworks as well as defining a relevant contextual

field of relevant artists. Here I conclude it is possible to develop artwork that engages

with and addresses fragile and complex relationships to place without resorting to

social commentaries or ethnographic documentation. Each work in the project

exhibition articulates both internal (psychological) and external (situational)

experience – reducing the space between artist, subject and place. Observational

techniques of recording social activity, speaking with people and photo-documenting

places, were at times incorporated to identify relationships between people and place;

while experimental narrative forms were used to describe and elaborate those

relationships. The project concludes that while contemporary art has a capacity to

163 I have made work specifically from Tasmanian places because personal implication and engagementwith the subjects I explored was a crucial element of the research process. I intend to expand thisapproach in the future to engage with different cultural and social contexts.

122

describe and elaborate a sense of place within individuals and communities, a level of

critical distance is also crucial in this context. While the artist might establish

meaningful relationships with a subject, those relationships are determined by the

artist’s intention to create an artwork – even if it is constructed from time-based media

such as video or film. The question of how much critical distance is needed and to the

extent to which relationships are maintained after the work is produced remains

dependent on the circumstances surrounding the work and, ultimately, reflects the

artist’s personal approach and ethical position, along with the preference of the

subjects.

During the research, I investigated events, experiences and memories that bind people

into communities and to place, and ways an artwork can elaborate these. The events,

experiences and memories that informed individual works emerged out of everyday

situations, either by chance or through careful manipulation and facilitation. Each of

the artworks included in the project exhibition and discussed in the contextual chapter

all reflect states of change, displacement and transition. The project concludes that for

an artwork to engage with a context of transition it must capture experiences and

conversations over a period of time, revealing the subtlety of these ‘states of being’

with sensitivity and commitment. The project has described how conversations and

experiences can be elaborated through the artist’s filtering and manipulation of

narrative elements in order to retain a sense of universality – thus creating connections

with other places, people and situations. An early example of this filtering process is

Arberg Bay, 2004, as it demonstrates an approach to presenting individual voices as

collective experience. This approach was extended through subsequent artworks,

especially Arberg Bay, 2006, the write/here project, Familiar Strangers and Unstable

Ground.

The project also questioned the function and use of social engagement and constructed

situations within contemporary art practice, and asked how these situations and

conversational engagements can be transferred from one context to another. By

discussing the work of Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Anri Sala, Kutlug

Ataman, Gillian Wearing, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean, Sharon

Lockhart and Doug Aitken, numerous examples are provided to illustrate the breadth

of art practice that incorporates social engagement. Many of these artists utilise

constructed situations as a means to manage the changing social circumstances that

surround their projects. By incorporating constructed situations, these artists work as

directors and facilitators to manipulate and take control of the situations they

123

encounter, producing narratives which then elaborate as well as describe social and

cultural relationships with place. Constructing situations therefore allows for a

creative scripting of the everyday, subtly shifting common actions and events into new

narrative realms. Overall, this project concludes that by using real people and real

places within constructed situations, everyday space is transformed to incorporate a

fictional dimension, thus revealing questions of relationships between reality and

fiction.

Throughout this project I have developed an argument for the validity of social

engagement as a form of production, finding that it must incorporate a level of

criticality, revelation and intimacy in order to provide a perspective on place that

explores beyond the surface of ‘common knowledge’. I developed different modes of

social engagement through extensive interviews, recorded conversations, writing

workshops and facilitated performances, as a way to gather ‘data’ for the content of

individual artworks. Even if I investigated elements of everyday life and common

places within this project, the narratives and experiences I have extricated and

revealed provide new cultural and artistic knowledge. The ‘Peacock Centre’ in

Unstable Ground, the Tasman Peninsula in Saturday Nights, the landscape in Arberg

Bay or the everyday interiors in Altered State may belong to common knowledge and

experience, but the personal narratives and images that emerged from within those

environments are only revealed after long periods of engagement and investigation.

The question of relationships between artist and subject and the ethical responsibilities

of artists who incorporate other people’s stories within artworks remains open and

relative. Here I have addressed ethical responsibility in relation to most of the works

included in the project exhibition and each provides a case study for different ethical

issues and possible means to navigate them. Establishing trust and familiarity with my

subjects in order to record private conversations, micro-performances and interactions

was crucial in works such as Altered State, Unstable Ground and Saturday Nights.

These works revealed questions about my position in relation to my subjects and how

the presence of a video camera can mediate experience. The project also provides a

contextual overview of artists who establish different relationships with their subjects,

and provides examples of relationships which are either personal and conversational

(Kutlug Ataman, Gillian Wearing, Anri Sala); celebratory and social (Pierre Huyghe,

Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Sharon Lockhart); observatory and detached (Gillian

Wearing, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean). The project concludes that

within a range of approaches, there is no single clear ethical guideline to determine the

124

correct way of incorporating other people’s stories into an artwork. Although human

research ethics policies clearly state the underlying principles to guide this type of

research, the artworks included in the project exhibition and discussed within the

contextual field are fluid, responsive, conversational and precarious – ethical issues

therefore need to be addressed progressively through the development of individual

works. The success of these works lies in their ability to use subjective stories without

exploitation in a way that addresses universal themes and issues – transforming the

here and now into a broader context and engaging other people within the narrative

space of the artwork.

Lastly, I have concluded that the viewer can be implicated within the exhibition space

through strategies such as immersion and being incorporated within a fractured

narrative. Therefore the heterogeneous structure of the project exhibition doesn’t

impose a particular pathway or method for viewing the work. The exhibition can

either be seen as one large, interrelated narrative, or as a collection of individual

narratives which can be interpreted in isolation from each other. New, subjective

narratives emerge through a cross-over of fragments of sounds, memories, images,

stories and scenarios. The works discussed within this exegesis and included in the

project exhibition seek to open a space and provide narrative elements for the viewer

to ‘complete’ through active engagement. Just as this research argues against the

dogmatic approach of the artist ‘speaking for others’, so too does it avoid artworks

which ‘tell the viewer’ about particular issues or places. Such active viewer

engagement may happen through negotiating and interpreting the space between text

and image (an in Unstable Ground, Saturday Nights or Arberg Bay 2004 and 2006), or

by subjectively reassembling multiple narrative elements (as in Altered State, the

write/here project or Familiar Strangers) – opening up questions as to whether the

artwork represents one person’s story or if, in fact, it actually connects a combination

of stories, experiences, places and perspectives.

Without reaching a singular conclusion – this project has proposed ways to identify,

describe and elaborate social and cultural relationships with place through narrative

artworks. The artworks discussed within this research remain open and subjective,

inviting the viewer to contribute their own relational perspectives to these narratives.

125

APPENDIX 1

Bibliography

Abell, Judith, ‘The Write/Here Project’, Landscape Architecture Australia 114, May2007

Ahtila, Eija-Liisa and Iles, Chrissie, ‘Thinking in Film: Eija-Liisa Ahtila inConversation with Chrissie Iles’, Parkett 68, 2003

Aitken, Doug, ‘Amanda Sharp in conversation with Doug Aitken’, Doug Aitken.

London and New York: Phaidon, 2001

Alÿs, Francis, ‘A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves

Mountains’, Artforum, (Summer 2002)

Arden, Paul, ‘Experimenting With the Real’, Contemporary Practices: Art as

Experience. (eds.) Paul Arden, Pascal Beausse and Laurent Goumarre, Paris: Dis Voir,1999

Birnbaum, Daniel, ‘Running on Empty: Daniel Birnbaum on the Art of Dominique

Gonzalez-Foerster’, Artforum, November 2003

Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production. Columbia: Columbia University

Press, 1993

Bourriaud, Nicolas, Postproduction. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002

Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002

Brown, Katrina M., Douglas Gordon. London: Tate, 2004

Buren, Daniel, ‘Conversation between Daniel Buren and Pierre Huyghe’, Parkett 66,

(2002)

Burn, Gordon, ‘The Encounter With Reality’, Parkett 70, 2002

Cameron, Dan, ‘I’m Desperate: Gillian Wearing’s art of transposed identities’, Parkett

70, 2002

Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life. trans. Steven Rendall, Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1984

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. ‘Pierre Huyghe: Through a Looking Glass’, Pierre

Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004

Copeland, Mathieu, ‘The In-Between’, Anna Sanders Films. Verona: Forma and Les

Presses Du Reel, 2003

Corrin, Lisa G, ‘Self-Questioning Monuments’, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Exhibition

catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, 2000

126

Cousins, Mark and Macdonald, Kevin (eds.), Imagining Reality: the Faber Book of

Documentary. London: Faber and Faber, 2006

Dan, Calin, Emotional Architecture. Exhibition catalogue, Bucharest: MNAC The

National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004

Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy (eds.), Place. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005

Dean, Tacita, ‘Tacita Dean: talks about Boots’, Artforum, October 2003

Dean, Tacita, ‘Tristan Da Cunha’, Artforum, Summer 2005

Deutsche, Rosalyn, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Chicago: MIT

Doherty, Claire, ‘The New Situationists’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to

Situation. (ed.) Claire Doherty, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004

Doropoulos, Tania, Eternal Beautiful Now. Exhibition catalogue, Sherman Galleries:

Sydney, May 2007

Eleey, Peter, ‘The Exploded Drive-In’. Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers. Exhibition

catalogue, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007

Ferguson, Niall (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York:

Basic Books, 1999

Fiedler, Jeannine (ed.), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. New York: Phaidon, 2001

Foster, Hal, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’, Return to the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End

of the Century. Cambridge: October Books, 1997

Fox, Dan, ‘Welcome to the Real World’, Frieze, issue 90, April 2005

Gillick, Liam, Five or Six. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2000

Gingeras, Alison M, ‘The decorative as Strategy’, Parkett 66, 2002

Gingeras, Alison M. ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas

Hirschhorn’, Thomas Hirschhorn. London and New York: Phaidon, 2004

Godfrey, Mark, ‘Articulate Enigma: the works of Anri Sala’, Anri Sala. London and

New York: Phaidon, 2006

Godfrey, Mark, ‘The Artist as Historian’, October 120, Spring 2007

Graham, Dan, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art.Cambridge: MIT, 1999

Greer, Germaine, ‘Boots’, Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006

Guagnini, Nicolas and Schneider, Karin, ‘Quasi Schizophrenia: Notes for a Liberated

Condition’, Parkett 68, 2003

127

Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Remote Possibilities: a roundtable discussion on Land Art’s

changing terrain’, Moderated by Tim Griffin, with Claire Bishop, Lynne Cooke, PierreHuyghe, Pamela M. Lee, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittle, Artforum, Summer 2005

Huyghe, Pierre, ‘Space Explorer: interview between Tom Morton and Pierre Huyghe’,

Frieze 100, August 2006

Kent, Rachel, ‘Reality at the Service of Fiction: the Film Art of Kutlug Ataman’,

Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum ofContemporary Art, 2005

Koch, Gertrude, ‘Home Movies: or the hardship of living in houses’, Parkett 68, 2003

Kwon, Miwon, ‘The Wrong Place’, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. (ed.)

Claire Doherty, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004

Lomax, Yve, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogues and Matters of Art, Nature

and Time. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005

Mc Donough, Tom (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationists International. Cambridge:

MIT/October, 2002

Mackenzie, Andrew, ‘Memory and Invention’, Architectural Review Australia 91,

2005

Maclear, Kyo and Testa, Bart (eds.), Life Style. London: Phaidon, 2000

Malpas, J.E., Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: CUP,

1999

Massèra, Jean-Charles, ‘The Lesson of Stains: Towards an Aesthetic of

Reconstruction’. The Third Memory. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou and the

Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 2000

Mast, Gerald, Film, Cinema, Movie: a Theory of Experience. Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1983

Mau, Bruce, ‘Getting Engaged: The Global Image Economy: Tourism’, Life Style.

Kyo Maclear (ed.), London: Phaidon, 2000

Merewether, Charles, ‘Taking Place: Act of Survival for a Time to Come’, 2006

Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact. Exhibition Catalogue, Sydney, 2006

Miller, Jeremy, ‘Travellers’ Tales’, Parkett 66, 2002

Moeller, Christian, A Time and Place: Christian Moeller Media Architecture, 1991 –

2003. Switzerland: Lars Muller, 2004

Molon, Dominic, ‘Observing the Masses’, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations.London: Merrell, 2003

Nash, Mark, ‘Kutlug Ataman’s experiments with truth’, Kutlug Ataman: perfect

strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005

128

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Anri Sala’, Anri Sala.

London: Phaidon, 2006

Pierre Huyghe. Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Italy: SKIRA, 2004)

Politi, Gia, ‘Kutlug Ataman and Atom Egoyan: and the world will be as one…’, Flash

Art, May/June 2006

Royoux, Jean-Christophe, ‘Mèlik Ohanian; the tracking shot, or revealing the world’,2004 Biennale of Sydney: On Reason and Emotion. Exhibition catalogue

Schwabsky, Barry, ‘The Voice Estranged’, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations.London: Merrell, 2003

Scott, Kitty, ‘Portrait: Francis Alÿs’, Parkett 69, 2003

Simpson, Bennett and Bourriaud, Nicolas, ‘Public Relations’, Artforum, April 2001

Spector, Nancy, ‘All the World’, Frieze 98, April 2006

Theriault, Michele, ‘Francis Alÿs: The Art of Balancing on a Tightrope’, Fancis Alÿs:

the last clown. Exhibition catalogue, Montreal: Galerie de I’UQAM, 2000

Thompson, Nato, ‘Jeremy Deller: for the Love of the People’, Parkett 74, 2005

Virilio, Paul, Open Sky. Rose, Julie (trans.), London: Verso, 1997

Websites

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314

‘Theory of the Dérive’

Guy-Ernest Debord

http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch/ENG/dgf_right.html

http://www.artleak.org/leccia2.html

http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=850

‘Walk on the wild side’Jörg Heiser on Francis Alÿs

www.arnolfini.org.uk

www.artangel.org.uk

www.berlinbiennale.de

www.documenta.de

www.manifesta.org

www.palaisdetokyo.com

129

APPENDIX 2

I l lustrat ions

Chapter 1: Project Description

Figure 1

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

variable

Figure 2

James Newitt, Untitled, 2003, still from 2-channel video installation, 8mm film

transferred to mini DV, stereo sound, 9:50 mins

Figure 3

James Newitt, IXL Redevelopment, site including signage, 2003

Figure 4

James Newitt, IXL Redevelopment signage (detail), 2003

Figure 5

Dan Graham, Homes for America, 1966-1978Photomontage, 89x65cm

20 October, 2007

From, www.kunsthausgraz.steiermark.at/cms/beitrag/10259298/7775299/

Figure 6

Dan Graham, Two Anamorphic Surfaces, 2000

Two-way mirror, glass, stainless steel

Installation view, Wanas, SwedenScanned from: Graham, Dan, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan

Graham on His Art. Cambridge: MIT, 1999

Chapter 2: The Project in Context

Figure 7

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

Staged fireworks display in Miami during the 2002 Art Basel Miami Beach fair.

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 352

Figure 8

Kutlug Ataman, Küba, 2004

40 monitor video installation, 40 parts, each 35-75 minutes

Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney:Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, pp. 64-65

Figure 9

Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney:

Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 66

130

Figure 10

Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what

someone else wants you to say, 1992-93Chromogenic development prints, each 16.5 x 12 inches

Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 11

Gillian Wearing, Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry, You Will be in Disguise.

Intrigued? Call Gillian, 1994

Video still from video and stereo sound, 30:00 mins

Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 12

Gillian Wearing, Trauma, 2000

Video still from video and stereo sound, 30:00 mins

Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

Figure 13

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Riyo, 1999

Film still from 35mm film, sound, 10:00 minScanned from: Anna Sanders Films. Verona: Forma and Les Presses Du Reel, 2003, p.

45

Figure 14

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Plages, 2001Production still from 35mm film, Dolby surround sound, 15:00 min

Scanned from: Anna Sanders Films. Verona: Forma and Les Presses Du Reel, 2003, p.

56

Figure 15

Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998

Video stills from video and stereo sound, 26:00 min

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London: Phaidon, 2006, p. 35

Figure 16

Tacita Dean, Bubble House, 1999

Colour Photograph

Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 101

Figure 17

Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 2000

Colour Photograph

Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 16

Figures 18 and 19

Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003

Film stills from 16mm anamorphic, colour film, 3 films in French, German and

English, each 20:00 minsScanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 104

Figures 20 and 21

Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003Installation view, Casa Serralves, Porto, Portugal

Scanned from: Tacita Dean. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 104

131

Figures 22 and 23

Pierre Huyghe, L’Expèdition scintillante (The Scintillating Expedition) A Musical,

2002L’Expèdition scintillante Act 1; Untitled (Ice Boat), ice 102 x 39 x 236 inches;

Untitled (Weather Score), rain, fog, snow; Untitled (Offshore Radio), ‘Radio Music’

by John Cage.L’Expèdition scintillante Act 3; Untitled (Black Ice Stage), 254 x 295 x 11 inches,

poster 157 x 118 inches, booklet 6 x 5 inches.

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum ofContemporary Art, 2004, pp. 94-95 and p. 106

Figures 24 and 25

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, 2005

Production stills from super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video,colour, sound.

10 November, 2007

From:

www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/manhattan/centralpark/wollman/ajourneythatwasnt/index.htm

Figure 26

Doug Aitken, Diamond Sea, 1997Production still of 3-channel video installation, 1 monitor, Duratrans backdrop, sound,

10:00 mins

Scanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 49

Figure 27

Doug Aitken, Eraser, 1998

Production still of 7-channel video installation, sound, 20:00 mins

Scanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 12

Figure 28

Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003

Production still of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00

minScanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 129

Figures 29 and 30

Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003Production stills of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00

min

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum ofContemporary Art, 2004, p. 139 and p. 141

Figure 31

Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003

Production still of activity for 35mm film and video transferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00min

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 145

132

Figures 32 and 33

Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002Production stills of activity for 3-channel video installation, 34:00 min

Scanned from: Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. Claire Doherty (ed.),

London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 6

Figure 34

Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002

Film still from 3-channel video installation, 16mm film transferred to video and

sound, 34:00 min15 October, 2007 From:

<http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_177_1.html>

Figures 35 and 36

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001Production stills from activity for 35mm film, transferred to video and sound, 61:00

mins

Scanned from: Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. Claire Doherty (ed.),

London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 93 and p. 97

Figure 37

Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005

Production documentation of super 16mm film transferred to video and stereo sound,12:57 mins

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 21

Figure 38

Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005Installation view of super 16mm film transferred to video, stereo sound, 12:57 mins

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 98

Figure 39

Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005Production documentation of super 16mm film transferred to video and stereo sound,

12:57 mins

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 101

Figure 40

Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005

Installation view of super 16mm film transferred to video, stereo sound, 12:57 mins

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 23

Figure 41

Kutlug Ataman, Küba, (detail), 2004

Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney:

Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 68

Figure 42

Gillian Wearing, Drunk, 1997-99

Video still of 3-channel video installation and sound, 23:00 mins

Scanned from: Gillian Wearing: Mass Observations. London: Merrell, 2003

133

Figures 43 and 44

Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, 2003

Exhibition stage includes 5 moving walls; video projection, 35mm film and videotransferred to Digi-Beta, 25:00 mins, 5 colour wall drawings

Installation view, DIA Centre for Contemporary Art, New York

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum ofContemporary Art, 2004, p. 152 and p. 153

Figure 45

Pierre Huyghe, Little Story, 1995

Installation view, offset printed poster, 26 x 39 inchesScanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 168

Figure 46

Pierre Huyghe, Chantier Barbès-Rochechouart, 1994Installation view, offset printed poster, 31 x 47 inches

Scanned from: Pierre Huyghe. Italy: SKIRA and Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2004, p. 163

Figure 47

Anri Sala, Entre Chien et Loup

Installation view, ARC/Musèe d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 2004

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 16

Figure 48

Anri Sala, scale model for exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, UjazdowskiCastle, Warsaw, 2005

Scanned from: Anri Sala. London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, p. 29

Figure 49

Kutlug Ataman, Stefan’s Room, 2004Installation view of 5-screen video installation, approx. 45:00 mins

Scanned from: Kutlug Ataman: perfect strangers. Exhibition catalogue, Sydney:

Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, pp. 54-55

Figure 50

Doug Aitken, Electric Earth, 1999

Colour film transferred to 8-channel laserdisc installation, sound, 9:50 min,

installation view, 48th Venice BiennaleScanned from: Doug Aitken. London and New York: Phaidon, 2001

Figure 51

Sharon Lockhart, Teatro Amazonas, 1999

Film still from 35mm film, sound, 30:00 minsScanned from: Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy (eds.), Place. London: Thames and

Hudson, 2005, p.111

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

Figure 52

James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004

Video still from 5:30 min, DVD loop, silent

134

Figure 53

James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004

Video still from 5:30 min, DVD loop, silent

Figure 54

James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2006

Production still from 8:00 min video, DVD loop, silent

Figure 55

James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2006

Production still from 8:00 min video, DVD loop, silent

Figure 56

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

Figure 57

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

Figure 58

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

Figure 59

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

Figure 60

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

Figure 61

James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07

Production still from workshop

Figure 62

James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07

Installation view, inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, 6 x 3m

Figure 63

James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07

Installation view, inkjet print onto billboard vinyl, 7.6 x 3.1m

Figures 64 and 65

James Newitt and Justy Phillips, the write/here project, 2005-07

Process documentation

Figures 66 and 67

James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007

Production stills from recording

135

Figures 68

James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007

25 channel sound installation, approx. 5min loop, speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVDplayers, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers, installation view

Figures 69 and 70

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

Figures 71 and 72

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

Figures 73 and 74

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

Figure 75

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

Figures 76 and 77

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

Figures 78 and 79

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

Figures 80 and 81

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

Figure 82

James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007

Project documentation from 10:30 min video, DVD loop, stereo sound

Figure 83

James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007

Production still from 10:30 min video, DVD loop, stereo sound

Figures 84 and 85

James Newitt, Arberg Bay, 2004 and Arberg Bay, 2006

Installation view, Quote, Long Gallery, Hobart, curated by Colin Langridge, 13August – 10 September

Figures 86 and 87

James Newitt, Altered State, 2006Installation view, Containers Village, Next Wave Festival 2006, Melbourne, 15 – 26

March, 2006

Figure 88

James Newitt, Altered State, 2006Installation view, …text me, Devonport Regional Gallery, curated by Ellie Ray, 5

August – 3 September

136

Figure 89

James Newitt, Unstable Ground, 2006-07

Installation view, Eternal Beautiful Now, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, curated byTania Doropoulos, 9 – 26 May, 2007

Figure 90

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

2007

Figures 91 and 92

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

26 November, 2007

Figure 93

James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007

Installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula Silva, 11

January – 1 February, 2007

Figure 94

James Newitt, Familiar Strangers, 2007

Installation view, Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula Silva, 11January – 1 February, 2007

Figure 95

James Newitt, Saturday Nights, 2007Installation view, Port Arthur Project, Port Arthur Historic Site, curated by Noel

Frankham and Julia Clarke, 16 March – 15 April, 2007

Appendix 4: Description of Selected Support Work

Figure 96

James Newitt, Discussion Frames, 2004

Installation view, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people

Figure 97

James Newitt, Discussion Frames, 2004

Installation view, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people

Figure 98

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

Figure 99

James Newitt, Projected Conversations, 2005

Video still of video and light installation and sound, Approx. 9:00 min

Figure 100

James Newitt, Big Green, Big Blue, 2005

Production documentation of video, DVD loop and stereo sound, 5:30 min

137

Figure 101

James Newitt, Some Other Place, 2005

Production stills of 2-channel video installation, silent, approx. 4:30 min

Figure 102

James Newitt, Some Other Place, 2005

Production still of 2-channel video installation, silent, approx. 4:30 min

Figure 103

come with me… 1 – 9 April, 2006

Video still of performance by Morganics and Sinpare, Royal Tasmanian BotanicalGardens

Figure 104

James Wilson and Nisha De Jong, Playscape (rhizome), 2006

Installation view, come with me…, Royal Tasmanian Botanical GardensGrass and MDF structure

Figure 105

Justy Phillips, quiet days, 2006Installation view, come with me…, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

CNC routed acrylic board

138

APPENDIX 3

List of Works Included in the Project Exhibition

Arberg Bay, 2004

5:30 min videoDVD loop

silent

Arberg Bay, 2006

8:00 min video

DVD loopsilent

Altered State, 2006

14:00 min video

2-channel DVD loop

Stereo sound

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

Type-C prints (crystal archive) from digital files

600 x 400 framed and 450 x 300 unframed

Familiar Strangers, 2007

25 channel sound installationApprox. 5min loop

Speakers, speaker wire, 5 x DVD players, 5 x 5.1 surround sound amplifiers

Unstable Ground, 2006-07

8:30 min video

2-channel DVD loopstereo sound

Saturday Nights, 2007

10:30 min video

HDV DVD loop

Stereo sound

139

APPENDIX 4

Description of Selected Support Work

Discussion Frames, 2004

8 steel frames, Perspex, vinyl film, permanent markers and people

Dimensions variable

Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

Discussion Frames was one of the first works I made during the PhD project as a

means to explore ideas of initiating social interaction. Installed at the Royal

Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Discussion Frames, posed questions for people to

respond to by drawing directly on the frames. Vinyl text on the frames asked short,

conversational questions such as: ‘so… tell me what you did today’, ‘what happened

last time you came here’, ‘um… what will you be doing in two-weeks?’ Although

somewhat naïve and simplistic, the questions where intended to encouraged the

viewer/participant to think about past/present/future experiences of a particular place.

During its 10-day installation period, a group of school children where provided with

permanent markers and encouraged to write and draw on the screens. The notes,

drawings and comments remained on the screens like a chaotic collection of

conversations and thoughts.

Fig. 96, Discussion Frames, 2004, installation view

140

Fig. 97, Discussion Frames, 2004, installation view

Discussion Frames was a very early experiment during the research. While it did not

contribute essential knowledge to the project, it did provide an opportunity to explore

active social engagement through art production, an approach I developed in relation

to later video works and installations such as the write/here project.

Projected Conversations, 2005

Approx. 9:00 min video and light installation

Stereo sound

Projected Conversations was a site-specific video installation that presented an

imagined meeting between an anonymous architect and developer. The conversation,

featured in the video as subtitles, is entirely fictional, but informed by recent debates

on local waterfront development. This conversation never reaches a particular

resolution; instead the meeting revolves around discussion about architectural

integrity, culture versus commercial interest and ‘the bottom line’. The site where the

video was presented is also significant; the large – then empty – building in

Salamanca Square previously housed an Antarctic interpretation centre. After the

business went bankrupt, the government gutted the building and sold it to a private

developer. Public speculation on the building’s new purpose was rife, and Projected

Conversations intended to extend and elaborate on that speculation.

141

Fig. 98, Projected Conversations, 2005, video still

Developed soon after Arberg Bay, 2004, Projected Conversations was a way for me to

continue exploration into constructing narratives that are informed by real situations

and events. I wanted to present a temporary work that would initiate discussion

through an open-ended narrative. I sought to implicate the viewer/passer by within the

artwork, by incorporating them in the scene – perhaps even unwillingly.164

Fig. 99, Projected Conversations, 2005, video still

Developing the work involved constructing character profiles for a developer and an

idealistic architect, then writing a script for the interaction that would take place in a

private meeting room. The conversation reads as being awkwardly contrived, partly

164 There was an ATM installed directly next to the projection screen, the project’s documentation revealshow use of the ATM became an extension of the work.

142

because I scripted a situation where relationships are one-dimensional and fragile, and

partly because the script is arguably still unresolved.

Projected Conversations signified an end to my compulsion to film ‘inactive

environments’ such as empty, architectural spaces and structures, which came earlier

works and research, particularly concerning my Honours work in 2003.

Although Projected Conversations is not included as a work presented for submission

exhibition, its inclusion as support work demonstrates a development in my use of

constructed narratives which respond to different social and geographic situations.

Big Green, Big Blue, 2005

5:30 min DVD loop

stereo sound

Big Green, Big Blue is a single channel video which explores ideas of contemporary

displacement through a micro-performance filmed at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical

Gardens. The video was a ‘sketch’ that helped develop ideas for the later work,

Altered State.

The performer in the video is Alfred, a young man from Sierra Leone who also

performed in Altered State. Alfred first came to Tasmania several years ago as a

refugee. He writes rap in competent but awkwardly naive English as well as French,

about his transition from Africa to Australia. Big Green, Big Blue was the first video I

made that incorporated an actor or actual person as subject matter – and this was

something I found very difficult to ‘control’ at the time. By directing Alfred’s

performance in a colonial, garden environment I aimed to make visible the, sometimes

contradictory, relationships that exist between people, place and history.

I knew about Alfred’s rapping through a number of friends, and was able to meet with

him and ask whether he was willing to perform one of his songs for me, while being

filmed at the Botanical Gardens. He seemed vaguely interested in the idea, and quite

happy to appear in front of the camera, but on the condition that I helped him direct

and film a video clip for his latest song. Over the following weeks, we worked

together to realise both projects – my video and his video clip.

143

I initially intended this work to be presented as a two-channel projection, so I filmed

the performance with two cameras (one in close frame and one shooting wide angle).

After working through different options during the editing, I decided that

incorporating two screens that depicted the same moment in time – from different

angles – seemed unnecessary. I used the two parallel shots to give two different

options and viewpoints to use in editing the single channel video.

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

As I mentioned above, most of the process behind this video involved building trust

and a relationship with Alfred, then planning the shots I wanted to film. The

experience of spending time with my subject made me aware of the time required to

allow a video, or the content of the video, to evolve and develop. Later projects such

as Unstable Ground and Saturday Nights benefited from this experience, especially

while I was spending months of time in research and development before actually

filming any scenes. By making this work I also realised the extent to which I wanted

to involve myself in directing future projects. Despite having complete control over

the shots and the aesthetic structure of the video, I found I had little control over the

actual content and the way Alfred performed in the video. The space between me, the

camera and Alfred was uncomfortable, and I later felt my position behind the camera

was too passive, I wanted to develop a more engaged and active role in future projects.

With the advantage of hindsight, I see that my work with Alfred and Big Green, Big

Blue, was the start of an idea that would evolve and eventually form the video work

Altered State, which was filmed in early 2006. During making both Big Green, Big

144

Blue and Alfred’s video clip, a relationship of trust and exchange was established and

this eventually allowed me to film Alfred dancing in his mother’s living room, totally

unencumbered, to his own soundtrack – as one of the performances that comprised

Altered State.

Some Other Place, 2005

Approx. 4:30 min, 2 channel video installation

silent

Some Other Place was a video projection onto buildings and structures – proposing a

virtual connection between two different places and times through the journey of an

anonymous character. Some Other Place is presented as video and still image

documentation of that projection.

In Some Other Place, A connection is drawn between places in the Botanical Gardens

at 6am and places in the city at 6pm. An anonymous character walks along three

different routes through the city at dusk – from out of sight, to full view – eventually

passing the camera. Conversely, the character is filmed walking in the Royal

Tasmanian Botanical Gardens at dawn – walking from directly behind the camera –

along three different routes until he is out of sight. After filming these walks, I

projected the character onto different environments during opposing time of day, i.e.

the footage of the character walking alone in the Gardens at dawn is projected onto

buildings in the city at dusk, and the city footage at dusk is projected in the Gardens at

dawn. This mirroring of spaces and times creates virtual connection between time and

space, in which the character passes through – over and over again.

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

145

Some Other Place, was an experimentation in methods of projection which was

informed by artists such as: Pierre Huyghe and his reinterpretation of Gordon Mata-

Clarke’s Conical in, Conical Intersect; Doug Aitken and his multi-screen projections

within architectural environments, especially his recent work Sleepwalkers, that

appeared on the façade of the MoMA in New York early in 2007; Philippe Parreno

and his one minute film El Sueno de Una Cosa, that was projected on a one minute

timer in different contexts; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and her Butterfly Pavilion at

Documenta X; and Douglas Gordon and the 5 year Drive In, shown in the Californian

desert.

Some Other Place was also an exploration into notions of Situationist International

psychogeography.165 I wanted the casual passer-by to be confronted with the

possibility that a place can exist in the mind as much as it can in reality, and the use of

video projection within different natural and architectural structures was a subtle way

of pursuing the meeting of real an imagined places.

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

Some Other Place also seeks to make visible the kind of isolation that can exist in

different urban spaces. Individuals isolated in their cars, navigating peak hour traffic,

might catch a glimpse at another isolated individual – projected onto a building,

navigating the empty space of the Botanical Gardens at dusk. Paradoxically, no one is

165 Guy Debord describes Psygeographical research as a, “study of the exact laws and precise effects ofthe geographical environment, consciously organised or not, acting directly on the affective deportmentof individuals.’ Debord, Guy, op.cit. ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, p. 45

146

present in the Botanical Gardens at dawn when the character is projected onto

different surfaces, navigating through peak-hour traffic and different urban walkways.

The work added to the development of the PhD project through the process of

documenting a temporary event. Through making Some Other Place, I came to realise

that I needed to confront the issue of effectively capturing and recording temporary

actions such as this, in a way that would allow them to be re-presented in different

situations and formats.

come with me…

1 – 9 April, 2006

Curated exhibition of commissioned artworks and an afternoon of sound and music

performance at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

come with me… was an exhibition I curated at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical

Gardens during the first week of April, 2006. I was originally motivated by the idea of

encouraging the visitor/viewer to move through the Gardens and connect different

experiences and artworks in order to form new interpretations of the site and gain a

deeper understanding of the conditions under which it currently exists. I was also

motivated to present artwork that responded to its immediate environment and, in

different ways, changed over time. The work in come with me… moved, disappeared,

grew, died, or got stolen. come with me… brought together 16 artists working as

individuals or in collaboration to intervene with the Botanical Gardens and create

points of differentiation within an already well interpreted and constructed

environment. These artists consisted of architects, sound artists, video artists,

sculptures, text-based artists and hip-hop artists. Some of the work in come with me…

appears as objects, but in many ways the objects were secondary to the interaction that

the objects initiated or inspired.

The exhibition ended with an afternoon performance of sound, spoken word and hip-

hop. As well as marking the end of the exhibition with a celebration, the performance

presented an alternative way of interpreting and responding to the environment. Hip-

hop artist Morganics and Kenyan hip-hop group Sinpare, interacted with the crowd

and the surrounding environment through constructing spontaneous rhymes mixed

with rehearsed song and beats.

147

Fig. 103, come with me…, 2006, video still of performance

come with me… was a way for me to explore ideas about the presentation of temporal

and spatial artwork, in a specific environment that was already the subject of much

historic and geographic interpretation. The exhibition allowed me to explore different

approaches to art practice through the mediation of a particular site, and to draw

connections between independent approaches to art making. come with me… was also

an important development in my facility to work as a director or coordinator of an

event. Later video projects involved the coordination of multiple individuals and

situations in order to construct a film or scripted situation; come with me… was a

testing ground for developing these later works.

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

148

Fig. 105, Justy Phillips, quiet days, 2006

come with me… signified an endpoint to a relationship with the Royal Tasmanian

Botanical Gardens; I have spent significant time establishing and pursuing a number

of projects and working relationships, some of which, have become less relevant to

my central concerns. Early in the project I established a relationship with the Royal

Tasmanian Botanical Gardens as a way for me to develop new work in relation to an

existing site and public institution. As my project developed, I realised that the

Botanical Gardens was not a site or context I wanted to focus on. The conditions that

define a botanical garden left insufficient room for the sort of critical encounters and

environments I was interested in investigating further. come with me… allowed me to

actualise some of the ideas and approaches I was developing in relation to the

Botanical Gardens before moving on to develop new work and discover different

situations/environments.

come with me… was a successful experimentation in its own right, but ultimately the

exhibition has not contributed essential knowledge or material to my final submission.

It has however provided me with the facilities to undertake subsequent projects with

confidence as well as significantly expanding my knowledge and ability to realise

methods of artwork installation and event organisation.

149

APPENDIX 5

Project Timeline (selected details)

Mid 2004:

- Early experimentation with video and collecting material

- Initiated and developed Arberg Bay, 2004

- Initiated Discussion Frames

Late 2004:

- Presented Arberg Bay, 2004

- Initiated and developed Projected Conversations

- Developed and installed Discussion Frames at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical

Gardens

- Developed a space in-between for INFLIGHT art

- Develop early works and experiments with text and video

Early 2005:

- Presented Projected Conversations at Salamanca Square

- Presented a space in-between at INFLIGHT art (solo exhibition), Hobart

- Initiated and developed public artwork 5 Points of Change for the IXL

Redevelopment, Hobart

- Reviewed and refined Projected Conversations

Mid 2005:

- Developed and exhibited Isolated Places in shop front in North Hobart with

Justy Phillips

- Initiated and developed Some Other Place

- Initiated and developed Big Green, Big Blue

- Initiated come with me… an exhibition of art, sound and words at the Royal

Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

- Initiated the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

- Initiated and developed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11

Architects

150

Late 2005:

- Developed come with me…

- Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

- Developed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11 Architects

- Presented Big Green, Big Blue at INFLIGHT art, Hobart

- Reviewed and refined Some Other Place

- Initiated and developed Altered State

Early 2006:

- Presented Altered State at the Next Wave Festival, Melbourne

- Installed public artwork Façade Intervention with Room 11 Architects at

Latrobe High School

- Presented come with me… during April, at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical

Gardens (14 artists and 10 sound artists/musicians)

- Presented Some Other Place at come with me…

- Presented process ideas for the write/here project and launched project

website at ‘Design Island’, Mawson’s Place, Hobart, with Justy Phillips

- Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

- Initiated and developed Arberg Bay, 2006

Mid 2006:

- Presented Arberg Bay, 2006 as part of ‘Quote’, at the Long Gallery,

Salamanca Arts Centre

- Initiated and developed Familiar Strangers

- Initiated and developed Unstable Ground

- Initiated and developed Saturday Nights

- Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

Late 2006:

- Reviewed and refined Familiar Strangers

- Developed Unstable Ground

- Developed Saturday Nights

- Developed the write/here project, with Justy Phillips

- Developed Intermission

151

Early 2007:

- Presented Familiar Strangers as part of ‘Made Public’, at the Carnegie

Gallery, Hobart

- Presented Intermission as part of ‘a room with a view’, at CAST Gallery,

Hobart

- Presented the write/here project, with Justy Phillips across 27 advertising

billboards throughout Hobart, during the 2007 ‘Ten Days on the Island’

festival

- Presented Saturday Nights as part of the Port Arthur Project, during the 2007

‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival

- Reviewed and refined Arberg Bay, 2004

- Reviewed and refined Arberg Bay, 2006

- Reviewed and refined Unstable Ground

Mid 2007:

- Presented Unstable Ground as part of ‘Eternal Beautiful Now’, at Sherman

Galleries, Sydney

- Reviewed and refined the write/here project for presentation

Late 2007:

- Reviewed and refined the write/here project for presentation

- Reviewed and refined Saturday Nights

- Developed and presented the project exhibition

152

APPENDIX 6

DVD contents

DISK ONE: Works in the project exhibition

Saturday Nights, 2007

10:30 min video, stereo sound

Unstable Ground, 2006-07

8:30 min video, 2-channel mock-up, stereo sound

Familiar Strangers, 2007

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

the write/here project, 2005-07

Documentation of installation using 27 advertising billboards, silent

Altered State, 2006

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

Arberg Bay, 2006

8:00 min video, silent

Arberg Bay, 2004

5:30 min video, silent

One-minute previews of all video works

DISK TWO: support work

come with me…, 2006

Documentation of curated exhibition and performance

Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, 3:00 min

Some Other Place, 2006

Video documentation of 2-channel projection, approx. 4:00 min

Isolated Places, 2005

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

Big Green, Big Blue, 2005

6:00 min video, stereo sound

Projected Conversations, 20057:40 min video, stereo sound

Discussion Frames, 2004Documentation of installation, 8 Perspex frames and permanent markers, 1:50 min

153

APPENDIX 7

Curriculum Vitae

Education

2007 PhD, Fine Arts, University of Tasmania2003 Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours), University of Tasmania

2001 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Tasmania

Upcoming Projects

2008 Handle With Care, 2008 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, curated

by Felicity Fenner, (the 14:00 min, 2 channel video, Altered State,2006, was selected for inclusion)

Selected Exhibitions

2007 Eternal Beautiful Now, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, curated by TaniaDoropoulos, 9 – 26 May, 2007

2007 the write/here project, billboard project as part of the 10 Days on the

Island, in collaboration with Justy Phillips, throughout Hobart,Tasmania, 23 March – 1 April

2007 Port Arthur Project, video installation as part of the 10 Days on the

Island, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, curated by Noel

Frankham and Julia Clark, 16 March – 15 April2007 a room with a view, CAST Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 4 March

2007 Made Public, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, curated by Paula de Silva, 11

January – 1 February2006 Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery

2006 Quote, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, curated by

Colin Langridge, 13 August – 10 September2006 text me… work from INFLIGHT art, Devonport Regional Gallery,

curated by Ellie Ray, 5 August – 3 September

2006 Next Wave Festival – container village, International Youth Arts

Festival, Melbourne (representing INFLIGHT art), 15 – 26 March2006 Beneath the Surface, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, in

collaboration with Justy Phillips, 6 – 21 May

2005 and then some…, INFLIGHT art, Hobart, 7 –28 October2005 Isolated Places, site-specific installation, Tasmanian Living Artists

Week, with Justy Phillips, 26 August – 4 September

2005 a space in-between, INFLIGHT art, Hobart (solo exhibition), 11 – 26March

2005 Young Designer’s Month, IXL Atrium, Hunter Street, Hobart, 11

February – 6 March

2004 Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery2004 Hatched 04: Healthway National Graduate Show, Perth Institute of

Contemporary Art, Perth, 21 May – 4 July

2004 Young Designer’s Month, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, 14February – 14 March

2003 IXL Art, Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, 23

December 2003 – 25 January 2004

2003 Young Designer’s Month, Mawson’s Place Pavilion, Hobart, 14February – 7 March

2002 Palimpsest, Entrepot Gallery, Hobart (solo exhibition)

2001 Transistor, Entrepot Gallery, Hobart

154

Selected Screenings

2007 Intermission, screened at, ‘From Small Things (Big Things One Day

Come)’, Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Sydney, 17 January2006 Altered State: Big Green, Big Blue, screened as part of

‘Electroprojections – The Doco Hour’, Electrofringe Festival,

Newcastle, Australia, 27 September – 1 October2006 Altered State: Big Green, Big Blue, screened at the1

st International

Film and Memorialisation Conference, University of Applied

Sciences, Germany, 14-15 October

Selected Commissions

2007 Port Arthur Project, video installation as part of the 10 Days on the

Island, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, 16 March – 15 April

2006 Public artwork commissioned for the Latrobe High School, in

collaboration with Room 11 architecture, opened 10 February

2005 Public artwork commissioned for the IXL Redevelopment, Hobart2005 Projected Conversations, video and light installation commissioned

by the Hobart City Council, 10 January

2004 Discussion Frames, installation at the Royal Tasmanian BotanicalGardens, 15 – 20 December

2004 Public artwork commission for Nubeena Community Centre

2004 Signage installed for commercial tenants for the IXL Redevelopment,Hunter Street, Hobart

2003 Signage policy for commercial tenants for the IXL Redevelopment,

Hunter Street, Hobart

2003 Foyer Installation for Arts Tasmania, show casing the work from theYoung Designer’s Month 2003

2002 Rendering Site, installation, University of Tasmania, School of Art

2002 Stencil artwork and signage design for TAFE Tasmania ClarenceCampus, (in collaboration with JAWS2/JAWS architects)

2002 Rendering Site installation, Tasmanian School of Art

2000 – 2005 Graphic design and artwork for the Tasmanian Conservatorium ofMusic

Exhibition and event curation

2006 come with me… an exhibition of art, sound and words, outdoor

exhibition and music performance at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical

Gardens, Hobart, 1 – 9 April2004 sight and sonic, electronic music and video art event at INFLIGHT

art, Hobart, 6 May

Awards, Grants and Professional Recognition

2006 Tasmanian Artist Award, Tidal: City of Devonport Art Prize,

Devonport Regional Gallery2006 Arts Tasmania project grant, with Justy Phillips for the write/here

project

2006 Australia Council Community, Cultural Development grant, withJusty Phillips for the write/here project

2006 Hobart City Council, Cultural Development grant, with Justy Phillips

for the write/here project

2005 Short course certificate in tertiary teaching2005 Semi-finalist in the Young Tasmanian of the Year, Arts category

2005 Arts Tasmania grant to assist in establishing an art and design ‘cluster’

2004 Semi-finalist in the Young Tasmanian of the Year, Arts category

155

2004 Awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award for research at the

University of Tasmania

2003 Received First Class Honours2001 Transistor E-Media category winner, (University of Tasmania,

showcase of student artwork)

Community/Professional Service

2002 – 2007 Founding Board Member of INFLIGHT artist run space, Hobart

2004 – 2006 Chair of INFLIGHT artist run space2003 – 2005 Founder of Cluster, group of young Tasmanian artists and designers

2002 – 2005 Vice president AGDA Tas. (Australian Graphic Design Association)

2002 – 2005 AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association), National Councillor

Employment History

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

Articles and citations

2007 Tracey Clement, ‘Eternal Beautiful Now’, Artlink, vol. 27, no.3, p.88

2007 Margaret Woodward, Eye, ‘Messages From the City’s Soul’, No. 64,2007, pp.84-85

2007 Judith Abell, Landscape Architecture Australia, ‘the write/here

project’, No. 114, May 2007, pp.34-37

2007 Judith Abell, RealTime, ‘the write/here project: signs of the times’,No. 78, April/May 2007, p.13

2007 Meryl Naidoo, The Mercury, Wednesday 21st March 2007, p.5

2006 Briony Downes, RealTime, ‘words as art’, No.76, Dec/Jan 2006, p.532006 Jess Atkinson, Typotastic, issue 2, 2006, pp.41-42

2005 Jane Rankin-Reid, The Sunday Tasmanian, Sunday 17th April 2005

p.9 (Sunday Arts)2005 Jane Rankin-Reid, The Melbourne Age, Wednesday12th January

2005, p.42

2004 Case Study: Collaboration, National Association for the Visual Arts,

December 2004 newsletter, pp.6-72004 Nurshahidah Syed, The Mercury, Flying High, Friday 29th October

2004, p.46

Presentations and conferences

2006 ‘come with me… interventions in the Botanical Gardens’, Senses of

Place conference, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 5 – 8 April2005 ‘a space in-between: constructing situations of interpretation’,

refereed paper, artists, designers and creative communities, 2005

ACUADS (Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools)conference, Perth, 28 – 30 September

2005 ‘Constructing Narratives and Connections in Everyday Space’, 10 x

10 x 10, National Architecture Week, Royal Australian Institute ofArchitects, Hobart, 23 – 29 October