THE CURVATURE OF THE EARTH
Blair French
The Bike Rider
Clad in black jeans, leather jacket and helmet and viewed always from behind, the motorcycle
rider is ever in motion away from us. He remains anonymous no matter how long we spend in
front of the screen. 1 The camera keeps a consistent tracking distance as the rider descends the
outback highway, the slow-motion scrolling of the white road lines through the frame evoking
a multitude of references from popular cinema, music and literature. The rider’s arms are
outstretched, parallel to the horizon line that splits the video frame, a line formed where sky –
on occasion vivid blue, other times tinged pink at dawn – meets the burnt red and grey mulga
and saltbush scrubland of the plains stretched out before him, evoking the high horizon line
used by twentieth-century Australian painters Sidney Nolan and in more pronounced manner
Fred Williams to picture the vertiginous experience of encounter with such vast spaces.2 Not
unsurprisingly, given the quality of his own painting practice, Shaun Gladwell always
carefully attends to formal composition within the picture plane, as well as to the
representational history of such composition.
The figure of the rider also serves to centre us in relation to the frame, providing a
focal point, a visual sighting device through which we project our own entry into this vast
landscape. Just as the rider constitutes an image of physical poise and balance, he also
pictorially apportions and balances space. Leonardo da Vinci’s ideal geometry of the
‘Vitruvian Man’ is recalled here, and in the harmonious fusion of body and machine as
modern agent of motion available to infinite replication, so is Le Corbusier’s ‘Modular Man’.
The Broken Promise of Arrival
Approach to Mundi Mundi (2007), described above, is a two-channel video work, each
channel projected onto one side of a double-sided hanging screen. Both channels depict the
same view – the motorbike rider from behind, arms outstretched, descending along a highway
1
We make this gender assumption. We may be wrong, but the strong masculine associations of the lone rider in
the landscape (particularly in relation to cinematic history), coupled with an awareness of Shaun Gladwell’s own
history of ‘performing’ in his own works nudges us towards this mindset. This holds even though Gladwell has
worked extensively with female performers across a range of works, for in these, along with the majority of his
works with collaborating performers, there is no masking or disguising of the physical features or identities of the
performers.
2
See Rex Butler, ‘Shaun Gladwell: Internal Horizon’, in Michele Helmrich, ed., New: Selected Recent
Acquisitions, Brisbane: University of Queensland Art Museum, 2008, p. 80.
into a vast outback plain. However the shots are not strictly the same – each side presents a
distinct ‘performance’, of the same action in the same location, but at different times of day in
changing light conditions. Circling the screen we cannot break or move beyond the sense of
the anonymous, monochromatic rider slowly, relentlessly journeying away from us, but with
no capacity to escape our view, no capacity to complete his journey, to truly enter or pass
through the great plains of Mundi Mundi at the eastern edge of the central desert region of
Australia. (The plains begin just outside the old, now barely inhabited mining town of
Silverton, itself a short distance west of the mining city of Broken Hill in far western New
South Wales.3) For although the rider descends the highway towards the vast plains, there
remains little indication of beginning and end points, of origin and destination. The circularity
of the work is propelled rather than disrupted by sections merging one take with another – the
rider lowers his arms as the image begins to blur focus, then seems to adjust his body and
raise them again, emerging into pictorial clarity as he sets out on his interminable ‘approach’.
Distances here are vast. In fact, it is often remarked that in the right weather it is possible to
discern the curvature of the earth looking west over Mundi Mundi. Arrival remains a broken
promise.
This formal circularity – a sense of the body in perpetual motion, subject to eternal
return – is a hallmark of Shaun Gladwell’s video work. For the past decade he has worked
with various performers – not just in Australia but also locations in Brazil, Europe, Japan,
Korea and New Zealand – picturing physical disciplines associated in part with youth and
street cultures and their interventions into and articulations of urban environments through
skateboarding, break dancing, BMX riding, capoeira, taekwondo and the like. Just as the
‘stagings’ of these in-situ performances have become increasingly ambitious, so have the
resulting moving-image installations become more finely honed as sculptural studies of both
the bodily experience and the physics of gravity, motion – in particular centrifugal energy –
and cyclical time.
All of these elements and concerns are extended in Gladwell’s MADDESTMAXIMVS
project. Here, however, Gladwell draws upon off-road extreme sports and newly enters a
long-standing set of discourses regarding land, place and space in Australian culture.
MADDESTMAXIMVS takes its local cues from sources as varied as Sidney Nolan’s ‘drought’
paintings and director George Miller’s Mad Max film trilogy, in particular Mad Max 2: The
Road Warrior (1981), filmed in the same landscape as Gladwell’s project. However, while
explicitly engaged in a performative and in many ways quite personal exploration of the
parameters and possibilities of a human relationship to the Australian hinterland,
MADDESTMAXIMVS draws upon disparate experiences of time and being, shared cultural
3
‘Mundi Mundi’ is thought to translate from local Indigenous language as something like ‘open space’, ‘open
plain’, or ‘great space’, the repetition simply indicating a concentration or proliferation – ‘more of’.
(Coincidentally, mundi is also Latin for ‘earth’ or ‘of the world’.)
reference points and metaphysics, as well as a range of representational and art-historical
touchstones both local and international.
MADDESTMAXIMVS at Venice
Begun in earnest in 2007, MADDESTMAXIMVS is an ongoing project under which Gladwell
conceives, produces and exhibits a variety of works in different configurations. Approach to
Mundi Mundi is one of a suite of video works that sit at the heart of the project. However, as
with two other of these works shown in the first iteration of MADDESTMAXIMVS in late
2007 – Maximus as Narcissus: Broken Field of Reflection and Broken Hill Linework (both
2007)4 –Approach to Mundi Mundi is not presented in the Australian pavilion project at the
2009 Venice Biennale. Rather, the core works on video here are an extended version of
another previously shown work – newly titled Apology to Roadkill (1–6) (2007–09) – and the
recently produced centrepiece work Interceptor Surf Sequence (2009). These are joined by
significant sculptural interventions into the pavilion itself: the motorbike from Approach to
Mundi Mundi and Apology to Roadkill (1–6) embedded into the outside wall of the pavilion,
creating a protrusion in the inner skin of the space; and an especially constructed, functioning
1:1 ‘sculptural’ replica of the famous V8 Interceptor car driven by Mel Gibson’s ‘Max’
character in Mad Max 1 and 2. The Venice project is completed by a new multi-channel video
work – Centred Pataphysical Suite (2009) – comprising a tower of monitors, each featuring
the image of a different performer spinning on the spot utilising their particular discipline
(skateboarding, break-dancing, classical dancing, BMX riding); a sculptural work
incorporating ‘live’ real-time footage on a monitor of the inside surface of a human skull
slowly rotating on a platform behind the monitor (Endoscopic Vanitas, 2009); and the latest
of Shaun Gladwell’s ongoing series of Planet and Stars Sequence projects, involving both
footage (Planet and Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway, 2009) and residue (Absolute Event
Horizon, 2009) of an aerosol-painting work undertaken by the artist kneeling on the shoulder
of an outback highway.5 As ever with Gladwell’s practice, the overall effect is one of
disparate but interrelated material forms and representational modalities housed together – a
conversation between elements rather than a singular and overly determining installation
structure.
4
Shaun Gladwell: MADDESTMAXIMVS, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 30 November – 22 December 2007. This
exhibition included other sculptural and photographic elements as well as a set of lithographs. Maximus as
Narcissus: Broken Field of Reflection features the same figure as that which appears in Approach to Mundi Mundi
and Apology to Roadkill riding a trailbike in the bush, coming across, contemplating and then riding through large
puddles until eventually stalling his bike in a particularly large puddle he has to wheel his bike from.
5
Absolute Event Horizon comprises a line of ‘props’, used as stencils for the aerosol painting of Plan et and Stars
Sequence: Barrier Highway. These tin cans and other roadside debris are marked by their use in the painting
performance, most evident in black paint around their base. These are displayed in a single, long shelf built into
the wall with back illumination – a form of seductive commodity display. The title of the work is a reference to
black hole theory, an event horizon being a space–time boundary around a black hole, and so serves to draw
parallels between gravitational pull and the force of consumer consumption.
A Bricolage Bound in Black Leather
Played by Mel Gibson, the figure of ‘Max’ in George Miller’s trilogy is a lawman who, by the
end of the first film, adopts a stance of lawless vengeance.6 Max is a bricolage bound in black
leather, a composite drawn from the cultural imaginary: lawman, outlaw, bush ranger,
boundary rider, wanderer, explorer, avenger. He is the heroic anti-hero drawn from and
returned to mythology and omnipresent through thousands of years of storytelling, given
potent form in late twentieth-century cinema. Developed in terms of his relationships with
family and friends in the first film (loved ones, all of whom meet violent fates), he becomes
increasingly mute as the trilogy progresses, manifesting an apparently reluctant compassion
for others through action. Cinematically defined in physical terms, his key relationships are
with the landscapes of the film, which by turn seek to kill and surprisingly sustain him, and
with the machinery that powers him through these spaces serving as protective prosthetic
armature as well as agent of violence. Ultimately, Max is a survivor – a man stripped bare –
and the trilogy an extended, hyperbolic, in parts even absurd yet affecting meditation on
survival.
Miller’s trilogy has generated its own mythology, particularly within Australia, and
for Shaun Gladwell’s generation growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s.7 Max has also
become an iconic figure. But as is the case with all icons, subtleties and particularities of
identity and meaning, not to mention points of doubt, lack, failure and critical wounding all
tend to be glossed by reverence. This being the case, there are perhaps dangers associated
with the creation of work in dialogue with or operating in the shadow of Mad Max, one being
the possibility of the work being consumed whole by the meta-narrative, like the bodies
swallowed by the hungry sands of the third film.
Gladwell’s project shows an acute awareness of such pitfalls; indeed, they are
inseparable from the attractions of the source. He works to harness and redirect the surfeit of
meaning and association that orbits the films, to rethink the discursive potential of an
iconography overburdened to the point of exhaustion – the figure in black leather, the
motorcycles, the customised car all performing in this extreme and redolent environment. The
resulting works necessarily then both perpetuate and challenge the trajectory of the heroic
6
In the second film there is no longer any law against which to define personal or social behaviour. In place of
‘law’ there exists only a fundamental drive to survival linked to a desperate obsession with fuel, tempered by the
utopian dreams of a community centred on a desert oil refinery and ultimately by the vestiges of Max’s lingering
personal ethics. In the more overtly post-apocalyptic setting of the third film a rudimentary and brutal form of law
binds the hellhole community of ‘Bartertown’, in contrast to the tribe of children and adolescents surviving in a
desert oasis who are galvanised by the ‘tell’ – a ritual of communal historical narration.
7
Perhaps more accurately, a generation of young men drawn to crazy, customised vehicles, speed and an ethos of
outlaw individualism.
masculine figure, as they lay down a rapid fire of extreme, sometimes even contradictory
signification that even at a structural level constitutes a form of myth reckoning.8
More specifically, Gladwell forges four interrelated forms of connection to the Mad
Max trilogy in this project. The first exists in Gladwell’s staging and representation of what
could be considered intense physical acts within the landscape. They never assume the
character of ‘stunts’ per se, but they bear clear relation to that cinematic activity. In the case
of Gladwell’s work these acts are means, in part, of seeking a dynamic but measured form of
relationship to place rather than forms of thrill seeking. Typical of his approach to video
representation of performative actions over the past decade, Gladwell eschews hyperbolic
forms of representation in this project – the rapid-cut editing, thumping soundtracks and
euphoric visual adrenalin of extreme sports television – for slowed, meditative studies of the
relation of body to place. Here, the forces animated in that relationship – mass, velocity,
gravity, time – are in effect pictured in operation through the concentrated movement of
bodies, from skateboarders (Storm Sequence, 2000, is the most celebrated example), BMX
and other bike riders (Hikaru: Fast Food Sequence, Hikaru: Car Park Sequence, both 2001,
Busan Triptych, 2006 and Street Haunting/Ghost Riding/Organ , 2008), to a capoiera
practitioner (Woolloomooloo Night, 2004) and break dancers (Godspeed Verticals: Escalator,
2004, Yokohama Untitled, 2005, and In a Station of the Metro, 2006). Gladwell’s work enacts
a transferral of their movements into a visual language.
The second connection resides in the lingering residue of a form of survival
discourse. This is most overt in the dangerous nature of the car-surfing action undertaken in
Interceptor Surf Sequence – a survival consciousness is drawn forth by its inferred loss even
for the viewer simply standing before the video screen. However it is also apparent in
Gladwell’s choice of sculptural or object forms within the Venice pavilion project and in the
experiential consciousness of being that is sought by the performers themselves. Seeking the
limits of physical experience in chosen movement disciplines is a means to heighten or
concentrate a sense of being present in space and time – an affirmation of life through a
testing of the capacity for survival. Survival is valued via the experience of life at its
extremities.
The third lies in discourses of place, the manner in which Gladwell treats a landscape
familiar as an active agent driving narrative and the shifting formations of cultural identity,
8
We might say that Gladwell’s overall project slips in and out of the skin of the Mad Max host body – or corpse –
as a means to both personal and cultural self-reflection, or introspection. This reveals something of Gladwell’s
ongoing interest in both history and ongoing logic of appropriation within Australian art. (The key art-historical
resource here is the anthology edited by Rex Butler, What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writing on
Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s, Brisbane and Sydney: Institute of Modern Art and Power Publications, 1996.)
Gladwell alludes to Pataphysical Man (1984) by Imants Tillers – a key figure in and theoretical champion of
appropriation practice. In the title of his Centred Pataphysical Suite. Gladwell has long sought to sketch out
cultural, historical and geographical coordinates for his practice through the practice of titling. (See Ihor Holubizky
with Shaun Gladwell, ‘Intentionality and Interpretation’, in Blair French, ed., Shaun Gladwell: Videowork,
Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2007, pp. 47–8.)
not just from the second Mad Max film but a whole plethora of visual production.9 And the
fourth lies in Gladwell’s particular fascination with and reconstruction of the V8 Interceptor
from the first two Mad Max films.
Last of the V8 Interceptors
The specially constructed black ‘Pursuit Special’ car that Max drives late in the first film, and
which then appears in a further modified form in the second film (built for pure survival – for
speed and the carriage of fuel) is a limited version of a 1973 Ford XB Falcon Coupe available
only in Australia for less than three years in the mid 1970s. In the second film in particular it
is a central presence, even a character; its destruction is keenly felt. It bears the status of a
national icon – both as the vehicle made famous in the hands of Max/Mel Gibson (here
especially the distinction becomes blurred) and as an emblem of the free-roaming outlaw,
embraced as a form of self-image in white male Australian mythology (Ned Kelly had his
homemade iron helmet, Max his self-modified V8 Interceptor). A replica is even parked
outside the Silverton hotel near where the film was shot, appearing in countless online
travelogue photographs and ‘YouTube’ clips. It is a form utterly digested by a particular
narrative.
This, more than anything, provides the motivation for Shaun Gladwell’s own
reconstruction of the Interceptor – another act of bricolage resulting in what is effectively a
sculptural form. While used as a vehicle in the Interceptor Surf Sequence video, positioned as
an object outside the entry to the Australian pavilion at Venice it is dysfunctional as anything
other than art – it can serve no more purpose as a vehicle and is thus aptly titled Last of the V8
Interceptors (2008–09). Like other object works within the project, it functions primarily as a
physical, imperfect manifestation of an idea.
Last of the V8 Interceptors has been built from scratch by a team working with the
artist. Its character as mimetic manifestation – its status as a replica – extends beyond its static
form, being based more adroitly in its imitation of the function of a cinematic prop or stunt
vehicle in Interceptor Surf Sequence. As such, it both realises and performs an identity
assigned to its ‘original’ cinematic referent. Encountered outside the pavilion, however, it
may remain simply a fascinating, appealing, out-of-place object. Or it may trigger
consideration of the tension between use and aesthetic value in forms of ‘functional’
installation and veer awkwardly into discourses of the readymade. Once we have viewed
Interceptor Surf Sequence inside the pavilion we might be led to think of the object outside as
a video prop, grounding the transitory, almost ethereal space of the projected image in an
9
While Mad Max 2 remains amongst the best-known representation of this particular landscape, it has become
something of a filmic convention in Australia, the site for numerous film, television and advertising shoots. See
www.filmbrokenhill.com for an indicative list.
appreciation of the ‘real’ time–space experience of machinery, both static and in motion. Yet,
for those especially deeply versed in Miller’s visual and narrative forms, it will inevitably act
as agent for more specific, fetishistic readings.
Gladwell’s modified representation (of a customised representational prop – here
again Gladwell’s interest is in the logic of appropriation as representational necessity) is both
vehicle and vessel; the latter in the sense of being a vessel for light, like the skull in
Endoscopic Vanitas and indeed the whole pavilion itself.10 A subtle arrangement of lights
within the car ensures that light passes both in and out of its veiled aperture.11 The car
contains light, projects light and is an interior (empty) space into which we as viewers project
imagination, fear, yearning – all abstract associations evoked through knowledge of the
vessel’s former function.
The Problem with Objects
Painting props and residue, the skull, car and motorcycle, even monitors themselves – there
are a large number of objects located alongside the videos within this project. This mixing of
register is even more pronounced when we add in the still photographic and lithographic
works that sit within the larger MADDESTMAXIMVS project. Throughout his career to date
Gladwell has worked a lot with ‘already given’ or pre-existing objects and forms – with book
covers, album covers, skateboard decks – often as material substructures. He is an artist
constantly locating objects or static forms – which bear existing cultural meaning both
historical and contemporary – in close relation to moving images. The effect, in part, is to
unsettle audience expectation regarding the nature of the ‘video encounter’ – its basis in
mediation, in the ephemeral and in an experience of an attenuated but always shaped
temporality – that the medium itself seems to have gradually accrued as convention.
All this resonates within the Venice pavilion installation. Audiences are led both into
and out of the space by objects – the V8 Interceptor outside the entry and a display shelf of
burnt and blackened objects (Absolute Event Horizon) leading to the exit point. The
10
The treatment of the gallery or exhibition venue itself as at once vessel, object and architectural environment –
as place located within a surrounding space – is similarly foregrounded in Gladwell’s approach to the conception
and installation of video work. His ‘Linework’ is exemplary in this regard. Broken Hill Linework depicts the
highway surface rushing by from the perspective of the camera fixed to the body of the motorbike rider and
looking down past the gloved hand of the rider. This work continues a series of ‘Lineworks’ made by Gladwell in
Sydney and Yokohama featuring street and footpath surfaces scrolling by from the vantage point of a camera
attached to the body of the artist skateboarding and riding a bicycle. The gloved motorcyclist’s hand and front end
of the skateboard respectively mark the presence of the mobile artist as well as the prosthetic agent of an active
articulation of space – a form of drawing almost. Here the importance of the Situationist concept of the dérive to
Gladwell’s work is particularly evident. Crucially, all Gladwell’s ‘Lineworks’ are exhibited in 1:1 (so small scale)
projections directly on the floor – a literal re-enactment of the viewing position through which they were produced,
which choreographs the viewer into an unusual relationship to screen surface and space within the gallery setting.
11
This recalls Joseph Beuys’s The Pack (1969), an installation work in which twenty-four small sleds appear to
have emerged from the back of a VW van, each carrying a roll of felt, a lump of animal fat and a torch – a matterof-fact yet eloquent evocation of the bare requirements for survival.
motorcycle as an object lodges horizontally in the exterior vertical wall of the pavilion – R6
Intersection (2009) is a literal puncturing of the skin of the architecture or vestige of the
external world seeking some form of entry, even sanctuary, within the otherwise clearly
bounded (and in terms of formal national imprimatur, reified) space of the pavilion. Once
inside the pavilion we encounter the mere trace of the motorcycle in a slight protruding bump
in the wall. It barely intersects the space of its representation. Lying somewhere between
barely three-dimensional object, architectural feature and almost flattened image, this
protrusion marks both the presence and exclusion of the motorbike from the pavilion interior,
both continuity and discontinuity between inner and outer spaces.
Gladwell’s work frequently questions the manner in which static forms act to draw
forth memory, how they act as the framework to which a coat of real-world associations
adhere, how they overtly occupy space, how they punctuate time, and how they often, finally,
appear somewhat spent or hollowed out. It is as if the root of their being, their dasein or even
their aura has not so much been evacuated by representation as transferred to an image-form
within Gladwell’s video works. Objects in Gladwell’s work often struggle, in the most
interesting manner, to avoid their apparently inevitable fate as memento mori.
Body and Machine
We are back in the position of the camera tracking through the outback landscape. Here we
follow the black V8 Interceptor from behind, travelling a red dirt road through the wide
plains. The sky is vast, in one sequence darkening elementally as we are drawn towards the
turbulence of a thunderstorm. Heat, and in particular dust, distort the view, stretching and
shimmering the physical coordinates of the landscape, scouring the lens and invading the
frame of the projection.12
Interceptor Surf Sequence shares certain elements with Approach to Mundi Mundi –
the tracking shot following figure and vehicle through the landscape, its dual projection on
two sides of a hanging screen (positioned above the stairs linking upper and lower levels of
the Venice pavilion, a bridge of sorts between spaces), its looped exhibition format and its
disavowal of any sense of progress or destination. However in this more recent work the
performative relationship between figure and vehicle is far more pronounced. The same figure
in black emerges from inside the moving car through the side window, slowly mounts the
roof of the vehicle – his movements careful, almost provisional as if feeling for purchase
upon the space around him – and stands upright,13 assuming a position overlooking his
12
The work was deliberately shot at the height of summer in extreme heat. Shaun Gladwell himself has noted this
interest in ‘picturing turbulence’ stretching back to his already iconic Storm Sequence (2000) work. See Ihor
Holubizky with Shaun Gladwell, ‘Intentionality and Interpretation’, p. 47.
13
This emergence and raising of the figure into an upright form suggests something of Shaun Gladwell’s interest
in computer-game avatar figures that lie motionless until animated by the player. He has used the form of the
surroundings from an unstable platform, a platform that is in fact a vehicle ‘car-jacked’ from
another genre and narrative.
In contrast to the highly graphic and symbolic cruciform shape adopted by the rider in
Approach to Mundi Mundi, here movements are kept to the minimum required to maintain
balance atop the roof of a vehicle travelling along a dirt road. Slowed in a manner favoured
by Shaun Gladwell in his video work, every nuance of the car-surfer’s movement is
accentuated, transforming a potentially dangerous act into a formal study in physical
virtuosity as the body embraces and balances elemental forces of velocity and gravity,
themselves visually abstracted in slow motion. The acute figure–ground relationship of the
work evokes multiple characterisations: the renegade figure, or the outlaw fused to
(determined by) the extreme environment; the contemplative, melancholy, perhaps
transcendent romantic figure gazing over the landscape absorbed in a form of hallucinatory
reverie;14 and a figure grounded in a material, everyday, earthy relationship to the
environment.15
The fusion of the human body as a vehicle for experiences of motion with the
mechanical reality of a vehicle hurtling through time and space is more precarious, more
subject to potential violent rupture than the relationship between bike rider and motorcycle in
the earlier work. Yet this fusion exists nevertheless. It exists not only in the fleeting form of
the performance but in its slow motion rearticulation at the heart of the Venice pavilion
project, suspended above the central set of steps linking upper and lower levels of the
pavilion, relentlessly proffering and deferring the moment of failure, that point at which body
and machine promise to part ways in a brutal cleaving of physical capacity.16
Facing the Centre
Shaun Gladwell’s abiding concern with how place is defined and claimed through forms of
presence, both playful and critical, reflective and declamatory, has always been quietly
prone, motionless, avatar figure earlier in Yokohama Untitled (2005), in which individual street dancers began
their solo, interventionist dérives through shopping centres, pedestrian malls, subway stations and train carriages
from such positions, pressed close to the ground. This work, along with the earlier Godspeed Verticals: Escalator
(2004), utilises the representational device of the surveilling camera tracking the passage of the performer from
behind in a basic form. The camera maintains a consistent distance, gazing upon the back of the figure but never
exposing itself to a return look – a shot structure that Gladwell hones in Approach to Mundi Mundi and Interceptor
Surf Sequence.
14
The obvious referents here are Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809) and Wanderer Above the Sea of
Fog (1818).
15
This is effectively Robert Rosenblum’s description of Romanticism counterpointed by Gustave Courbet’s The
Artist on the Seashore at Palavas (1854) in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: From
Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
16
Such anticipation of a cruel failure of balance is at heart a projection onto the image on the part of the viewer
created in part through consciousness of vernacular cinematic conventions. But failure – or the ultimate agency of
gravity – has also been a key focal point for earlier works by the artist, ranging from his own benign skating
imperfections in a work such as Kickflipper: Fragments Edit (2000–03) through to the bone-crunching, almosttoo-excruciating-to-view ‘stacks’ of various skateboarders in Handrails (2007).
shadowed by consciousness of the force of western identification with and projection onto
land in Australia, whether this is a primarily psychological, cultural, emotional, economic or
political act. Be they the urban malls and plazas of Sydney and elsewhere, the suburbanfringe lands of fibro houses, or the vast lands beyond, the places of Gladwell’s works are also
active, generative subjects in themselves. The potency of the outback in continuing western
mythologising of Australia, particularly via film, brings a special intensity to this aspect of
Gladwell’s practice in MADDESTMAXIMVS.17
Here Gladwell’s work enters into a potent field of discourse and collective
psychological space. Landscape has long been bent to the task of colonial and post-colonial
signification in non-Indigenous Australian culture. As Ross Gibson, an astute theorist of
landscape in Australian visual culture notes in a recent essay, for local or ‘native-’ born
inhabitants, ‘landscape is inseparable from the idea of place in Australian culture; while from
an immigrant perspective, a consciousness of the landscape must be developed from an initial
encounter with space.’18 Crucially, with regard to thinking about the dynamic modalities of
moving-image practices, in particular those involving movement within and in relation to the
landscape, Gibson writes that ‘the making and maintaining of landscapes is a practice that
folds the country in and out of its occupants’, and is ‘enacted along a spectrum stretching
between place and space.’19 The country here occupies the very being of its inhabitants, but
remains always subject to flux.
‘Australia’ is largely absent in name or by explicit narrative reference through the
bulk of the Mad Max film trilogy. Yet the films are generally considered Australian in
character. There are subtle indicators of cultural place,20 but ultimately it is the use of
landscape in the films, and more accurately the tensile relationship between human figures
and place – a performative relation – that most aggressively badges the films as Australian,
from the flat plains and coastal bush of the first film, the red outback of the second film to the
jagged gorge oasis of the third.21 Sometimes the land rushes by, pictured low down from the
17
This paragraph has been adapted from a passage in an earlier essay. See Blair French, ‘Return to Earth’, in
Shaun Gladwell: Videowork, pp. 28–9.
18
Ross Gibson, ‘Remembering a Future for Landscape in Australia’, in Catherine Elwes et al, eds, Figuring
Landscapes: Artists’ Moving Image from Australia and the UK, exhibition catalogue, London: International Centre
for Fine Art Research and Camberwell College of Arts, University of London, 2008, p. 59. For the purposes of his
discussion Gibson defines ‘place’ as ‘the shared scene where occupants debate, narrate, subvert, or maintain a
culture which orients them in the turbulent world of fate, nature, history, and political power … a custodial
phenomenon involving practices in time as well as topography’; while ‘space’ is treated as ‘a neutral entity
awaiting significance.’ A still from Shaun Gladwell’s Approach to Mundi Mundi dominates the cover of this
publication.
19
Gibson, ‘Remembering a Future for Landscape in Australia’, p. 59.
20
Including the accents and phrasings of speech, most notable in the first film (which was dubbed with American
voices for its US release), the particular mix of individualism and social bond that threads through the mythologies
of masculine white Australia, and right at the end of the trilogy the ruins of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera
House.
21
Accumulatively, the films constitute a noticeably non-Indigenous vision of the Australian landscape, or put
differently, a vision of Australia that recognises Aboriginal culture only through oblique appropriations: a metal
boomerang; the hint of a didgeridoo on a soundtrack; the generically ‘tribal’ appearance of a community of young
survivors and their adoption of communal storytelling and cave painting to bear and give life to their own history.
perspective of a vehicle speeding cleanly over blistering asphalt, or buffeted by outback
undulations and choked in dust. On one notable occasion, the earth slides like a painted
backdrop beneath Max’s lolling head as he is transported to safety in a gyrocopter. Such
images – along with those of other artists, photographers and filmmakers – formed the basis
of Gladwell’s ‘familiarity’ with this desert landscape before he visited Mundi Mundi and the
surrounding region – an experience of the outback as a place in representation (in image and
narrative) no less common to the majority of Australia’s actual inhabitants as to people living
elsewhere on the globe.
Chasing the Mirage
One mirage always masks another, and there will be another one up ahead, behind the hills,
beyond those shrubs, over there, always a bit further on; like a fugue, mirages constantly
rebuild themselves in the imperfections of the land and they call out to us.22
Shaun Gladwell has long been fascinated by the environment of the desert, pursuing this in
direct manner through travels to the deserts of Rajasthan and the northern Sahara, and
observing how this fascination/obsession plays out in the representational projects of others,
for example, in Jean Baudrillard’s desert tour in America, 23 Tracey Emin’s Monument Valley
(Grand Scale) (1995–97),24 and Francis Alÿs’s southern Argentinean desert wandering in
ostensible search for the ñandú (a flightless bird) that found form as a film and accompanying
book – A Story of Deception: Patagonien 2003–2006 (with text by Olivier Debroise). These
projects, like that of Gladwell, involve practitioners relatively removed from the
environments in question investing significant creative and critical energy into them;
undertaking reflective tasks – questing, questioning, probing; drawing from and projecting
onto the desert in various ways.
The book accompanying Alÿs’s project features images (photographs and film stills)
of the highway shimmering in South American heat; of the artist, camera in hand; and of
guanako (a llama-like animal) standing curious in the scrub. One memorable foldout bears a
full-bleed image of flat blue sky bleeding onto the receding highway. Alongside sits a
photograph of a figure (the artist most likely) pictured from behind, lying strapped to the
bonnet of a vehicle and, we assume, filming the highway rolling beneath.
For an expanded, related discussion of such issues see Adrian Martin, The Mad Max Movies, Sydney: Currency
Press, 2003, pp. 52, 65–7.
22
Olivier Debroise, ‘White Spot’, in Francis Alÿs, A Story of Deception: Patagonien 2003–2006, Frankfurt:
Revolver and Portikus, 2006, p. 88.
23
Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner, London and New York: Verso, 1998.
24
This is the title of a photograph of the artist sitting in a chair (inherited from her grandmother) in Monument
Valley, Arizona, reading from her book Exploration of the Soul (1994). This is one of a number of such readings
Emin made during a road trip across from San Francisco to New York in 1994.
The outback highway is also a significant, recurring feature within Gladwell’s
MADDESTMAXIMVS. It provides a visual path into the picture plane in Approach to Mundi
Mundi, is the core visual subject of Broken Hill Linework, and the site or performance
location for both Apology to Roadkill (1–6) and Planet and Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway.
In the last of these works (Planet and Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway) the artist –
obscured by mask, respirator, gloves and protective clothing – kneels at the edge of the
outback highway rapidly producing a series of paintings of celestial forms on diamondshaped boards25 using aerosol-paint and everyday objects including detritus found around the
site, for instance using discarded cans as stencils. The latest in an ongoing series of Planet
and Stars Sequence works undertaken in various locations, the work presents painting as a
form of performance itself, modelled on the live stencil-painting actions of graffiti artists. In
further dialogue with the culture of graffiti, in particular its representational impermanence
and ongoing cycling of creation and disappearance, Gladwell ‘disappears’ or conceals the
paintings by covering them in a veil of black aerosol paint as soon as they are completed.
Representation as such is momentary, a revelatory flash of signification at the midpoint of the
painting process, a marking in time that both punctuates and manifests a perpetual sequencing
of creation and destruction. Planet and Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway yokes reference to
celestial time and space with the physical presence of the single figure crouched by a hot,
dirty highway labouring with rough and ready materials in an activity with no apparent
pragmatic or productive output. Again, we might treat it as simply an act of being, a
performative communion with experiences of time, place, space and even art history.26
We have got this far and we still don’t know whether it’s where we ought to be. When all’s
said and done, it’s not important. We know precisely where we are and we’re prepared for
deception … / … Now we can play with the sun and lose our southern bearings as we revolve
around each other, in the heart of the mirage.27
The Miltonic Spiral
In a far earlier essay to the one cited above, Ross Gibson uses the Miltonic motif of the spiral
– cited with reference to the structure of Paradise Lost – both to describe his own critical
strategy of circling in upon his subject, looking to its centre, in ever-diminishing circles, and
25
The diamond shape is a clear reference to highway road signs.
This history stretches from street artists to ‘fine’ artists working with street forms (Basquiat, Haring etc.) back
even to histories of erasure in modern art (from various early twentieth-century iconoclastic impulses to
destruction through to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing) and to historical
practice methodologies such as Man Ray’s aerograph technique. See Tania Doropoulos, ‘The Planet and Stars
Sequences’, in Nicholas Tsoutas, ed., Australian!, exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre,
2009.
27
Debroise, ‘White Spot’, pp. 93, 94.
26
as a model for actual as well as imaginative colonisation of space in Australia.28 The spiral
serves as apt metaphor for the manner in which Western settlement begins at the outer edge of
the continent but with a psychological pull to the centre, exemplified by the colonial search
for a great inland sea and the veneration accorded nineteenth-century journeys of inland
exploration, including ones with tragic conclusions.29 Present-day occupation continues to be
concentrated at the coastal fringes and plains of the continent with the deeper inland
remaining, at least in Euro-Australian terms, primarily a space to travel through (unless
occupation is required for purposes of wealth creation, particularly in mining), but more
significantly, a symbolic realm through which a unique collective identity is claimed.30
In this regard, Shaun Gladwell’s very act of working in a performative manner in this
hinterland constitutes both a rehearsal of and reflection upon this tendency in Australian
visual culture to look to the centre for a form of symbolic nourishment.31 Based in an
explorative, performative relationship to and within the landscape, Gladwell’s work then
reprocesses the resulting forms into gallery contexts – this is to say, the landscape is both host
to and subject of the work. As host, it holds its complex personae close. It functions for the
work as an immediate, tangible physical and psychological environment. It resonates with an
intense temporality – a sense of deep ‘historical’ time both geological and cultural. Yet to the
outsider – its ‘audience’, whether immediate or at distance – it is always subject to and bearer
of multiple pre-existing representations (forms of its own image projected back upon it). For
the visitor, such as Gladwell, these representations serve to shape both expectation and initial
experiences of the space, experiences that need to be worked through over time if a form of
understanding or experience of place inferred by Gibson is to be forged. And this marks the
point at which Gladwell’s work most fundamentally separates itself from its cinematic
reference points, for in MADDESTMAXIMVS the relationship between subject and land is
anything but antagonistic and certainly not violent. Performative actions and the condition of
contemplation that their moving image representations produce constitute a forging of
understanding. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Apology to Roadkill (1–6).
Acts of Apology
28
See Ross Gibson, ‘The Middle Distance’, in Art Network, Spring/Summer 1986, pp. 29–35.
The most famous is the 1860–61 Burke and Wills expedition from Melbourne on the south coast of the continent
to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north. While successful in reaching the far north, both leaders died on the
return journey with seven expedition members in all losing their lives. One of the expedition’s key staging points
was at Menindee, a set of lakes fed by the Darling River only some 125km east of the Mundi Mundi Plains region.
30
This metaphor of the spiral – of circling towards the centre – may be layered over the Mad Max trilogy also.
Max lives with his family in a beautiful, dramatic coastal setting at the start of the first film (in which the coast and
ocean feature strongly). His response to personal tragedy and societal breakdown is to roam inland and the trilogy
ends with him walking westward into the sunset – implicitly further inland. Yet the two peaceful communities that
he encounters in the second and third films respectively both fulfil their dreams of establishing settlements east, on
the coast, in the latter case amongst the ruins of ‘home’. Max is emblematic of a collective desire to quest inland;
the two communities of more practical settlement options that also reflect Australia’s colonial past.
31
The term ‘visual culture’ is apt here, gathering in a vast array of still and moving imagery found in television,
advertising and cinema as well as art.
29
Our bike rider in black is filmed pulling onto the dirt verge of an outback highway alongside
‘roadkill’ – grey kangaroos struck by the large trucks that continue to billow red dust, or
shimmer across distance on thin strips of blacktop. These carcasses are an everyday sight in
this environment, but also apparently the object of the rider’s quest. All his movements are so
carefully considered, so deliberate. Still helmeted, he quietly examines each scene, finally
cradling the animals in his arms; at which point at least one disintegrates as fetid flesh, blood
and fur. In subtle gestures reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’s famous performance work, How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), the rider appears to at least attempt to convey
something of modest consequence to these lifeless bodies. Beuys’s example is important to
Gladwell’s work here, where the shamanistic metaphysics of the reference point is met by the
blunt, everyday reality of roadkill. We might recognise other references too: the figure of
Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999) carrying the bodies of unwanted dogs to the
incinerator; or even Arnold Böcklin’s figure of the ferryman in The Isle of the Dead (1880),
bearing figures across the river Styx, boundary between earth and the underworld.32
These key references aside, there is both beauty and brutality in the limp, bloodied,
marsupial form. In one sense the work is a study in abjection, where clear relationships
between subject and object collapse (the point at which both connection and distinction
between forms disarticulate). In another it is a study of humility, emphasised in art and
literary references but reinforced visually in the form of a prostrate figure (providing a visual
bridge between earth and sky).33 A free play of association takes place in such a potent yet
intimate set of actions and images. But for an Australian audience at least there is a hard edge,
too, in the apparent reference to the failure of the Australian nation (at the time the work was
first shot and presented in 2007) to formally apologise to its Indigenous population regarding
aspects of their treatment under colonisation.34 Of course, it would clearly be inappropriate to
treat these dead examples of native fauna as somehow representative of or metonymic standins for a people, however their appearance in this work does ground the project overall in
cultural locality.35 Just as significantly, this grounding in place through time further suggests
32
Böcklin is thought to have painted five versions of The Isle of the Dead between 1880 and 1886. Böcklin is cited
by Imants Tillers in ‘Locality Fails’, an important essay that enacts dynamic, discursive, almost associative links
between local and international histories – in this instance between Böcklin’s work and the genocidal treatment of
Tasmanian Aborigines by nineteenth-century colonial authorities and settlers. See Imants Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’,
Art & Text 6, 1982. (Republished in Butler, ed., What is Appropriation?)
33
This prostrate figure is echoed in Planet and Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway also.
34
After being the subject of much national debate for many years, a government apology to the ‘Stolen
Generations’ made by the then new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008 was a landmark
event. The term Stolen Generations refers to children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent removed
from their families by State and Federal government agencies under policies of assimilation and placed in the care
of and raised by government and church organisations. Such removals took place from the late nineteenth century
through to the early 1970s.
35
And in recognition of an extraordinary presence reaching back tens of thousands of years prior to European
arrival.
how the work also prompts speculation on relationships between people and environment –
the balance of understanding necessary for the harmonious relationship between the two.36
If reconciliation between peoples (and between societies and their own histories) as
well as between peoples and the environment can be built upon accumulations of small,
intimate gestures, then this work enacts a certain tenderness that might be located at the core
of such a vision while also projecting a broader allegorical resonance concerning modes of
response to the hard realities of place. Too rich in allusion to be an exercise in pedagogy,
Apology to Roadkill serves rather to dramatise the power of apology, but also the way in
which when uttered with authenticity it bears upon the speaker just as much as the subject
their apology is directed to.37
Time Cycles
All of Shaun Gladwell’s video work may be considered, in part, in terms of an experiential
mechanics of cyclical movement and time set in dialectical relation to the figure of ‘time’s
arrow’, of time’s relentless trajectories so succinctly characterised for general understanding
by Stephen Hawking as thermodynamic, psychological and cosmological.38 We could almost
think of the works in graphic, diagrammatic terms, in sketches that trace flows of elemental
forces: circles of centrifugal movement; ascending and descending movement vectors
signalling the rise and fall of figures through spaces; lightly dotted lines indicating anticipated
zones of fading momentum and energy; and semi-circular and right-angle inversions of
bodies flipped in projection format, pictorially concentrating rather than banishing
gravitational force – all accompanied by provisional calculations for how the slowing of the
works will restrain velocity and stretch time.39
Figures in Gladwell’s work frequently rotate and spin, harnessing and demonstrating
a gravitational energy. Or they move back and forth, recycling in temporal and spatial terms.
Where the passage through space is more linear – whether pre-determined or improvised – as
if inferring a set path or narrative to the work, the spatial form of the installation (such as
hanging screens that the viewer moves around to view on both sides) creates an internal
dynamic and an experience of perpetual, circular motion.
36
The serial quality of the actions – six are featured in the work – serves as a pointer to the sheer volume of
roadkill, signal of an imbalance in this relationship.
37
This section has been adapted from a passage in an earlier essay. See French, ‘Return to Earth’, pp 28 –9.
38
Hawking describes the thermodynamic arrow of time in terms of increasing disorder or entropy with the passing
of time; the psychological arrow of time in terms of our feeling or sense of time passing, by memory and the
manner in which we remember the past rather than the future; and the cosmological arrow of time as the direction
of time in which the universe expands rather than contracts. See Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time:
From the Big Bang to Black Holes, London: Transworld, 1988, p. 145.
39
Shaun Gladwell is, in fact, an artist who sketches constantly. The reams of preparatory studies and responses to
the MADDESTMAXIMVS project, however, collectively function more as elemental and psychogeographic maps
and diagrams than as visualisations of movement.
Counterpointing the movement of figure and vehicle through place in Interceptor Surf
Sequence and building upon concentrated studies of figures rotating in various ways in earlier
works – in particular the single inverted figure spinning on his blue helmet in Gladwell’s
earlier Pataphysical Man (2005) – the stacked figures in Centred Pataphysical Suite spin in
various ways and are presented at different image speeds. These differing visual
concentrations of energy constitute something like a taxonomy of bodies revolving in space, a
study of the nuances of the body seeking its own centre of gravity, the body apprehending its
own mass through velocity.
The spinning actions take place at distance from the outback location of the core
MADDESTMAXIMVS works, in far less coded environments. The figures performing in front
of a sheer sandstone cliff-face do, however, share a location. It has an almost abstracted,
textured backdrop quality, but its striations and surface markings hint at the deep geological
time of its formation. The performances create experiences of time in motion – of energy
expended without any departure from a single point in space–time – for both performer and
viewer. This rock surface is itself recalled on-screen in Endoscopic Vanitas (2009). A
monochromatic surface not unlike that of the cliff-face slowly progresses across a monitor
screen, mostly smooth but with some markings, indentations and what appear to be shafts of
light coming in and out of view. Watch long enough and we might apprehend that in fact this
is the result of an endoscopic camera fixed inside a hollow, revolving form, filming its
interior surface. Step back and look behind the monitor and we will discover it is a human
skull rotating within a harness with a real-time video-feed to the monitor.
This vanitas work sits in a lineage of skull representations in Gladwell’s practice
ranging in source from popular skating culture to medieval painting to the picked over and
sun-bleached bare skeletal forms of dead stock and wild animals encountered in the outback
(always counter to or in sceptical relationship to the predominance of the skull as bearer of
embellished surfaces within contemporary art, as a membrane that projects outwards, denying
entry to its invisible interior). It is equally positioned within the artist’s longstanding interest
in the association of vanitas with emptiness, the transience of life and the inevitability of
decay, loss and death.
Here literally sits the now empty site of consciousness and subjectivity – the space of
Plato’s cave upon which surfaces we may project traces of our own ideal forms. There is a
form of visual poetry here in a reduction to essentials. The object stands within its own
representation, subject to partial veiling by its own live image turned inside out. We might
think of it as an attempt to visualise the internal vessel. The skull as an object has its own
apertures through which light passes (and with light, time, and with time a sense of generation
and evolution of being). As a form it evokes a very real, biological experience of the linear
passage of time quite different from the video performance works. And yet, harnessed to the
artist’s project here as a stand-in for the artist, less a self-portrait than a place-holder,40 this is
a body set truly, if mechanically, to demonstrating the idea of perpetual revolution – motion
that transcends boundaries of past, present and future, even life and death. No beginning; no
ending; just the continuum of being both in and beyond consciousness.
BLAIR FRENCH is Executive Director, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney where he curated the first major
survey of Shaun Gladwell’s work – In the Station of the Metro (2007) – along with a touring version – Shaun
Gladwell: Videowork – presented in eight venues in Australia through 2008 and 2009 accompanied by a book of
the same title. Blair holds a doctorate in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney; has held curatorial
positions in New Zealand and the United Kingdom as well as in Australia; and has taught at universities in
Australia and New Zealand. His publications include the books Twelve Australian Photo Artists (2009, with Daniel
Palmer); Out of Time: Essays Between Photography and Art (2006); and as editor recent project monographs on
the work of André Stitt (2007), Michael Goldberg (2008) and Rose Nolan (2009) as well as the book Photo Files:
An Australian Photography Reader (1999). With Reuben Keehan he is joint founding and managing editor of the
Artspace periodical, Column.
40
In this regard the work ‘marks time’ until it may eventually be replaced by a singular, posthumous artist’s proof.
Inspiration for this act is found in that of pianist André Tchaikowsky, originally from Poland but based in the
United Kingdom from his mid-twenties, who having been a regular attendee at Royal Shakespeare Company
performances bequeathed his skull to the company upon his death of cancer in 1982 at the age of forty-six for use
in performances of Hamlet , replacing their plastic replica skull which he detested, so seeking to return an element
of the real to the theatre.