Objectifying
Elsewhere
Curated by Luke Letourneau
13.08.15 - 04.09.15
Objectifying
Elsewhere
Curated by Luke Letourneau
13.08.15 - 04.09.15
13 August – 4 September 2015
Curated by Luke Letourneau
@ 2015 authors and artists. Except in the context of research,
study, criticism, or review, or as otherwise permitted by the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission.
Published as part of the exhibition ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’, which
took place at Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude St, Fitzroy VIC 3065,
12 August – 4 September
2015.
Editors:
Luke Letourneau & Sophie Moshakis
Design:
Chris Mark
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Title:
Objectifying Elsewhere
ISBN:
978-0-646-94243-8
Subject:
Art, Australian – 21st century – Exhibitions.
Other Authors/Contributors:
Kate Beckingham, Brett Breedon, Emma Jenkins, Luke Letourneau,
Sophie Moshakis, Alyce Neal, Vaughan O’Connor, Naomi Riddle, Lisa
Sammut, Aurora Scott, Rachel Schenberg, Kai Wasikowski.
/ 100
Table of Contents
2
Introduction: A Note from SEVENTH
4
Luke Letourneau
After the screen: aesthetics and the hypertextual
10
Aurora Scott
Fast-forwarding and Re-winding
16
Emma Jenkins
BAD AT SPORTS
22
Alyce Neal
The Third Entity
28
Vaughan O’Connor
Two Devices after Lisa Sammut
34
Naomi Riddle
Eurydice’s Shadow
39
Acknowledgements
1
A note from SEVENTH
SEVENTH Gallery is pleased to present the second Emerging Curators’
Program. This program, initiated in 2014, aims to support emerging arts
professionals and artists through a mentoring framework. This year, we
are delighted to present an exhibition curated by Luke Letourneau and this
catalogue of dialogues surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition entitled
Objectifying Elsewhere explores the notion of viewing and the objects that
frame viewing and perception. This exhibition draws together five artists
and five writers who explore a range of mediums that question, investigate,
deliberate and subjugate notions of viewing artworks and the refracted
world in, behind and beyond the works and objects themselves.
We would like to especially thank the City of Yarra who have continued to
support this program and its aim to provide mentoring for the development
of emerging curators. SEVENTH would also like to thank Daine Singer for
her esteemed mentoring of the 2015 program. We congratulate Luke on this
outstanding exhibition.
Sophie Moshakis
Gallery Manager
SEVENTH Gallery
August, 2015
2
This responsive publication of facilitated dialogues between writers and
the artist’s, guided by curator Luke Letourneau frames the exhibition. It
journeys through the artists minds and concepts and provides glimpses into
the thought processes behind the works that will be presented at SEVENTH.
3
4
After the screen: aesthetics and the hypertextual
Luke Letourneau
You are a person, standing in a space looking at an object. The object is in
collaboration with perception, its surrounding space and its own materiality.
Everything is loaded and everything is intra-related.
‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ is not an exhibition creating these links, instead it is
one in dialogue with them. The exhibition acts as a point containing multiple
voices, time and physical distance to deny a stasis, because everything is
always in a state of becoming. You, the audience member, are one of the
active agents of the space. It’s through you standing in the gallery, revelling in
the confliction and conflation of multiple voices, that objects are actualised.
Space is porous. So is material, and so are you.
5
Do you have clumsy hands? Well Kate Beckingham sympathises with you. Bad
at sports is a series taking as its starting point videos of athletes, competing
at high profile events, who watch success as it slowly falls away from their
grip.
Kate Beckingham begins as a viewer. Sitting in front of a screen, the artist
scrolls through lists and videos compiling athletic failure; what must be
devastating moments for those depicted. Beckingham then transforms
this replayed moment into a still image that is paired with an appropriation
of the object denoting failure. However, these object are no longer fit for
completion. They have become impossible objects. What was once functional
and symbolic about the object has been removed. What was once sleek and
aerodynamic is now fragile, and what was once obvious and directional is
now invisible.
Where the artist sources this imagery from are spaces entertaining
procrastination. While the artist does not re-present the screen as object in
her work, the screen as a conceptually loaded one is still present. The screen
is an object binding space, but only through your navigation. Beckingham
takes an existing navigation to repurpose it and corrupt it. The artist
reorganises the imagery to be placed for an audience in physical space. The
artist’s work is a product of a conflated experience of space and your role as
a spectator.
The agency of our objects and devices, and where we stand amongst them,
has been explored by Anna McCarthy in her investigation of television’s
hyphenated role in our lives:
Like all technologies of “space-binding,” television poses challenges to fixed
conceptions of materiality and immateriality, farness and nearness, vision
and touch. It is both a thing and a conduit for electronic signals, both a
piece of furniture in a room and a window to an imaged elsewhere, both a
commodity and a way of looking at commodities.1
1
McCarthy, A, From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture, and Its Place, October, Vol.98,
2000, p.1
McCarthy’s writing is at the core of where this exhibition is positioning itself.
Objects shape immediate space. Perception, space and materiality always
exist in relation to one another. Broadly, this exhibition presents objects
as responses to how information transmits and transforms into new uses
and values as it both converges onto new platforms, and communicates to
audiences.
Lisa Sammut makes cosmic scale tangible. Images of the universe are
imbedded into wooden object fabricated by the artist. These objects are then
mechanised, giving them motion, as well as the capacity for tampering with
light and luminosity. A naturally occurring phenomenon is imitated and made
accessible.
The new moon is a piece of plywood displaying on one side a representation
of our moon while on the other side it has mounted on it a mirror. The object
hangs from the ceiling slowly rotating, gliding through air, and reflecting a
disc of white light around the space. The moon, an object of greatness in size,
both in its scale and its impact on our way of life, is made measurable. It is in
no way a to scale recording of the moon, neither in size nor operation, but it
behaves and processes information in a way accessible to where you stand.
Here, the moon is singular. It is just for you.
Kai Wasikowski’s Foliage is an unstable image. It is a representation of foliage
constructed through a process of lenticular printing. This process creates
both the illusion of depth as well as its movement. Looking at Foliage is a
behavioral act. When you move, it moves. In that regard, it is similar to The
new moon. However, while Sammut’s work is externally mobile Wasikowski’s
is internally unfixed. With Foliage you are needed to actualize the information
of the image, but our eyes cannot see it all, it cannot contain it all.
Foliage is flat, but not static. It is nonlinear, open, and without a hierarchy.
Jaishree K. Odin has discussed this fragmentation of experiences as a
hypertextual one. In relation to the navigation of text on screen, Odin writes:
The hypertexual medium is also composed of mobile elements; the textual
body comes momentarily into existence by the spatial trajectory traced by
the reader who actualizes it through situating it and temporalizing it.2
While the discussion here is directly relating to reading text and language on
digital screens, it is not a stretch to reframe this discussion in relationship
to objects in space. The objects contained in ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’, bind
space in
2
Odin, J K, The Edge of Difference: Negotiations Between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial, MFS
Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.43, 1997, p.603
6
This artistic act is one that brings the awesomeness of the universe into
your immediate space. Through the re-articulation of planets, landscapes
and light, the magnitude of the universe is given an intimacy. The artist binds
space and positions you amongst its plurality.
their negotiation of it, its own materiality and the viewer’s relationship to it.
They are of, and in reacting to an elsewhere.
Michael Joyce similarly frames the hypertextual directly in relationship to
the negotiation of text as a visual thing:
Hypertext is before anything else a visual form, a complex network of signs
that presents texts and images in an order that the artist has shaped but
which the viewer chooses and reshapes.3
Sensory data is disarmed in Wasikowski’s work, and how you look directly
impacts what you see. The sensation of looking is not one that fixes you to a
position but one that invites you to navigation.
7
While Wasikowski employs a representation to make you acknowledge the
symbols and codes of looking, Brett Breedon is working to remove them.
With Breedon’s work we are looking at a photograph, not a representation.
Fiddly semantics? Perhaps, but it gets to the heart of how the artist is asking
you to see.
I thought I saw something is a series of photographs that have captured
abstract light and shapes. To gain these images Breedon has interfered with
the lens of various cameras, both analogue and digital, to capture the effect
in-between this augmentation of site and object. Light reaches the artist’s
lens only by filtering through these interferences. What you see as a viewer
is the fragmentation of this place and materiality. You are not entering into
an illusionistic space; you are negotiating a photograph as object. In this
sense the artist is rearticulating the role of the photographic image. He is
in dialogue with you. He presents you with an object, loaded with a history
of documentary, and then re-presents nothing. But you are still a viewer,
negotiating an artifact. So when this artifact refuses to communicate
with you in the way you have been taught to read, what becomes of the
relationship between you and your looking?
Sound is given materiality in Rachel Schenberg’s Between what I say and
what I keep silent. To construct this work Schenberg has recorded voices in
conversation, yet stripped it back to the mutual silences. These pauses in
speech then become site specific as the sounds are played through speakers
embedded in objects and played in the ‘white cube’ of SEVENTH. These
conversational in-betweens reverberate in their structure and continue to
augment as the gallery lives its life.
3
Joyce, M. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 1995, p.206.
9
Fast-forwarding and Re-winding
by Aurora Scott
10
Kai Wasikowski
11
top:
Kai Wasikowski - Foliage (interlaced) A4 proof
below:
Kai Wasikowski - Foliage depth map drawing
Kai: So cross your eyes… Give into it. Give in!
Aurora: It’s that vase-women-thing! With the women on the sides and the
vase in the middle.
K: Is it coming out at you or going in?
A: Coming out…
K: Ah good you’re doing it right. Sick. And the vase is an invert?
A: Yeh, and I’m blinking and it’s still there.
K: Yeh, and you can look around it and it’s still there?
A: Yeh!
K: You’ve got a whole lot of fun ahead of you now!
For a lenticular image to work the blacks and whites must perfectly line up.
The lens is a tiny plastic mountain range that zig-zags across the image —
the left slope corresponds to the left eye and the right corresponds to the
right. To create depth perception in a 2D image ‘valleys’ and ‘peaks’ must
be nominated. A depth map is drawn out on paper and then scanned onto
a computer to be converted into a white and black gradient on Photoshop.
When the depth map is merged with the photograph the image becomes a
blur. It is not until the lens is applied that focal points appear — the peaks and
valleys become foreground and background, respectively. Success becomes
an act of translation: you have to make sure the photoshopped image, the
printer and the lens are all speaking to each other. A pitch test prints out
groups of black and white lines that are slightly different distances apart.
40 black lines per inch looks grey from both left and right under a 40 LPI
lens? The printer is printing too wide or too small, or the paper is expanding
or contracting. “It’s a lot to account for,” Kai admits. When the mountain
range aligns with the valleys and the peaks, the plastic lens calibrates with
the paper, a bush appears before the viewer: shiny and green and brown in
full 3D. “This is what I love about using this technology — when you hit that
12
Stereogram, published by HarperCollins in 1994, begins with a punchy
generalisation: The human brain is the most incredible virtual-reality machine
anyone has ever discovered. High pop-science (it builds an alternative
evolution: brainless human discovers brain — brainless, yet, apparently, with
all appropriate motor-skills still in tact.), the book offers up a Questacon
brand of entertainment that Kai Wasikowski warmly extends on. “It’s not
like 3D technology is cutting-edge,” he tells me as I try to get the image to
appear — crossing my eyes and moving the book slowly away from my nose —
somewhere in the pattern of 36 identical bouquets of flowers a heart shape
is supposed to come together. “But I like the feeling that you get from 3D
perception — particularly that you get in that book. I was playing with that —
how it takes you by surprise when it’s constructed in front of you.”
spot when everything turns all weird and it feels like the static you get when
you’re fast-forwarding and re-winding.”
Dr. C. W. Tyler’s famous auto-stereogram Heart resembles black dots of
static on a white TV screen. First presented in 1979, Stereogram maintains
that, “Tyler’s ingenious random-dot stereograms continue to excite the
stereogram world”. I still can’t see a heart.
Foliage uses the viewer’s vision (no eye-crossing required) to create an
image that exists wholly in the individual’s physical experience: “You have
to use your two eyes.” Kai explains, “You can’t see it any other other way.
The body is key.” Viewing a lenticular sets a particular process in motion.
This process does not create a virtual experience, as much as Stereogram’s
stoner-theorising might try to convince us otherwise. It exists in reality, in
full actuality — using technology to augment the light that enters into the
respondent’s eyes. Foliage manipulates our natural responses: a shiny, green
and brown short-circuit.
A: I’ve always thought of what you do as a hologram, not a stereogram?
13
K: It’s technically autostereoscopy, what I do… because it’s… how good are
those pictures though!
A: This one needs to be a cover of an album — the one of the people, the
crowd? And it moves? The album should be called Mexican Wave.
K: Ha. Yeh, that one! I think I’m going to use a crowd. To make an animation
for a music video…
A: This book just gives and gives, doesn’t it?
K: It gives so much.
14
15
BAD AT SPORTS
by Emma Jenkins
16
Kate Beckingham
17
top:
Kate Beckingham - Sketch ripped from Kate Beckingham’s diary
BAD AT SPORTS / Round 1
Bad at sports traces Kate Beckingham’s response to the moment of physical
failure through a series of found video stills and corresponding art objects.
Not only does she succeed in making visible the intangible moment of failure,
she pushes against the boundaries of representation to question when
spectatorship becomes participation. Artistic actions are destined to fail,
Kate declares, because bodies are too personal to replicate; to re-enact the
athlete’s failure would be inauthentic. However, the records of others’ failure
flood our reality. Sixteen million views. Thumbs up. Comments disabled.
These records are not our opponents, rather a reflection of human nature.
The authenticity of an unanticipated record of failure makes the reality of the
event more visible than other mimetic objects. The found images of the body
failing are not interpretations, but traces; the art objects are not replicas but
tangible indices, footprints, death-masks. The work is the space observed
between the still and the object, where the eye becomes a ball that is offtarget and rebounding. Minolta: when you are the camera and the camera is
you. Bad at sports: when you are the athlete and the athlete is a record and
the record is a license to look at the feeling of failure.
18
This text includes the found and altered quotes of Bobby Knight, Diane Arbus, Kate Beckingham,
Luke Letourneau, Emma Jenkins, a Minolta advertisement, and Susan Sontag.
BAD AT SPORTS / Round 2
19
The space that exists between the art object and the found video still reveals
a site where the flat becomes inflated, where passive spectatorship becomes
active identification. There is no end-point as a single frame captures a
timeless pause. No hocus-pocus, just a moment of focus that encourages
the endless recurrence of the failure. The found still has done what the eye
cannot; it has preserved the rumblin’ bumblin’ stumblin’ moment and made
it tangible. The moment of failure has been pinpointed, augmented, and
transformed. It is not lost, but transferred. Failure no longer resides in the
duration of a slip caught on camera. It resides in the slip of the viewer’s
eye and the recollection of their own body. An object that tells of loss, of
failure, does not speak of itself; it tells others of their own failure. The eye
is a ball, rolling out of reach. The ghost-moment is made tangible and we
cannot refute the play of bodily interaction. This precise moment of failure is
absolutely unique, except for the one beside it, and the one the viewer recalls,
which are all identically embodied, timelessly preserved, both recurring and
static. All of this it totally up to you.
This text includes the found and altered quotes of Chris Berman, Jasper Johns, John Berger,
Kate Beckingham, Murray Walker, Emma Jenkins, Susan Sontag, and Walt Frazier.
BAD AT SPORTS / Round 3
The contemporary condition has failed over and over and over again. By
embracing that failure, it has turned itself into success. The athlete’s failure is
Kate’s success, your success, our success. VICTORY. The temporary has been
destroyed; we are caught in the endless slip from the bars, the interminable
fall from the diving board, the perpetual drop of the stomach. What was
unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and unanticipated has become relatable, tangible,
and generative. It is not a recreation, but a translation. The eye is a ball,
both in and out of the net. We may think that the primary achievement of
this work is that the moment of physical failure has been captured and made
tangible through a series of art objects. However, at its core is the simulated
slip between one body and another, between the position of spectator and
participant. This, to me, succeeds in scouting the limits of bodily capabilities
more than any feat of athleticism. Bad at sports is about slipping between
the imaginary body, and the body of reality; about animating the found video
still and the art object, and being animated in return; about the absolute
excellence of being a body at all.
20
This text includes the found and altered quotes of John Berger, Kate Beckingham, Luke
Letourneau, Emma Jenkins, Michael Jordan, and Roland Barthes.
21
The Third Entity
Alyce Neal
22
Rachel Schenberg
23
top:
Rachel Schenberg - “Diffractions” from Meeting The Universe Halfway, Karen Barad,
pg. 79
Transnational
International
Intraction
Interaction
Within
Beyond
Alongside
Opposite
Multiple
Monolithic
Spatial
Temporal
24
The third entity is not tangible and exists in the
presence of the two other parts.
Rachel’s practice is one which strives to mute the distractions and strip the
superfluous, reconfiguring the formal relationship between the artwork,
viewer and space. Such an idea may seem unordinary; yet investigation
posits new ideas of performance and engagement to suggest alternative
methods of defining materiality and time.
25
Rachel and I work at an art space together and have met numerous times
to discuss ideas for this piece. Our conversations drifted around feminist
theory, spatial conceptions of time and history, as well as ideas of materiality
and existing outside of and within boundaries. Rachel first described her
thoughts on the possibilities of entanglement between the artwork, audience
and space through the work of theorist Karen Barad. Drawing on Barad’s
book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning, Rachel tells me about the possibilities of what Barad
terms ‘intra-actions’. Rachel keenly explains this specifically through the
‘double slit’ experiment outlined in Barad’s book whereby particles were
observed as acting like particles as well as waves, performing outside of their
fixed identity.
This term ‘intra-action’ comes from Barad’s theory of Agential Realism1;
interaction suggests pre-existing entities that engage with each other while
intra-action removes the notion of individually constituted entities and
implies a process on ongoing becoming. Barad suggests that “‘individuals’
do not pre-exist as such, but rather materialise in intra-action”.2 Intraaction questions the origin of differences and the processes by which they
are determined.3 Proposing the coexistence of material entangled with one
another dissolves prescribed definitions of what is – material entities or
agents are not restricted to perform as defined by language.
I initially was taken aback when Rachel pulled out this thick large book on
quantum physics and was not entirely sure how it related to our discussion.
Quantum physics may seem distant from art, however Barad’s theories
suggest methods of inquiry that examine the very core of materiality,
the materiality of the artwork, viewer and space, all overlapping and
intraconnected agents.
1
“Agential Theory is a theory that ultimately undermines not just the substance of matter as we
know it, but also the dichotomies between nature and culture, animal and human, female and
male, even problematising the social practice of science and the nature of ethics” A Kleinman,
‘Intra-actions’, Mousse Magazine, no. 35, October 2012, p. 76.
2
Kleinman, A, ‘Intra-actions’, Mousse Magazine, no. 35, October 2012, p. 77.
3
Barad, K, Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning, Duke University Press, 2007, p. 197.
Alyce: The role of the visitor in your practice is a role that is actively called
into question, how do you view this role?
Rachel: The active role of the visitor can be used as a way to continue the
work beyond its immediacy, beyond its direct affect.
I feel a work, in any artistic realm, has a capacity to extend outside of itself:
to act as a disturbance within the mind, like a wave - diffracting and bouncing
off other elements that consume thought. I think there is an importance to
make use of this ability, and to give rise to a potentiality beyond its present
reception and existence. There is a certain element, a force that can shift
from the centre of the work to that in the mind of the visitor. And this is the
space I am interested in accessing, triggering.
A: You discuss how forms, be it inanimate or alive, react to the presence of
another. Do you feel that viewing work can be a prescribed performance?
R: I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of viewing work as a prescribed
performance - the term, ‘prescribed’ somehow feels quite controlled
and closed - not necessarily open to new relations between the individual
agencies of the visitor and the work and space.
Therefore, what fascinates me in the realm of experiencing work in an
exhibition scope, is the idea of the visitor initiating/completing/being the
moment, the event, where all agencies – that of space, work and audience –
converse and relate.
A: How does language provide a means to rupture notions of fixed and static
ideas of objects or individuals?
R: I think what fascinates me about language is its ability to exist
independent to what it represents - words can join another world, that of
representation - beyond the thing itself. But when read/heard/received, the
two worlds, despite having a gap, overlap - intra-act - they have a relation. I
am interested in this process of understanding - between the thing itself, its
signifier, and what it represents. And even more so, in poetry - where a poem
can be seen as being other to the impossibility of what it replaces.
26
I recognise these entities as being porous structures, which transmit within
and between each other - intra-acting, overlapping and diffracting. As matter
is understood in the physics world - it is described through how it behaves in
relation to other matter. The relations are what hold meanings.
27
Two devices after Lisa Sammut
Vaughan O’Connor
28
Lisa Sammut
29
top:
Lisa Sammut - We too pass the sun (Henry Chamberlain Russell’s Transit of Venus
1892, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences Research Library
Lisa Sammut’s allegorical, poetic works suggest strategies by which the
viewer can navigate different scales of time and cosmic phenomena. While
drone-vision, image recognition and Deep Dream offer new technological
perspectives (and paranoia), Sammut’s devices draw us back to older
imaging systems. Rather than nostalgia, Sammut’s interest in the history
of astronomy examines human presence within an ecological and cosmic
context. In offering further analysis of Sammut’s The new moon, part of
Luke Letourneau’s ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ at SEVENTH, I will examine two
devices which offer an expanded readings of Sammut’s research.
In considering Sammut’s practice, there can be a difficulty in reconciling
vastly different scales of time. Or more precisely, how the viewer might
consider galactic time-scales while mired in the ebb and flow of sidereal
time. In this respect, Michelson’s Inferferometer perhaps offers a similar
navigation of time and space as to Sammut’s devices; revealing how the
intake of breath might affect a wavelength of light.
1
Dawson, P, Holographic Materiality. Studies in Material Thinking. Vol. 8. 2012.
2
ibid
30
Firstly, the Michelson Interferometer. Albert A. Michelson developed
numerous interferometers to test various hypothesis. In essence, the
Interferometer ‘causes the collimated light emitted from a single laser to
be split by a tilted semi-silvered mirror and recombined—the beams being
superimposed onto each other and expanded.’1 One use of the Interferometer
is to determine the suitability of laboratory conditions for holographic
exposures. Preeminent Australian holographer Paula Dawson provides an
additional reading of the Interferometer. While the function of the device
gauges the functioning of optical equipment, its sensitivity to ambient
conditions, space and the observer’s presence parallels the navigation of
site and materiality by contemporary artists. As Dawson notes ‘...changing
weight between our feet when standing close to a table holding the
Michelson Interferometer will cause the fringes to move more slowly and
over a smaller distance. We can observe, over different periods of time,
the effects of displacements of material things from walking, cars passing,
breathing, sliding of componentry mirrors when stands are not tightened,
and the movement of air currents through the beams.’ 2
The second ‘device’ offered is the Delftibactin called the ‘Philosopher’s
Stone’. A mythical element (or instrument, or aggregate, it seems unclear),
the intent of the Philosopher’s Stone seems dubious. Within the popular
imagination, it seems to illustrate the most totalitarian aspirations of
science: engineering the absolute commutability of all things. Yet, the oldest
alchemical texts 3 (circa 300 BC) describe it as xerion (Arabic El Lksir; Latin
elixir).4 Within this context, the xerion/elixir has a medical aspiration; a cure
for human mortality and weakness.
In a contemporary context, the promise of this elixir has resurfaced. Instead
of healing human frailty, it seems to promise salvation from a toxic planet.
Researchers from Adelaide University were inspired by the discovery of a
peptide called Delftibactin produced by Delftia acidovorans, bacteria which
lives on toxic gold ores. The bacteria changes contaminated gold from a liquid
state to a solid state with a purity of 99%.5 Students ran successful tests
using e-waste and Escherichia coli bacteria they modified for the production
of Delftibactin.
31
Unlike ancient alchemists, these young scientists are not seeking mythical
substances. Instead of controlling nature, this research re-engineers the
environmental toxicity caused by humans. For both Sammut and these
persisting in the shadow of the Anthropocene, the naturality of the ‘natural’
world seems increasingly problematic.
My final thoughts on the intersections between Lisa Sammut’s practice
and the devices mentioned previously draw me to Wikipedia’s List of
Mythological Objects.6 Michelson’s Interferometer, the Deltibactin and the
poetic machines of Sammut would seem at-home in this list. With a pickled
hand capable of unlocking any door, numerous amulets bestowing riches and
variations of the ‘fountain of youth’, these objects variously extend or stand
in for bodies.
Devices compel us with their relativity to our own bodies; simultaneously
analogous and incongruous. The exquisite functioning of these assemblages
is best described by Deleuze & Guatarri, which I offer as an ending:
In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of
bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and
whole regimes of signs. 7
3
Hoffmann-Dietrich, J Looking for the Philosophers Stone.. The Third International Conference
on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture
4
ibid
5
ibid
6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mythological_objects
7
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F A, Thousand Plateaus. 1980
32
33
Eurydice’s Shadow
Naomi Riddle
34
Brett Breedon
35
top:
Brett Breedon - Process Photograph
It is said that the music that Orpheus played to the king of the underworld
was so sweet that he was granted his request to bring his wife Eurydice
back from the dead. There was one condition: Orpheus could walk through
the underworld towards the light and Eurydice would follow behind, but if
he were to turn around and look at her directly, all would be lost. Halfway
through the journey Orpheus begins not to trust that his wife is following
behind, he can’t hear footsteps or her breath, and so believing that he has
been tricked, turns around in anger. When he does find her shadow trailing
right behind him, the promise is broken. The king of the underworld was
clever, knowing how easily blind faith can falter.
When we look at a photograph we tend to be like Orpheus trying to look
straight ahead without turning. We want what we see to be true, to be the
object of our gaze, a particular moment captured, time frozen, something
to hold onto and to keep. To try and look directly within the frame and trust
an image is to try not to see Eurydice’s figure lurking behind it: to ignore the
process, the camera, the lens and the flash, to have the same kind of blind
faith in the image itself.
In writing about NASA’s recent photographs of Pluto, Jenna Garrett finds
a similar kind of clouded veil hovering between us and images beamed from
light years away: “there is something between us and Pluto, aside from the
vastness of space…You might see an image and believe it is ‘true’, but it isn’t
necessarily the truth. Every photograph’s meaning is limited by the technology
that captured it, the technology that disseminated it, and people’s ability to
understand what it is they’re seeing.”1 Breedon simultaneously draws our
attention to all three of these concerns. What is it we are seeing here and
what is it that we know to be true?
1
Jenna Garrett, ‘What we’re really looking at when we look at Pluto’, WIRED (26.7.15)
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All photography is about different ways of seeing, about where the eye goes.
Even the camera itself has its own set of eyes and refracted gaze. Brett
Breedon is interested in the shadows, on Eurydice’s side, giving us only
surface and texture. We cannot truly know what it is we are seeing in these
images, and as our sight and certainty becomes occluded, what is tangible
is hidden behind a veil. Looking at Breedon’s photographs feels like trying to
hold on to images from a half-remembered dream, those images that tend to
fall away just upon waking; shapes and shadows that we can’t necessarily say
are one thing or another, but seem to feel, somehow, uneasily important and
significant. And they always tend to remain hazy when they come reaching
up at us out of our unconscious with their true meaning eluding our grasp.
Through Breedon’s act of disrupting the eye of the camera itself, through
manipulating and altering the lens, we are left with images from a machine
that has altered vision and perception, technology that can’t be trusted. The
result is an imprecise haze that turns our gaze outward, makes us stumble
towards the object itself, rather than the image contained within it. It makes
me think of all those artworks whose contents have been carefully and
painstakingly concealed, think of Christo’s Packages and Wrapped Objects,
what becomes more important, where does your eye go, to the unknown that
lies beneath or the knotted string and paper?
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Breedon is asking the same question of photography itself – what is
important here, the camera, the process or the resulting image; what is it
that we see when we don’t necessarily know what it is we are looking at?
There’s a pull to the present moment, an immediacy that can only come
about because of the indistinct nature of these images. There’s a move to
understanding that what we are looking at perhaps isn’t the point. Instead,
Breedon challenges us to shift our gaze, and what is at play here becomes
as much about you looking at Breedon’s photographs as what is contained
within the frame. It’s kind of that idea that in order to see clearly we must
first lose part of our vision, we must be made to see that our way of looking
does not give us truth or certainty, that blind faith can only get us so far – we
must turn around to find Eurydice behind us.
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Acknowledgements
I am not from Melbourne. So I must then first acknowledge and thank
SEVENTH’s board of directors for conceiving of, and implementing the
Emerging Curator Program. This program has provided access to both critical
and financial guidance. I must especially thank SEVENTH’s chair, Sophie
Moshakis, for being a key contact and responsive figure in the development
of this exhibition. With these support systems I have found an entry point to
engage, and be in dialogue with, an arts community separate from the one I
know in Sydney.
I also extend deep gratitude to the City of Yarra for their fundamental
financial support to this project. Without this, not only would I not have
been able to allow direct dialogue between artists and writers based in both
Melbourne and Sydney, I wouldn’t even be able to mount this exhibition.
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Daine Singer has been my program mentor for this exhibition. Daine has been
present throughout this process and has been a figure providing intelligent
and direct criticism of my curatorial practice. Similarly significant has
been her guidance in negotiating the Melbourne arts community while also
providing meaningful introductions to curators, artists and arts managers.
This has led me to engage in a critical dialogue with arts workers that I
otherwise would have had no involvement with, or even an understaning of.
Finally, I must thank Kate Beckingham, Brett Breedon, Emma Jenkins, Alyce
Neal, Vaughan O’Connor, Naomi Riddle, Lisa Sammut, Aurora Scott, Rachel
Schenberg, and Kai Wasikowski. You are the writers and artists who allow
this catalogue and exhibition to exist. Without our meaningful discussion and
your intellect ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ is without cause. Thank you.