Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts
Hosts: Keith Gallasch and Fiona Winning
Guests: Rosemary Hinde, Martin Thiele, and Harley Stumm Amanda Card (Executive Producer, One Extra Company)
This is an almost complete transcript of the forum: small edits were made where the recording was not clear. For a precis of the transcript, see “Wanted: Creative Producers” in RealTime edition number 69 on this site or in the print edition on page 40.
Keith Gallasch: Introduction
We’re here to discuss creative producers—who they are, what they do and why they’re needed. You could say that all producers are creative (or let’s hope so), that they search out and nurture the creativity of others. But, of course, some producers are more creative than others. I’m thinking of those, in particular, who don’t just pick up an already developed work but who are in there from the beginning with the artists helping to shape, fund and mount the work, sustaining the artists’ vision and even sometimes playing a dramaturgical role. We’re familiar with producers we like to think of as creative—perhaps, say, in the film industry; people like Jan Chapman who has worked with a number of Australian film directors. Or we think of the infamous model of the Hollywood moguls or producers like David O Selznick giving Hitchcock a hard time over the making of Rebecca, interfering every step of the way. And nowadays, again in Hollywood, the accountants who manipulate visions to suit their own ends. These are the people who appropriate the visions of others—hopefully they’re not the subjects of tonight’s discussion.
In the Australian performing arts, our image of the producer is not very clear. It’s a bit like dramaturgy, where everyone involved in a production plays a dramaturgical role to some degree but dramaturgs do it more than anyone else. Similarly, many artists are self-producing and sometimes they get help from various kinds of “producers.” There are agents, for example. Some agents just look after people. But others harness a particular group of artists. There are companies like Strut’n’Fret in Brisbane who put together a whole lot of idiosyncratic, cutting-edge cabaret performers. And you can recognise their very particular brand. There are venues whose programming helps to shape a terrain for artists to work. And occasionally, as with the Sydney Opera House, through Philip Rolfe, Virginia Hyam and The Studio and others will commission work and follow its gestation and development through to the end. Even more importantly is the role these venues play in creating touring networks.
There are also venues that act as incubators. I’m thinking of places like Performance Space who program work in a consistent way, who commission where they can, provide a home, a place where work can develop and be tried out. Performance Space too has its own networks. It’s currently part of a very important one, which will probably come up this evening, called Mobile States. Unfortunately, most venues rarely have the funds to commit to producing in any serious way. Then there’s a touring agency like Performing Lines. It picks up work it thinks it can tour successfully and sometimes the company can be in there from the beginning as a producer with artists and projects it feels it can commit to.
But I think there’s something that a lot of us feel is missing from the arts ecology at the moment and this is a group of independent producers who are not necessarily attached to venues and who are not agents. They’re another species or breed. These people, some of whom are here this evening, rarely have the funds to pursue their vision. Something similar happens in the film industry—we might get Martin Thiele to talk about this—he works both in film and in contemporary performance as a producer. What you get in both artforms is a kind of “bittiness”—people lurching from one project to another, and producers without the funds to achieve any kind of continuity; producers whose capacity to help artists is limited to a project-by-project basis. In the performing arts, the way funding is structured is that most funding is primarily sought by artists who get the grants and then seek help from people they want to assist them who may or may not be producers.
Tonight we’ll have what we hope will be the first of several discussions about strengthening the producer level in the ecology so that as the market gets more and more complex for artists to deal with, there will be people out there to sustain their vision. So tonight we’ll look at a number of models: an executive producer of a dance company, Amanda Card; Rosemary Hinde, a producer who sets up cross-cultural productions and tours them in Asia and Australia; a producer for performance—Martin Thiele, who’s worked with performance company Not Yet It’s Difficult, in Melbourne and is currently working with ABC TV on an arts TV program and who’s also played a role in producing documentary film; and Harley Stumm who’s worked with a different kind of producing model who’ll talk about the Urban Theatre Projects experience. He’s now working with Performing Lines.
I’ll hand over to our 4 guests and ask them what actually drives them as producers, what formed them. Where did it start? Rosemary, perhaps you’d like to kick off.
Rosemary Hinde
My company is called Hirano Productions and I’ve run it for the last 15 years. I do 3 things: I function as an agent. I represent companies with existing productions and tour them within the Asian regions on a tour-by-tour basis. I produce collaborations and co-productions with international partners from Asia—and that’s a big part of my work. Also, where it’s possible, I present, to some extent, Asian companies in Australia—mostly in the areas of dance and physical performance. In my agency work I also represent a lot of outdoor work. So I’m bridging the worlds of popular culture and fine art, I guess, because the reality of the market within Asia for most outdoor performance is that it’s a commercial popular market, particularly in Japan where I work quite a lot.
Within that group of activities and services that we offer, the main area in which I’m a producer is in intercultural projects. I’ve got to say I ‘ve never called myself a creative producer. If there’s anyone creative in my business it’s probably my accountant because I’m still here. That’s the miracle really. I’ve encountered the term in the area of popular entertainment that I work in. So when I work with advertising agencies in Asia or event companies, they have creative producers. What those people do is choose ‘the talent’, the ‘concept.’ They’re responsible for those aspects of the event or the advertisement or the production. I think their role is contrasted to someone like an executive producer or a line producer who deals with contracts, budgets, keeping things on track. Traditionally, I think, in the world of commercial theatre, the role of a producer is to have the final say on both the artistic and financial aspects of a production or an event. And that seems to me to be the characteristic of producing in whatever medium. The producer raises the money and, in commercial theatre, safeguards the interests of the investors. And that’s also the case in commercial film. The role has not primarily been as an advocate for artists. It’s, in a sense, historically been as an advocate for investors.
The artists’ interests, it seems to me, have traditionally been represented and safeguarded by managements and agents. Their role is to represent the artists rather than that being part of the producer’s role. The title ‘producer’ seems to have become quite common in the last 5 years. I notice local governments now have creative producers. City of Melbourne has a creative producer. Ten years ago when you dealt with Australian arts companies, they had general managers and artistic directors. Now they all have executive producers. So, it’s a bit of a terminology thing. It really gets down to what people do.
I’ve worked a little bit with film people and there’s a difference between the role of a producer in the film industry and in the live performance industry. The industries are structured very differently. In film, the companies are on the whole profit-driven. They’re private companies. So the production company for film and television is a normal profit-making company. Live performance is dominated by the not-for-profit structure.
The second key thing is that in film, the copyright is owned by the production company. In live performance, the individual creative artists own the copyright. Probably as a consequence of that, funding in film and TV goes to the producers as the representatives of the copyright. They hire and fire writers, directors, actors, whatever. Live performance doesn’t work that way. The key funding goes to the artists who then, if they choose, engage a producer. So, that’s a structural difference in those industries, which, it seems to me, makes it not very easy to transfer the role of producer from a film and television context to a live performance context.
I think there are many producing models. Deciding on the best model depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Firstly, it’s important to realise that just simply by introducing a producer, you’re not going to solve fundamental problems of lack of audience or lack of money or other resources. Some young artists think that’s going to happen. It’s not. The economic reality of the industry is not going to change simply by introducing a producer. So It doesn’t mean that styles of work that aren’t profitable or don’t get audiences are suddenly going to start getting them because you have a producer.
Traditionally, within a funded and not-for-profit context, funding has been driven through the core unit of the company with its general manager and artistic director or executive producer. Historically, that’s been the basic unit and model of arts funding in Australia. Now, I’m actually not sure that that is any more the most economically productive way of deploying funding because it seems to me—and I work with companies. I tour companies that have exactly those structures—but I think that what you’re effectively doing when you fund things that way is to duplicate roles. Every company has a marketing manager, a finance manager, an operations manager, every core area of operations. I think not all companies need that.
A company that does 2 seasons a year, it seems to me, doesn’t need a marketing manager. But maybe 6 companies who are grouped together with a complementary set of skills, I guess, in the way a festival works with specialist managers who come together and work as a team that service each of those individual companies, might be a better way of looking at it. Performing Lines is definitely one model. Arts Admin in London is also a model that supports companies over time. It has that specialist expertise and it has line managers for each of those companies so that they’re preserved as entities.
I think it’s to do with the structure of the industry rather than a question of creative producers. You can’t look at one in isolation from the other.
Keith Gallasch
And what drives you as an agent/producer?
Rosemary Hinde
I always had a strong international focus. I worked for Melbourne Festival for a time. I started working in the industry when I was in London. I was interested in working internationally and I was specifically interested in Asia.
Keith Gallasch
What about the dance aspect?
Rosemary Hinde
I was a dancer too. So it’s personally driven.
Keith Gallasch
We might move on to Martin who works in both film and theatre domains.
Martin Thiele
I don’t think of myself as being specifically a performing arts producer. I actually started in visual arts, indigenous arts, multicultural arts, community arts, documentary film, media arts, and then performance art. So I think of myself very much as a cross-artform producer.
What drove me to become a producer? It’s actually a monumental moment in my life. I was general manager and working about 70 hours a week in an organization that was kind of in crisis, which is not unusual for small arts organizations. And in fact, I ended up having an industrial dispute with the board of management who were quite disengaged and the weight of the organization I felt was very much on my shoulders. So it was a particular moment in my life. I ended up threatening to take legal action against the board and then actually getting paid out and walking away from that and thinking, that was the most hideous experience of my life.
Seven years later I worked with a much smaller company called Not Yet, It’s Difficult (NYID), which really kept its board at bay and had a philosophy of putting its energy into making art rather than maintaining itself as an organization. I worked out that as an organisational manager, about 85% of my time had gone into maintaining the earlier organization and 15% into creative arts projects. Seven years later, 85% of my energy as a producer went into creating arts projects and 15% effort went into maintaining the organization. Curiously, these were both not-for-profit structures.
Rosemary, one thing you forgot to mention is that in company structures there are often boards of management and, unfortunately … and I’m sure people here are on boards, and I’ve been on boards…they can be full of dickheads, or it can be very hard. Often the people running the company know a hell of a lot more about the history and the artforms than the people on their boards. But because of this historical fact that most arts organizations need to be not-for-profit and need to comply with state regulations, often arts managers can inherit a particular structure that they have to work within.
On the flip side, film production companies are profit-making entities, though I’m still trying to find one that actually has made money! People think that because Vizard made money, everybody does. But actually, they don’t. What is interesting about the film industry is that film projects can become charitable entities in their own right. So a documentary film or a feature can in fact be registered with DOCITA and get 10BA status, which means it becomes a not-for-profit entity. I’ll just mention that and come back to it. I think it’s a really interesting point that a film or an artwork can become a charity.
I think a creative producer provides consensual, logistical compliance, financial and technical support to a project or at least oversees those particular elements of a project. I think in (performing) arts, film and television which are the 3 mediums I’ve worked in over the last 12 months, the producing element is essential. Historically, artists have taken responsibility for self-producing and I think that within the arts support infrastructure there’s still an assumption that artists will take that responsibility. And I think that’s something we need to address because, generally speaking, producers have no status. Independent creative producers have very little status within the arts. Within the film industry it’s acknowledged that such support is core and essential. So a producer is acknowledged alongside a writer and a director and, in terms of the budgeting structuring, is what you call ‘above the line.’ So it’s acknowledged that the role the producer plays is a core part of actually creating an artwork, a film. I think, interestingly, in TV a producer actually can be also the writer and director. So it’s inherently assumed that a producer is creative and has artistic ideas and can kind of manage things, although there are particular structures that people operate in. I think I’ll stop there.
Amanda Card
I came to One Extra after leaving dance. One Extra became what it is now in 1996 partly through necessity and partly through the application of someone for the job who offered the Board a different model from what had been the running model for most contemporary dance companies, which is the artistic director-driven model. Janet Robertson joined the company in 1996 and since then we’ve retained that model. I think they invented the Executive Producer title because (they were) trying to find a model within say film or whatever (with which) they could label this strange beast that became One Extra at the time.
It was also driven partly out of the desires and requirements of the artists who were around at the time. It had been happening for a long time but the small company structure which most of you would know about, well, the bottom had fallen out of it. There wasn’t a lot of support for it. It was also generational. A lot of people were coming out of companies and wanting to create their own work but there wasn’t a model under which they could create those works. A lot of people were trying to create work by themselves, being all those things that they had to be [administrators, publicists, artists].
When I joined One Extra in 2000, I did so because (a) I was looking for a job and (b) I had been trying to find a way in which my past could have an impact on my present. I’d been to university. I’d done all sorts of things like massage and whatever, to see how I could fit back into a system I’d really enjoyed, but I didn’t want to dance any more. It took me 10 or 15 years to find that. When I joined I had absolutely no idea of financial structures and all that sort of stuff. I worked full-time and I had a part-time administrator. What I did have and what I think keeps me at One Extra is that I still really enjoy watching dance performance [and] a group of people for whom this is a life’s ambition. They have to do it. They wouldn’t do it unless they had that burning desire. And most of the time they find themselves in the position where they don’t have enough time to spend in the studio creating the work they want to make because they have to do all these other things—be administrators, marketers, financiers, whatever. One Extra basically tries to provide all those things. And I do have a little bit of a problem in defining what I do in terms of either producing, creative producing, management—a bit like Rosemary. The multiplicity of what is expected of me and what I expect to be able to provide goes beyond just the idea of either finding the money or helping artists find the money to do things. It actually goes towards the early stages of getting work together.
We don’t do much touring. We’re trying to find ways to establish relationships that give the work, once it’s created, a second life. What we mainly do is create relationships. It is creating a sense of location, a sense of connectedness and a collection of relationships these people can have. Most of my time is spent brokering relationships with funding bodies, venues and other organisations. In the dance world here in Sydney it’s places like Performance Space, Critical Path, and The Studio trying to work out how artists can begin their work in the best way possible and then finally make the work that might have another life with any of those organizations. I’ve heard of producers on a film walking in and they don’t like what’s going on and so they get rid of everybody and start again. That’s not something that we would possibly want to do. I see my role as being a conduit for the beginning of the process. I’m trying to make as many relationships for the artists as possible that will allow them to make the work (a) that they want to make and (b) the best work it can be.
I’m not a dramaturg. I have opinions but I don’t walk into the space and say, “I don’t like that. Don’t do that bit.” I might ask questions but that’s also really fluid. It depends on the relationship I have with the artist. As far as I’m concerned, you’re constantly doing whatever you think might work for that particular artist. You don’t tick the boxes on every one. You have to keep moving all the time. Some artists I can talk to about the work that’s being developed. With others I don’t have that relationship with, I try to set up that relationship with someone else. The main thing is developing an environment within which all the best relationships are made in order for the work to be the best it can be. It’s always going to be a gamble.
I was looking at a website about what a creative producer could be. “Lunatic” was one of the things that came up. There was a documentary film site, which included some ideas that might be useful for producers. They’re things like:
Be comfortable with half-developed ideas.
Learn how to stretch organizational regulations.
Try not to dwell on mistakes.
Be a good listener.
Provide lots of feedback
Accept trivial foibles
Defend the artist against attack.
So when you get a bad review or everyone, except a small group of people hates what you do, it’s about having those conversations and saying, well, where do you go from here?
Development work too is one of the best things to be invented in the last ten-fifteen years. Instead of [creating the whole work in] 4 weeks [or] 6 weeks and on it goes, funding bodies are starting to realise that you can develop stuff over time. With the likes of Critical Path we have other places where the development process can go on… (allowing us) to have different conversations about each step of the way. Ultimately, the artist is the one that we’ve identified [to focus on]. We’ve said, okay we’ll give it a go. We’ll call you an artist too and see what you can make. And it might not always be great.
[Being located at] Performance Space has meant that we are no longer on our own either. We used to be at the Seymour Centre and we were a bit isolated and, structurally, a bit out on our own. Coming to Performance Space in 2003 has meant that we can have relationships of our own that we hope will start to develop, a relationship between artists and audience that will stretch over time. So, if you don’t like one work, you might hang around for the next one to see how it went, rather than saying, “Ditch this person. We didn’t like that. We’re not gonna come back for another one.” That constant shifting and moving between relationships, between artists, mentors, money, government is pretty much what we do.
Another thing I do when artists don’t get money is a lot of jumping up and down and carrying on in order to get the money from somewhere else. Also a lot of what One Extra does is stretching out to the relationships we can make with other people, looking at ways that we might be able to make it possible for other companies to have…not replicating, as Rosemary has suggested. One Extra works with anywhere between 6 and 10 artists. Sometimes, I will identify those artists. Other times they’ll come to me. Or there are historical relationships with people that extend over time.
Harley Stumm
In answer to the questions posed, eg, what drives me as a producer, I wrote: “Apart from the obvious things like earning a pay cheque and personal ambition and the desire to conquer the world and all those kind of things, I’d say a desire to influence our public culture, a desire to see the work of really exciting artists (insert your favourites here) to be experienced widely; a desire to make unforgettable performance events. Blah Blah Blah.”
Okay, activist, evangelist and artist, kind of. Which is not the answer that anyone expects. Businessperson is the connotation that usually goes with the title ‘producer.’ And that’s the sort of thing that you have to learn by accident. It’s not what drives you. It’s the means to the end, I guess. I was thinking about this when Rosemary was talking about the model of the commercial film producer who’s the businessperson who goes out to find the artist, to mine the talent. Probably the work we’re all engaged in is more pitching up rather than being a bottom feeder, or all those negative manifestations.
What formed you as a producer? The first event I produced was kind of by accident. I never thought of myself as having produced this event until I came to prepare this paper. The first performance event I caused to happen was in 1984 when I was 20 and worked at a community radio station (4ZZZ) in Brisbane. And for the radiothon market I organised—it’s interesting the other words for this work. There’s a different discourse for each sector or field, often depending on the politics. The whole idea of ‘organising’ obviously connects with political activism. Anyway, I organised the TV-Smashing event of the market in which I sourced 29 defunct television sets and stacked them up in rows 4 high and cut out photos of the baddies of the day—Thatcher and Reagan and Bert Newton and the Channel 9 newsreader and Andrew Peacock and John Howard. We charged people one dollar to hurl half a brick at the TVs. And then after all that—it was an extraordinary event—the punks moved in with long-handled pick axes and reduced everything to rubble. Then I found out it was the producer’s job to take the rubble to the dump.
The next thing I did as a producer—and of course I would never have thought of myself as a producer—I was actually employed by the Communist Party in 1988, to make an intervention into what would happen to the Expo 88 site in Brisbane. We made a submission and had an event with the oral social history of the area involving all the wonderful things that were going to be destroyed, made artworks about it and some fairly lame interactive models to get people into the idea that they could have a role in urban planning. So I think perhaps a lot of people in the arts have come out of this sort of background and we kind of forget it. I think of myself as being socially engaged without thinking of myself as an activist now. But I do think that is a model that we do tend to forget.
I worked in radio for 10 years as a radio producer. Through producing for public radio and for the ABC is very different. I mean, I didn’t know I even had a budget actually. People just showed up and I didn’t even realise they were being paid. But I did documentaries for Radio National and JJJ where I was the program maker, the creator. I also worked as a live radio producer show for Angela Catterns for a year, which I hated. There I wasn’t sure whether I was the brains of the outfit or the tea lady. That’s the radio model.
Then, by accident, I started working in theatre, for Death Defying Theatre, which later became Urban Theatre Projects. That was quite an interesting model. This was around the same time Amanda was describing, around 1996 when One Extra was moving to a producer model. DDT in 1995 had an artistic directorate and no full-time artistic director. And again, I never thought of myself as the producer but found myself running this massive community based hip hop project with workshops in 8 suburbs and 4 artforms and an event at Casula Powerhouse and what is now Bangarra Studios down at the Wharf. I produced a number of site-specific events after that. From 1996, John Baylis came in as artistic co-ordinator, then artistic director and then Alicia Talbot took over a few years later. Obviously they involved very different relationships. But I guess in a way, it never occurred to me that: (a) You never thought of yourself as a producer but (b) I kind of assumed that every manager of a small theatre company had the same intimate relationship with making a piece of theatre that I did.
I gave a talk here a few years ago about producing site-based performance and talked about how essential it was to integrate all the aspects, all the departments—creative and production and marketing and management—in that work. In site-based work, logistics and art are so interwoven in every aspect. I guess in a way, that wasn’t just an observation about site-based work but an articulation of my approach to producing performance. I think a lot of the things that are often seen as ‘dry’ management tasks (budgets, schedules and so on), they’re just a different discourse about the creative process. A budget is a plan for the distribution of resources. So, you can’t do all that work without having a really clear idea of the vision for making that work of art. Is the soundscape a layer at the end or is it completely integral? That’s a small, banal example. To frame a budget, entails asking a series of questions of the artistic director about the intention of the work and how it’s to be made. I don’t see how you can do that effectively without the two feeding back to each other. In the same way, writing an application for funding can often spur the development of the work and contributes to the conceptual development of the work. A media release, when you’re dealing with a devised work that is yet to be made, is the same kind of thing.
The other thing I wanted to say was that it’s really essential to conceive the outcome of this art-making process not as a contained piece of art but as an event that doesn’t meaningfully exist until there’s an audience. The audience are co-conspirators in making the event and then making the meaning. All of that is sort of “Contemporary Cultural Theory 101” I suppose. Often, I think the producer is the only one who has the time or the space or the need to see it that way. That’s the most useful perspective a creative producer can bring to making a piece of work.
I don’t want to talk much about Performing Lines because I’ve really only been there for a few weeks. I could just talk about a couple of projects I’ve worked on since I’ve been there. One is Branch Nebula’s BNP6 and version 1.0’s Wages of Spin and just reflect on how different the role was in each. And this reflects I think the very different work but also the very different structures of the companies and the different skills of the people involved. In a way, you kind of fill the gaps.
Branch Nebula is a devising group without a director. Rightly or wrongly, you kind of feel a bit more compelled to perhaps offer a lot more feedback than would be the case with the other project (welcome or unwelcome, as mostly it is). I see the role there as being an informed audience member and saying, I don’t understand what you’re doing there? What is it? Rather than saying, why don’t you do it this way. So it’s not so much a dramaturgical role but you’re acting as a stand-in for the audience who can’t be present in that making process.
Keith Gallasch
Thanks to all the speakers. I’d like to go back to Rosemary’s opening provocations. Perhaps this might be a starting point for a broader discussion. You suggested that it’s not primarily an issue of creative producers first up but of the structure of the industry—lots of small companies each with their own artistic director and general manager. And then there was Martin’s point about leaving that behind and getting out of that structure.
Rosemary Hinde
I’ve worked for organizations and you spend an enormous amount of time working out your strategy before the board meeting. I don’t have a board. I do whatever I like. I’m totally feral. It gives me a whole lot more time to do the work.
Keith Gallasch
The feral producer, I like that. If there is a fantasy world in which we have a sudden new breed proliferating, a new species—creative producers—and they’re out there, where does the money come from? Is it a matter of re-structuring? Do 6 small companies say, okay we’ll sack our artistic directors and our general managers and we’ll link up in a consortium to share this creative producer. Is that going to work? Even the smallest companies like to be autonomous, drive their own vision.
John Baylis (Director, Theatre Board, Australia Council)
Whether it’s practical or not is perhaps further down the track. Certainly the current model, picking up on what Rosemary said, isn’t probably sustainable—the idea of the little self-contained company with its general manager and artistic director. For a start, a lot of the smaller companies are having trouble even recruiting those staff because there are so many of them out there trying to get the right people. That model arose in the 70s when, if companies wanted to make their own work, they had to create the infrastructure to make it. That case doesn’t pertain now. There are more structures around. You rattled them off before—The Opera House, Performance Space and the like. Things you can tap into. You don’t necessarily need your stand-alone structure. But we’ve inherited that model and it’s rarely been questioned. It’s assumed to be the natural order of things. You aspire to be an artistic director and have your general manager to take all that boring work off your hands and get on with it. It’s cracking.
Fiona Winning
It’s the standstill funding model really.
John Baylis
It is, but … Sorry, just to introduce myself, I’m John Baylis and I’m the Director of the Theatre Board at the Australia Council and we commissioned research into the small to medium theatre companies two years ago which told us what was the problem with our 33 triennially funded organizations. And yes, that exercise was about trying to get more money from government to support them: we can say, yes this model will work, we just need more money. But if you forget about that for a minute and if you were creating things from scratch right now, is that the model you’d go with? I think that’s a question we should be asking.
Rosemary Hinde
I see an enormous amount of resources in things like venues. I think, why don’t venues have to apply with an annual program that includes x amount of Australian work or new work or whatever, and get their funding and do it on that basis? So the management and accountability stuff for the companies gets reduced and the pressure of spending 70 hours a week wondering how you’re going to deal with your board gets taken away. That’s 70 hours a week you can spend on getting the work out there. That gets moved onto a different structure. Some of these problems were created with federalism I think. Arts centres, which lock up an enormous amount of resources, are mostly state funded in a particular way. Partly it’s a problem of Australia being over-governed. It has national, state and local government which all lock up enormous resources and become somehow hard to access, I reckon. They don’t work together.
John Baylis
The last 20 years has seen a huge investment in local government funded performing arts centres both in regional and suburban areas. And yet they’re a parallel structure to the other Australia Council and state government funded kind of producing infrastructure. The two only meet vaguely when invited by Playing Australia or something like that. Yet they represent an enormous resource for artists which everyone turns a blind eye to, including funding bodies like us.
Anne-Louise Rentell
Could I just take that up as a representative of one of those regional performing arts centres. I’m the Performing Arts Facilitator in Wollongong and I’ve been down there for 2 and a half years. This is a position created by the NSW Ministry for the Arts to facilitate professional performing arts in the Illawarra region. It’s been quite an interesting job because you’re in a semi-producer role. You’re seeking out work and helping it happen and providing ways for it to happen, paths of development, that sort of thing. Even though it’s been based at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC), it’s also had an external involvement with the community. We’re now looking at making that position much more embedded within the Centre because it’s one of the performing arts centres that tours work. It tours big companies and whatever. But we felt that the work of the performing arts facilitator can’t go any further without there being a venue for that work to actually develop.
We used to have a regional theatre company called Theatre South, that was made redundant or wound up, about a year and a half ago. So there’s no regional theatre company. So we’re also a venue that’s placed to also be a professional producing company because there is no other company or venue with the capacity that we have. So we have resources from operations managers to technicians to a director who’s been working with a state theatre company, and I bring my own experience. And we’ve got 2 great venues. So we’re sitting there, under-utilised pretty much. We’re touring shows. We have the Merrigong Fringe, our alternative, locally driven—although not entirely—performance opportunity. But what John’s saying is right. We’re now seeing that we’re ripe to actually provide opportunities for development and to produce local work from the ground up. I think it’s a really exciting opportunity.
Martin Thiele
So where do you see the resources coming from to develop this new work that you want to put into your arts centre?
Anne-Louise Rentell
We’re working on that at the moment. We have applications in at the Ministry, one for the role of performing arts facilitator to morph into this new role that will actually look after the development of a theatre program. We’d be looking at things at a grass roots level, incorporating things that are already happening, for example I produce a bi-monthly cabaret down there which is a performance opportunity that’s starting to create work of its own. We’re looking at ways of feeding in. We’re dependent on funding but in terms of how we exist, we’re very well funded by the local council.
Martin Thiele
But does that actually include incubator money for new work?
Anne-Louise Rentell
No, it won’t. It provides resources, the venue, and wages. They don’t fund the artistic content. So we have to seek (funds), if we’re touring stuff, through Playing Australia like everyone else or in terms of projects, through the Ministry for the Arts. But I suppose what I’m saying is it’s an interesting model to contemplate [www.ipac.org.au].
John Baylis
In a way it’s an answer to your question of who will pay for the producer. Well, you could imagine maybe local government will pay for the producer and current specific arts funding, which is now paying for the art making but also for the infrastructure and the general manager to support that, can just go to the art-making. That’s one fantasy future.
Rosemary Hinde
I don’t think that’s entirely fantasy. In a way, the City of Melbourne sort of does that. They have a creative producer [Stephen Richardson] and it has rehearsal venues and performance venues and funds the work to go into them. It’s a fully vertically integrated system really. So it does happen.
Fiona Winning
I suppose there are models outside that. People who work around Performance Space are mostly self-producing, very lean teams of artists or independents making work and I just can’t imagine where they would go in a structure like that.
I’m wondering about another model—-one of my fantasies—that might sit alongside a series of other models such as that. This is of an independent producer with a very lean machine/office. They work with a cluster of artists in quite intense relationships, with those same artists over a number of years to create their vision, whether it be to creatively develop a work, make a new work, to get that on somewhere, to get it toured either nationally or internationally. I suppose this is another model we need because not everybody’s issues are going to be solved by any one model. And it seems to me that that sort of cluster, without the investment in a whole big infrastructure, is is very lean and about relationships. Mostly artists self-produce and mostly do it extremely well but when I see them working with producers, I see it actually enabling the artist to concentrate on making the work rather than worrying about, say, the media release. What producers are able to do in those circumstances is to create relationships at moments when the artist really needs to be in the studio making the work.
Martin Thiele
That’s roughly how I worked last year. I organised a national conference, I produced an interactive artwork with NYID that went to the Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne Festivals. And we worked on a theatre performance called Blowback, an immersive, interactive theatre project. Coincidentally, in the same year, the documentary film I worked on won an AFI Award and the book I’d worked on 2 years before was nominated for an Australian Publishing Award. And curiously, in that year, I earned $26,000 and clocked up 20,000 kilometres on my car and had a $2,000 mobile phone bill and swore I could never work like that again. It was the most successful year of my professional life and I’m still paying off the $10,000 credit card debt as a consequence of having worked like that.
Rosemary Hinde
I’ve got to say that my experience as an independent producer is exactly the same. I had an absolutely bumper year with overseas tours last year but it’s not reflected financially. So for that to work, somehow producers have to be paid because it’s not a commercially viable market. It just isn’t.
Fiona Winning
So it needs subsidy.
Rosemary Hinde
Well, it needs something.
Harley Stumm
That’s why people persist with incorporating and setting up the infrastructure. That’s the way that arts funding covers those costs. Martin and I saw each other a year ago and he said, “So you sold out before I did”, because I’d taken on a salaried job. Really I didn’t give it even 12 months. I mean, I didn’t have any money to invest. How can you call yourself a producer if you don’t have any money? Obviously you’re going to have to invest in a project, apart from giving it your time and enthusiasm and energy. Otherwise it feels like a bit of a fraud really to say that. So then you’re working on a project basis when there’s money available. Or for the things that you really believe in you’re working on ways to advance them as an investment of your own time. But then there’s the effectiveness of working out of an organization, like when you send an email to a festival director from harley@performinglines compared to harley@optusnet, [the difference is] just unbelievable.
Fiona Winning
There’s a UK company called Arts Admin which I think is a fascinating model. Maybe you could talk about that Sophie.
Sophie Travers (Critical Path)
That’s pretty much your dream model. It’s a subsidised entity. I worked with them when I was in the UK. And I think it’s really interesting that the model is held up around the world and in the UK itself and yet it doesn’t exist anywhere else. So even in the UK everyone acknowledges that that is the model but nobody can replicate it. Arts Admin came up through 3 very strong women who started the organization about 15, 20 years ago. They weren’t subsidised and muddled through pretty much like you’re doing, you know, losing money and always on the brink of giving up. Then they broke into being subsidised but they held onto their integrity with the artists and refused to grow as much as they were pushed to do. And it sort of always exists on a knife-edge, even now that they’re world-renowned. It’s the sort of alchemy that nobody can quite pin down.
I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that the critical mass of artists they’re associated with are really good artists. So there’s always more demand out there for those artists….so they’re always on the winning side. They’re never really scrabbling around for a project. They’re also working with enough artists so that if certain artists want to take time off as quite a few do, on a sabbatical or a research project, they’re not having to chase that next bit of income for that artist. The portfolio is really broad and that enables them to sustain over the long period without having to shift their methodology.
Keith Gallasch
How does it actually work?
Sophie Travers
There are two senior producers and there’s one really interesting, shadowy woman who almost nobody knows who’s actually the sort of financial and business genius. I’ve never even met her and I’ve worked very closely with Arts Admin. So she somehow keeps the whole thing afloat. Then the 2 senior producers, who’ve been there from the beginning as the founding members, they have in a sense recruited other younger producers to work with them. And each producer has a range of companies that they’re responsible for. But they also have a different skill set. So every time they introduce somebody new, they bring in different cultural networks or different sponsorships. So they’ve evolved with the times but they’ve kept that one-producer-for-one-group-of-artists. And they really range. Some of them are like an individual who makes one work every 5 years, to companies like DV8. They work across performing arts, visual arts. They pick up projects and put them down again. They got very heavily into science and arts and they didn’t continue with it. They run a bursary scheme. That’s a separate satellite. They were, like everybody, bombarded with people who wanted to be on their client list and they couldn’t deal with them so they set up this bursary scheme where people could access some of their expertise but the company didn’t have to grow to bring in all these new people.
Fiona Winning
I think that’s fantastic because [the funds], as I understand it, are devolved money from Arts Council and other sources. So it becomes this bursary that they can give to emerging and mid-career artists—an amount of money that could be used for R and D or creative development with 10 or 15 artists a year so that those artists always potentially could come onto the books, should someone be taking a sabbatical or someone grow big enough to have their own infrastructure. So there are artists who’ve been with them for years but there are also new people coming in as well. It’s incredibly vibrant.
Sophie Travers
But still, it’s always on the brink of collapse. Always struggling.
Martin Thiele
I was talking before with Fiona about Rising Tide in Melbourne. Angharad Wynne-Jones and Stephen Armstrong and Tanya Farman, a group of far more formidable creative producers than me, and Kristy Edmunds who’s now the director of the Melbourne Festival, actually got together and presumably they tried to create something similar. (This was) an alliance of incredibly well connected international but Australian, and internationally-based producers, but one by one, they’ve all taken jobs. So you have to ask, why didn’t that work? John, what do you think?
John Baylis
Well, Angharad came to see Rosalind Richards (Dance Board) and I to try and find a funding hole for them. The existing funding programs are not very friendly towards that. I think Dance gave them business planning funding.
Rosalind Richards (former Manager, Dance Board, Australia Council)
We gave them an establishment grant of around $15,000.
John Baylis
But beyond that, it’s more or less, you know, we’ll fund the project and you can take your cut. And of course, that’s not a very profitable…. so the funding structure is not set up to deal with that and it’s a great shame.
Fiona Winning
Perhaps this could come out of the Special Initiatives fund, which is now bigger than anything else at the Australia Council from what I can tell, isn’t it?
Russell Dumas (Dance Exchange)
This is also the battle of Artists Services in New York in the early 60s and 70s. And it collapsed because it eventually gets to a point where there’s too much conflict of interest. You devolve money and then there’s all this internal stuff. And they were Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn and Robert Wilson—quite diverse. It doesn’t work because they all want their own.
Fiona Winning
It worked well for quite a specific arc of time.
Russell Dumas
Yes, but I think that arc of time it works for refers to a much broader sociological thing than saying you can just reproduce this in this time, now. It’s a different time, a different paradigm. It’s like introducing a dinosaur. I think a lot of this producer stuff is doing that too. If you’re actually talking about a structure that has already failed elsewhere. It hasn’t failed here yet but do we need to have to go through it here like we have to do with all the other structures? Do we have to have our own local version of that?
Keith Gallasch
We are at a difficult juncture where the old model is fast running out of steam. A lot of key organizations are facing collapse.
Russell Dumas
But that’s happening everywhere.
Keith Gallasch
It doesn’t matter if it’s happening everywhere, we still have to address it. We were just at a point in the conversation where we were about to say; maybe the time is ripe for a new model. Was that what you were saying, John?
John Baylis
I’ m not suggesting the funding structure is there yet. But certainly I think it’s in the air. Because we’re in a very tight funding situation, the models that I’m grasping at are of using existing infrastructure and inflecting that towards it. And whether that’s the performing arts centres or existing funded entities which are willing to kind of transform into more umbrella…It’s interesting what Sophie just said because in this very room in the 80s, there was a tiny attempt to set up a similar type of umbrella: I was then manager of One Extra Company and I sat in that corner; Christopher Allen was manager of Entr’acte and he sat there; Performance Space sat in that corner. We made the first steps towards setting up an umbrella. What held us back was that our existing companies wouldn’t let us go. You know, you’re my administrator, said One Extra, and so on. So there was that sense, you’re our resource. So it’s getting that transition, where companies are prepared to merge that infrastructure.
Rosemary Hinde
You should start with artists and not companies. We’re not looking at trying to transform companies, which seems to me a really hard job. If you’re looking at it with new artists and new structures…
John Baylis
That’s the other way.
Russell Dumas
So you’re just going to set up another structure. Where are the artists going to come from?
Rosemary Hinde
They’re already there. They’re knocking on the door every day wanting producers. And we can’t afford to take them on.
John Baylis
If the very best artists want to work that way I guess they will attract that structure. Lucy Guerin seems to be one of them. Kate Champion seems to have done that in Sydney.
Harley Stumm
John’s story about the shared infrastructure reminds me of Performance Net which was the experiment in shared management and producing resources between Gravity Feed, Kantanka and Erth. This was Michael Cohen’s baby and then he took the gig up in Newcastle and the 3 companies moved to the Red Box at Lilyfield and then, unfortunately, the Ministry discovered that the sprinklers hadn’t been put in so everyone had to move out. So all these disasters happened on top of the fact that the companies all existed on a sporadic project-by-project basis. But I think that was a really exciting idea about how to share resources.
I worked on this for a while. We had endless planning meetings trying to make it work. But we were always stymied by the building not being finished and things like that. But that’s a kind of model that’s worth thinking about for the future. Three companies coming together and employing a producer/manager to service them all. We were talking about bringing in new people and thinking, well, perhaps we can sell our services at a higher rate to corporate users and this could subsidise the arts companies. Performing Lines has done this a little bit, not so much for corporate users. But it has the ability to charge bigger bucks to the Opera House and the festivals and to subsidise the work in development—for Branch Nebula, Jessica Wilson and so forth. That’s something that this sector should look at doing more because the skills that people are exercising on a daily basis are being paid 10 times the rate in the corporate world. Is there a way to generate some income that can then subsidise the development of contemporary work?
Rosemary Hinde
That’s the way I work a lot of the time.
Simon Wellington (Urban Theatre Projects)
I think this is a really big discussion because there are so many models that work for so many different personalities or companies or groups of artists. I’m interested to understand or talk about where a producer steps in. What’s the compromise between taking risks and producing material that is edifying to a touring circuit or a particular venue or a council to put into their venue?
Amanda Card
Sophie mentioned to me that when she was working with Random Dance Company and thinking about all of the venues as possible locations at which Random might present, she decided to flip it and instead go to the venues and ask: What do you want? What do you present? How do you do your thing? Basically she minimised …
Fiona Winning
Her pitch.
Amanda Card
Yes. She could look at the group and say, that’s where I’ll go. With One Extra, we get to the point where we’ve made a work and only certain works will appeal to say Performing Lines. But that’s a real problem. When you start from this end, from development and making work. Once the work exists, sometimes that’s it. There’s no obvious location where we can go forward. So for us it’s about how to make relationships with a wider group of people where these works might have a location to go to and have another life. Otherwise you’re in a constant cycle which independent artists here will know about, the cycle of making new work all the time.
Simon Wellington
I guess my point is finding that balance between organizations that support the risk-taking, whatever the outcome might be—a one-off season, you know, or 3 years of touring throughout Australia or Europe or Asia or wherever it might go—compared to the companies who may only produce or support the production of the work that will have a definite outcome, where they can see the ingredients there that they can sell on to specific venues or their network of relationships. So it’s finding that balance, I guess, rather than there’s this model, or who’s determining the work.
Amanda Card
It depends on the artist. If an artist wants to present at The Opera House, then we need to find out together, One Extra and the artist, what makes a work possible for the Opera House. And if the artist then makes the choice to make the work reflect that, then it’s up to them. I often use the analogy of the visual artist. The first work the artist makes might be the work they want to make. Then someone comes in and says, “I really like that piece but I’d like it in purple to go with my couch.” The artist is in a position to say well, give me $20,000 to do that.
Fiona Winning
Or not.
Amanda Card
Or not. So there are artists who want to make finite work and then drop it and start the next 3 or 4-year project. There are others who’d like to see their work move around.
Fiona Winning
You’re right, Simon. There’s a multiplicity of models. There’s also a range of work that is of its moment that must be made which is for an audience of 6 or a research and development project, which nobody might see, which relies on other outcomes.
Simon Wellington
You need the flexibility to have the support and the resources there to respond to something that’s happening right there and then rather than waiting till—you know, “We don’t make decisions until February 2006” or something.
Russell Dumas
The consequence is you reduce… Like in Europe all the different festivals. You go to Monpelier, different dance festivals around France and Germany and it’s the same producers who are making decisions about what survives and what doesn’t. In a real way, they become the ones who are determining what is produced.
Fiona Winning
Who’s determining it now?
Russell Dumas
Oh, a whole bunch of them and they keep going. It’s the same in America.
Fiona Winning
No, I mean here.
Russell Dumas
I don’t think there is enough mass here to actually to talk about that. In the extreme you can see things like that. I think it’s difficult in Australia because there are so many mitigating circumstances. We’re actually a mish-mash of models that always came from elsewhere. And we can’t really contextualise. And the people making the decisions are making them with bits of information. Simply, things like the terms we use. If you start to problematise the relationship between dance, dancer, choreographer and say, we use these terms as if we know what they mean without actually their historical production. Sally Gardiner talks a lot about affective and effective relationships—the conditions under which a work is made. So for a choreographer she talks about relationships between the choreographer and the dancers they’re working with. Well, if you’re in a pick-up situation, which is the model, we have in the Australian Ballet, we’ve taken this one model and we’ve reproduced it like fungus across the country. It is the only model we have.
I think we started off talking about why people incorporate. And it’s because the legal requirement to get money is that you actually have to have a board of directors who are responsible because, as we all know, artists aren’t responsible.
Keith Gallasch
Simon has brought up this matter of risk. What role does risk play in Hirano, Rosemary?
Rosemary Hinde
It varies a bit. I accept that to get anywhere you have to make an initial investment because to market a show and to set up, just looking at the touring side of it, I won’t take on anything that’s will give me any less than 2 years—because you can’t do anything in terms of developing the strategy and building those relationships for those particular artists and companies. You’re not earning money while you’re doing that. You’re investing in the work. So, I have to believe that at the end of it, it’s going to be worth doing. It does effect what I think I can take on. It’s my house on the line, basically.
John Baylis
If you were to be subsidised, what form would that ideally take, you know, not just money in a brown paper envelope. But what strings would you accept, what would you find intolerable?
Rosemary Hinde
That’s a difficult question, John. I’d have to think about it. I’ve worked independently for nearly 14 years now. Obviously within that time I get money for projects and particular tours and stuff like that. But there is a trade-off that doesn’t necessarily occur in film, does it Martin? Film producers don’t have to make that trade-off.
Martin Thiele
How do you mean?
Rosemary Hinde
In terms of setting up those sort of companies. Producers can be funded directly without having to have the levels of government accountability that….
Martin Thiele
They have legal infrastructure. It’s quite complicated in terms of assignment of risk. Curiously, in terms of that producer support, both the AFC and also Film Victoria have actually been exploring the idea of producer subsidy or business grants to producers, often with quite substantial interest rate returns (10% in the case of Film Victoria), on the assumption that when you get a film financed, a percentage of the production will actually be returned. So, for example, in the case of Big and Little Films, the production company I was working with, we had a digital feature film that was commissioned by SBS. So about $5,000 of that would have gone into repaying a $30,000 producer’s investment. But I actually suspect that given film production has been stalling, at this stage, people have taken on that return responsibility without necessarily getting the capacity. A lot of really experienced film producers are out of work and have been for a number of years. In some respects, I think there are some interesting structural things in film production, but the state of the film industry is that it’s in crisis.
There are still interesting lessons in that model. One of the good things about film production is that they’ve got great systematized structures. Your A-Z budget and your cost reporting structure. At some stage, the AFC thought, okay can we absolutely systematize the process of the business behind the making of film? And they have. So you can get your Producers Pack from the AFC for $150, which will give you all the necessary compliance information including a funding structure. I think that’s really quite useful in terms of refining and standardising the way people might work for stuff that can be systematized. Obviously, not everything can. But a lot of the compliance and financial structures can be. It’s certainly worth considering. Every time I’ve produced something, I’ve had to invent a system to go with it.
Rosemary Hinde
The other thing, in answer to the question, is that when I set up Hirano, I did it because I couldn’t see any other way of doing it. There weren’t organizations that had job labels that said: “You can develop touring markets in Asia and intercultural co-productions.” There weren’t any. That’s why I did it.
Fiona Winning
When we were looking at the list of people to ask to speak at this forum, there weren’t actually independent producers operating like you two have been—Marguerite Pepper wanted to attend but is away.
Rosemary Hinde
It’s the same in Melbourne. Companies die all the time because it’s hard.
Martin Thiele
It’s not just performing arts. I worked a lot last year with [new media artist] Lynette Walworth, trying to put together an interactive project and we would just have endless meetings. In the end it was impossible to put together a deal to support an interactive film project with a budget of $50,000 with an artist of her stature. And David Pledger will say he still hasn’t worked out how to tour work between Australian cities. It’s much easier to tour overseas.
There are lots of structural problems and the bittiness of the bureaucratic structure. And I’m not going to hold the Australia Council completely responsible. It’s impossible. You go to ACMI and they talk about commissioning a $50,000 project with a $6,000 investment. It’s completely out of whack. The costs of making new and innovative work are just not being acknowledged. And so a lot of people, who would love to be making the innovative work in Australia, are giving up, taking academic jobs, taking paid work or heading overseas. And that’s not a new thing in this country. It’s been happening for years. But in terms of innovative work that’s made in new ways, there just isn’t that many ways to make it.
Russell Dumas
But there isn’t support for what is being made. So, to actually set up another bureaucratic…
Martin Thiele
Well, there is some support. The festivals initiative, the MFI is one way that some artists have been able to get commissions for new work.
Russell Dumas
But, again, it’s funnelling through a particular group of people who actually decide what survives and what doesn’t. And they’re not artists. And you can’t make work without resources.
Rosemary Hinde
I wouldn’t call them producers. Festivals aren’t producers. They’re presenters. They hire producers to put together what they want. And I do think there’s a problem with the presentational culture in Australia. I think there’s an incredible risk-aversion.
Russell Dumas
But it’s often the same people. They just do the shuffle. After they’ve done one festival, they just move on to the next one. So it’s actually coming down to a very small group of people who are making all the decisions about what survives.
Rosemary Hinde
Of course.
Russell Dumas
That’s the thing that I think is dangerous. And I don’t think it’s going to be solved by putting in another level of bureaucracy.
John Baylis
I don’t think it is. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s actually about trying to devolve money from the bureaucracies to people who have more flexibility and can cut corners and don’t have the same accountability structures that big bureaucracies do. If there was a network of independent producers whom we could devolve a lot of what is our New Work money to, and trust them to choose the artists, and work with them to take the work, I’m sure they can get more value out of that money than we can, going through our transparent processes.
Russell Dumas
Don’t you think it will be more parochial?
John Baylis
Parochial?
Russell Dumas
You devolve it far enough and it’ll just eventually….
Audience member
I like the out-of-town model. “It wowed them in Wollongong.” Are we brave enough to go that way?
Keith Gallasch
There was a model of devolution which everyone was afraid of in the 80s which suggested that you gave the money to large companies to look after the little ones or you gave it to state governments. But I don’t think we’re talking about that kind of devolution. I think we’re talking about a different group of people with perhaps a national overview who are interested in works touring, like the Mobile States initiative. And I think that’s quite a different model of devolution. The money goes to the small to medium sector and these producers work with the people they’re interested in. The Australia Council has become this kind of grant processing machine and this would change some of that to a degree.
Amanda Card
(If One Extra doesn’t suit the artist’s) requirements, they’re not going to want to work with One Extra. They can take themselves elsewhere or do it on their own. It’s not imposed. Of course, sometimes, especially for a commercial producer, there are a whole lot of ways you have to think. But the funding bodies will find out very quickly if nobody wants to work with a particular producer. And so in a way, the responsibility for, or the imposition of choice is not always from the producer’s end. It’s often from the artist’s end. And sometimes, of course, it’s made in a very unfriendly environment. So obviously, everybody’s going to be going, where can I find someone to help me do this stuff? But if you’re not doing it to their satisfaction…
Keith Gallasch
And it doesn’t have to be a total model either, does it? It’s just another element.
Amanda Card
And the moving in and out of those associations—it’s important that people can do that. Like the model you were talking about in the UK. It’s not always something that you have to be grafted to. What you find with a number of the company models—I can only talk about dance, I don’t know what it’s like in theatre—but often what happens is this incredible pressure to keep producing work year after year, means that sometimes you just want to stop and go away and come back. I know that for some that pressure is also great. It’s not always advisable that it should be maintained over long periods of time.
Simon Wellington
Isn’t the Australia Council getting better at that idea of companies taking breaks, going into development, having longer genesis periods for new work? These seem to have become more acceptable over the past few years?
Keith Gallasch
Fiona and I are aware that we’ve all been talking for an hour and a half, so we should start to wind up. This has been a very interesting conversation and we’re hoping that it will be part of a continuing one. It is interesting to see if we are on the cusp of something else—another model. I’m just not quite sure whether it’s already in process with things like Mobile States. Or if we think it’s worth fighting for, what are the next stages of pushing this, because I think it’s really important. Funding for the arts is not increasing. Apparently, according to Australia Council Chair Gonski, we can look forward to a boom in private philanthrop—-people dropping dead and leaving $16 million to the Conservatorium of Music …[LAUGHTER]… but not to the rest of us. Different models need to evolve so that we have improved access and networks right across Australia that artists can participate in. So we’re ready to wrap up now. But if anyone has anything to add…
Simon Wellington
Just one thing. All of the models we’ve talked about are interesting. But also if we’re talking about producers…just from my experience in a company, the leverage that you get out of that large amount of money that you get-and sure, at the end of the day, only a relatively small amount of it might go into the creative process after you’ve paid for the administration-but what that can leverage at a grass roots level in terms of alternative sources of funding is a really interesting thing that we might face in changing models. It’s something that has to be confronted. How do you maintain those links? That’s really important.
Harley Stumm
Yep, I agree with that. Particularly in terms of the philanthropic and private sponsorship stuff, it’s very hard to get those people to give money to a relatively faceless organization like Performing Lines compared to a pitch to your local community such as “Hi, we’re this Western Sydney company…” You’ve got to weigh up the cost benefit analysis I guess. But it must be thought through.
Keith Gallasch
Thanks to our guests from both Melbourne and Sydney. Thanks to you all for coming. Please have a drink and keep the dialogue going.
Clare Langan, Too Dark for Night
Within an hour of landing at Tullamarine I can usually be found, like a faithful pilgrim, descending the staircase of ACMI’s screening gallery in the hope of losing myself in selections of the best in contemporary screen-based art. The latest offering World Without End, is definitely an exhibition where the viewer is asked to surrender to an unknown journey. Inspired by Godard’s dictum “It is not necessary to create a world, but the possibility of a world” (catalogue essay) curators Alexie Glass and Alessio Cavallaro have selected Australian and international works which play with scale and time, exploring vastness through compression, fetishising the detail in the epic, and challenging the sense of self in an infinite universe.
In the entrance stairway is the Pleix Collective’s Netlag (France)—a tessellated map of the world made up of footage from over 1600 web cameras across the globe. We pan and zoom in on sections of the map to glimpse quotidian activities as captured by the anonymous cameras. The banality of detail provides this world view with a bland universality, heightened by the generic electro beat of the soundscape.
Susan Norrie’s Enola (Australia) also plays with scale but focuses more on the compression of the constructed world. Filmed at the Tobu World Square theme park, the camera slowly circles the wonders of the world in quarter size—the Eiffel Tower plonked next to the Vatican, nestled near airports with aimlessly circling planes. Strangely the muzak soundtrack adds to the suggested silence of the place, in which the only living figures are 2 hooded observers, peering in wonder at these creations. This world is too clean, too ordered, too observed, too quiet…we have built ourselves out of existence.
From this quiet, constructed world we enter the bombastic audiovisual symphony of Simon Carroll and Martin Friedel’s History of a Day (Australia). Here the viewer is surrounded by cascading images of a day in progress from sunrise to sunset. In the intervening 4 minutes we experience earth, air, water and fire—soaring across seas and deserts, plunging into volcanoes and industrial zones, riding tempests and cloud gusts. The footage is stunning, playing in cannon across the 5 screens, accompanied by a near operatic soundscape. The pace and virtuosity of the piece is certainly impressive even if the grandeur overrides the possibility for deeper contemplative resonances.
Matching the visual scale of History of a Day, is Daniel Crook’s Train No 1 (Australia). Shown several times over the last few years, this is the most impressive presentation of this work, spanning half the wall of the main gallery, utilising 3 projectors. Using his TimeSlice technique, the vision is staggered and interwoven extending the visual material—in this case a train—into seemingly infinite dimensions. Each sliver of image has its own character and charged essences which in combination create a shimmering mirage of everyday experience.
Deftly placed opposite Train No 1 is the most subtle but beguiling of the works in World Without End—Ross Cooper and Jussi Ängeslevä’s The Last Clock (UK). Concentric circles are formed by the rotation of clock hands—hour, minute, second. The circles are heavily textured with tawny smears, each with a different density. The accompanying notes tell us that these are the product of the sweep of the hands of a clock across live video images from a camera placed upstairs on Federation Square. Knowing this and discovering figures appearing and being wiped away—moments held and then obliterated over 3 different timeframes—lends the piece an ephemeral, poetic quality, a ‘liveness’. However, it is a knowledge well hidden unless you read the notes. Perhaps there is a way in which this work could be presented in relation to the source of the video material, so that the cause and effect could be more easily discovered.
It is this same ‘liveness’, the physicality of Lynette Walworth’s Hold: Vessel 1 (Australia) which makes it such an appealing work. A gentle interactive experience, the visitor holds a finely crafted translucent glass bowl in order to catch the projection—underwater creatures of quivering cilia, wispy tendrils and exotic colours are manifest in your hands, accompanied by an intricately textured soundscore. Placed in its own viewing room, the work still weaves its magic 4 years after its initial inception.
Scattered through the exhibition are Robert Cahen’s Cartes Postale: Video Melting Pot (France). Starting with touristic stills, these scenes have but a brief moment to come to life, before being frozen again in time. There is a satisfying haiku element to these works—revealing layers below the cliche. My favourite is the idyllic view of an Icelandic town which, when unfrozen, shows an aeroplane soaring across the skyscape.
A jarring inclusion is A Viagem (The Voyage) by Christian Boustani (Portugal). Commissioned by the Portuguese government for Expo ‘98 it depicts the 1543 Portuguese expedition to Japan. It is a finely crafted and visually impressive film of collaged action and 2 and 3D animation inspired by Japanese gilded panels. However, there is a self-conscious trickiness and triteness that makes it sit uncomfortably within the contemplative framework of the other exhibits. Its cute and beatsy soundtrack completely drowned out the unearthly calm of Darren Almond’s (UK) A, a meditative exploration of Antartica.
Moving from the white ice of Antartica into the sweltering vastness of the Namibian Desert, Clare Langan’s Too Dark for Night (Ireland) is an apt culmination for this journey to the end of the world. A lone figure walks with calm purpose across the massive wind-sculpted sand dunes. The cinematography is astounding, and Langan’s use of handmade filters subtly protects the viewer from being swamped by the image. The figure searches for signs of other humans, finds only ruins and continues the search, a cycle as inevitable as the entropy of the shifting landscape. This is quietly devastating.
Seoungho Cho’s Rev (South Korea) and Brian Doyle’s The Light (US), were the least engaging works in the exhibition. Positioned next to the exit escalator, Doyle’s quietly contemplative studies of light (lights) are both visually and aurally overwhelmed by Cho’s hyperactive portrait of urban living—a collage of wildly spinning cameras, a revolving door and a candle flame. This section also marks the centre of the gallery space, so not only did Cho’s sound overwhelm Doyle’s work, but all the sound from the works seemed to coalesce into a cacophony of thunderclaps, train noises and clashing tones. In fact, soundbleed was an issue for all the works not accorded their own viewing rooms. Although considerable effort was made to place speakers directionally so that visitors sitting on the viewing couches could discern elements of each audioscape, several works dominated the entire aural space. This is an ongoing problem in screen-based exhibitions, and while many seem to accept the inevitability of it, the compromised audio element of this audiovisual medium should not be underestimated.
Even though the placement of works is seriously problematic for the sound, it is the fact that the works rub up against each other—each piece sharing some element of the works placed near it creating sympathetic resonances—that makes World Without End such an enjoyable exhibition providing many possible pathways to explore and possible worlds in which to lose yourself.
World Without End, curators Alexie Glass and Alessio Cavallaro, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, April 14-July 17
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 38
© Gail Priest; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Junebum Park, 1 Parking 2001-2002, DVD
Mirror Worlds—Contemporary Video From Asia reflects, often humorously, sometimes surreally, on globalised culture and its consumerist economy that both fuels unbridled change and provokes violent reactions.
Junebum Park’s 3 videos are typical of the exhibition’s tone. 1 Parking (South Korea, 2001-02) offers a bird’s-eye view of a car park where an enormous pair of hands hover over the scene, moving the cars about and pushing pedestrians along when they threaten the traffic flow. The impression of a controlling force guiding the city is enhanced by the projection of the image onto the gallery floor, placing the viewer in the position of the giant ordering the rapid fire activity below. In 15 Excavator (2003), the same oversized hands operate an earth moving machine on a building site, while The Advertisement (2004) sees them nimbly plastering advertising signs across an office block’s naked facade. The fast motion in all 3 works lends a comic edge to the unsettling representation of the myriad powers ruling life in the modern metropolis, with the hands evoking everything from the surveillance of traffic controllers to the more abstract ‘hand of the market’.
Chen Shaoxiong’s Anti-Terrorism Variety (China, 2002-3) similarly evokes unseen forces, this time of political and religious violence. The work comprises 2 screens angled at 45 degrees, each with an image of an urban skyline. One is Guangzhou, the other Shanghai; both feature ultra-modern high-rises, with some structures looking more like science fiction fantasies than buildings of the present. Boats glide across Guangzhou’s harbour, while in Shanghai pedestrians stroll in and out of frame and a major road dissects the screen, creating a strange disjunction between the futuristic skyscrapers and the familiar scenes of city life below. In the skies above, cartoonish silhouettes of jetliners periodically appear, moving like unconvincing models in cheap television sci-fi. Sometimes they come in groups, sticking to the buildings like flies caught on flypaper, before fading one by one. At other times the towers bend like blades of grass and permit the aeroplanes to fly harmlessly by, or else the tallest tower in each skyline curves like elastic before snapping back, launching the aircraft off-screen. Sometimes the planes simply fly into the buildings, to reappear on the other side transformed into missiles or doves of peace.
Anti-Terrorism Variety wryly evokes contemporary events, or rather our mediated experience of them, the iconography referencing everything from the 2D graphics of early computer games to handicam footage of the September 11 attacks. The Chinese setting also called attention to the universalising power of media imagery. More subtly, the ability of the towers to mould themselves to accommodate or avoid the silent onslaught graphically represents the capacity of the modern globalised economic system, symbolised by China’s 21st-century skyline, to absorb, dodge, or repel almost any force set against it.
Rashid Rana’s focus in 10 Differences (Pakistan, 2004) is more oblique. Mirror images of the artist face off across a screen, each raising and lowering a pistol in an uneasy stand-off. Both figures stand before identical tables decked out with formal cloth coverings and flowers, suggesting negotiating tables as well as a domestic setting. Finally, with an explosive roar, the guns fire simultaneously, and the screen cuts to 2 images of Rana’s bloodied corpse sliding down the wall and slumping forward. One image frames him in long shot, the other in close up, tilting to follow the bloody trail of his slide. The action and setting in each frame is a mirror image of the other. After a fade to white, the sequence returns to another face off, another blast of guns, and the 2 Ranas collapsing in an endless loop of escalating tension, violent outburst and death. 10 Differences suggests multiple readings. Some relate to the artist’s home, Pakistan, a nation founded on a violent split with a mirrored other. More broadly, the cycle implies that the constant threat of violence between opposing forces creates mirror images of tension and fear, with multiple viewpoints only becoming apparent in the aftermath of conflict.
Elsewhere in the exhibition Flight Rehearsals (2003), by Indian artist Kiran Subbaiah, draws more on the traditions of Surrealist cinema than the conceptual tropes of most video art. The work is a highly amusing meditation on the way our ordering of time contains and constricts our imaginative compulsion to flights of fancy. Beginning with an image of the artist sitting on a table, Subbaiah relates in a droll voiceover his attempts to learn how to fly. Practising only in the early hours of the morning to avoid being “discouraged by the interrogation of responsible people”, he discovers the secret of flight, which involves jumping into the air as high as possible and then jumping again before “gravity has time to act.” Naturally, his ability to fly brings an understanding of the language of birds, including the dawn crow of the neighbourhood cock.
With the coming of morning, Subbaiah’s flight is framed by a television screen and we track back into a looking-glass bedroom. A cooked chicken sits atop the television. An alarm clock rings and Subbaiah comes crashing to his bed in the extreme foreground. Initially, the clock appears to be next to him. However, when Subbaiah rises and walks over to stop the alarm, it becomes a very large clock at the back of the room. It’s difficult to convey in words the clever distortion of our sense of space. As Subbaiah turns off the alarm, his dream of flight on the television disintegrates into visual static. He turns the TV off, picks up a smouldering cigarette and takes a rueful puff.
Superficially Mirror Worlds’ most overtly comic and whimsical work, Flight Rehearsals is a complex interrogation of the relationship between our dreams and their literalisation in mass-produced moving images. It’s also an entertaining narrative, a surreal depiction of the mind’s ability to conjure images of the impossible, and a deadpan comment on the way the conditions of modern life delimit our ability to creatively and intellectually take flight.
Although more overly filmic than the rest of Mirror Worlds, Flight Rehearsals confirms the impression that the avant-garde of the moving image is now to be found in the gallery rather than the cinema. In an age in which the image is increasingly utilised to convey simplistic, one-dimensional messages of hatred, fear or consumerist pleasure, video provides a crucial means by which artists can intercede, interrogate and reflect upon our highly mediated global landscape. Small quibbles like chronic sound spillage aside, curators Zoe Butt and Bec Dean are to be praised for expanding the Australian Centre of Photography’s already broad ambit and exposing Sydneysiders to the work of our region’s artists in this most vital of contemporary forms.
Mirror Worlds—Contemporary Video From Asia, curators Zoe Butt and Bec Dean, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, May 27-July 10
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 37
© Dan Edwards; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Naree Vachananda, Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour
When we discuss choreography which deals with a specific subject, we say that it explores, investigates, addresses. It never explains. It never defines. If we dance ‘about’ something, we do so in the sense of dancing ‘around’ it, circling, approaching and retreating. Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour is a solo dance about death, perhaps the most unapproachable topic of all. Heavily supported by recorded music and voice tracks, lighting, set design and multimedia projections, the work is a rich and meditative one that tackles its chosen theme with a contemplative leisure. Naree Vachananda kneels, an intricately tailored gauze shirt pulled over her head. She struggles to escape, but doesn’t remove the garment, wearing it instead. The fraying hood elicits thoughts of a shroud or winding sheet, the first intimations of mortality to arise in the work.
The evocatively titled piece purports to have been inspired by the September 11 attacks in New York, but any history presented by the work is entirely personal. Projected upon the walls are images of the former funeral parlour which faced the bedroom window of Vachananda’s one-time home, and we return to this site repeatedly (including, near the work’s closing, a fascinating video tour through the boarded up building). A recorded monologue blends Vachananda’s musings on the parlour and death with texts from Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Persephone.’ Throughout, the dancer enacts a series of recurring routines, including an extended piece encased in a transparent coffin-like structure.
Vachananda’s choreography is striking—her movements frequently return to figures of circularity, sweeping limbs leading to larger rotations of her body, and this circling comes to signify much, be it the cyclical nature of life or the difficulty of escaping this eternal return. A novel phrase sees her head acting as a heavy weight, rolling from hand to hand and appearing in danger of toppling to the floor. The increasing pace of her attempts to support it eventually makes her head appear to detach itself from her body, a powerful yet playful suggestion.
Though the ostensible theme of Opposite My House is death, there are also strong undertones of birth and reincarnation here, perhaps not so surprising considering Vachananda’s Buddhist faith, as well as the texts she recycles through the work’s sonic components (the Persephone myth, Buddhist chants). The shroud-shirt could equally represent a caul, the membrane covering infants at birth; the glass coffin’s clear walls and warm glow could suggest an incubator. The long, loose thread hanging from Vachananda’s shirt and winding its way across the stage echoes the silver thread supposed to link the body to the wandering soul, while an umbilical cord is another inevitable association.
The aural aspects of the work are not without problems. The excessive mixing and layering of Vachananda’s speech sometimes obscures the content and becomes a distraction rather than complementing the physical work. Since such a large amount of text is presented as part of the performance, much of it intriguing, it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t emerge with the same attention to detail that marks the rest of this piece. These objections aside, Vachananda is a daring, able choreographer with a strong presence and this work offers a provocative glimpse of the kinds of sustained solo work that can still exist outside the larger streams of dance in Australia.
Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour, choreographer-performer Naree Vachananda, sound composition Edward Kelly, multimedia Yeap Heng Sheng, installation Naree Vachananda and Matt Crosby, costumes Esshoshika; fortyfivedownstairs, June 9-12
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 39
© John Bailey; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
In May 2001, Tess De Quincey’s Nerve 9 premiered at Performance Space. A multilayered, intensive collaboration with visual artist Deborah Petrovich, poet/performer Amanda Stewart and writer/new media artist Francesca da Rimini, Nerve 9 was hypnotic, gloriously abstract and curiously sensual. Solo dancer/choreographer De Quincey moved as if on a different plane to audience mortals, her elliptical trajectory intersecting with projected images and texts and aural worlds. Nerve 9 is making a very welcome return with a national tour through the innovative Mobile States program.
In her review for RealTime, Eleanor Brickhill wrote: “Nerve 9 is hybrid in essence…creating an intellectual arena within which all its ideas can grow and mingle. It synthesises some quite rarefied elements—Stewart’s shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey’s enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty. The different sounds (both text and soundscapes) and movement are entwined, as if De Quincey’s body can be shot through with those textures, human and electronic, structured and hanging on shafts or webs of sound, animated sometimes entirely by those vibrations (RT 44, p35, “Nerve 9: a body called flesh”).
Tess de Quincey is a unique performer. Eleanor Brickhill wrote, “She seems to work with ideas, particularly internalised and embodied, rather than with overt and consciously planned movement. It’s possible to see a physical narrative unfolding through the work—the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.”
The tour of Nerve 9 presents a rare opportunity for audiences intrigued by contemporary performance and dance to witness a seamless integration of movement, image, text and sound in the work of these 4 leading artists. RT
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Tess De Quincey, Nerve 9, PICA, Performance Space, Salamanca Arts Centre, Arts House (North Melbourne Town Hall), Brisbane Powerhouse, Darwin Entertainment Centre, Sept 28-Nov 23 (see advertisement for venue dates)
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 39
© RealTime; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Linda Luke, FIVE short solos
photo Mayu Kanamori
Linda Luke, FIVE short solos
“It’s like paying to visit a madhouse”, muttered a satisfied customer with a smile at the end of De Quincey Company’s Five. Witnessing one of the 5 15-minute performances while hearing those already experienced and others to come, all at the very same time, all repeating themselves as the audience moves in small groups room to room, yields at times a delirium somewhere between reverie and nightmare. The performers embody intense states of being, but they’re mostly talkative, reaching out to us with words even if the bodies sometimes, fascinatingly, seem to be somewhere else. This shared tension between body and voice and the simultaneity of and the overlap between performances generated a palpable sense of one work, more than the sum of its 5 parts.
Of the performances that most appealed to me, one did not employ the live voice and the other worked the voice from a point of duress. Victoria Hunt’s Flying Backwards to Meet the Future… is a physically intense evocation of the impact of a death in the family. The performer’s body is wracked against a soundscore that includes readings from a Coroner’s Court record. Projected images of a Maori kite taking flight suggest some kind of release. Adroitly designed, lit and constantly transformed, Flying Backwards… is multimedia performance with the body at its centre while the soundtrack and projections do the talking. In contrast, Linda Luke’s Death of A Wall is kin to performance art. We enter the room to find the performer pinned beneath a heavy rock suspended by red threads from the ceiling. The power of this performance is not in the multiplication of theatrical means but in the essence of the weight of a rock on a naked body. Even after she frees herself we feel its presence in her relationship to the walls of the room, to herself, and in the sudden burst of leaping and laughing. The words from Cafavy and Kazantzakis spill from her, quavery, tense, unleashed. There is no sense of recitation—the challenge common to most of Five’s performances is their melding of literary quotation with intensely focused physical performances. Here the performer is weighed down by but is part of the rock, of the buildings and architecture around which the work appears to pivot.
The title of Narelle Benjamin’s new work, Out of Water, suggests that its protagonists are displaced; certainly they don’t appear to be of the natural order of things as the light reveals their odd shapes—human but not, and bottom up in more ways than one. They look like life forms, emerging from water perhaps, or some fecund soup of incipient life and unfolding later into something human. Of their tautly curled bodies we first see only back and buttocks. Even when standing the bodies shape themselves strangely, as if joints could angle whichever way, and move as if gravity doesn’t matter. After Kathy Cogill unfolds into full height, her extended arms waver as if beating with new found life. Kristina Chan and Lina Limosani duet with exquisite precision like twin organisms before separating into fine solo flights, one as if failing to find the point of gravity that will bring rest, the other as if finding gravity inverted. Restless sleep and a return to life are followed by a (too) long, collective entropy (reinforced by the sound score’s mechanical, musical wind-down). Perhaps a life cycle has been completed. Out of Water is a great advance on Benjamin’s first choreographic outing with Inside Out (RT59, p 31) in 2004. Here the choreography is sustained rather than episodic, the yoga influence finely absorbed, and, best of all, Benjamin refuses to work from dancing feet to realise her vision. The points of origin for movement are everywhere in the body and they work the floor and re-work gravity to give us a new sense of our bodies at a moment in history when we are reconsidering the importance of our biological selves.
For Grounded on Air, Dean Walsh has created a strange, even scary persona, that looks us in the eye, demands we dance (we do), and expects us to play silent confidante to tales of an empty life and hints of inner demons. He manages to do this with a cool, quiet delivery sparely scripted with a deliciously calculated naivety (earlier works reveal a more poetically inclined Walsh). The symbolism is laid on deadpan from the beginning, Walsh sitting to the side, at a desk, head in a cloud of balloons. Dance too becomes a motif, not only indicative of the waste that comes of weeks of partying, but of an exhausting, trivial battle of styles, including snatches of balletic and contemporary dance, until they manically merge. A huge swing centre stage suggest pleasure as Walsh arcs towards us but also represents the failure to communicate (a to and fro phone exchange of vacuous consolation and a cry for help) and sheer helplessness, when trapped beneath an instrument of pleasure that could take off your head. Such is life. Many balloons are burst or let fly, elegant dancing is attained, and the final swing-ride is satisfyingly sideways. Walsh’s persona in Grounded on Air is wonderful for not being loveable, reminding me not a little of the infinitely frustrating characters from the the creations of UK’s Forced Entertainment. But Walsh allows his stage alter-ego some redemption, and us the pleasure of a finely constructed encounter with a strange beast.
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De Quincey Company, FIVE short solos, director Tess de Quincey, performers Peter Fraser, Victoria Hunt, Linda Luke, Tom Davies, Kristina Harrison, lighting Richard Manner, Performance Space Galleries, June 23-July 3
One Extra, Out of Water, choreography Narelle Benjamin, composer Huey Benjamin; Grounded on Air, performer-choreographer Dean Walsh, sound Drew Crawford; lighting for both shows Neil Simpson; Performance Space, June 29-July 10
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 40
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Buzz Theatre, Pre-Tender
photo Jon Green
Buzz Theatre, Pre-Tender
Modern cinema, especially in the US, has long see-sawed between representing the office as an efficient, homogenizing institution, antithetical to the individual, and as a site of play within which individual subjectivity bursts forth, often with chaotically creative results (Playtime, Desk Set, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Working Girl, Broadcast News, Secretary). Director Felicity Bott has created a new theatrical exploration of this dynamic with her Buzz Dance production, Pretender.
Relative to these rich, cinematic precedents, Bott and theatrical advisor Monica Main have opted for relative simplicity. Bott’s dramaturgical palette is highly suggestive yet essentially static, with characters quickly identified through movement (the pneumatic robotism of Paul Blackman, the solid finality and easy weightiness of Simon Stewart), complementary pairings (the rival office leaders Katrina Lazaroff and Glenn Lo; the flirtatious couple Simon Stewart and Rachel Usher), and costume (Blackman and his complement Rachel Hare having a vaguely Goth-industrial look, distinguished by red and black, versus the others’ dominant greys).
As a dance theatre piece expressed via mime and movement, Pretender lacks the linguistic sophistication of, say, His Girl Friday, but verbal virtuosity is replaced here by an equally exhibitionistic sound score from Michael O’Brien. Each character is accompanied by a distinctive aural palette drawn from particular sound worlds—air-driven machines for Blackman; a trumpet with sneezing for girly Leanne Mason; a motorbike revving for Stewart. New elements are added (tech-disco, hip-hop vocal sampling, drum’n’bass) as the characters’ flights of fancy become increasingly abstract, and acrobatic dance takes over from mime.
Like screwball comedy, development is less within characters than in the form and the theatrical environment which they animate. They enter the space, take to their desks and then explode the office structure. Tables and other objects are constantly arrayed to create a sense of order before being spun about the stage, the office transformed into a space of dreaming—dynamic, contingent, playful, noisy and musical. The sounds of office time-keeping or email arrivals come to underwrite an exuberant dance in which fittings act as stages for a martial duel, or as racing cars, or, heaped together, make a ludicrous assemblage representing nothing but its own creative excesses, a liberation from the structures of the office and commerce, and even those of theatrical signification. The performance ends with this weird, lopsided tower: a crazy aggregate of desks, print outs, chairs, masking tape, writing pads, Texta scrawls and a blizzard of shredded paper.
Aside from its accomplished execution, Pretender is commendable for avoiding the banalities typically directed at youth audiences. Here is the joy of the unfettered imagination, giving birth to images comprehensible only according to their own bizarre, abstract logic.
Buzz Dance Theatre, Pretender, choreographer, director Felicity Bott, performers Paul Blackman, Rachael Hare, Katrina Lazaroff, Glen Lo, Leanne Mason, Timothy Rogers, Simon Stewart, Rachel Usher, dramaturg Monica Main, sound Michael O’Brien, lighting Nicholas Higgins, costumes Anna Serna, Toby Whittington. Perth Playhouse, June 1-4
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 40
© Jonathan Marshall; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
DasArts
A unique event coincided with the latter stages of the 2005 Amsterdam Arts Festival. The DasArts Festival was organised to celebrate the 11th year of DasArts. For the first and possibly only time the festival put on display in a public venue (the Frascati in downtown Amsterdam) work from this year’s graduates as well as from a number of previous graduates invited to participate. The work itself, whilst never boring, varied in quality from startling to obscure, from disturbing to interestingly pretentious, from media-savvy to simply human. But the energy that drove the festival and that elevated it above the familiar collection of student work was the dynamic energy of DasArts itself—the school, the program, the congregation of artists committed to a way of developing.
Ritsaert ten Cate, the former Director of the Mickery in Amsterdam, created DasArts in 1994. His aim from the start was, as he said to his daughter in a letter written in 1993 when he was still in the preparatory stage, to “design a practical model that (as far as I know) does not yet exist.” The focus was not to be on “training” but on “evolving an extremely select group of participants who are given the opportunity to develop themselves as persons.” The school would offer “a large number of tools that he or she will be able to start using as desired.” But the basis of the contract with the participant would be reciprocal: “Call it a different sort of professional mentality mainly aimed at developing an awareness that you yourself will in the first place have to be able to offer something if you want to be interesting for the contact with specialists we will be providing for the program.”
The focus, in other words, would be on the development of the artist rather than on the work that the artist produces. In the words of the statement of purpose that ten Cate and his associate Marijke Hoogenboom wrote in 1995: “DasArts is a unique laboratory for development, wherein the artist is the product…and the work the artist creates in this laboratory period is only a signal of the development of the artist him/herself.” They summed up the objectives of DasArts as follows: “First, it is always about what is brought to it, and never what any one person can get out of it; second, each student is listened to and talked with by specialists with an eclectic range of knowledge and experience; third, although it is a full-time program, the rhythm of this program will be adjusted on an individual basis in such a way that each student may immediately apply his or her own findings; fourth, the program uses theatre as we know it now only as a tool to define what our students, the artists of the future, may make out of it; and, fifth, ideas executed are not considered valuable unless the consequences of those ideas are understood as being of first priority.”
The strength of DasArts, its success and its reputation as a leading international school of performance practice, lies implicitly in this clearly provocative list of objectives and explicitly in the unique way in which it puts them into practice. What I wish to do here is to outline aspects of the program that may stimulate thought in our Australian training centres.
Size
DasArts is a small school and seeks to keep itself that way, despite increasing governmental pressure to increase numbers. It is affiliated to the Amsterdam School of the Arts but works with complete autonomy in its beautifully but simply adapted buildings in what was a school for handicapped children on the outskirts of Amsterdam Centraal. Permanent staff are kept to a minimum so the focus can go onto the “extremely select group of students” and the “specialists” who run each Block. Currently the school is headed by performance artist Moniek Tobosch; the administrator is Lieve Baert who worked with Ritsaert ten Cate at the Mickery and came to work for DasArts a couple of years after it began; and the key advisory role of Dramaturg has been shared until recently by Jan van den Berg, Director of Theater Ad Hoc, and video artist Harko Haagsma. There are 3 other administrative and technical staff, integral to the operations of a school that never stops working. But the money is spent not on a large support staff but on the program that is the truly unique aspect of a DasArts experience.
Program
The participant enters a 4 semester program. The first 2 semesters each consist of a 10 week Block of work guided and curated by a mentor and guest teachers. Then follows 6 months of an Individual Trajectory (IT), an individual research project arising from prior artistic development. In semester 4, the Final Project (FP) is an autonomous work created in collaboration with a co-producer or venue. The IT and the FP are guided dramaturgically by the artistic staff of the school and additional mentors are chosen by the student. The focus in the FP is upon individual projects rather than collaborations. A student graduates with a diploma.
Artistic Encounters
Each Block encountered in the first 2 semesters has a theme proposed by the mentor. The workshops, lectures and presentations therein emerge as a response to that theme and the students’ interaction with it. The mentors chosen are all professional artists and have come from many different countries and continents. Past artist mentors have included John Jesurun, Anna Koos, Anne van Delft, Stuart Sherman, Moniek Tobosch, Richard Gough and Janine Brogt. Ong Ken Sen was a mentor in 2004 and earlier this year the Dutch group Discordia ran a Block. Needless to say, the drawing power of particular mentors is huge. To ensure that students enter the program and do not come simply to encounter a particular individual, it is a rule that the mentor and theme for a Block will not be publicised until after students have applied and been accepted.
Focus of the Learning Encounter
At DasArts they are not bothered about the acquisition of technical skills; the student should already have those when he arrives, or else they can be learnt elsewhere. The emphasis…lies entirely on the individual student’s personal artistic development.
Marianne Van Kerkhoven
The Student Body
DasArts is an international multi-disciplinary program. It is conducted in English to deal with international diversity. Although there is an informal understanding that there be some Dutch students each year, in fact the majority of participants are always non-Dutch. In the graduation I witnessed, there were students from Mexico, Japan, Germany, Lebanon and the Netherlands. Up to 75 applicants apply from all continents. This year, 12 were accepted for commencement over 2 Blocks. The usual number of ongoing students involved is around 30. Artistic background ranges across theatre, dance, video, music, visual art, design and installation art. Applicants have to travel to Amsterdam for their interview but once they are accepted the program is free and they are supported with an allowance that sits just above the poverty line in the Netherlands. For many international students this is a real incentive.
These facts are but a poor indication of the human, humane, interrogative, risky, brave power of DasArts. Two factors need to be mentioned in relation to this: humanity and interrogation.
Humanity
In his letter to his daughter in 1993, ten Cate wrote: “Insight into the self in relation to the other, also to read the other as though from a different culture, should always be highly esteemed.” This emphasis on the quality of humanity, implicit too in number 5 of the list of objectives, is reflected in the comment of a past student published in What is DasArts, a book produced during the recent Festival. “Block 1 to me was RESPECT, respect that was threatening…It made me think that art, no matter what the object or event, is about human relations and interaction…”
Interrogation
In his reflection on the program in 1998, quoting Plato’s dictum that “an unexamined life is not worth living”, ten Cate commented: “An unexamined institution is not worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell…The basic structure of DasArts enforces ongoing examination.” He is right. The Block structure ensures that a new curriculum is introduced every 6 months. That curriculum is completely the responsibility not of the permanent staff but of the guest mentor(s). This in its very form places the entire system under constant scrutiny.
But once this spirit of interrogation is allowed in, it turns in a healthy way upon its host body. In an inspiring address at the recent festival, Marijke Hoogenboom, in her paper, “Who is afraid of (art) education? Undecent proposals for an uncertain future”, put up for questioning not only the base structure of DasArts but the very concept of an arts education itself. (This from one of the foremost contemporary arts educators.) I don’t have the space to reproduce her argument here (it is something I wish to return to in a future piece on the challenges facing arts education in Australia), but will conclude with one of the opening salvos in her act of deep self-interrogation: “One of the crucial starting points of DasArts was and is, to suggest that with every new Block the school would be questioned and reinvented; but after 11 Blocks that I have been part of, I started to wonder if we really had kept our promise. Or—what was really needed to not just expand our system once again, but knock us out of our own territory forever.”
Quotations in this article are from: DasArts, edited by Jan Brand and Ewan Lentjes (Amsterdam 2000); What is DasArts, collated by Hein Eberson (Amsterdam 2005) and “Who is afraid of (arts) education?” by Marijke Hoogenboom.
With thanks to everyone at DasArts for their hospitality.
DasArts Festival, Frascati, Amsterdam, June 14-18
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 42
© Richard Murphet; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess
photo Hugo Glendinning
Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess
Forced Enterainment, arguably one of the most important and groundbreaking theatre and cross-artform companies of the last 20 years, will be returning to Australia from the UK in October to present their new work, Bloody Mess, as part of Kristy Edmunds’ Melbourne International Festival of the Arts. Their first visit, with First Night and the durational improvisation And on the thousandth night…(RT 60, p27) at the 2004 Adelaide Festival, was received by audiences and critics with a combination of rapture, confusion and anger. For me it was the most exciting theatrical import since Romeo Castellucci’s Giulio Cesare in the 2000 Adelaide Festival.
According to the dictionary on my laptop, “entertain” can mean “to engage a person or audience by providing amusing or interesting material”, “to offer hospitality, especially by providing food and drink for people in your home” and “to turn something over in your mind, looking at it from various points of view.” ‘Forced’ is defined as “not natural or spontaneous, but produced by an act of will”, “not done voluntarily but out of necessity” and “done because somebody who has power requires it.” These definitions offer 9 permutations of what “forced entertainment” might stand for as a concept. Rehearsing (or entertaining) each one in my mind as a possible description of the work of Forced Entertainment, the performance company, each rings true. Necessary amusement, coerced hospitality, wilful contemplation, and so on. Crucial to the project of the company is a constant flipping between these definitions, and the uncertain status of the audience and performer within it (who is forcing whom? what is being entertained?). It’s an exciting field of possibilities, made so by the expertise with which the company gives these ideas a living, breathing form, in performance, in discussion and on the page.
There’s a lot I would like to say about Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess—the fraught space between the doing of performance and the theorising about it—at the same time, I don’t want to reveal too much. It is an experience best entered into without too much prior knowledge. A wild, awkward, noisy, seemingly anarchic yet very carefully constructed pastiche of performance art, bad comedy, melodrama, high school physics lecture and rock concert, it is an engaging, hilarious critique of the act of performance and, at the same time, a nostalgic evocation of adolescence. I saw Bloody Mess last year as part of a 2-day symposium celebrating and reflecting upon 20 years of work by Forced Entertainment, hosted by Lancaster University’s Centre for the Advanced Study of Contemporary Performance Practice and held at the Nuffield Theatre. The title of the symposium, a typical combination of artistic idealism and critical clarity, was “We are searching for a theatre that can really talk about what it’s like to live through these times.”
The conference had the feel of a family gathering, with a small attendance of theatre makers, academics and students, many of whom had a long history of engagement with the company. Mathew Goulish and Lin Hixson, of Chicago-based performance ensemble Goat Island were present. The companies have collaborated extensively and Goulish and Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director, Tim Etchells, are the creators of the web-based Institute of Failure.
David Williams of Dartington College of the Arts gave the standout paper of the weekend. Williams influenced a generation of Australian theatre makers and students through his years teaching at the University of Western Australia and the Victorian University of Technology in the 90s before returning to the UK. His performance-presentation, titled “Welcome to Paradise (You’d Have Loved it) or, in that failing is your heartbeat” was prefaced as both “a meditation on memory, fiction, lies, maps and their gaps, and the productive limits of knowing,” and “a love song to Sheffield and Australia, and to our animal others.” It was a beautiful, rich, emotionally raw evocation of an individual audience member’s relationship with a theatre company over time. It was particularly powerful for me, as it was through witnessing David Williams’ lectures and being part of workshops and creative processes with him in Perth while an undergraduate student at UWA that I first was turned on to the idea of theatre as a site of enormous possibilities. Listening to him reflect on discovering the work of a company in a far off land by reading journal articles and seeing snatches of blurry single-camera VHS documentation, was vivid articulation of my own journey in relation to innovative work in Europe and North America, as well as the work of now defunct companies in Australia such as the Sydney Front.
Another memorable paper was given by Tim Etchells, Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, the morning after the UK premiere of Bloody Mess. Still recovering from major heart surgery, there was a sense of deep tiredness, as if Etchells was carrying the previous 20 years on his shoulders, not with resentment but with a kind of weary, nostalgic contentment. The previous day, a speaker on a “failure” panel had quoted the great Charlie Rich—“I’ve tried, I’ve failed, Lord I feel like going home” as a kind of mantra for the company—and I felt this in Etchells’ talk. His work has always been about failure, the failure of performance, the failure of language, the failure of human decency, the failure of the Left. In Etchells talk, I realised just how much he means it. The company started out in Thatcher’s Britain, and after 2 decades of political performance finds itself in Blair’s Cool Brittania. In Etchells talk, I had the feeling that there is never any home to go to, only more trying and more failures as in the journey charted in Samuel Beckett’s famous advice, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
I first encountered the company’s work as part of the brilliant Kunstenfestival des Arts in Brussels in 2000. Scar Stories was perhaps not one of their more successful experiments. In the show, 2 actors—Terry O’Connor and Richard Lowdon—recite a list of stories about being scarred, pointing to non-existent marks on each other’s bodies as they do so. The audience surrounds them on 3 sides, very close to the stage due to an incredible seating rake. There is no embodiment of character, no mediation through performance forms, no narrative build, very little humour, very little levity. Afterwards it was as if nothing happened at all. I left that show with a very particular, and in hindsight, skewed idea of the company’s vision.
Seeing First Night and And on the Thousandth Night… in Adelaide 4 years later, I was able to really get a sense of the dystopian, excessive, brutally beautiful aesthetic which is central to the company’s long term project. Recurring motifs include bits of cardboard, lists, miniature stages-within-stages, words hand-written in paint, pantomime animal suits, beer, mess, British music hall entertainment, tits and lo-fi multimedia. Props, costumes, texts and ideas are often recycled from show to show. The company tends to pick over ideas that may have been left out of previous shows, or to develop ideas in one show which had begun in an earlier production. In terms of content, the company is obsessively interested in the rules of play which govern theatre, what is meant by “performer” and “audience” and what happens if these rules and categories are deliberately broken.
An aspect of Forced Entertainment that is not often written about is how strongly they are rooted in a particular culture—that of white, middle class England. The founders moved to Sheffield 20 years ago, because the beer and rent were cheap and they were able to be lost among the millions of people drawing unemployment benefits in Thatcher’s Britain while quietly going about creating theatre. They talk a lot about beer and football and drunken nights on tour. The forms most often referenced (and deconstructed) are music hall, amateur nights, pantomimes and school plays. Forced Entertainment picks over the bones of British culture—perhaps this is what gives the work such force, the underlying pathos of a great empire in decline.
Bloody Mess is the most user-friendly of the 4 shows I have seen by Forced Entertainment. Closer in form to First Night than their durational or metatheatrical experiements, it is a collage of overlapping theatrical experiments, ‘what ifs’, centering on the idea of ‘performance.’ If First Night was an investigation of the idea of an audience, then Bloody Mess turns the mirror back on the performers themselves.
Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess is part of the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 6-10, The CUB Malthouse
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 43
© Chris Kohn; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
version 1.0, Wages of Spin
photo Heidrun Löhr
version 1.0, Wages of Spin
The Wages of Spin is ethically immersive. Sydney’s version 1.0 toss you in the moral deep end. At the show’s conclusion you come up, if not gasping at, then certainly contemplating your complicity in Australia’s reign of terror at home and abroad. Version 1.0 make it perfectly clear where they stand politically but, true to form in an already impressive body of work for a young company, their position is nuanced, blending blunt politicking, wicked satire and, pervasively, subtle inversion of expectation.
You enter a simulated TV show, passing a blindfolded man being interrogated by the media as he walks between upturned nails—but he’s not an Iraqi in Abu Ghraib, he’s our Minister of Defence. Shortly, with your fellow audience members, you are video-taped ‘pre-show’ applauding wildly for nothing in particular only to see yourselves later rapturuously framing an electorally victorious John Howard. Not me, you want to say, but too late. As with the election, we let it happen.
The power of The Wages of Spin resides in the totality of its vision and its expert realisation. Performance Space becomes a TV studio replete with mobile TV monitors, a control bank of screens, sound desk, musician, studio staff and a huge dominating screen that completes the sense of actual broadcast. The version 1.0 Wages of Spin logo turns beneath outsize images of the action played out before us, mixed with footage of warmongering and scrolling death statistics. The 3 performers play a range of politicians, TV presenters and Delta Goodrem, rarely resorting to direct mimickry (the John Clarke model of focusing on the semantic weaponry the politician wields as opposed to Max Gillies’ too precise imitations).
The studio setting amplifies how totally media frames the presentation of politics as bites, as entertainments, as half-baked debates helping ever more adept politicians spin their webs of deception. Characters are wheeled into position, switch on attitudes in an instant, exit out-of-frame like puppets, disappear as screens move past them or box them in, and look more impressive, more monstrous, on the big screen than as the small humans flailing about immediately before us. It’s not long before you are giddy with spin, even though you’ve heard it all before—but not like this. It frees you from the web to hear the all-too-obvious lies repeated, but moreso when a smug politician like Robert Hill cracks, caught in a loop of his own inept weaving.
version 1.0’s previous success, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident), was similarly based on verbatim materials, but for the most part drew on one document and one event—the record of the Senate inquiry into ‘the children overboard affair.’ For most of its audience the material—the verbatim moral illogic of parliamentarians—was revelatory. There was also a sense of something monstrous, which for all of the Labor senators’ efforts to break through the web of lies and obsfucation, could not be breached—with a sense of ensuing moral exhaustion, relieved only by the comedy of the senators’ personalities and wranglings. The Wages of Spin is framed as an anchor-less TV news program, a series of media vignettes in which reporters report, politicians babble and writhe before Ray Martin and Kerry O’Brien, and Delta Goodrem plays victim while Iraqui war-dead are ignored, Major-General Peter Cosgrove talks over a box of yawling kittens and right-wing columnists prattle on about the failure of the opposition to the war. An angry, if ironic voice from Newtown angsts over the Howard victory, despairing over feeling alienated from the majority of Australians.
David Williams excels as the voice of dubious authority in various guises (miming a John Howard speech at one point); Stephen Klinder is wonderful as an unhinged Robert Hill and also as a rattled reporter working from cue cards to deliver a quickfire recent history of elections, war and terror; and Deborah Pollard does a funny, giggly Goodrem (cruelly intercut with Iraq war images) as well as grim, defeated Labor voter (although her ‘everything is fucked’ speech would have benefited from the detached style she so successfully exploited in CMI).
The focus on 3 transforming performers, the hightly integrated TV broadcast setting with its constantly inventive screen reframings (with a hyperactive but adroitly low profile studio staff) and a galvanising live guitar-driven score from Gail Priest, give The Wages of Spin cohesion. So too do the recurring litanies of spin, images of torture, the rolling out of statistics and various ‘media magic’ stagings strengthen a structure that threatens to fall in to skit-ishness. In its first realisation The Wages of Spin is not quite as taut, consistent and powerful as it could be. Oddly, the show’s most potent images come early on, first as we enter the studio to encounter the blind-folded man walking through nails and secondly when we are videotaped. The first image, played out as the audience is being seated, is sustained, anxiety-making and complex in a way that nothing else is that comes after. The second image has Klinder preparing us for the taping, but instead of facing us, he’s at the other end of the studio talking to the big screen version of us—the effect of the inversion on the audience is palpable with the realisation that we’ve been ‘mediated’, mere cyphers of ourselves, and, as it turns out, dupes. Thereafter we’re just an audience,
The Wages of Spin is an immaculately realised hybrid of performance and electronic media, and one of the best I’ve witnessed, with much of the credit going to video artist Sean Bacon. My only reservation is about the show’s ending surrendering to the filmic side of the hybrid, with a list of the war dead rolling down the screen. Sure, the point is that this information should defeat the spin we’ve heard iterated across the show, but it’s like watching a documentary in a cinema rather than feeling the power of integrated live action and video that’s worked so effectively to this point. It’s feels like a doco cliché and it belongs with the performative cliches that occasionally infect The Wages of Spin—like litanies and running. They should go the way of unadorned Suzuki stomping, old bathtubs, piles of shoes, suitcases and dead leaves, into the bin of performance history unless you can do something very special with them.
The Wages of Spin is a bizarre, self-lacerating entertainment, where you have to be prepared to laugh and grimace in turn at the lunacy of brutally effective spin and its perpetrators, at yourself if you’re taken in, or for letting them get away with blatant untruths. As a reminder of how we’ve arrived at this most culpable of moments in our national history, where there are no excuses, and as a model of multimedia performance, The Wages of Spin is mandatory viewing.
Briefly
…
Suzan Lori-Parks is a major American playwright. Even her overtly didactic In the Blood is driven by wonderful dialogue, populated with idiosyncratic characters and blessed with suspenseful construction. Director Tanya Denny has realised Park’s grim vision of an embattled black mother and her children with a poetic intensity that rises above the comforts of naturalism, a fine cast who get the American accents and rhythms right in a way the big theatre companies invariably don’t, and a superb central performance from Candy Bowers (of Sista She and a NIDA graduate, 2001). One of 2005’s best in Sydney as well as part of a strong B Sharp program
Emma J Cooper and Kiruna Stamell are engaging performers (see page 47). They make the most of the opportunities offered by Genet’s The Maids (director Paul Barry) to play out the permutations of a power fantasy with spontaneity and an acuity of interpretation. Less convincing is the relationship with their mistress (Beccy Iland), who, save a physical facility to aptly treat her short-statured co-performers like children (dragging them along, picking them up, tossing them onto the bed), lacks the psychological power to kick the drama onto another level—it’s as if nothing is happening to her. As well, the heavy-handed underlining of each of the maids’ role-playing scenes with music unfortunately undercuts the performers’ vocal reach. Nonetheless there is something eerily right in the ‘dance’ that comprises the relationship between the maids. Cooper and Stamell are performers to watch out for.
Louise Fox’s This Little Piggy updates Animal Farm into the early 21st century. The farm has become a clinic and some of its more-equal-than-other inhabitants are experimenting genetically on one another, until the plug is pulled on the project. Although adroitly directed (Benjamin Winspear) and visually realised (Ralph Myers, Gabriela Tylesova) and with some fine performances, the play’s a bigger problem than the issues. Too much of the first part is wearyingly expository, the next (a shadow play) re-enacts the Animal Farm story that inspired it (why?), and the last part withers away just when we thought that Matthew Whittet’s fine ‘Pig’ would get the opportunity to do battle with Nicholas Hope’s under-written executive, ‘Eagle.’ But, no go.
version 1.0, The Wages of Spin, devised & performed by Stephen Klinder, Deborah Pollard, David Williams, dramaturgy Paul Dwyer, outside eye Yana Taylor, lighting Simon Wise, video Sean Bacon, sound Gail Priest, producer Harley Stumm; Performance Space, May 20-June 5
Atypical Theatre/Two Hour Traffic, Fig Tree Theatre, UNSW, June 1-18
Sydney Theatre Company Blueprints Program, Wharf 2, from June 15
Belvoir St Downstairs, May 19-June 5
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 44
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Snuff Puppets, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic
photo Ponch Hawkes
Snuff Puppets, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic
The Snuff Puppets have always been a daring, maverick outfit. What could be more audacious than scheduling an outdoor show in Melbourne in late May? Nyet Nyet’s Picnic ran for 3 nights in Birrarung Marr, drawing crowds of people to the park, out along the river under the moon in a clear cold sky. All the elements of a storytelling space were there: a traditional cleared circle, a mound of sand, a dead tree and a fire. Also, a non-traditional green garbage bin. Peering into this circle, we see images derived from versions of bunyip stories collected from Indigenous communities all over Victoria and used with permission of Boonerwrung elder, Carolyn Briggs.
Bunyips are a natural subject for the Snuff Puppets. For years they have imagined and assembled huge animated things that give life to the creatures of dreams and nightmares. These visions are made to walk amongst us, inviting themselves into our unguarded childhood fascination with puppets. But once we let them in, Snuff Puppets behave in unexpected and disturbing ways, touching on fear, bizarre fascinations and sickening transformations. So, there are plenty of brown, big-footed, hairy, goggle-eyed folk. Endearingly cute but a bit scary. A big white hairy dog-like creature is stuffed into the garbage bin. Pale, hollow-eyed devouring things with beaks float around. Then a huge gorgeous vision: think of a Chinese dragon. She is vast, pink and orange and she eats flowers much as the Cookie Monster eats cookies, with chewing, gurgling and burps. But Snuff Puppets are Muppets gone feral. She is no vegan. Her real passion is to eat a Yorta Yorta man. The poor soul who does the wrong thing and drifts into her path is chewed greedily into her orange and pink beard. He struggles valiantly and is spat out again. Poor old girl—back to the flowers.
It turns out that a number of the monsters are female and often old as the earth herself. The Nyet Nyets trap people—not to eat them but to feed them. They suckle their wayward victims from old, droopy green breasts in order to possess their spirits. An interesting inversion of vampire stories where men with sharp teeth feed on the necks of innocent girls.
There are sections of this work where the grandeur of vision leaves the structure as a whole looking underdeveloped. If you can, picture an entire paddle steamer, with people on board, navigating onto the sandy mound. From underneath, a vast green Mulgawonky unfurls itself. Ignoring the Indigenous knowledge that if you harm the Mulgawonky you die, the foreigners dismember the monster whose body parts float off in several directions. And then they die a terrible death. The creation of such an image encapsulates the visionary way in which Snuff Puppets work. Text and internal linking are thin by comparison and at times get in the way of what we are seeing. This may be because Nyet Nyet’s Picnic started life as a part of Melbourne’s 2003 Moomba Parade, hence the emphasis on engaging visual storytelling.
A Red Neck Ranger character wanders around the site doggedly trying to enforce his ‘No Camping’ rule where the Indigenous kids have settled for the night. Visually impressive but somewhat aimless, his character really comes into its own when his head catches fire. Snuff Puppets have always excelled at capturing moments such as this—grotesque, eccentric, flamboyant and faintly nauseating.
In all their forms, these stories show bunyips are active in a kind of ongoing moral policing role. If you leave them alone and behave yourself, you’ll be okay, but if you are caught in the wrong place, alone or doing the wrong thing, out too late, then they’ll get you. These are bunyips as part of the land and the natural order of things. More than myths, they are a real and dangerous presence. I think of the Yarra (Bayrawrung) running quietly past this performance in the background. From its pristine state, Bayrawrung has been gradually made into a sewer, a tip, a storm water run-off. In recent years we find strange things might be emerging from its depths to make people very sick. Who’s been naughty, then?
Nyet Nyet’s Picnic, presented by the Snuff Puppets and Indigenous Artists; director Ian Pidd, performers Nick Barlow, Tony Briggs, Corleen Cooper, Jania Charles, Gary Donnelly, Dennis Fisher, Daniell Flood, Jason Jai, KT Prescott, Earl Rosas, PJ Rosas, Naretha Williams, designer Andy Freer, choreographer Earl Rosas, musical director, James Wilkinson; Birrarung Marr, May 20-22
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 45
© Mary Ann Hunter; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Bell In the Storm,
Thunderstorms, the brain, oceans and love.
This by-line for David Buchanan’s new play, A Bell in the Storm, at the Planetarium in Perth promises a heightened theatrical experience. Simon (Luke Hewitt) steps on stage. He probes the audience about our relationship to pain. Who of the audience is in pain right now? How long has this pain lasted?
From these questions, and from the way he inhabits his body, we understand that Simon is a troubled man. And it is a sad story that he tells us. One night driving home, he stops at an intersection. As he waits, chatting idly to his wife and kids on the mobile, headlights loom in the rear vision mirror. A car careers into the back of Simon’s vehicle.
Down the track, Simon is in trouble. He suffers chronic pain as a result of his accident, and has lost his job as a teacher. His marriage has collapsed, and his only support is clinical psychologist, Sally (Rosemarie Lenzo). When Sally visits pain specialist Andrew (Steve Turner) to seek a sympathetic referral for Simon’s pending insurance case, she recognises the doctor as the man she loved nearly 20 years before. Sally solicits Andrew’s support, and tells him that, to date, medical specialists have found no physiological basis—no proof—of Simon’s pain. Hence Sally and Simon fear that his damages case will be dismissed and he will lose everything.
With romantic business temporarily on the backburner, Simon and Andrew have a testy meeting. Luckily for Simon, Andrew is interested in pain, and has studied the effects of trauma on victims of war. Simon eventually opens up to Andrew. While most of Simon’s life is spent barely containing his acute state, he had discovered a way to externalise and manage his pain through photography. While taking photographs of electrical storms, Simon feels no pain. The Planetarium becomes the screen for impressive projections of thunderstorms, which Andrew recognises as a vivid and apt visual metaphor for neuropathic pain. But Simon’s managing of his pain threatens to be his undoing; the insurance company has film of him, able-bodied and limber, out at night with his camera in the storm. Meanwhile, as the court case comes closer, we learn that Sally has kept something hidden from Andrew…
A Bell in the Storm is driven by a passionate desire to critique dominant paradigms of pain which, since the 18th century, have been dominated by the Cartesian mind/body split. As we all know, pain is now largely the property of science and the pharmaceutical industry. We have no trouble dismissing something as ‘all in their heads’, implying that real pain is wholly and incontrovertibly in the body; hence locatable and curable. As the characters in the play explain, Descartes’ theory of pain was encapsulated in an image of a naked man putting his foot in a fire. An outside stimulus (fire) causes pain to travel in a single direction up a nerve/bell-rope, to a bell which rings in the brain (response).
Undoing this mechanical model, the characters here speak of neuropathic pain, such as occurs in ‘phantom limb syndrome.’ We learn that even minor pain can make some people sensitive to further pain; that the effects of shock can be multiple, complicated, and fluid.
In the writer’s program notes, Buchanan tells us that the concerns of the play are directly linked to his having had a car accident, and that the ideas and insights in this play were the subject of a PhD. However, there is an uneasy gap between the powerful ideas that form the core of this author’s play and the character-based mode that is employed to embody the concepts. Most of the time, the script is busy attending to the boggy needs of plot, while the performers are beholden to the clunky demands of melodramatic realism—a genre of which no one on stage seems particularly convinced. While the domed screen of the planetarium enables an epic expression of pain through the metaphor of the lightning bolt and the storm, it disables the performers’ movement, restricting them to a small podium with the audience raked steeply above them.
It is rare to see theatre take the subject of pain and the body as its subject, and to be brave enough to create a narrative that can express the lonely and disabling experience of inhabiting the body in pain and attempt to illuminate the issues in a popular and accessible way.
Simon does not kill himself, and Sally and Andrew are re-united. Such rigid attention to the demands of a certain kind of story-telling undermines one of the key insights of the play: for Simon there is, was, and will be no easy way out.
I was left longing for a more poetic, elastic form; a form that could leave endings open, and that could unbind rather than bind.
A Bell In the Storm, writer David Buchanan, director Angela Chaplin, Deckchair Theatre, The Planetarium, SciTech Discovery Centre, May 12-28
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 45
© Josephine Wilson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Moira Finucaine, Gotharama
photo Heidrun Löhr
Moira Finucaine, Gotharama
Non Parlo di Salo
Monstrous and breathtaking, Melbourne Workers Theatre’s Non Parlo di Salò is also one of the most ruthlessly philosophical pieces of theatre to emerge locally in recent years. It could too easily have taken the notorious Pasolini film Salò at its centre as an excuse to shock, or make a one-sided anti-censorship plea. And to be sure, there is much here to unsettle even the most jaded of viewers, including sexualised violence, nudity, sodomy and shit-eating. But the honesty of the writer’s intentions, as well as a remarkable commitment by all performers mean that rather than turning off, the audience cannot help but be convinced of the integrity of the piece. Pasolini himself, played with great depth by John Francis Howard, is an iconic figure in his tinted dark glasses and sharp suit. Provocateur and political rebel, artist and antihero; we are offered a constantly shifting perspective on a profoundly contradictory character. Most of the play takes place off set during the filming of Salò, with a brief, but compelling sidestory of a young present-day Australian filmmaker, who is inspired by Pasolini, in confrontation with his despairing mother.
Director Andrea James mentioned to me after the show that she’d not fully appreciated the power of Christos Tsiolkas and Spiro Economopoulos’ script on the page, and that it was only when given life by actors that Non Parlo di Salò achieved its disturbing resonance. Certainly, the play provides a more visceral understanding of the sort of cinema Pasolini strove to create than anything I’ve read on the subject. Salò was his nightmare, and we learn much of what kind of mind seeks to recreate such a nightmare as art.
Gotharama
Nightmares of a different order are in no short supply in the latest “cabaret bizarre” by cross-genre artist Moira Finucane. Finucane’s works merge elements of cabaret, dance, storytelling and sideshow, often playing on imagery equally grotesque and beautiful. Gotharama’s near-dozen short vignettes betray a fascination with the Gothic in all of its definitions: from the trashy page-turner of the 18th century to the industrial-edged Goth subculture of today. But while the term has almost come to signify a repository of cliched tropes, a kind of shorthand for creating suspense and the thrill of fear, Gotharama manages to reanimate the corpse of the Gothic through inventively reinterpreting the standard types of the form. There are moments of Gothic intensity in which Finucane’s performance approaches the sublime, in the philosophical sense: tableaux which cannot be assimilated through any frame of reference except their own heightened, hysterical brilliance. They are savage and erotic spectacles such as the Frankenstein-like “fair maid” who jerks manically to life, all bloodcurdling screams and erratic spider-walking, limbs flailing to a shattering industrial throb; or the closing vision of a Carrie-style figure spouting showers of blood and revelling in the carnage. But equally, Finucane’s more measured and subtle moments of storytelling create uncanny and disquieting effects. A disembodied head upon a bed explains how a series of unfortunate events led to her present state; a young girl recounts a boat trip with a sinister older man bent on her destruction. There is much humour. In Buried Alive!, the victim cries, “I’m not dead! I’m not dead! I was just bored!”
But the most eerie and understated piece, in my opinion, is A Sunny Day, in which a bikini-clad woman sits contently in the sun, which slowly disappears leaving her shivering with an increasing violence. Over the course of several minutes, and with not a word spoken, Finucane suggests a world of personal terror through the simple, natural process of growing cold. Finucane is able to switch from sledgehammer to slow-acting poison in a heartbeat, and in Gotharama she has created a show worthy of comparison with her best works of the past decade.
The Wall Project
Despite the self-imposed restraints demanded of participants in The Wall Project, a quite remarkable triptych has been produced. Three writers were given a short period in which to develop a series of 5 scenes centred on the theme of the Wall, and over a period of only a few weeks, performers and director Chris Bendall workshopped the disparate scripts into a somewhat uneven whole. The 3 pieces which make up the project are only tenuously connected, and the dramatic core of each is not necessarily the wall of the overall piece’s title.
Ben Ellis offers us an imagined nation which could be the product of Kafka writing on contemporary terrorism: the absurdity of the bureaucratic state is juxtaposed with the story of a retarded boy sent on a suicide bombing mission. A foreign visitor is subjected to absurd interrogation, and then introduced to a vain and worn out actor as ironically symbolic of the republic’s great character. It is the actor, of course, who brings about the explosive climax. Ellis is here in a territory in which he can confidently write, expanding on earlier plays which interweave the political with personal dramas, all presented in a sly and ironic fashion.
Tee O’Neill’s piece, too, is a powerful take on contemporary global politics, in this case the miseries of international sex trafficking. A Sex and the City-styled heroine waits for her boyfriend in a leafy city park, but comes upon the ravaged figure of a Russian sex slave buried in the undergrowth, shackled by a leather chastity belt with a counter to tally the number of men by whom she has been brutalised, and accompanied by a child whose mental scarring is quickly apparent. Our protagonist’s own involvement in the scenario slowly emerges, and a murderous conclusion leaves audiences with a series of powerful and indelible impressions.
Tom Wright’s is the least successful work in the context of the larger project. Set aboard the Second Fleet and focusing on a trio of prostitutes sent to the colonies, the drama is articulated in the kind of guttural archaic language which has recently enlivened works like Anthony Crowley’s The Frail Man and Wright’s own adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (RT 67, p29). The story told is ripe with allegorical possibility, as one of the women is raped and miscarries a shrunken Christ child, a sacrifice resonant with the aborted dreams of Australia’s history. But the voices of these characters require a different kind of engagement to the more accessible pieces they abut, and this creates a jarring effect when we shift from scene to scene. It’s not that diverse styles of theatre should not be presented alongside one another in this way; it’s just that Wright’s piece is exponentially more ‘difficult’ than the others.
Catastrophe Practice 1: Skylight
Skylight possesses an air of the historical, of revealing a moment when something was blowing in the wind. One of only 3 pieces for theatre written by renowned British author Nicholas Mosley, the production at La Mama’s Courthouse Theatre was in fact also the world premiere—decades after the work was written. Despite Mosley’s marginal status in the British theatrical revolutions of the 1960s, we can still see here correspondences with contemporaneous work by Pinter or Brook and, across the Channel, Handke or Grotowski. Mosley’s plays are perhaps less confronting than the key works of these formidable theatremakers. However they are more playful, silly even, and generous towards an audience’s desire for narrative.
The play opens as a kind of Noel Coward social comedy gone wrong. A small group of loosely defined aristocrats are raising the roof in the seclusion of a mountain top castle, while some kind of unrest rumbles in the town below. There are intimations of desire and betrayal, familial problems and perhaps even deadly sabotage. But from the outset, these conventional devices are cut up with the “non-acting” explicitly espoused by Mosley. Actors handle lighting changes themselves and operate a pair of CD players loaded with nostalgic melodies; at times they appear to fudge lines and even show a reluctance to enter the stage, requiring others to drag them on. David Bailiht’s Ariel is especially entertaining, pulling ridiculously histrionic grimaces and amateurish balletic poses, to the disgust of his fellow players. Individual audience members are frequently addressed (“Is it you?”) and a long fuse connected to explosives is planted amongst onlookers. It’s the kind of fourth wall breakdown which has itself become somewhat dated, but the non-serious way in which it is presented keeps things from growing mouldy.
Non Parlo di Salò, writers Christos Tsiolkas, Spiro Economopoulos, director Andrea James, dramaturg Patricia Cornelius, design Emily Barrie, lighting Marko Respondeck, sound Jethro Woodward; Melbourne Workers Theatre, Trades Hall New Ballroom, July 13-30
Gotharama, Keep Breathing Productions, text by Moira Finucane, performers Moira Finucane, Carolyn Connors, director Jackie Smith, design Anna Tregloan, costumes David Anderson, lighting Paul Jackson, sound Carolyn Connors, Darrin Verhagen; fortyfivedownstairs, July 6-24
The Wall Project, writers Ben Ellis, Tee O’Neill and Tom Wright, director Chris Bendall; Theatre@Risk, fortyfivedownstairs, June 1-5
Catastrophe Practice 1: Skylight, writer Nicholas Mosley, director Bob Pavlich, lighting Luke Hails, designer Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman, sound Previn Naidu; La Mama, Carlton Courthouse, July 13-30
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 46,
© John Bailey; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Emma J Cooper and Kirüna Stamell, Atypical Theatre Company, The Maids
Melanie Russel (FPC Courier)
Emma J Cooper and Kirüna Stamell, Atypical Theatre Company, The Maids
In The Myth of the Mainstream (Platform Papers No 4, Currency House, April 2005), Robyn Archer argues that under Australia’s conservative government, a “superficial, smoothed-over public domain” provides less and less space for the making of challenging art. The weight upon emerging artists to wrestle with this world, as well as to step into the well-trodden genres of performance making is a heavy challenge. And yet, those who are ‘emerging’ into this murky domain are stoic and clear about what they are trying to achieve. I spoke to several Sydney-based groups in various stages of training and development about the issues they face and how they go about identifying themselves in the contemporary performance landscape and broader political sphere.
Categories
The term ‘emerging artist’ is problematic. Some artists consider themselves as ‘always emerging’ as a matter of principle, while some resent discriminatory distinctions implied between established artists with bodies of work and those without. Others comment on the age bracket that defines the category—up to 26 years of age for an Australia Council grant under the Young Artists’ Initiative, up to 35 years for a new writers’ program run by Griffin Theatre. While there is necessary discussion to be had on age bracket strictures—on how and when one has ‘successfully’ emerged—there is also debate around the contexts in which emerging artists are supported and trained.
The performance community in Sydney supports emerging performers in a number of ways. Both PACT Youth Theatre and Urban Theatre Projects have ensemble programs designed to bring younger and established practitioners together. The Universities of New South Wales, Western Sydney and Charles Sturt University provide contexts for artist-led productions, and the national mentorship program Spark enables relationships between established and emerging artists. Such intergenerational activity plays an important role in developing a supportive performance community with a common aesthetic and outlook. The shift however, between younger artists merely imitating the knowledges that are shared and inventing newer practices in more self-driven contexts is particularly tricky, especially when access (such as creative development funding) is bracketed by age.
Reflecting on her experiences on the way to professional status, Michelle Outram says that negotiating the gap between being “seen as young and emerging but too senior for some opportunities” was difficult. For her, this involved the shift from her work with Teik Kim Pok and Gavin Sladen as Shagging Julie, whose caravan installation Better Than a Blow-up Doll! (RT60, p31) toured to the 2004 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, to establishing herself as a solo artist with various ongoing collaborations. Michelle’s strategy was to garner “support from a range of people and places—not generally monetary support.” She formed relationships with Performance Studies at Sydney University and PACT, and also participated in Time_Place_Space which introduced her to performance networks. There was also, of course, “lots of knocking on doors, lots of applications.”
My Darling Patricia
My Darling Patricia’s Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan, Katrina Gill and Halcyon Macleod recently completed their season of Politely Savage (RT 67, p32). Their impressive collective resume includes Visual Arts degrees from Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, training with PACT Youth Theatre’s ImPACT Ensemble, an apprenticeship with Erth Theatre Company, an international classical dance career, training in circus arts and a Production Crafts degree from NIDA. What is noticeable about the Patricias’ expertise is that it incorporates development in professional contexts—“constructing and performing and doing street theatre and corporate gigs”—as well as formal education in generating visual and performance languages. For them, this has meant that the gap felt by emerging artists between artistic dreaming and its actual realisation in production has been skillfully managed, with their latest triumph, the large scaffolding structure housing Politely Savage, being designed and constructed solely by the artists.
Halcyon explains that Politely Savage grew out of “an ongoing interest in the lost or damaged child” and from a conversation Katrina recorded between her 2 grandmothers for Kissing the Mirror, an earlier work. “We had these characters who were old women, and we were interested in what they were like when they were young.” The striking nature of the work stems from its very delicately built interplay of subconscious and conscious worlds—a step outside current performance trends which seem to offer more direct discursive, spatial or physical interventions into the political sphere and to avoid image-based terrain. Interestingly, the Patricias acknowledge numerous mentors as contributing to their work, suggesting that they learn from artists who have been influenced by “the great innovators in Australia, people like The Sydney Front.” Rather than having direct experience of those glory days themselves, they note that back then “we were probably still at primary school.” Ex-Sydney Fronter Chris Ryan consulted on Politely Savage.
spat&loogie
Lara Thoms and Kat Barron are spat&loogie, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Media Arts Production students working at Performance Space to develop Shopping Games, a performative installation exploring notions of consumerism and marketing overdrive through creating a hyperreal supermarket. Shopping Games is funded by Next Wave’s Kickstart program. Lara explains that she and Kat are “trying to create a sensory environment through design and new media and scanner [barcode] technology” which “comes up with your retail-consumer fortune: an analysis of what you’ve bought.” They suggest that what drives them is equally their political objection to “increased corporate power and increased marketing strategies” and their interest in form, where they are “really trying to make very hybrid work, giving things like video and performance and installation equal weight.”
The primary influences for Lara and Kat are to be found in communities “who put on short work nights, or visual arts exhibitions which use interactive media” outside established performance territory. However, making their subcultural practice visible in Performance Space testifies to the fine line emerging artists hedge between negotiating funding expectations and being able to experiment. Lara explains, “There is a lot more pressure. We have time to create a process and experiment, but at the same time, we have the Next Wave festival in mind. We’re also just really lucky to have this opportunity.”
Atypical Theatre
A different kind of politics is being investigated by Kirüna Stamell and Emma J Cooper with the establishment of their Atypical Theatre Company, a company invested in positioning the disabled body centrally within theatre and performance practice. Both Kirüna and Emma are short-statured performers and their recent co-production with Two Hour Traffic of Jean Genet’s The Maids exposes the discrimination that inadvertently absents disabled bodies from mainstream roles. “We’re taking a traditional work and making alternative casting decisions”, Kirüna explains. “For the majority of scripts there is absolutely no reason why somebody doesn’t have a missing limb, it’s just assumed they don’t. Emma and I are constantly seen as performing artists not as actors.”
The challenge Emma and Kirüna put to both performance and theatre communities is to shift the way relationships between disabled and able-bodied performers are perceived and to alter expectations around what those bodies can do in terms of form. They met while one was working for the Sydney Theatre Company in Volpone and the other in Macbeth. Aside from classical theatre work, Emma’s recent performance with the Urban Theatre Projects’ and Branch Nebula’s co-production Plaza Real saw her “suddenly become a physical performer, something that just emerged.” Placed alongside Kirüna’s background in dance, the duo offer a vision of theatre that does not discriminate between canonical texts or contemporary devised scores, with future projects including a possible commission for a writer. Their work also offers an important vision of partnership centre stage. Kirüna explains, “For the first time I am not an anomaly and people are saying, “There’s 2 of them… oh my God… maybe there’s more”.”
Futures
My Darling Patricia are currently looking to tour Politely Savage, Emma and Kirüna each have Australia Council grants to pursue, and Michelle has initiated a new collaboration called The Plimsoll Line, “a group of artists who come together for research and development.” Lara and Kat want to get some serious skills under their belts, such as welding and new media programming. Their vision for a further work: “performance in true life, adopting fake identities and invisible theatre scenarios.”
So, is there a slow burn of common ideas and forms among emerging companies building towards the creation of major players as in years gone by? Or more recently, in version 1.0’s successful bringing together of several generations of performers after careful emergence? To paraphrase Clare Britton, maybe if we look back in 20 years’ time, then we’ll see the patterns we are drawing together now.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 47
© Bryoni Trezise; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Sarah-Jane Pell, Hydrophilia, BEAP04 Perth, Video Still
photo Lorraine Corker
Sarah-Jane Pell, Hydrophilia, BEAP04 Perth, Video Still
Walking With Water offered a retrospective of work by performance and installation artist Sarah-Jane Pell, in what she calls “aquabatics.” Although she draws on the poetic and performative potential suggested by aquatic environments, her body of work is best described as an aestheticisation of life support systems. The body in water is dialectical, at once in communion with and conflict with water. Aquatic performance offers the possibility of an ecstatic release into the enveloping weightlessness of an azure world, yet nevertheless the body gags in the face of this fantasy, as the need for oxygen reasserts itself.
The most successful of Pell’s live works documented in Walking With Water is Under Current (2003-4). It did not, however, involve any external water source, rather the body became watery: a tortured, twisted, physical object, vacuum-sealed beneath a plexiglass dome, dragged across the floor while water vapour condensed on the shell over Pell’s increasingly distressed form. For 16 minutes, the sound of her laboured breathing was amplified to the audience as she crawled about, all but consuming the available oxygen. Like the tremulously beautiful performances by butoh master Kazuo Ohno of the 1970s, in which he depicted the ghost of his “dead foetus” alter ego, or the childhood recollections of his peer Tatsumi Hijikata of holding himself beneath a deadly whirlpool while undergoing multiple deaths and rebirths, Under Current is a violently sublime work, playing on the sadomasochistic beauty of our fragile embodiment.
Pell’s other works engage more directly with water. Second Nature: Second Skin (2003) and Revolutions (2004) are video installations of actions performed on or under the ocean. In Second Nature, Pell is shown silhouetted by an aureole of light, suspended in deep blue water, her arms adorned with wing-shaped, steel and perspex armatures based upon Leonardo da Vinci’s speculative designs for human flight. In Revolutions, however, Pell is shown spread-eagled (as in da Vinci’s Ecce homo), rolling across a bay in a German wheel, her smile periodically submerged as she turns upside down. Videoed in the warmth of sunset, Revolutions suggests a joyful game with water, while Second Nature is more meditative, the human form surrounded by dark liquid recalling Bill Viola’s more arresting installation, The Messenger, at the 1998 Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Pell’s most provocative and innovative practice is that in which she is also most tentative. Hydrophilia (2004) and Odyssey (2005, performed alongside the retrospective) both employ clear plastic headpieces partially filled with water, air being visibly provided to the audibly breathing performer via valves. Hydrophilia is a fascinating durational work using a heavy, spherical helmet, in which the water distorts Pell’s physiognomy and spittle pours from an external valve, dramatising the affinity between water inside and outside the body. Although visually attractive, this helmet proved dangerously heavy and was replaced by the flexible casque of Odyssey additionally fitted with an external air-cleansing unit, moulded in the shape of a heart and lungs. While this externalization of internal life processes was intriguing, the mechanics of Odyssey eclipsed this conceptual focus.
Pell cautiously entered the gallery, engaged in complicated hand signals with her support staff, laboriously positioned herself in the German wheel before standing for a minute, breathing loudly, then inverting herself in the wheel to allow for the equally involved removal of the helmet. To safely establish the body within such a framework proved so fraught that the logistics themselves became the form, audiences becoming absorbed with watching Pell’s semaphoring, or in trying to determine what was happening.
Pell taps into a rich vein and her video installations are highly accomplished. However, her recent live performance primarily served as a fascinatingly tragic enactment of the overwhelming complexities involved in designing safe life support systems. By focusing her attention on minimizing the dangers inherent in her process, Pell loses the visceral affectiveness inherent in live art works such as Joseph Beuys’ residency with a wild coyote (I Love America and America Loves Me, 1974), in favor of an aesthetic which gestures towards the eventual taming of these dangers via a thoroughly technologised aesthetic. Whether such an art would be compelling, once rendered streamlined and safe, remains to be seen.
Walking With Water: An exhibition of underwater performance research, Sarah-Jane Pell, Western Australian Maritime Museum, June 17-22
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 48
© Jonathan Marshall; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Jacques Soddell, 24 gestures (for giussepe chiari) from The Piano Room
undue noise began in 1999 as a forum for local experimental underground/electronic musicians in the central Victorian town of Bendigo and surrounding areas. This year’s Remembrance of Things Past was organised by Jacques Soddell at the Allans Walk artist run space.
The Walk was named after the Allans music store that once occupied the building. It comprises neglected arcades, their stained glass windows painted over, a false ceiling installed over the balcony, and balustrades and staircase removed to a storehouse. Bendigo once boomed as an outpost to Melbourne and still shares similarities with it from the infancy of their commercial growth. Although now a large urban regional centre, Bendigo strangely juxtaposes past and present. undue noise’s 4-part exhibition reflects this schism in various ways.
Soddell’s exhibition, The Piano Room, originated in the history of the store’s piano room. In a partly archival presentation it documents the movement of the piano from its status as a universal domestic object through to its modernist reworkings. The Piano Room references John Cage’s 4’33”, prepared piano and the Fluxus movement (especially George Macuinas, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Giuseppe Chiari). Documents of the Fluxus movement are accompanied by a small video work which shows Sonic Youth dismembering the keyboard of a piano, and the immortal image of the little boy playing in the Dr Seuss tale 5000 fingers of Dr T. These capture the theatricality and anxiety that a piano can generate as a monolithic instrument that has to be mastered, even defeated.
In another section of the space a delightful work engages the audience. As an interactive tribute to Baranoff-Rosine’s Piano Opto-phonique (1923), Soddell has created a synthesiser keyboard that, when touched, manipulates projected computer generated images. These were based on the visuals from the first exploration by the opto-phonique, a tool to explore the relationship between sound and light.
In a corner, music faintly emanates from a shopping bag containing baguette and book. Soddell’s Deconstruction of Claude Debussy’s hommage to Rameau is a captivating, quietly, poetic sound installation that demands attention to the internal nature of music and the way it travels with us in the everyday. The subtle interplay of sounds throughout Sodell’s exhibition brought past and present together, our understanding of music today heightened by echoes from the past.
Paul Fletcher’s Time Decomposing, was a subtle and evocative installation using sounds (including the recollections of a retired worker) and images (on video) from the building’s past. Fletcher describes the work as “a decomposing time capsule.” The other works in the undue noise festival were midden me thus and other dreamings, an installation with loungeroom ambience combining optigan (for ‘optical organ’, a 70s home keyboard based on film soundtrack technology) and artworks by double other (Justin Bull, Kenneth Gordon and Mark Else); and Jason Waters’ engaging Organization of Transport & Exchange with its reflections on the impact of the synthesizer with apt historical reference to Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969).
The sound works in undue noise invited interaction and encouraged contemplation, exploring the building that housed them and the many ways in which sound plays a role in an everyday built on the past and its dreams of tomorrow.
Remembrance of Things Past: undue noise festival, Allans Walk, Bendigo, May 11-June 14
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 48
© Tara Gilbee; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Beta Erko
photo Renae Mason
Beta Erko
While it has been consistently growing over the last 6 years, taking in Brisbane and associated events in Sydney, it was clear this year that Liquid Architecture 6 had pulled out all stops with a massive program of concerts, screenings, installations, workshops and talks spanning 14 days in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns and Canberra. Ramping up the publicity there were regular email updates, major media interest and even a give-away CD in Wire, that elicited in many of us a twinge of Australian soundculture patriotism. Liquid Architecture did hype—and from what I experienced of the Melbourne and Sydney events, lived up to it.
Director Nat Bates describes Liquid Architecture as a “sense-specific” rather than a genre-based festival. This distinction allowed for dynamic and eclectic programming.
There were 3 main concerts in Melbourne, 2 at the North Melbourne Town Hall and a party-based gig at the Public Office. The opening night concert set the tone for some variegated programming, with 7 acts approaching sound and music making from very different perspectives. Scott d. Cotterill (Tasmania) opened the evening with a gentle guitar and laptop set which straddled textural and melodic explorations and augmentations, tones lingering, looping and distorting to build up the body of sound. Antediluvian Rocking Horse (Victoria), a DJ outfit, collaged their record collection, moving between exercises in ambient soundscaping and tune spinning. Alex White (NSW) gave us fat oscillations, tweaking and shaping, growing them into multilayered fabrics of pulsing noise. Clinton Green/Undecisive God (Victoria) looped his guitar manipulations, sometimes losing himself, resulting in a predictable delay effect, but sometimes pulling all the elements together to create a wall of highly detailed timbral play. Will Guthrie (Victoria/France) played all manner of objects—striking, tocking, thwacking and vibrating them to bring out their secret rhythms and resonances, which he then deftly shaped into a considered composition, covering the spectrum of frequencies, density and space. And that was only the first half!
The second half of the concert was broadcast live on ABC Classic FM, which created a slightly disturbing disembodying effect—the focus shifting from an experience to be shared by live bodies in a room, to one projected onto an anonymous other, with slightly more conservative tastes. DJ Olive (US) opened, revealing infinite potential for the turntable as instrument. Olive collaged snippets of vocal text, some garbled, some George Bush, his whole body engaged in the process of spinning, holding, carving the rhythm of the voices. His skill is so refined he can catch a breath, reverse it, catch it again. Moving from the turntables to a computer he flooded the space with a dreamy fullbodied wash of warm tones. The sense of composition was strong in this improvised work and the political narrative added satisfying gravitas.
The final act was Essendon Airport, (David Chesworth, Robert Goode and Graham Lee). An interesting inclusion, the ensemble played selections from their re-released recording from 1979 Sonic Investigations of the Trivial. These compositions are keyboard centred melodic minimalism augmented by electric and lap steel slide guitar. Although this offered good contrast, and a relieving simplicity, neatly divided into songs, the fact that it was programmed at midnight and the seventh act for the evening, made it challenging for both performers and audience. Perhaps the live broadcast placed too many restrictions on content and timing that actually impinged on the overall event.
The highlight of the Melbourne program was the audiovisual performance by Wet Gate—a San Francisco trio of filmmakers/sound artists who use 16mm film loops to create both visual and sonic material. The 3 stand in front of the audience and ‘play’ the projectors, threading and discarding film, raising telescopic hooks to accommodate the loops. Moving the image around from small framed screen to large cyclorama, they blurred, colourised and shattered images with filters and mirrors held in front of the lens. The content is mainly drawn from old educational films along with techniques such as drawing, rubbing and scratching the surface of film (including the optical sound strip) so that both image and sound is generated by the resulting pattern. The audio is also manipulated subtly using samplers while keeping the loops as the focus of the composition. (Several people suggested that Wet Gate and Sydney’s Loop Orchestra would make a great double-bill.) The found footage collage aesthetic can so easily degenerate into shallow irony, but in manipulating the relationship between sound and image, their synchronicities and slippages, Wet Gate transcends content to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
The Sunday evening performance at the North Melbourne Town Hall was presented in impressive 16 speaker surround, with the performers in the middle of the space and the audience divided into 2 blocks facing each other. James Hullick presented a composition for various instruments, vocalists and soundscape. The piece had a radiophonic feel, as acoustic instrumental explorations skittered around the room, accompanied by barely discernible voices, snippets of text floating to the surface above surging field recording atmospherics. This nicely crafted and spatialised piece took on an even more impressive dimension, when at the conclusion the stage curtain opened to reveal the musicians and actors who had in fact been performing live.
Alan Lamb played a particularly imposing work, based on his investigations with long string instruments and wind organs creating sheering crescendos and shifts of thick, heavy noises and soul shaking bass. The gloriously rich bridge recordings of Jodi Rose were also well suited to the grandeur of the sound system, her spatialisation indicating the exciting potential for multispeaker presentation of this material. Particularly impressive was Slap Shot, a pre-recorded work by Eric La Casa and Jean Luc Guionnet (France) ‘diffused’ through the space in collaboration with Philip Samartzis. Based on field recordings of an ice hockey game, there was an interesting separation and reintegration of sonority and source material through the work—moments where sound was purely sound—just texture and movement loosened from its meaning. The spatialisation was incredible with waves catapulting across the room, horizontal sheets of audio descending upon, washing through you. The improvised final work was not quite as impressive, perhaps because once again, it came at the end of a long program, but also as the trio never seemed to quite establish a relationship.
In order to mobilise nationally Liquid Architecture works closely with promoters in each city. For the last 3 years the Brisbane leg has been organised in collaboration with room40/Lawrence English. In 2005, after a few years of associated events with impermanent.audio, Liquid Architecture 6 formed a firm partnership with Alias Frequencies (Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne) and Performance Space to bring an impressive program to Sydney.
Taking a slightly different approach to the eclectic programming, each night in Sydney had a different focus. The opening night was noise-based madness, the second had a calmer, deep listening focus and the third concentrated on the much maligned beat. The diversity of acts programmed within these thematics attracted different, perhaps new audiences, particularly the beat night featuring the international pop and techno artists TBA and Thomas Brinkman.
A real highlight was Thembi Soddell (Victoria). Her sound is like sand—seemingly one mass, one colour, but actually made of thousands of particles constantly shifting to form new temporal landscapes. Playing from behind the audience, her work is immersive and her acute control of dynamics, like hitting turbulence, creates not just dramatic tension, but also an uneasy sensation of loss. Also on the same evening Rik Rue and Julian Knowles brought out their Social Interior collaboration (after an 8 year break) to present a shimmering set of manipulated field recordings. Like La Casa & Guionnet, the everyday sounds floated into conscious recognition then played themselves out of naming, accompanied by some beautifully tempered video work. The vision was perfectly pitched for simplicity and rhythmic cohesion, so rather than distracting from the sound or adding another layer, it simply resonated with it.
The ultimate act that had the crowd vibrating with anticipation was the debut performance of Beta Erko. This supergroup of sound art includes Martin Ng on turntable destruction, Robin Fox on digital evisceration, Anthony Pateras on mixing desk, voice spasms and more, and MC Vulk Makedonski from the hip hop phenomenon Curse Ov Dialect on trilingual alien channelling. Together they created the most spectacularly invigorating noise onslaught I’ve ever heard (noise not generally my genre). Each artist was so adept at the detail of their destructiveness that the combined energy of the group literally blew a light and set off the fire alarm. Hopefully the evil posse will find time amongst their other sonic pursuits to reprise this astounding combo.
In both Melbourne and Sydney there were also audio visual screenings and artists talks (with disappointing attendance in Melbourne perhaps due to weekend daytime programming) and, in Melbourne an exhibition component including the results of a residency by French guest La Casa and Guionett, and a new mobile phone installation by WA artists Cat Hope and Rob Muir. Add to this all the other interstate events and it is clear that Liquid Architecture 6 is now a true celebration of the aural sense, with a fearless drive and ambition, aiming to shift expectations, challenge and develop audiences and to take the idea of a soundart festival to the next level (perhaps like Mutek and early Sonars). We can only hope that the funding climate warms to allow this scale and approach to be maintained.
Liquid Architecture 6, artistic director Nat Bates, Sydney co-directors Ben Byrne & Shannon O’Neill; Melbourne July 1-7, Sydney July 13-16
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 49
© Gail Priest; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Tony Conrad, Bowed Film
The Anthology Film Archive in New York is central to America’s avant-garde film tradition, its history closely bound to successive generations of ‘visionary’ filmmakers, critics, artists and outsiders. Opened in 1970 by Jonas Mekas, Anthology played a major role in establishing recognition and critical engagement for avant-garde film and 35 years on is more vital than ever, housing the world’s most important collection of avant-garde film material, ultra-rare film prints, negatives and fragments of work, plus prescribed and unprescribed medications, record collections and personal ephemera left behind by inspired artists like Harry Smith, Jack Smith and Maya Deren. At 82, Mekas is artistic director, with much of the running passed on to inventive and informed young cinephiles who help negotiate Anthology’s ongoing place in the contemporary New York cultural scene.
Over 3 weeks in May and June, Anthology hosted Eye and Ear Controlled, curated by Andrew Lampert and Jim O’Rourke and featuring artists who infiltrated both the avant-garde film and music camps, making compelling contributions to both. These included Tony Conrad, Alvin Lucier, Mauricio Kagel, Phill Niblock, Michael Snow and Charlemagne Palestine. This article focuses on Conrad who is now well recognised in both worlds, and Mauricio Kagel and Alvin Lucier who are primarily considered composers. All the artists were, in fact, moving freely and frequently between any number of forms. As Fluxus artist Dick Higgins wrote in ‘Statement on Intermedia’ (1966), “A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.”
Conrad conceived of The Flicker (1965), his first film, as alternately a science fiction film (“but not the kind where people dressed as robots fall in love”), a “disruption of abstract art” and as “ideosensory phenomena”, an intrusion into interior spaces “where totally different rules apply.” Essentially The Flicker is a series of alternating pure black and white film frames projected in sequences of rapid acceleration and deceleration. Conrad wasn’t the first to explicitly explore the approach, Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Dwinell Grant’s Colour Sequence (1943) are earlier examples. But where these are objects of ‘cool’ minimalist contemplation, Conrad’s Flicker is deliberately aggressive and confrontational, specifically setting out to attack and distort the frame, which he associated with abstract art. A faintly satiric epilepsy warning, stating that a physician should be in attendance, was Conrad’s tactic for weeding out squeamish, uncommitted spectators. In fact, very few have suffered the much feared fit, although ‘photogenic migraines’, lasting a week, have apparently been more common.
For all the fighting talk and mythologising, experiencing The Flicker today is comparable to listening to Conrad’s minimal music of the same period. It’s mesmerising, complex work examining the minimum perceptual register, but hardly violent, dangerous or even as irritating to the senses as might have been intended. The Buchla Synthesiser piece on the soundtrack was directly inspired by Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1960). A stream of stereo pulses shift in pitch according to the ear’s proximity to speakers and the geometry of the listening environment. Conrad applied complementary structures to sound and image producing a kind of ‘phantom’ synchronicity, a feeling of ‘transsensoriality’, the senses as connected channels or highways rather than isolated territories or domains.
Straight and Narrow (1970) untangles the 2 senses into clearer isolation. A raucous Terry Riley/John Cale jam accompanies Conrad’s second flicker piece, “structural film gone funky”. Just like a mobile Bridget Riley, Straight and Narrow uses black and white stripes to produce spinning shapes and colour bursts, and they are amazing indeed. The soundtrack gives the film a euphoric edge but also stamps it psychedelic, something the morse code austerity of The Flicker happily bypasses. Conrad’s other abstract films are less known but equally interesting. Film Feedback (1972) is an experiment in instant filming, developing, projecting and refilming, all on a continuous 14-minute strip. The technical process is barely fathomable but what results aesthetically is a particularly fragile meditation on re-recording, degeneration and time, a silent companion to Alvin Lucier’s piece for voice and tape recorder I am sitting in a room (1969). Eye of Count Flickerstein (1967) is another silent study of TV static in wiggly microscopic detail. Projected large in a new luminous print, it is stuning.
The highlight of the Conrad series, however, is Coming Attractions (1970), his only feature film. Conrad’s filmmaking start came through Jack Smith; he soundtracked Smith’s Scotch Tape (1962) and worked on Normal Love (1963). In Coming Attractions, Conrad borrows Smith’s trademark unhinged aesthetic delirium and his actor from Flaming Creatures (1961), Arnold Rockwood. Conrad is credited ‘producer’, his wife Beverly Grant directorial duties, however who did what is impossible to discern as the film is so completely manipulated, bizarre, and manifestly incoherent. Ostensibly an exploration of the relation between extreme formal and narrative devices, Coming Attractions consists of hysterically trashed ‘stars’, filmed in ‘Tantacolor’, rambling, screaming and writhing through a set of radically skewed orgiastic ‘trailers’ (ie coming attractions). Conrad physically altered the footage so much that he saw Coming Attractions not as a film, but rather as many fragments of film in various stages of preparation. The sound is brilliantly collaged from unreleased pieces ‘commissioned’ by Conrad and performed by LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, John Cale and Charlemagne Palestine amongst others, particular highlights being Young’s slow-motion vocal impression of a lonesome cowboy and the bleating group performance, ‘sacred shriek’ symphony.”
Conrad’s characteristic irreverence is on full display for the disarmingly charming and entertaining lecture/performance, Filmmaking as a Critical Intervention. Sitting cross-legged on stage amidst papers, projectors, food, and cooking utensils, he reflects insightfully on the development of ideas on film, music and culture, acknowledging the early influence of Henry Flynt’s anti-cultural activism at Harvard and in New York, through to the ‘domestic’ qualities of life at the Media Lab in Buffalo, where Conrad moved in 1972 along with filmmakers Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton. Creative ‘domestic’ life is demonstrated in Curried 7302, a beautiful film made in the traditional Indian manner. The faded orange hue of the print suggests it might have been a mild Korma. In Bowed Film, a piece of film loops around Conrad’s head. Inside the loop, he experiences a private screening. The effect is enhanced with vigorous violin bowing, the film apparently dances, and the sound is a monstrous multiphonic wailing. Whilst speaking Conrad also prepares a Sukiyaki, a Japanese noodle dish, today mixed with fragments of antique film. Sukiyaki is ‘projected’ according to the Latin meaning, ‘to cast forward’. The anthology screen ends up splattered with vegetables, noodles, sauce, and various length fragments of film. Conrad apologises profusely to the staff whilst everyone applauds.
The Dr Chicago films, directed by George Manupelli, have been whispered about for years, but rarely seen. Manupelli and Alvin Lucier, with Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, were key players in the Once Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Manupelli also founded the Ann Arbor Film Festival) and although the associated music has been widely circulated, not so Manupelli’s films. The prints screened at Anthology are in fact the only ones in existence, having been rescued, thankfully in fairly decent condition, from lab storage. Lucier, uncannily resembling a young Dennis Hopper, is a revelation as Dr Alvin Chicago, a charismatic but deluded sex-change surgeon running from the law. Dr Chicago (1968), the first film, is all luscious black and white cinematography, full of subtly ludicrous monologues delivered by Chicago to his mostly drowsy and silent entourage of troubled young women. Ride, Dr. Chicago, Ride (1970) sees the doctor and his gang befriending itinerant nomads (including composer Pauline Oliveros) in the deserted wastelands near the Mexican border. The third instalment, Cry, Dr. Chicago (1971) takes place in a Riviera villa, with Chicago repeatedly poisoned by his nemesis, a confused and bad tempered French playboy. Remarkably the bugged black jellybeans have no effect. The pace of the films will be familiar to those who appreciate Lucier’s music, a slow creeping logic and humour built upon the placement of gestures across the mostly empty space of the narrative. Indeed, Lucier’s whole delivery is intensely musical; he feints, stutters, pauses and picks his way through sentences, flirting with resolution, establishing an unstable, hypnotic logic. The gentle cumulative absurdities of the films make them enjoyable on multiple levels; almost Jacques Tati-like in tone, they are intensely funny without ever being directly comic.
Mauricio Kagel’s anti-establishment pedigree as a composer is well recognized in avant-garde circles, however surprisingly few people realise that he has also made over 20 films in which his signature themes—absurdist physical theatre, psycho-religious reverie, and the gleeful parody of high cultural seriousness—are explored in abundance. Solo (1967) features 3 deranged orchestra conductors staggering aimlessly amidst the rubble of an abstracted classical theatre. The only sounds are their demented humming, the swish of frantic baton waving and the inadvertent impact of collision with percussion objects and discarded instruments strewn across the set. Duo (1967) is more complex and reflexive, a meticulously conceived surrealist play on chance, nonsense, fragmentation, and improbable synchronisation, strung together with detuned scrapes, plucks and thuds from various instruments and non-instruments. Duo culminates with its characters wandering into a theatre in which Solo is screening and wildly improvising along with it until the 2 films merge and collapse in hallucinatory flashes of light and ripped celluloid. If Solo and Duo possess their share of abnormality, they pale in comparison to Hallelujah (1968). Beginning inside an open screaming mouth, the camera lolls outward into a psychotic world of ritualised hysteria. This might be Kagel’s grand statement on the disintegration of meaning, an advocation of animal impulses and mass incoherence. Kagel constructs spectacles of perverse choreography between bodies, spaces, and objects (often musical instruments). In the end, it is hard to describe them as anything other than serious cacophony.
Eye and Ear Controlled presented an extraordinary opportunity for audiences to experience significant but rarely screened work, in an environment rich with history and mystique. Conrad, Lucier, Manupelli, Ashley, Michael Snow and Phill Niblock all attended and helped generate an atmosphere of relaxed intimacy without any of the unnecessary formal pretension that a museum or major institution would undoubtedly have brought to the event. Very few cities would have the resources to stage an event like this outside of the institutional scene, and, as always, New Yorkers are the infuriatingly lucky ones.
Eye & Ear Controlled, Anthology Film Archives New York, May 19-June 11
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 50
© Joel Stern; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
David Chesworth
photo John Tsiavos
David Chesworth
Although he’s been hard at it with music theatre (Cosmonaut RT64, p37, and the forthcoming revival of Recital for Malthouse) and sound installations (through Wax Media, his partnership with Sonia Leiber), it’s been a long time between recordings for composer David Chesworth. Badlands, a tautly constructed exploration of theme (inspired by the Terence Malick film of the same name and its use of the music of Carl Orff) and the distinctive instrumental palette of the David Chesworth Ensemble, appeared in 1998. Now the composer is releasing 2 CDS, one of new works for his ensemble, Music to see through, with a bonus disk of experimental pieces, and the other a collection of miniatures from 1978: 50 synthesizer greats.
In Music to see through long compositions alternate with short more or less ambient creations. It’s the larger works that grab attention, sustained compositions with that characterful Chesworth ensemble sound. The immersive, gentle 9-minute Panopticon conjures something organic for which growth is eternally incremental, building on itself over and over like something out of Chaos theory. The title doesn’t seem to fit, unless it’s something to do with the circularity of vision and the quiet insistence of the piece. In the engaging Passage des panoramas the trombone alternates between droning and hitting the high short notes against a piano-led rhythm section. A second theme cuts loose from the formal pacing of the first section with lyrical piano moments and a cello-violin exhange against a marimba pulse. Eventually, the string duo sing their way out on their own. The opening steady piano line of Floating Worlds breaks into hesitancy which, with strings, becomes the second strand of the work, then alternating with the first theme. A gorgeously sighing violin dances in counterpoint with the marimba, and then takes off with the cello in a wonderfully sustained reverie. Then it’s back to the lone piano and we float off again. Will is markedly less lyrical, comprising short, chugging phrases from piano, metal percussion, strings and trombone. The discrete units come together and break apart before a long violin line briefly takes over from the beat and against a substratum of liquid piano and watery electronics before the return to propulsion.
Among the shorter works are 2 songs (not to my taste) and tracks with a movie soundtrack feel. Persuade kicks off like a thriller score with strings riffing briskly before settling into something more mellow as violin, cello and trombone take alternate leads. The drum-driven Perpetual presence is textured with odd shufflings, creakings and seems to have nowhere to go until its riffs run together in a mad, accelerating rush to a conclusion. The shortest works generate quiet ambience with spare, bell-like percussion against warbling strings, or a low pulse against vibraphone musings. Or they suggest something a little more urgent as in Soft skin tutti which alternates delicate moments with outbursts of rapid drumming, mad piano, cymbal clashes and high violin cries. Surveillance evokes an aural world built from grinding strings, bell crashes and an eerily indeterminate sonic substratum.
The album concludes with the dancey Bland flaneur: classic Chesworth ensemble sound, trombone leading; and Wait a while: vibes and piano against a muttering sound bed before the arrival of a langorously cool Hot Club violin. It’s a good album for programming into the order you prefer.
The bonus album, The Disk of Idioms, is also blessed with some fine tracks and some intriguing electronics, although with much less sense of ensemble. The 12-minute Oceanography is a consumate sound world inhabited by data flow, electronic twitterings and distant rumblings and overlaid with a delicate vibraphone reverie that almost resolves into the deepest of its notes. In the droll Aspirational, a voice trills and then races against a fast electronic shuffle and acoustic rattlings. There are snatches of song, gasps, wheezes and an exhausting dash. Funeral sentence is a fascinatingly distorted 5-minute choral piece, male and female voices and phrases stretched and sucked away against a clanking of chains and a shifting stream of electronic noise. Music to see through reaches many high points, best experienced in its major compositions, but encountered here and there in works of intriguing brevity.
David Chesworth Ensemble, Music to see through, w.minc, distributed by Shock, WMINCCD034
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 51
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Elena Kats-Chernin
Elena Kats-Chernin might be considered an odd inclusion in this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival. However, she is no stranger to cabaret and in her student days performed in Cabaret Conspiracy alongside luminaries such as Boom Boom La Verne, Fifi L’Amour and David da Most. Subsequently she worked to pay the bills in the Red Hot and Blues Cabaret show in Berlin while studying at the height of German compositional pedagogy under Helmut Lachenmann at the Hochschule. Kats-Chernin’s career has always trod parallel paths—one serious and one fun.
Kats-Chernin’s appearance at this year’s festival follows her performance as band-member in her own work Mr. Barbecue, at the 2004 Cabaret Festival. The inimitable Lyndon Terracini featured as ‘everyman’ performing the great Australian barbecue ritual. Kats-Chernin was invited back for this year’s event, in obvious recognition of her entertainment value, with Elena Kats-Chernin and Friends, a show originally developed for the 2004 Barossa Music Festival. It was not the usual cabaret fare of stand-up or the crooning of old torch songs, but drew a long bow with the same tradition. Long time friend and associate Christopher Latham on violin stylishly accompanied the relaxed, charming and radiantly good humoured Kats-Chernin at her piano. The other friends in her show were the people in the story of her life that she announced at the outset included “some facts, some half-truths and some complete lies.”
Kats-Chernin’s keyboard virtuosity was beautifully complemented by Latham’s daring violin, in turn haunting, lyrical and always wonderfully evocative. Latham obviously has great empathy for Kats-Chernin’s music and she in turn demonstrates great faith in his translation.
The mood shifted from elegaic to whimsical and at times magical. Popular mid-20th century dance forms dominated the music: tango, waltz and blues peppered with a good smattering of rags—one of her favourite forms as player and composer.
Kats-Chernin’s narrative moved from her earliest memories to a dedication to her Barossa patrons from the first incarnation of this show. Her musical experience of a blind violinist performing in Bucharia, where her mother was posted as an eye specialist, translated to the exotic Bucharian Melody, while Slick Back Tango is derived from the memory of the smell of her aunt’s hair cream. Kats-Chernin’s compositional method of building a work from one or two notes was candidly demonstrated in Blue Rose, an ultimately complex work characterised by a series of time shifts. Chopin was acknowledged as the inspiration for the blues movement of her second piano concerto (written while her mother was dying) and quoted liberally within to melancholic effect, while a reworked quotation from Satie’s Gymnopédie became the building block for Naïve Waltz.
Economy Class Blues was inspired by long flights between engagements in the most dreaded airline class affordable to concert presenters. Birthday Rag was dedicated to her co-performer and his way of splitting the day in 2 parts: not awake and awake. Augusta’s Garden Waltz is named after the first vintage from the vineyard of Barossa Music Festival impressario John Russell, and the piece that she called a “swizzle stick”—Cocktail Rag—was dedicated to Barossa Festival host extraordinaire Peter Lehmann. The uplifting Get Well Rag was written for one of her sons when he became very ill, and the encore piece Peggy’s Rag was dedicated to one of Australia’s great composers, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and written during the time that Kats-Chernin spent at Peggy’s Paddington musician’s retreat when she returned from her studies in Germany. Russian Rag, another encore, was the oldest piece in the show, dating from 1996, and one that has subsequently appeared in many arrangements including the version that frames Radio National’s Late Night Live, hosted by Phillip Adams.
The musical and emotional depth of a show that displayed both compositional and performance proficiency, contradicted all the quaint titles and facile dance forms. The music was at once challenging, but postmodern references to popular styles and western musical tradition made it highly accessible and enjoyable. It was a privilege to hear newly devised material in The Maiden and the Well Spirit, based on Russian folklore. But the highlight was the music from Wild Swans that emerged from one of Kats-Chernin’s most fruitful collaborations to date. Her piano adaptations from the full orchestral score of her ballet music for Wild Swans, choreographed for the Australian Ballet in 2004 by Meryl Tankard, gave glimpses of the rich musical palate of the ballet.
The inclusion of Elena Kats-Chernin in this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival is less curious in terms of genre than is speculation about what drove a highly successful mid-career composer to strut and fret upon the cabaret stage. Fortunately for those able to attend, the show provided a rare and engaging insight into the workings of an inspired and incandescent musical mind.
Elena Kats-Chernin and Friends, composer & pianist Elena Kats-Chernin, violinist Chris Latham, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Adelaide Fesitval Centre, June 10-25
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 52
© Helen Rusak; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Candice Breitz, Mother, 2005, video stills
The Venice Biennale vernissage is experienced in a sort of blur, moving between hundreds of artworks, in and out of ‘countries’ (pavilions), making polite conversation with remote acquaintances in a state of caffeine-fuelled exhilaration. It’s an environment conducive to hype and spectacle, best suited to admiring the designer shoes of the international art elite rather than reflecting critically on the art. Indeed, one of my strong, if obscure, impressions of the 2005 Venice Biennale was the prevalence of wood. Quite aside from the woody memento mori carvings of our own representative, Ricky Swallow, this most traditional of media featured in a whole range of artworks filling the Giardini—the gardens where the ‘old’ countries and a few newcomers like Australia and Korea have their national pavilions.
In the Israeli pavilion, Guy Ben Ner’s brilliant Treehouse Kit presented an ‘instructional video’ on how to create various items of furniture, IKEA-style, out of the disassembled parts of a strange looking Hills Hoist-like wooden tree, also on display. In his cartoon style performance, the artist appears in his underwear sporting a huge Jewish beard. Hans Schabus completely reconstructed the Austrian pavilion into a huge artificial mountain with his work, The Last Land. An elaborate web of wooden beams and staircases are covered with stone coloured canvas. You could enter and climb to the peak for a view of Venice. Icelandic artist Gabríela Fridriksdóttir similarly transformed her compact national pavilion, covering its outer walls with tree roots. The inside was a multimedia cave-like lair, with primal performances by actors (including Björk) in furry suits whom you watched while seated on log stools.
If these works were more hybrid and conceptual than Ricky Swallow’s low-tech melancholy austerity, they felt equally original in their imaginative use of ‘old media.’ By contrast, the most prominent ‘new media’ artwork in Venice appeared positively old-fashioned. Fabrizio Plessi’s Vertical Sea is a boat-shaped light-emitting structure on the water in front of the entrance to the Giardini, and is aptly described as a “big technological totem of steel.” Promoted as “a metaphor of the journey towards [the] unknown but also symbol of artistic creation”, it looks more like kitsch corporate art and is, unfortunately, permanent. A more subtle, though easily missed, instance of public new media art was the nearby Games Machine installed by Anika Eriksson. This temporary amusement arcade on the otherwise stately or tourist-mobbed, and eminently bourgeois, waterside was promoted via posters to local youth.
Given it doesn’t present itself as a media art festival, it’s hardly surprising that very little of the art at the Venice Biennale reflected on, say, its electronic or digital status. To be sure, contemporary art exists for the most part in a post-media condition, while strong examples of new media art take some searching out. In addition, digital media are often incorporated into contemporary art practice in invisible ways. This is literally the case in South African artist Candice Breitz’s twin video installations Mother and Father. This work recasts well known Hollywood actors Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Steve Martin and Dustin Hoffman among others, their ‘cut-out’ portraits carefully strung together against a black background, constantly regurgitating carefully selected sentences from their movie appearances to form a narrative investigating the idea of motherhood and fatherhood.
Of course there were screens at every turn, some displaying impressive film-based narratives. These included a room of animated films by South African William Kentridge, a homage to Georges Méliès’ experiments, with the artist often drawing in reverse from within his jerky stop-motion and charcoal landscapes, and a very elaborate new black and white film by Stan Douglas, Inconsolable Memories, about a young black man in Cuba. In the Dutch pavilion, De Rijke/De Rooij presented a half-hour 16mm film, Mandarin Ducks, in the tradition of avant-garde cinema meets contemporary soap opera, laced with biting irony about the lives of the very rich.
There were many good works at the Biennale, needless to say. Of the many video installations—including new ones by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Mark Wallinger and others—the most sensual was surely Homo Sapiens Sapiens by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, projected onto the entire vaulted ceiling of the Baroque Church of San Stae on the Grand Canal. Limited numbers were allowed in, to recline on plump mattresses and be treated to close-up erotic, psychedelic visions of women, flowers and ripe fruit. Kitsch, pornographic and sublime all at once, its edenic imagery was certainly compelling in this context.
I have mentioned only a variety of single artworks that stood out. Some of these were included in the two major curated exhibitions of the Biennale, The Experience of Art, curated by María de Corral, and Always a Little Further, curated by fellow Spaniard Rosa Martinez. The better show, The Experience of Art was a more or less conventional survey of recent practice held in a museum-style space. Always a Little Further—at the Arsenale in a series of old warehouses once used to make rope for the Venetian shipping industry—ostensibly looked to the future, but felt retrograde. A lot was made of the fact that it’s the first time female curators have been at the helm, and also the fact that they chose artists from a broader geographical spectrum than usual (with an inevitable Latin bias). But overall, the show lacked structure and the work felt flat. It opened with a display of large spoof hoardings by the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous New York cooperative formed in 1985 to condemn the art world for the low numbers of women and artists of colour then exhibiting in galleries and museums. Their statistical reflections on the history of the Venice Biennale felt strained, the method now a little tired, even if it is still shocking to learn that this is the first time in a hundred years that the French pavilion has had a solo show by a female artist.
Unfortunately, much of the art chosen to politicise the Biennale was heavy-handed. Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos presented a work called The Bride made up of a chandelier, 5 meters high and over 2 meters in diameter, composed of thousands of tampons. Regina José Galindo was named best young artist for her gory film of a “hymen replacement” operation, and a film record of her ritually shaving and flagellating herself, dipping her feet in a bowl of blood and leaving footprints in the street to protest the violence against women in her native Guatemala. If these works made you feel queasy, or just sleepy, you could always lie down on a bed in a work called Swansong by The Centre of Attention and request the song you’d like to be played at your funeral—promptly downloaded from a massive online playlist.
Outside the main Arsenale-Giardini axis, the narrow streets of Venice become a treasure trove of ancient spaces temporarily transformed into national pavilions by newer exhibiting countries. After the worthy seriousness of Always a Little Further, the idiotic humour of Kuang-yu Tsui in the Taiwanese pavilion (The Spectre of Freedom) was refreshing. In a series of short video performance works, the artist is seen headbutting vans and cows, and trying to guess the objects being thrown against the back of his head. At the Turkish Pavilion, in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, Hussein Chalayan’s intriguing multiscreen video installation, The Absent Presence, features Tilda Swinton attempting to link genetic identity with clothing. These items are also displayed as the transformed sculptures they become in the narrative (Chalayan is best known as a fashion designer).
Four small, unrelated concluding points. First, many people—attested both by the long lines and the Golden Lion award for best national pavilion—liked the French Casino by Annette Messager, which achieves magical effects with billowing red silk. I was unmoved. Second, there was almost no photography at this year’s Venice Biennale, with the grand exception of Thomas Ruff’s pictorial pixels. Third, the national pavilions easiest to make fun of were the Romanian European Influenza, a literally empty space with the doors open to the ‘outside world’ (artist Daniel Knorr has been making “invisible” artworks since 2001), and the German, where actors dressed as museum guards simultaneously break into song: “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary” (after which you are supposed to want to talk to them about contemporary art!). After all of this, Andrea Blum’s assemblage of outdoor metal furniture, plant holders and drinking fountains in the café garden provided welcome relief.
2005 Venice Biennale, Venice, from June 12
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 54
© Daniel Palmer; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Siri Hayes, Lyric Theatre series
The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) recently reopened in a new building in George St, Fitzroy, with exhibitions ranging across photographic styles and visual and cultural agendas. The Centre’s 5 exhibition spaces unfold in a spiral from a small, central room to larger galleries, and there’s a window onto which projections are cast after dark for viewing by passers-by. The CCP has a seminar room, a shop selling new and second-hand books, and an image bank, and it offers public programs including lectures on the history of photography. Director Naomi Cass is concerned that the CCP should be a resource for artists as well as a showcase for contemporary work.
The second season in the new space includes solo exhibitions by Cherine Fahd and Siri Hayes, and the exhibition Black on White, a collection of works by Aboriginal artists. The central room is occupied by Simon Disler’s new work 1:1, including a series of photographs of blackberry plants, the scale, positioning and low lighting of which subtly create simultaneous feelings of sensuality and enclosure. His Hay Bale is a photograph of the side of a roll of hay, printed on a round, waist-high sheet of colourbond, questioning 2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional objects. And on a high shelf, a very small TV camera shows Disler’s Untitled, a DVD including a long shot of a tree, challenging the definition of the moving image.
Cherine Fahd’s The Chosen, shown in Germany in 2004, comprises 13 type C photographs that extend Fahd’s contemplation of the individual. Her photographs are of various people pictured against the same high stone wall. Placing of her subjects in this setting emphasises the similarities and differences between them: children, young and old adults, male and female, of various ethnic origins, in casual clothes or bathing suits, each in isolation from others. They appear to be standing under a water sprinkler—passers-by cooling off in summer heat. Their attention seems turned inward, as if in prayer and oblivious to the camera. These works recall ethnographic documentary, but the personality and preoccupations of each person emerge through expression, posture and attire. The ambiguity of the action and the evidence of a common humanness in this disparate group generate much appeal.
Siri Hayes’s new exhibition Lyric Theatre, a series of 10 large-scale photos of a creek setting in the suburbs, posits a kind of suburban sublime. As Phip Murray notes in her catalogue essay, the composition of these photographs references classical painting, Poussin for example. But Hayes’ photos are far from Arcadian scenes of classical heroism, and instead ironically reveal endemic environmental degradation. Merri Creek is polluted and choked with exotic plants. Intrusive suburban dwellings replace the classical ruins of decayed antiquity. Hayes’ images establish the viewer as unseen observer surveying nature’s grandeur and mystery as one might observe a theatre stage, but this play is a tragedy. Various individuals are visible in these scenes. In one, a woman in business clothes holding a clipboard looks back at the viewer, challenging our complacency. In another, the presence of a child recalls McCubbin’s Lost Child, but this loss is of a different order. The kind of epiphany experienced by the everyman in Caspar David Friedrich’s work is now unattainable.
Occupying the main gallery space is Black on White, where curators Maree Clarke and Megan Evans have assembled a disparate body of recent and past work by several Aboriginal artists that turns the lens back on white society. Gayle Maddigan’s photographs are documentaries of contemporary life—domestic habitation, the country fair, and two panoramic prints nearly 4 metres wide, one of a tram outside Swanston St Station and the other of children in an asphalt school ground. Journalist Mervyn Bishop’s work includes his 1975 image of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ceremonially handing back the soil of Dagu Ragu to Vincent Lingiari, an historic moment in the Land Rights movement. Also included is Bishop’s 1971 image of a nun carrying a sick Afghani child, an image of considerable resonance today, especially as it is displayed as originally published, in a newspaper front page. Brook Andrew shows several photographs of signs pinned to trees bearing texts such as “opinion as crime” and “select your invader”, questioning economic and cultural power in Australia. Lisa Bellear’s single work comprises dozens of photographs grouped like a collection of snaps Blu-tacked to the fridge, except these are larger scale laser prints and cover half a wall. They include prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people shown together at public occasions, and shots of Burke & Wills memorials and settlers’ graves, aggregating to a kind of family album of post-colonial history. Dianne Jones shows a series of colour portraits of subjects of mixed race, pondering the collapse of the black/white divide by emphasising her subjects’ individuality. And there is Christian Thompson’s video of a young man ceremonially dressing up in a fetish costume representing the fox, the cunning invader, and offering a complex metaphor for the origins of Australian art. In addition to mapping an alternative Australian cultural perspective, Black on White questions established constructions and sources of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identity, and invites the dissolution of that divide.
Finally, and most spectacularly, Annie Wilson’s 4-minute DVD Suspense is projected onto a tall, narrow, glass wall on the CCP’s George St frontage. Intended for viewing from without, it shows people apparently flying through the air, out of the building, evoking, she says, the feeling of falling that can occur in dreams. Coincidentally, Suspense seems emblematic of dramas depicted within.
A theme emerging from this absorbing CCP season is that of reconsideration: the reconsideration of social division; of the environment as distinct from the landscape; of the sublime in the 21st century; of the impact of documentary photography, undimmed by technical innovations in image manipulation; of the origins and nature of Australian art, culture and history; and of the power of the photograph generally. Naomi Cass suggests that the CCP had considered calling itself the “centre for the still image.” Though there are moving images on show, the CCP’s primary concern is with the still. However produced, the photograph remains central because of its ubiquity and dominance in our visual culture.
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, June 10-July 16
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 55
© Chris Reid; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Bill Viola, Silent Mountain 2001 Kira Perov
The prospect of sensual and emotional immersion in an exhibition of recent works by Bill Viola will have many planning pilgrimages to Canberra in the Spring. Memories of The Messenger, which appeared at various arts festivals here, should be enough to prompt these journeys. And it’s the first large scale exhibition of Viola’s works to come to Australia.
Viola’s slow motion imagery hovers dynamically between photography’s stillness and cinema’s fluidity, allowing for both intense contemplation and a sense of transformation. The colouration, framing and positioning of his subjects suggests a latterday Renaissance vision (sometimes inspired by works of the period) replete with religious overtones that never lock down suggested meanings.
The show is a touring exhibition of the J Paul Getty Trust. It includes the monumental The Five Angels of the Millenium (2001): 5 bodies on giant screens in a darkened room, moving through water, but impossible to tell if they are rising or falling, save for moments when the surface is strikingly broken. The other works in the show range from large works to intimate portraits.
In the meantime we can fantasize witnessing the Peter Sellars-Bill Viola collaboration on Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for this year’s Salzburg Festival: it gloriously graces the pages of many international art magazines. Or if you want to read about Viola, there’s an excellent interview, which includes an account of Viola’s dysgraphia (a condition which privileges images over words and which was passed on to his eldest son), in John Tusa’s The Janus Aspect, Artists in the 21st Century (Methuen, London, 2005).
Free Viola or $5 Viola
If you’re a tertiary student and you have your card with you, you could be one of the first 2000 students to gain free entry to the exhibition. Or you might prefer Viola by Night. For $5 you get the show, a film, a lecture and cocktails and refreshments are available. RT
Bill Viola: The Passions, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, July 29-Nov 6; www.nga.gov.au/Viola
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 56
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The artwork as thesis
A major transformation of postgraduate degrees in the arts has been taking place over the last decade. We’ve witnessed a growing number of artists, many of them entering mid-career, going back to university to do postgraduate degrees. But they’re degrees with a difference: Masters and Doctorates of Creative Arts. The major component in each is the creation of a work of art. As soon as we announced our theme we found ourselves in the midst of a debate about the viability of artworks as theses. The work is usually accompanied by a written thesis, but even so the issue worried at over and over is whether or not the artwork can do the same things as a thesis. Or should it have to? Can it be seriously explanatory? Can the creation of an artwork in itself represent genuine research?
Like the Creative Industries phenomenon, the creative postgraduate degree could be seen as adaptive in financially and ideologically challenging times. Universities search out new means of securing funds (from either fees or government subsidy) by targeting vocation if in very different ways. Similarly, artists often look to these degrees as part of their survival strategy as arts grants and contract teaching diminish and production costs increase. Without a doubt, the postgraduate creative degree represents another way to make work. There are advantages to be had from access to resources, expert advice and networks, and occasionally, teaching jobs.
However, as you’ll see from the interviews in this edition with dancers, musicians, theatre artists, filmmakers, new media artists, a visual artist and a novelist, their postgraduate creative degrees have meant much more than short-term opportunities. Most see the degree work as regenerative, an opportunity to deepen their work and their understanding of it, and to expand their thinking. We’ve also included a few artists who have chosen to write theses rather than make works.
There are considerable challenges to be experienced in the areas of supervision and assessment (see the articles by Helen Lancaster and Jo-Anne Duggan in particular). Richard Vella, himself a practising composer and academic, outlines the issues of supervision and how to address them. For more on the teaching and supervision of experienced artists (if outside a degree structure) see Richard Murphet’s report on his recent visit to DasArts in the Netherlands (p42).
University arts half-Nelsoned
As John Howard moves relentlessly into ‘big government’ mode on industrial relations, security, health and the environment, Education Minister Brendan Nelson leads the way for him on university education. The board of the Australian Research Council will be “retired” and replaced by one person reporting to the Minister. University unions will be banned from collecting compulsory fees from students. The negative impact on theatre in the universities has been widely argued, that on university galleries less so.
Nick Vickers, who provided the half-Nelson metaphor, writes that the Sir Hermann Black Gallery he directs for the Sydney University Union “has hosted exhibitions that have featured the works of over 700 artists within the 9 years of its existence. Some of these artists are well known but others have been represented at an early stage in their careers and that support has enabled them to find significant positions in Australia’s arts industry. Many student galleries will show the same statistics, many student union theatres will have the names of actors, directors and producers that have gained their first experiences on student stages. Similarly, most student newspapers and publications can boast a history of first steps for our country’s top journalists, editors and writers. The prizes and awards that are annually dispensed by student unions, the collections of the works of emerging artists that are, after all, the encouragement awards that, in many cases, have assisted in the confidence building that is required for survival in the arts industry in Australia.
“The introduction of VSU (voluntary student unionism) is not a political triumph, it is an artistic catastrophe. This has been tested and verified by the abolition of some student unions in Victoria and Western Australia whose experiences will be outlined in the submission to the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Legislation Committee for the Inquiry into the provisions of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front union Fees) Bill 2005” (“VSU and the Visual Arts”, press release, July 28, n.vickers@usu.usyd.edu.au). For more information about the Senate inquiry go to: www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/eet_ctte/highed_unionfees/index.htm
Protest now before the grip turns to a deadly full-Nelson!
–
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 3
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Angela Ndalianis
Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
MIT Press, Mass. and London, 2004
“Once upon a time there was a film called Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1992), and on its release, audiences went to the cinemas by the millions to be entertained by the magic that it had to offer.” This opening sentence of Angela Ndalianis’ Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment encapsulates both the book’s resolute emphasis on the popular and the sense of magic, wonder and virtuosity that she argues characterises contemporary ‘neo-baroque’ aesthetics. What makes the book more interesting than other postmodern celebrations of big-budget Hollywood, computer games and theme park rides is Ndalianis’ charting of the links between a significant strain of 20th and 21st century entertainment and the 17th century baroque. Asserting that the technical-aesthetic innovations of both eras give “voice to the association of art with pleasure, divertissement, and entertainment”, she also argues that the contemporary neo-baroque is more challenging and complex than the largely religious connotations of 17th century baroque forms due to the heterogeneity and ambiguity of metaphysical allusion in a secular age. “The unity of the neo-baroque embraces a more daunting task than that of the baroque,” she writes, “asking its audience to discover order from multiple and often contradictory paths.”
In sustaining this cross-century framework, extensive research into and critical reflection upon the respective eras is utilised in presenting the neo-baroque as a logical continuation of the 17th century baroque challenge to an “Aristotelian-Ptolemaic-Christian universe.” Crucially however, Ndalianis argues that an expanded kind of classical order can emerge from the apparent chaos of the baroque—an order heavily reliant upon audience media literacy, without which “chaos reigns supreme…[T]he classical can emerge only when the audience is capable of deciphering the system.” In a familiar move, Ndalianis goes on to differentiate between 2 hermeneutic levels, common to both the 17th and 20/21st century contexts: a broad accessibility by way of the text/artwork’s impact as spectacle, and a more complex intertextual address made up of “iconographic conceits” and metaphors for more “discerning” readers.
As with the baroque’s appeal to religious and mystical suggestion by means of revolutionary formal innovation, Ndalianis highlights how contemporary cutting-edge technical virtuosity is also “strange enough and so radically new as to evoke not only curiosity and wonder, but an aura of the mystical.” This wonder easily becomes “a ‘spiritual presence’…affected by scientifically and technologically creative illusions. Hence the new age element in many contemporary baroque films.” A crucial distinction is set up through the idea that rather than forging signifiers that point to a meta-zone, neo-baroque form is highly reflexive in carrying out its primary role of enabling an immanent wonder: mysticism is generated within the technical virtuosity on display. As Ndalianis suggests while discussing the conclusion to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): “it is both the spectacle and technical mastery as performance that produce the state of affect…[T]he neo-baroque seeks to make the concreter (the technological) unrepresentable by imbuing it with a spiritual quality.”
The book asserts that this spiritually suggestive, high-technology form is brought to life with “the active engagement of audience members, who are invited to participate in a self-reflexive game involving the work’s artifice.” Ndalianis argues this active spectatorship is enabled by the baroque’s “open structures”, which favour an intertextual relationship between a film, its sequel, computer game, comic, theme parks ride, etc. This argument reaches its apogee with the contention that the modern-day ‘high concept’ blockbuster, initiated with Star Wars (George Lucas 1977), has meant “the conception of the passive viewer collapses…The audience’s perception of and active engagement with the image orders the illusion.”
Irrespective of how convincing one finds this argument vis à vis the kinds of spectatorship these films possibly engender, such an assertion also implicitly disavows previous eras of film and criticism centrally emphasising the ‘active viewer’, notably various film modernisms. While Ndalianis does mention that the baroque has been often associated with modernism (citing the Latin American writers of the 1960s and 70s), neither modernist cinema’s emphasis on active spectatorship nor its diverse baroque excursions—Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, Raul Ruiz being well-known exemplars—are engaged with, beyond a lone citing of Ruiz.
Simultaneous with the suggestion that contemporary Hollywood increases the activity of the spectator, we have the familiar assertion that contemporary virtual forms brought about by digital technology inherently connote fecund interactivity. What remains unaddressed is the question of what kinds of thought, interaction or creativity such activity encourages or entails. This point relates closely to the book’s disavowal of political analysis or critique. Ndalianis highlights well the connection between 17th century baroque artists being commissioned by powerful (mainly religious) figures of the day and contemporary baroque practitioners requiring the financial backing of today’s high priests in the form of large corporations, taking care to state that such reliance cannot be without an ideological component. But beyond acknowledging that such a dimension exists, the book never elucidates how this political economy and its related ideology play out. Nor is the possible nature of this ideology discussed.
By the end of the book, the author’s self-conscious attraction to the baroque seductions she details may actually provide for a (perhaps inadvertent) critique, such is the bold clarity of the concluding remarks. Ndalianis uses openly ontological terms when she says the advanced technologies of the neo-baroque “can reaffirm our connection with the basics of our being: our ability to scream hysterically, to feel intense joy and exhilaration…[W]e recompose the multi-media components and they, in turn, recompose us by reconfirming our ability to feel intensely.” Her investment in the value of technological advancement as a means to endless progress in feeding neo-baroque forms and our evolving humanity is summarised in the book’s final sentiment: “Where these journeys will take us, one can only guess…[O]ne thing is certain: I will definitely go along for the ride.”
The absence of critique that characterises the book is partially explained by Ndalianis’ illuminating early assertions vis à vis postmodernity and its theoretical reflections. She states that “postmodern debates do not constitute the primary concern of this book”, distancing herself in particular from the highly critical early reflections of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Yet her book repeats the now much more familiar—and much more celebratory—postmodern tendency to affirm the intertextual nuances of contemporary popular culture that, as Ndaliandis understandably suggests, critical theory historically viewed as “the product of an era steeped in sterile repetition and unoriginality.” In this way, the book seeks to (re)valorise not so much the baroque per se but its distinctly popular outcomes. The value and originality of Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment lies in its trans-century analysis, featuring an effective mix of sophisticated big-picture commentary and detailed intertextural analysis of specific artworks. However, to imply it is unusual or brave to celebrate and closely analyse the formal, conceptual and spectatorial centres of image-dense popular culture in the wake of 2 decades of postmodern criticism and theory is surely by now untenable; rather than subversive exceptions, such discourses and studies constitute the prevailing orthodoxy.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 20
© Hamish Ford; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Jo-Anne Duggan, Impossible Gaze #15 2002
Having recently encountered the amorphous nature of a creative doctorate (graduating in 2004) I look back on the experience as enlightening—even with its trials and tribulations—in more ways than I anticipated. My Doctor of Creative Arts project, Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance, investigated the nature of engagement in museums. More specifically, it examined the experience of Italian museums and the multitude of histories—the art’s, the museums’ and the viewers’—that collide in the context of viewing Renaissance art. The nature of my thesis demanded a multi-disciplinary approach that spanned visual art, art history and theory, museology, historiography and cultural tourism, as well as combining both academic research and image-making, which resulted in 2 major exhibitions shown here and in Italy. I worked with both the visual and the textual to most appropriately and effectively express my concerns regarding museum viewing. In a peculiar act of doubling, I was making art about the experience of viewing it.
Motives
A key point in the discussion on creative doctorates is the question of why an artist would undertake one. That this question looms so large puzzles me. Is it so perverse for an artist to want to grapple with academic rigour? Greater employment prospects are often cited as a driving force, but it would be delusional to think a doctoral degree would guarantee employment in the arts and humanities faculties of universities today. Given the number of applicants competing for an ever-diminishing pool of teaching positions one shouldn’t undertake this gargantuan battle for immediate job security. On a more mercenary level, further academic studies can be a major consideration in terms of funding opportunities. Artists wanting to launch substantial, long-term projects often need to rely on the support of either the arts or academic sectors. The art-based project that I had been working on prior to my DCA tended to slip between too academic and not academic enough as far as funding bodies were concerned. I believed that pursuing higher degree research would provide me with a resolution for this dilemma.
Of far greater significance, the DCA was an opportunity to be involved in research that took me outside of my own professional sphere and academic discipline. Having been a photomedia practitioner for more than 20 years and sustaining a long association with the arts through photomedia departments in art faculties and varying professional positions, I commenced studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), not necessarily as a path of re-invention but to expand the knowledge base from which my art could draw. I wanted to explore the concerns and theories that guide other disciplines and to engage with people outside of my existing circle. Fortunately to this end, my work in Italian museums has been enriched by all manner of scholars, curators, historians, museologists, conservators, art handlers, guides and guards as they expressed their views on topics as diverse as politics and dust.
I applied to do a DCA because I hoped that more profound historical and contemporary cultural studies would further develop my ideas and understanding of museums and their visitors, and that my art would evolve accordingly. I also wanted to better articulate, especially through writing, my concerns as an artist. On a professional level, undertaking a doctorate with the backing of a university leant an air of legitimacy to my project (and a degree of accountability) when negotiating with bureaucracies, especially in Italy. It gained me privileges and access to photograph and research in often restricted areas of museums.
Between word & image
A DCA does present its own particular set of challenges (and I stress here that each project and its creative medium carries its own idiosyncratic load). The difficulties that I encountered, though personal, are I believe not unique. Maintaining fluidity between writing and image-making was a constant battle, while the problem of designing an exacting structure on which to hang both creative and theoretical components was the toughest nut to crack. With no models of methodology or guidelines, and during my time too few relevant examples, it was difficult defining the parameters of the project or even understanding what form it could possibly take.
Eventually, with intuitive and astute supervision, I embraced the less conventional structure of a DCA. This liberated me to shift positions alternately between viewer, artist and scholar in order to raise the questions and concerns relevant to contemporary museum viewing. This mode of writing with different voices provided an essential conduit between photographing and theoretical reflection. By combining the practices of writing and image-making I was able to both explore more profoundly and comment more decisively on Italian Renaissance museums and the ideas that surround the act of viewing. The visual component enabled me to focus my concerns and more lucidly follow lines of enquiry that had previously left me tongue-tied. My photographs, clawing at the essence of the museum experience, enabled me to depict the underpinning philosophical issues in a rich and explicit way. They stimulated and inspired the theoretical, historical and cultural reflections in the thesis and contributed a sensorial experience to the intellectual one, enabling the viewer/reader to sense the issues as well as read them.
As an artist, I was painfully aware that I had little grounding in the language and arguments of the numerous disciplines that I was investigating. To acquire a critical overview of the relevant debates I needed to wade through vast amounts of existing scholarship, all the while recognising that it would be impossible within the time constraint of the degree to become expert in each field. As someone working ‘outside’ these disciplines I acknowledge that I only briefly addressed the magnitude of studies that surface in the artwork that I created for this project. While the minutiae of dates and facts are rarely evident in my images, the knowledge of exchanges, influences, changes and developments that have occurred, do contribute to the cognitive construction and intentions of my exhibition themes and image content. The broad fields that I traversed allowed me to see my own work within the context of other artists and scholars and to better understand the scope and positioning of their work. At the same time—although self-reflection is not necessarily relevant to doctoral research—the process enabled me to thoroughly analyse the drive behind my own art-making.
Evaluation
When it comes to assessment a number of issues arise. With no concrete models of what a theorised practice should look like—for either the candidate or the examiner—analysis and assessment of the process and outcomes proves somewhat elusive. While image-making is a natural process for artists to express ideas that flow from research, the open-endedness of images makes the nature of the knowledge they produce difficult to qualify. Furthermore, exhibition work (or other forms of creative output) can prove problematic, as examiners, for reasons of distance or timing, don’t always see the outcomes. Other than providing documentation of the artworks, examiners have no tangible evidence of what was achieved. The scale, context and physical presence that an exhibition produces are lost and under these circumstances the thesis is assessed not only independently but also often without a comprehensive understanding of what the artwork has contributed. In this case, the manner in which the thesis needs to be read must be fully addressed for examiners, especially when artists write across several disciplines (in my case, later identified as art criticism, history and philosophy). James Elkins points out that examiners need to know the “theory of reading that should guide [their] participation” as readers from different disciplines “will not have access to the whole project.” (The issue of ‘reading’ a thesis is discussed by James Elkins both in my doctoral examination report and Printed Project, James Elkins ed, Sculptor’s Society of Ireland, UK, issue 04, April 2005.)
Paradoxes
Daily doctoral life is fraught with the curly issues of isolation, limited resources and appropriate supervision, all of which seem unfathomable at the time. I can only in retrospect confess my delight in the process and the challenges that it presented. I had the privilege and pleasure of engaging with the ideas and critical thinking of numerous and varied specialists and scholars, an invaluable experience that ultimately nourished my work (and my soul). At the same time, I learnt to better craft both my research and writing and further develop the indispensable skills of project management and administration that were necessary to undertake this colossal task.
Beyond a great deal of personal satisfaction however, the long term outcomes and benefits of this degree remain undecided. I am yet to be convinced, even with the current push for multi-disciplinarity, that creativity is readily and widely accepted as a valid form of research—regardless of how liberal universities may proclaim to be, they themselves are unclear in relation to the government and funding about how to ‘count’ and think about creative research. In many respects, having an exhibition practice instead of the traditional form of publication, I am confronted with the same quandary I began with—is it considered academic enough?
Having been through the doctoral mill, I would suggest there is a need to continue the search for greater clarity of expectations and requirements, despite the murky situation of creative research in the Australian academic context, so that both candidates and their supervisors can confidently work within a formally recognised framework. This is a paradox indeed given the very nature and contribution of a creative higher degree is in fact its originality and individuality. I would also suggest that with too few places in academia to accommodate an increasing number of creative doctoral graduates, one lives in hope that other types of cultural institutions and knowledge-based organisations will embrace the diversity and innovation that artists can offer. I for one look forward to grander and more challenging projects and fruitful cultural and scholarly collaborations.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 4,
© Jo-Anne Duggan; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Melissa Carey, autumn_04
A university is characterised by its research centres, a conservatorium by its master musicians. With research high on the agenda, this parallel could provide unity but instead seems lost in an argument over paperwork. At a meeting of the National Association of Tertiary Music Schools in 2003, the head of one Australian music institution is reported to have said, “I hate the word ‘research.’ What you’re doing and what I’m doing is research—why do we have to write it down?” (Diana Davis, “A working model for postgraduate practice based research across the creative arts”, Doctoral Education in Design, 2003).
The question highlights a fundamental issue of the debate which positions academics and musicians in different corners. The traditional PhD ‘thesis’ (meaning the total submission) makes a contribution to knowledge or presents substantial new insights into a field of learning. It asks questions and proposes answers by testing theory or hypotheses. The process and outcomes should be replicable and documented, usually in a substantial, written dissertation. On one hand is the argument that creative work can neither meet these expectations nor contribute to knowledge, on the other is the contention that it extends the field.
According to Peter McCallum, formerly of the Sydney Conservatorium, “The arts are concerned with creating things which are valued for their aesthetic or expressive qualities. I find it more useful to say that artists create aesthetic objects rather than to say that they create knowledge.” But the knowledge argument runs the risk of narrowing the scope of the word. Knowledge need not rely on written fact—new knowledge may emerge through interpretation (Adrian Vickers, Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Creative Arts, 2004). To confine knowledge to “acquaintance with facts” is to ignore it as “practical understanding of an art” (Oxford Dictionary). Aesthetic knowledge may be non-verbal: “while some of music’s aesthetic information can be described in words, a considerable part remains untranslatable” (Reiner and Fox, “The Research Status of Music Composition in Australia”, AJME 1, 2003).
Dennis Strand’s report Research into the Creative Arts (DETYA,1998) lists 3 approaches to creative research: the conservative, traditional approach (research about), the pragmatic midway mix of creative and written work (research in), and the liberal approach supporting creative practice as research. The distinction between the last 2 is crucial. In the third, creative work has the status of a thesis, its contribution to knowledge conveyed through the work itself. Although some Australian music institutions choose the DMA as a safe alternative to this format, there are cases emerging in PhD programs. This article offers a few such examples.
There is no confusion about musicological research, or research about music. It leads to scholarly work, historical, theoretical or critical, and is written down. Research in music practice is also acceptable because outcomes contribute to music or develop something new—and there is accompanying text. Some universities have offered this mix for so long that they no longer place it on the “creative” list. In this form, the thesis comprises a portfolio of scores with a written component—superficially a similar format to that in which creative work is the thesis. The thesis doesn’t need to be dualist. Richard Vella’s assessment is that the issue is not so much about the ratio of creative and written components, but rather how best to communicate the research inquiry: “Is it in the work and understood through the experience of the work or must it be explained in some textual commentary on the work?”
Research occurring through music practice may look the same but here the outcome is artistic. PhD candidate Eve Klein (Macquarie University) explains the distinction: “creative works need to operate as a practice or understanding of how the work reconfigures and pushes the artform. The complexity is making this visible beyond simply producing a new ‘original’ artistic work.” Defining the difference between a composition or performance as an artistic event and one which is the outcome of research confounds academics and provides an easy escape for those who allocate funding. Amongst struggling music institutions, money is the motivating force driving their determination to have creative practice recognised as research.
As composition takes on less predictable forms (not all on the page), some institutions exercise more caution than others. Having inherited a composition-based PhD from the University of Sydney’s Music Department, Sydney Conservatorium has extended it to electronic music composition where original software might form part of the outcome. However, as Peter McCallum explains, “in the Con’s case (the software) could never be the sole thesis. That would be a matter for computer science.” Perhaps there’s another argument—that in a cross-disciplinary world, software extends the field and might therefore be considered research in music practice?
Melissa Carey
Southern Cross University takes a more liberal approach. The abstract from Melissa Carey’s research, “Graphic Notations: Visual Representations of Music and Aural Representation of Image”, acknowledges that “our concept of what constitutes ‘music’ has changed”. To prove her point the thesis will be an installation with wall-hung images, artists’ scorebooks and an accompanying audio CD. Carey’s new notational technique (Intermedia Frottage) uses image-sound conversion software to translate image into sound. In this process “the image takes on the role of a graphic score that can be ‘read’ in relation to the sound composition as well as providing an initial map for its creation”. Carey explores the sounds which result from different readings of image, demonstrated in autumn_04. Constructed from a single leaf image using the principle of theme and variations, “each object layer in the image was saved, and subsequently ‘sounded’, individually. The resulting sound files were then reconstructed to create sound composition, in…the way we might ‘read’ the image as a collection of discrete objects, rather than simply scanning from left to right.”
Matt Robison
A description of Matt Robison’s thesis (also at SCU) as a creative folio of 14 original compositions presented on an audio CD with a written component presented in electronic form on CD-ROM neglects the fascinating evolutionary journey his work has taken. A successful musician whose work has been played on television and on the ABC’s Triple J network, Robison claims that research informs and inspires his creative work, and believes his creative and commercial success is “intimately linked” to research practice. His thesis has been acknowledged by examiner Professor Derek Scott (University of Salford, UK) as a model for this kind of doctorate.
Robison’s example typifies the argument for composer and performer that creative work is informed by a unique mix of experiences. The composer framing new work and the musician preparing performance each embarks on a journey comprising research of various kinds, some more obvious than others. Huib Schippers (Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre) describes performance as “the end-result of complex physiological, technical, conceptual, aesthetic and social processes” (The Marriage of Art and Academia, 2003). Reproducing such a journey borders on the impossible, making it difficult to convince academia of its place in the research funding stakes.
Postgrad boom
Australia’s record of philanthropic support is poor, but Sydney Conservatorium’s recent windfall of a $16 million bequest from pastoralist George William Henderson will fuel plans for a new PhD in performance commencing in 2006. According to the Conservatorium’s Dean, Professor Kim Walker, the bequest will support top scholars and performers in “a unique program involving performance, composition and research.” The Elder School of Music at the University of Adelaide has already introduced a PhD by examination in performance which, according to Charles Bodman Rae, is the first of its kind in Australia. All current Elder candidates have secured Australian Postgraduate Awards, so their research is valued where it counts. The work of one, Leigh Harrold, has also attracted ABC-FM to record his performances of American composer Robert Muczynski’s piano music and assess them for commercial release. Also at Elder, jazz pianist Chris Martin is investigating unexplored potential for incorporating 12-tone vocabulary into jazz. Through performance, Martin’s thesis documents “a personal improvisational vocabulary and style that reflects the incorporation of a highly structured approach to dissonance” within the jazz tradition.
Grant Collins
A successful professional drummer and composer, Grant Collins (QUT), combines composition and performance to review the boundaries of the large modern drumset as a medium for contemporary solo performance. Investigating compositions which employ all 4 limbs, Collins will “develop and introduce new techniques to establish advanced levels of co-ordination, independence and motion not previously achieved on a standard drum set.” His thesis combines the development of new playing techniques, live performances and recordings, and new compositions to develop repertoire for training the techniques he is exploring.
If research is expected to demonstrate relevance to the performance and composition of music, Collins is well on the way to achieving this. Ensuring that the results are rigorous and objective is the responsibility of the framework QUT provides for the creative PhD. As supervisor, Richard Vella claims “understanding the idiosyncracies of the candidate’s work is the first step” in the process leading to interpreting or contextualizing creative work as research. He explains that “the relationship between the artist’s creative work and the external world can be done through analogy, parody or some other rhetorical positioning. It can be discursive, analytical or sensory. As long as this relationship is expressed, the candidate’s outcomes or findings can be experiential, explanatory or both. It is the expression of this relationship that makes the work research within the current university context” (“Practice based Research”, 2005).
Eve Klein
Creative work is challenged by academic expectations of adequate and accurate measurement systems to test the research. Like Collins, Eve Klein (Macquarie University) plans to create new work as a way of developing and testing new techniques. In Klein’s case, it is an investigation into how electronic music alters and reconfigures philosophical discussions of operatic vocality. An excellent example of pioneering spirit among creative PhD candidates, Klein has carefully documented all aspects of her creative work, noting an “onerous sense of needing to ‘justify’ the creative component rigorously.” Further, Klein has also undertaken extensive vocal training to enable her to perform vocally to professional operatic standard, a time-consuming commitment.
* * * * *
If institutions are characterised by their research, the new breed of music researchers points to a different style of music institution for the future, one which understands and supports practice as research—regardless of the paperwork. Hopefully, universities will get the (non-textual) message.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 6
© Helen Lancaster; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Yuji Sone, Rosalind Crisp
photo Heidrun Löhr
Yuji Sone, Rosalind Crisp
Deploying Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of irreducible otherness (alterity), my thesis examined hidden assumptions about cultural otherness in performance. Generally, understandings of it are based on recognisability and ultimately difference through representation. Alterity, however, cannot be accounted for in these terms and remains excessive to representation. In the practical component of the research, I explored artistic strategies and ways in which these concerns could be expressed in performance.
I like art works that make me think. Similarly, to make art is to think. In other words, I am interested in the process of making art which provides me with material on which I can speculate. This attitude toward art making is different from those of ‘product-centred’ and ‘market-driven’ art practices. The awarding of the doctoral degree has encouraged me to develop my particular manner of ‘art practice’ as academic research, and enabled me to continue consideration of methodological questions through my current postdoctoral research at UNSW.
Art versus theory
As a new form of degree, practice-based doctoral courses in Australia have not yet earned academic legitimacy, largely due to the ambiguity of their nature and purpose. I still feel I am sometimes seen as ‘suspect’ by both theorists and artists when I tell them that I hold a practice-based doctorate. They sometimes see me as not quite theorist, not quite artist. I don’t mind this in-between position, because it has been very productive for my work, but ‘practitioner-researcher’ doesn’t seem to fit easily into the disciplinary structure at art and academic institutions.
There has been a similar sentiment expressed, in regard to the ambiguous status of practice-based doctoral degrees, by academics in the UK (Robin Nelson,and Stuart Andrews, “Practice as Research: Regulations, Protocols and Guidelines’, PALATINE, www.lancs.ac.uk/palatine/dev-awards/par-report.htm, 2003).
I’ve found that the implicit division between theory and practice is problematic. Elizabeth Grosz pointed out in the late 1980s that art and theory see themselves as antagonists: “both art and theory aggrandise the capacity each sees in itself and thus construes its counterpart” (“Every Picture Tells a Story: Art and Theory Re-examined” in Gary Sangster, curator, Sighting References: ciphers, systems and codes in recent Australian visual art, Artspace, Surry Hills, NSW, 1987). According to Grosz, the practices should not be seen as “doubles (and thus also as opposites)” but as “twins” who share similarities, but differences as well. In fact, Grosz argues for a complementary relationship between theory and practice where ‘theory is one among many inspirational sources for art, and art, one of the critical vantage points from which theory can be assessed.”
I would also argue that the interaction between theory and art practice as research can yield new creative entities, the engendering and analysis of which can be employed legitimately as an academic research methodology.
This issue of the theory/practice divide was discussed at the RIP (Research Into Practice) Conference in 2004 at University of Hertfordshire, in the UK, which focused on the role of artefact in art and design research.
Peer review
The PARIP 2005 Conference, in partnership with University of Leeds, was the final public event of a 5-year research project under the directorship of Baz Kershaw of the University of Bristol. The project was designed to examine issues relating to practice as research in the performance media of theatre, dance, film, video, and television. Peer review was PARIP 2005’s particular focus.
The conference aimed to discuss methods and criteria for “the robust evaluation of performance as research by communities of practitioners-researchers” (conference program). It scheduled peer review sessions alongside panel and plenary sessions. In actuality, the conference made us aware that more studies and discussion on methodologies of peer review need to be done before implementing it on artworks.
Although PARIP 2005 brought together a broad field of practices across theatre, dance, performance art, film, television and new media, some common themes were not necessarily specific to a single, established art medium. I found particularly interesting topics such as “sound/space interface”, “body/space interface” and “PaR (practice as research) and New Technologies”, which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and suggest new ways of discussing art projects.
The way forward
As universities respond to the ‘knowledge economy’, research culture in the creative arts has ‘forced’ a recognition of practice as an important vehicle for investigative work. “Increasingly there is perceived to be a need and a market for specific forms of doctoral research provision for advanced-level professional practitioners [in the creative arts]” (Bill Green and Adrian Kiernander, “Doctoral Education, Professional Practice and the Creative Arts: Research and Scholarship in a New Key?”, in Bill Green, TW Maxwell and Peter Shanahan eds, Doctoral Education and Professional Practice: The Next Generation?, Kardoorair Press, Armidale, NSW, 2001). Consequently, a growing number of Australian universities allow doctoral degrees to incorporate creative art works, such as visual art exhibition or music composition, as non-text-based research outcomes.
There are, however, noticeable differences between schools and faculties over the nature, course of study, thesis format and examination procedure of the practice-based doctoral research courses offered in Australian universities. The lack of agreement between universities on an appropriate assessment process complicates the acceptance of practice-based doctoral degrees as a legitimate mode of academic research. There is also no agreement on the question regarding the theory/practice divide, which goes to the heart of what we mean by research and the question of what language is appropriate to communicate and understand these academic research findings.
Until these issues are resolved, the question of how research outcomes can be discussed and disseminated more widely cannot be addressed.
Dr Yuji Sone is a performance practitioner-researcher and postdoctoral research fellow at The School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales. His current research focuses on notions of intermediation in relation to media/technology-based performance, in addition to investigating methodological issues related to creative performance research. As part of his research project, Yuji is organising e-Performance and Plug-ins: A Mediatised Performance Conference at UNSW for late 2005.
This is an edited version of an email interview. KG
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 8
© Yuji Sone; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Simon Ellis, Lost Something
photo Heidi Romano
Simon Ellis, Lost Something
The last decade has seen the rise of the creative postgraduate degree in dance and with it, an institutional interest in the notion of dance practice as academic research, especially in Melbourne and Brisbane. This is no surprise given the number of dance artists in academic positions in Melbourne universities (Dr Elizabeth Dempster, Jude Walton, Helen Herbertson, Dr Mark Minchinton) and the fact that Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is home to Australia’s first PhD graduate in dance studies, Associate Professor Cheryl Stock. Stock is an enthusiastic advocate, stating that “the most important thing about Creative Practice as Research is that it validates the work itself as a research outcome and privileges the artist’s voice which has been marginalised or even silenced for far too long in arts research.”
If professional dancers and choreographers find it hard to achieve a sustainable practice in Australia, those at the interface with broader contemporary theoretical concerns are naturally turning to tertiary institutions. Some Australian universities offer support and stimulation for dance practitioners who may not find these things in their immediate community. Many are also teaching in the institutions in which they are enrolled.
Gavin Webber
A case in point is Gavin Webber, the new Artistic Director Of Dance North in Brisbane. Webber has just begun a Masters by Research this year at QUT with Stock as supervisor. Webber’s research focuses on his dance theatre practice and discovering and intellectualising his own research methodology—a “conundrum” that he is working through. As part of his process involves serendipity, improvisation and accidental discovery, he is considering how these kinds of practices fit into the structure of a Masters. Webber had some reservations about becoming “too much of a researcher in that you may lose some of your creative capabilities as you begin to think too much about how you work.” He cites David Lynch as an artist who doesn’t like talking about his work because he believes this “limits the audience’s ability to dream”, yet at the same time Lynch does talk very poetically about his films. This second conundrum has become another part of Webber’s thesis.
Webber chose postgraduate research after arriving back in Australia from working in Europe with companies such as Wim Vandekeybus’ Ultima Vez. This hugely successful Belgian dance company has little profile here so Webber found it difficult to find support as an artist until he met Stock who drew him into QUT as a teacher. Webber believes that Australian universities provide a lot of support for innovative contemporary dance in this country and that “QUT is very forward-thinking in terms of its postgraduate courses and the role for artists there.”
Stock explains that this direction at QUT really took off in 2001 when Creative Industries was formed as a faculty within QUT and, with it, a new research centre, Creative Industries Research and Application Centre (CIRAC). Stock states that “CIRAC now has around 200 RHDs (Research Higher Degrees—Masters and PhDs) of which half are undertaking Creative Practice as Research across many disciplines, including dance of course.” At a recent conference covering many of the issues surrounding creative practice as research (Speculation and Innovation Conference, QUT, March 2005) dance artists Hellen Sky, Shaaron Boughen, Chrissie Parrott and Simon Ellis gave performative presentations in keeping with the theme of the conference.
Simon Ellis
Ellis enrolled in 2000 at the Victorian College of the Arts’ School of Dance under the supervision of Dr Don Asker and is the school’s first PhD candidate, submitting in May this year. Others have followed: Neil Adams and Siobhan Murphy are both currently enrolled as DCA candidates. Ellis’ area of research was creation and performance beyond ‘live’ processes and the relation to the workings of memory. He draws on Bergsonian theories of memory, Philip Auslander’s performance theory and the theoretical work of Elizabeth Grosz. He also approached questions of epistemology itself—a recurring theme for the artist-scholars interviews—and submitted his thesis as an interactive DVD-ROM which included his written component and video footage. Ellis chose the school because he wanted to “start the project from a ‘dance perspective’…as opposed to commencing from, say, a sociological or psychological framework and then ‘squeezing’ that into a dance perspective.”
For Ellis, a full-time PhD while on an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) scholarship meant being able to “devote my time to developing and rethinking my professional practice…For the first time I was able to just do practice-led research unencumbered by bread and butter jobs.” Despite the criteria that creative PhD students should have a substantial body of practice behind them, Ellis said he began his PhD while his practice was still at a “nascent” stage and that this has ultimately got him off to a better start. It has enabled him to think outside the limitations (and disappointments) of funding rounds and categories with their emphasis on ‘tourable’ work, which has in turn impacted on his practice. Current projects seeded during his PhD research include a series of animations based on Melbourne dancers, the dad.project (www.skellis.net/dad.project) and a larger scale project involving collaborative partnerships, Inert (www.skellis.net/Inert).
Julie-Anne Long
Julie-Anne Long was also motivated to take on a PhD by some fairly practical realities. Having finished an MA Honours by research she decided she needed to get a “proper job” due to the lack of funding for dance in NSW, but every academic job that came up had a PhD prerequisite. She also chose to do a PhD without a creative component as she has perceived a degree of academic snobbery in Sydney that values the former over the latter, an attitude that has been overcome in other Australian states and some other countries. And like Ellis, she could not have gone ahead without an APA scholarship.
Long is the only practising dance artist currently enrolled as a postgraduate student in a dance department in NSW. (This is indicative of the broader crisis in tertiary dance studies in the state.) She is completing her thesis in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and chose that institution because she knew other postgraduate students working with dance theory there. The thesis has an autobiographical slant and the working title is Walking in Sydney: Looking for Dancing. Long maps the city at our own historical point via the spaces and places where dancing occurs, while remembering the sites where people used to work. She says that the main reason for beginning this project “was that there is so little written about the independent dance scene in Sydney. I was wanting to present an alternative history of dancing in Sydney, and reflect on the puzzle of non-recognition.” Long continues with her solo dance practice outside of her academic research and is happy to do so in an academic climate she sees as placing so little value on the artist.
Tracie Mitchell
While Long’s research works around and just touches on her own history as an artist, Tracie Mitchell’s DCA is providing an opportunity to take stock of her current dancefilm practice in relation to the recent history of international dance screen work. Like Ellis, she feels that the degree is in its infancy and that “we are making up the rules as we go along.” She enrolled in the School of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance at Victorian University (VU) in 2005. Her supervisors are Mark Minchinton and Jude Walton. Mitchell chose the school as she “found this one was most rigorous about the theory of art practice, particularly contemporary arts practice.” Other postgraduate dance artists currently enrolled at VU include Josie Daw, Alice Cummins, Gretel Taylor and Holly Cooper. Graduates include Trevor Patrick, Helen Herbertson and Russell Dumas.
Mitchell returned from overseas at the end of an Australia Council Fellowship and, like Webber, was looking for a supportive environment in which she could focus on making work. An APA recipient, Mitchell feels she has been given “a fantastic gift” that will allow her to do just that. The impact of her studies on her long-term career is not as important to her as the immediate “investment in making deep and thoughtful work”.
Claudia Alessi
On the subject of longer term benefits of postgraduate study, Claudia Alessi believes the postgraduate work that artists produce is a valuable addition to the resources available for tertiary studies in the performing arts. Alessi is enrolled as a masters candidate at WAAPA in the School of Dramatic Arts’ Dance faculty. Her research is based around a series of solos, Point of Entry, and the effect of integrating physical and visual art forms (aerial work, physical theatre, puppetry, martial arts, video) with ‘pure dance.’
Alessi turned to solo practice due to “the current economic climate and the lack of funding that is allocated to dance—in particular contemporary dance within WA.” The masters offered her the opportunity to seek out and investigate “like-minded dance practitioners” and provided her with a challenging creative project which she would not have been able to do without an extended period of research.
* * * * *
This survey of dance artists and the kinds of creative research they are generating in dance departments across our universities represents only the tip of the iceberg. Some of the other choreographers currently enrolled in various postgraduate degrees include Paul O’Sullivan, Csaba Buday, Jennifer Proctor, Shaaron Boughen and Karen Pearlman. Postgraduate research is providing our dance artists with an alternative source of funding, resources, employment, sense of community and creative stimulus at a time when many of these are in short supply.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 10
© Erin Brannigan; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Deborah Leiser-Moore, Here and There—Then and Now
Theatre practitioners are undertaking postgraduate study in universities round the country. Creative doctorates, Master’s degrees and PhD work by research and practice appear to be choices many artists are making after some years in the industry. A range of reasons came up when I spoke to those engaged in postgraduate research, but all spoke of the riches of having the time to go deeper into theory behind their practice, and of the access to the resources of a university.
Vanessa Pigrum
Director and performance maker Vanessa Pigrum is mid-way through an MA in Animateuring at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). After some years as Artistic Director of the Melbourne Fringe, event management, teaching in the tertiary sector and following the birth of her daughter, she decided to pursue an MA part-time and “juggle it” with her other projects. The MA has allowed her to pursue “an eccentric interest”, examining how structural models from music and the visual arts can be adapted for the process of making theatre. “After working in the field for over a decade I started to feel I was able to apply skills I had built up into a range of activities. You find yourself slipping into being a gun for hire, applying the skills you have to what’s in front of you. There were very few pet projects. The practical concerns override your inner creative drive. I was saddened by the lack of space for applying myself to projects—to be able to follow them through.” Pigrum also values the support of her supervisor. “It has been very encouraging to know that my mentor is (almost) as involved in my research as I am and will push me to be more thorough, more daring, more circumspect.”
Anna Tregloan
Anna Tregloan is a set and costume designer also completing an MA in Animateuring at VCA. “A lot of what I do is show-oriented and has a quick turn around. It has been good to take time with the MA.” She explains that she has been “working practically in aesthetics for a long time but hadn’t had a chance to do academic and philosophical research.” The structure of working within academic parameters freed her to explore the link between her practice and the principles underlying her work. “As much as you’d like to take yourself off to the library, it’s good to have a construct to do that within—that pushes you along.”
Kim Bastin
Composer and director Kim Bastin has this year begun work on a PhD at Latrobe University through the Theatre and Drama Unit. “I’ve been working very hard for the last 19 years and arrived at creative burnout last year. I wanted to give myself a period away from creative work in order to revitalize my energies and have time to reflect on my creative practice.” Her PhD examines the practical question of “how theatre directors and musicians communicate across 2 very different disciplines. I am also looking at how music works within current theatre practice; what it does, how it creates meaning, how it supports narrative and emotion.”
Sam Haren
The opportunity to explore both theory and practice appealed to director Sam Haren, who is doing his PhD at the Flinders Drama Centre in Adelaide. Researching the work of the Wooster Group and Romeo Castelucci and the connection between place and performance. “I’m looking at how dwelling in a place culturally influences the company and the work they make. The PhD is in part researching these organisations, but there is also a practical component looking at the way I work in Adelaide—how this place effects my own work.” Haren has relished the opportunity to continue an extension of learning, “to feed the work that I’m doing”, as he continues his freelance work as a director alongside his PhD studies.
Deborah Leiser-Moore
Director and performer Deborah Leiser-Moore also took the chance to further her own work through an MA at Victoria University. “When you’re in that spin of working, working, you don’t have the chance to sit back and you don’t get interrogated in the same kind of ways.” Leiser-Moore’s MA has been mainly practical, and examines the passing down of ritual from one generation to another in Jewish and Muslim culture. She created a video installation and performance piece which used the ritual of the wedding as a centrepiece. Extensive research and development took place over a period of 4 years as she juggled other work commitments and parenting her young son. The project and resources of the university enabled her to learn how to edit video. “I was able to move my work to a different place—I was excited by changing the form of my work. When you’re making new work and funded by the funding bodies you don’t try new things because you’re not being funded to do something new, but something you can already do.” This can lead to a kind of stagnation, as the pressure of working to project demands in short timeframes means artists draw on their existing skills, rather than going deeper, or developing new abilities.
Ralf Rauker
Performer Ralf Rauker has commenced a PhD at Edith Cowan University, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) while he teaches full-time in Contemporary Performance. He is familiar with combining a theoretical and practical approach. For him, “research was always very much connected with my artistic interest to make a performance or develop performance training.” His PhD revolves around Brecht’s first play, Baal, and has a practical component which will involve 3 different productions based on Voyages of the God of Happiness by Brecht. Why Brecht? “I love Brecht! I hate Brecht! I want to know more about Brecht! For my work as a lecturer and an artist it is an essential struggle, to confront myself with his work. Trying to find out what political theatre means at the beginning of the 21st century I want to learn from Brecht’s enormous influence on political theatre during the 20th century.” However Ralf Rauker’s attitude to Brecht remains critical. “I want to find out what I can use from his legacy and what is not relevant for me today. And in the future I want to ask the question again and again: Why Brecht?”
Kit Lazaroo
The question of linking 2 worlds come up in a different way for writer Kit Lazaroo as she reflects on the first 12 months of her PhD work with the East Timorese Hakka community in Melbourne. She explains, “a number of the East Timorese had been asylum seekers for up to 10 years and had never been given any certainty about the outcome of their cases. I wanted to research the impact of that uncertainty upon wellbeing.” As part of her PhD, Kit meets with members of the community each week to hear their stories of Timor, and to share craft activities. “Because I practice in the worlds of medicine and playwrighting, research into the lives of the East Timorese refugees seemed like a way of bringing those things together—to examine the subject of wellbeing on the one hand, but doing it through story-telling on the other. But I didn’t think it was going to result in me developing myself as a playwright—that realisation has come more recently.”
Challenges
Most of the practitioners I spoke to were comfortable with combining performing arts practice with academic work. Many were stimulated by new ways of confronting their own practice, of being presented with a fresh set of questions to ask. Deborah Leiser-Moore says it “is a rigorousness you would never ask of yourself. It’s so exciting.” Anna Tregloan has also combined a practical component in her MA with a written component which she is “struggling through” at the moment. “To work within certain academic parameters I often found to be counter-intuitive. But in the end I would come up against these research boundaries and keep on going. It has been fantastic to be freed of the product oriented nature of the task of making a show.”
The question of resources and practical support is a major one for theatre makers. Sam Haren also makes the point that “as independent artists you are looking for ways to practice and to have professional development and extension of your practice.” The practical aspect of his PhD is an opportunity to “accelerate an academic understanding of a proposal—like a litmus test.” He is also conscious of the historical legacy of undertaking postgraduate research. “The whole idea of a PhD is that you’re extending the theoretical knowledge of the field you’re working in.” He says that financial considerations (“Do I need to get a job at the call centre?”) have played a role in his decision to go on with the PhD. “However, if I had to pay HECS and didn’t have a scholarship then I don’t think I’d be able to do it.”
Anne Thompson
Anne Thompson, who works mainly as a director after many years as a dance practitioner, is completing her PhD at Flinders University. Unlike the other artists I spoke to, she has done a “straight PhD.” Her subject of enquiry has been white performance and reconciliation. “I was interested in exploring what it was to be white in Australia. My experience in contemporary dance had never confronted me with cultural politics. I had engaged with feminism and the body, but the issue of racism felt like an unthought through area for me.” Her work has been entirely written with no practical component. Anne Thompson had been freelancing for a couple of years and didn’t like taking work that she “didn’t feel happy with at the end.” She applied for a scholarship for the PhD study “to buy me some time. It is a way of self-funding.”
Thompson has worked extensively in the performing arts and education, and believes there is a good relationship between the sectors. She has been charged and changed by the experience of academic research. “It trains your mind. If I did 6 years of an intensive dance style it would train my body in a particular way. I think differently now. There is a stamina and rigor in relationship to ideas. My brain has been shifted into a different shape.” The solitariness of the work of postgraduate research has not troubled her. Her work as a dancer and choreographer means she is used to working in a self-motivated, disciplined way. “The parallels are clearer to me in the dance sense, because of the discipline of dance and having to shift yourself into the pedagogy that’s presented.”
The academic impact
How has the academic study affected their practice? Vanessa Pigrum’s piece, The things you cannot know opens in August in Melbourne as part of her MA work. “I am hoping to get out of it a new process to share with other artists.” Anna Tregloan says, “I went back and read postmodernist theory and theatre history that I hadn’t read in years and theories that I hadn’t come across—all this has broadened the understanding of my practice and clarified the doing of it.” Kit Lazaroo is still formulating what the work will mean to her practice as a writer. “I’ve always felt that I write plays because I’m this odd person and I don’t mix very well with other people—it’s something I need to do to get through life. Now I can see in a more general way that it’s something that other people share and it answers something quite deep in people. How it will actually affect my writing I’m not sure yet.” Ralf Rauker too can only guess at outcomes for his own practice. “I’m just at the beginning of my postgrad work and I don’t know yet how it will influence me as a practitioner. I don’t want to get irritated by the formal aspects of doing a PhD. The academic world and the world of an artistic practitioner are different, but this does not mean that communication is impossible. Because I want to continue to work as a university lecturer I will build bridges in my own thinking and doing, between those 2 worlds. As an artist I know how fruitful creative chaos can be, but I also know how important it is in performance work to organise your material. In a way the PhD is an exercise in how to organize my research and how to connect it with my performance work.”
Kim Bastin feels the tension between the two worlds more acutely. “I am attempting to produce something that doesn’t require a higher degree to be understood, or will only be of use to academics. I don’t want to get so immersed in theory that I won’t have the confidence to create anything when I go back to my practice.” Lazaroo also expresses the difficulty of blending 2 approaches in a project. “I had this dream I was given a can of sardines, and I had to put the sardines in a blender and as I walked to the blender I’d opened the tin and the sardines were alive and they had little budgerigar heads with beaks and they were biting my fingers trying to stop me taking them to the blender.”
Industry impact
How might the numbers of arts practitioners with postgraduate qualifications affect the industry as a whole? Anna Tregloan feels that theatre in Australia “lacks a great deal of philosophical discussion about itself. In comparison with the visual arts there is very little discussion on and around it. If more debate and discussion begins to happen around theatre as an artform then I’d like to participate.” Sam Haren’s hopes that increased numbers of performing arts practitioners undertaking postgrad research will enable artists to have “a greater awareness of context and the history of their field.”
Personal motives
The commitment to postgraduate research has come out of deeply personal reasons for each of the artists I spoke to. Vanessa Pigrum asked herself, “Are you still in the game or not? Are you going to take an easier road, or the opportunity to keep your artistic self stimulated and active?” Sam Haren spoke of a desire to “Get out of the rat race of getting the next project funding and going into a carefully pursued line of work.” Lazaroo describes how “It’s not a resting thing, it’s a wrestling thing—wrestling with who I am, why do I write, what relevance does my writing have.” Bastin is pursuing her line of enquiry because she is “hoping to have a few more answers to questions I confront in my own practice.” Tregloan believes “it is an artist’s responsibility to be knowledgeable in what they’re doing and to have as complex an understanding as they can manage.” Anne Thompson says the “brain shifting” nature of the work has given her “a clearer sense of my own cultural positioning and my values and where I come from.” It all sounds so very rewarding and constructive, in theory and in practice. Clearly, postgraduate research for theatre practitioners can be a brain shifting challenge that creates a reservoir of meaning for practice.Jane Woollard is a director and writer and Artistic Director of Here Theatre. She completed an undergraduate degree at University of Melbourne and a diploma at VCA in the 1980s and is feeling that her brain could do with some shape shifting at some point in the near future.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 12,
© Jane Woollard; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Cat Hope, DACS-BEAP 2002
What is ‘Sound Art’? For many, it refers to sound-based art work (or at least art work where the principal focus is on sound) across the broad gamut of performance, installation and broadcast contexts, which departs from both traditional musical instrumentation and notational methods and frequently employs electronic media. Others may see it as an intersecting space with roots in post-Cageian music practice, or indeed ‘post-phonographic’ music practice, and installation art. Artists labelled under this term perform in local warehouse, gallery and club performance series such as; impermanent audio, Disorientation, 1/4inch, Club Zho, Make it Up Club, Small Black Box, and Fabrique; and at festivals such as Liquid Architecture, What Is Music?, Now Now, Electrofringe, BEAP, SoundCulture and REV. Despite questions over its status as a discrete discipline, it is clear that practitioners feel a strong sense of community and share artistic and political concerns which are distinct from the western classical music and visual arts traditions. For example, performance is rarely separated from composition, developments in electronic media and communications technologies heavily influence practice, and traditional instrumental/notational practices are either not privileged or have been superseded by other forms of electronic notation and sound production.
Against the backdrop of this diverse and evolving contemporary practice are the universities, conservatoria and art schools offering postgraduate study and research training which, more often than not, takes the form of advanced creative practice. Strong competition in the marketplace has forced these institutions to orientate themselves in specific directions, especially tertiary music schools and conservatoria. The emerging pattern has been that conservatoria have remained orientated towards instrumental training in the western classical tradition, whilst many tertiary music schools have chosen to focus on more contemporary aspects of musical production, developing areas of research strength around contemporary, or ‘non-heritage’ practices. It is in the latter institutions, that the strongest support exists for sound art and electronic music at postgraduate level. These institutions include (but are not limited to) the music and sound areas at QUT (Queensland University of Technology), University of Western Sydney and the University of Wollongong, joined by some significant players with media and communication arts strengths such as Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and (University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Other institutions may provide some support via individual staff, but the majority of practitioners tend to gravitate to one of the above institutions for research degrees in this area, with some choosing to study at a distance. This may be due to the fact that these institutions have identified this area as one of focus and have made a substantial investment in a number of academic and research staff to support that. A number of these institutions also hold ARC research grants in the field, some within specific research concentrations, thus bolstering their capacity to support a strong research training agenda. Not surprisingly, staff profiles and research track records seem to be critical ingredients in attracting high quality research students. Perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, a major attractor might have been access to advanced facilities, but since the increase in speed of home computers, most artists who work at this level maintain relatively powerful home studios, allowing them to undertake a great deal (although often not all) of their production work off-campus.
Motivators
To probe the issues around postgraduate research in this field, I spoke to a number of established and emerging artists who have completed, or are currently undertaking, research degrees. First off, the reasons for enrolling were many and varied. According to artist/musician Dave Noyze (Burraston), currently undertaking research in generative music and cellular automata at the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS, it was a necessary qualification. Aspiring to full time research work at academic institutions in the UK he said, “the response…was always the same: you need a PhD before we will be interested.” For emerging artist Mark Havryliv, whose postgraduate research at the University of Wollongong involves the development of original software to explore gaming devices as musical instruments, it was a desire for input from supervisors, a formal framework and an opportunity for cross-disciplinary interaction. Havryliv was also attracted to opportunities to gain teaching experience. For artist/curator Philip Samartzis, who undertook practice-led research in surround sound performance, installation and publication via a PhD at RMIT, it was “worthwhile to work within a structured learning program in order to introduce rigour and ongoing critical analysis into my working methodology.” By way of contrast, sound artist/sculptor Nigel Helyer, who enrolled after a long period of arts practice, said “my arm [was] slowly twisted” through a number of offers from various institutions over the course of time, which led to being a “guinea pig candidate” in a new DCA (Doctorate of Creative Arts) program at UTS.
Habitats
On the issue of locating appropriate institutions and supervisors, a wide variety of views were expressed. While some found the choice of institution and supervisor a simple or natural process, the majority were presented with few choices, experiencing some difficulty locating both a suitable supervisor and a concentration of research students in relevant areas. Some had unsatisfactory experiences in prior undergraduate or Masters degrees and sought a more supportive environment for doctoral work. The composer/performer Lindsay Vickery, who is undertaking a practice-led doctorate at QUT on new structural models for solo interactive multimedia works, undertook his first postgraduate degree at another institution prior to the ‘creative practice as research’ era. He says, “the suggestion that I theorize my own work was actually dismissed as ‘not academic’…My folio and thesis were sent for examination to experts only in the area of my thesis, resulting in pages of notes about the Stockhausen [content] and about a paragraph of comment on the folio works that were supposed to comprise the bulk of the submission.” Herein lies a clear example of the once strong hold that traditional musicology had over the postgraduate area in many ‘older-style’ music departments. It was a somewhat curious phenomenon, given the significant push from key figures in European modernism to place composition at the centre of research culture in music. Whilst it might be tempting to think that the almost universal uptake of European modernism in universities was a good thing for ‘sound artists’, much of the discourse was very ‘notation-centric’, ironically privileging score-based instrumental music over much of the important musical experimentation in which so-called ‘sound art’ has its roots. Are we seeing an argument for ‘sound art’ yet?
Community
From a student perspective, the choice of institution seems to be driven by both the staffing profile (potential supervisors) and the existing student cohort, suggesting that there is a desire for a sense of community. Cat Hope, bass player, noise artist and lecturer at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) has recently enrolled in practice-led research towards a doctorate through Media Arts at RMIT. Although provided with encouragement by her academic employer, she felt “on my own in Perth—there are no other PhD sound researchers there.” By contrast, she felt “very at home when amongst the students in Melbourne.” Mark Havryliv feels the benefits include “support from a group of other students, not necessarily music students, to work with and hold my ideas accountable to”, suggesting a desire to interact with other students to test ideas in cross-disciplinary contexts.
The projects
The types of projects undertaken in this field are predominantly practice-led, consisting of a folio of works accompanied by a contextualizing exegesis. It is not uncommon for the research to take the form of original software and in some cases, hardware, with a number of such projects underway in various institutions. Whether the projects are practice-led, soft/hardware based or theoretical, however, there seems to be an interest from all artists to examine their work and processes within a more rigorous conceptual framework, often revealing or consolidating important aspects or, in the case of emerging artists, assisting in developing a notion of informed and focused practice. Peter Blamey, the well-known no-input mixing board performer/improviser, is undertaking a PhD by thesis (a less common choice for artists) at UWS, researching the history of the sine tone and simple acoustic phenomena in experimental compositional practice. Although a theoretical investigation, observers of Blamey’s work will note an intimate connection arising from his strong interest in pure minimalism and the American experimental music tradition. “Delving into the work of artists I admire is in part examining the history behind some of what I do artistically, whether I have consciously acknowledged it before or not.” According to Philip Samartzis, “over the course of the research program…I became more confident about my field of investigation…I felt I could clearly articulate my findings.” Lindsay Vickery is finding the process of theorizing his work a very rich experience: “the theoretical frameworks for the work specific to the degree seem to have spread outwards towards areas of my practice that I didn’t initially see as connected…It brings a certain focus to the work and importantly forces one to consider seriously the opinions of others…which is not necessarily most artists’ strong suit.” Nigel Helyer, on the other hand, felt that he commenced his research degree with a strong sense of theorised practice, but expressed concern that the institution “simply could not ‘get’ the concept that a practice was in itself (or embodied) a ‘thesis’…the administration possessed a peculiar ‘default’ setting that had difficulties with the notion of practice as valid research.”
Many artists feel natural synergies between their research and other aspects of their creative careers. Dave Noyze enthuses over a recent completion of new music track based on cellular automata: “the final production and mixing was done by Australian electronic music legend Garry Bradbury (ex Severed Heads)…Tom Ellard (current Severed Heads) told me it was played on Triple-J last Sunday.” If the broadcast of PhD folio work on Triple-J is seen as an amusing and somewhat unexpected benefit of the doctoral experience, Helyer notes dryly, “being a Dr. lets me park my car [illegally], sometimes gains an upgrade on planes, and makes suited academics uneasy!”
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 15
© Julian Knowles; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The romantic notion of the writer is not of one who’s been trained: the big-game hunting Hemingway, the rail-riding Faulkner, wind-tousled Emily on the moors. The university trained MA graduate writer is not so evocative. In fact, there are authors who go to great lengths to obscure the fact that their writing developed within a university writing context. Partly because the university qualification tends to wipe out street cred, and, mostly, because the university-trained writer rouses suspicion. The made writer is a faker.
Though of course, this notion is beginning to be challenged. We know, for instance, that in the USA graduate writers are extremely prominent. This is starting to happen here, with an uindeniable proliferation of creative writing courses.
While many established writers are taking DCAs (Doctorates of Creative Arts) to consolidate their practice in some way, or to provide the possibility of academic employment, there are MAs offered that constitute the writer’s first full length project. For me, this was the case. As I neared the end of my Postgraduate diploma, I decided to take a break from film subjects, and almost as an aside, and since I wasn’t up to the gruelling nature of film projects, took a unit in narrative writing. I produced a short story, later published, that proved enough to gain entry into the MA.
But the question is—and has been since the introduction of creative writing programs into the universities—what happens when the creative project meets the academic project? Do they have the same ends? What happens when the creative project aligns itself with academic ends, rather than orienting itself to industry: in this case the publishing industry? Certainly at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), where I studied, publishable work was emphasised, and there was no snobbery permeating distinctions between, say, genre writing and literary fiction. But with a university, there is always the question of the academic project. For me, the academic project involves the extension of the discipline. It must. It can’t simply be to emulate successful formulae, or to produce a perfect replica of the perfect book. To me, inherent in the academic project is a call to arms to take risks, and this isn’t necessarily—as it’s been accused—a contrivance.
Room to move
During the years of my MA, I worked on a manuscript supervised by writer and editor Jan Hutchinson. At the end of the degree I had produced a short novel. Well, ostensibly a short novel. There was the ‘story’, set in 70s Melbourne, when the stasis of suburbia collided with the spectacular in the guise of the Sharpie. While my training had equipped me with understandings of character construction, scene setting, structure etc, I broke any rules I felt like breaking in order to respond to my material, and, as an academic experiment, to extend the practice of creative writing. What was produced was an unusual manuscript: neither highly experimental, nor highbrow/obviously intellectual, and not without its flaws. It wasn’t contrived to be unusual as such; it felt ‘natural.’ It was, paradoxically perhaps, as much about instinct as it was academic, because what academic training does best is allow you to explore genesis, how things have come about, and you don’t just accept conventions. In so doing, you automatically disrupt naturalised constructions such as character, ‘prose’, plot, structure. And this proved to be highly problematic when I turned to the market.
Getting published
After my MA had been completed, marks had been registered, and the manuscript printed up and bound, I began to approach publishers. I’m not going to complain here about the manuscript being lost in the large stacks of unsolicited material in agents’ and publishers’ offices. I mean I would, but I was far luckier. The manuscript was introduced directly to editors and agents by some of the lecturers at UTS who had taken an interest. But, unsurprisingly perhaps, every one passed. Some lingered for a while (in the publishing world this can take the best part of a year), tossing up if character arc could be developed (I never would have co-operated, incidentally). But all eventually passed. Not every single publisher in Australia, but nearly. When it looked like the manuscript would never make it to a book, along came the writer Keri Glastonbury. I had already met Keri in the corridors of UTS several times when my supervisor suggested to her she might like my thesis. Keri ended up taking the book to Stephen Muecke, Local Consumption Publications (LCP) publisher, and made it happen.
And so it did. Novelist Mireille Juchau came on board, editing the manuscript, and Christen Cornell joined later, after returning from China. It was a very homemade affair. Photos were taken by Sophie Boord, and she and the gals from Spring In Alaska designed the book. It looked exactly as I wanted it. There were advantages in publishing like this which I never would have experienced somewhere else. Most importantly, my book was allowed to be: it was allowed to fail or succeed, whatever these mean, on its own terms. LCP is an academic publisher (though not a university press), and nearly everyone involved had come from academia; it was also somewhat radical, roughly affiliated with Cultural Studies, which meant the book wasn’t expected to conform to the conventions of literariness. All of which added up to the proper place for my manuscript, and the only place. In my MA year I am still the only one to have had their manuscript published. Others have experienced long deliberations by publishers whose marketing departments end up deeming the works “too quiet.” Though none of these manuscripts could be called experimental, in this notoriously down era of fiction publishing the question of writing that breaks with tradition seems particularly vexed.
In whose head?
When my book was released and reviewed in the mainstream press, I couldn’t have been prepared for the vitriol that erupted from the Age reviewer. My little novella was, I never guessed, entirely offensive. Basically a petty moralist tract (why weren’t these kids at school?), the thing that really made me cringe was the reviewer’s assertion that the vernacular I used was designed to “get you inside the Sharpie’s head” and create sympathy for the character. When she gloated that she would have liked to see these young people thrown in a divvy van, she was making plain something I’d forgotten about literature. That it’s for the middle class (by which I mean an aesthetic and moral state of being). I had failed to get her into the Sharpie’s head, I’d failed to create sympathy, and I had failed to write to her. If you don’t take aim at the middlebrow, you commit literary suicide (unless of course your work is indisputably high literature).
While the street press was favourable, while 2 universities are now teaching the book, while both writers and people who never usually read love it, there are those who hate it. That’s the way it should be. The book I’m sure has its problems. One I suspect is too much plot. But in the mainstream press reviews, while some were grudgingly flattering, peppered with backhanded compliments, not one talked about how the book might be different, how it might have opened up new ground. They were most concerned with how it failed to be a conventional reading experience; how it didn’t fulfil their ideas of literature. And that, at the end of the day, is what can put academia and industry at odds.
Now the book is done, its film rights have been bought by the New York production house Avery Childs, and if that eventuates we’ll see how this academic project sits in the cinematic realm.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 16
© Michelle Moo; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Peter Hegedus, Grandfathers and Revolutions
As the world rapidly divides itself between the technologically comfortable and the technologically wary, one often hears the word ‘Luddite’, used to mean someone who resists engaging with technology. But this is an inaccurate use of the word. Originally a Luddite was a craftsperson, for example, a glove maker, who knew everything about their craft from tanning leather to embroidering appliques. Skilled craftspeople were called Luddites after the leader of a union movement that was against transforming individual workshops into assembly lines. On assembly lines any worker could be replaced because each worker only did one small, easy to learn job; none was an expert, so none was indispensable. The Luddite label was perhaps the first use of the now well-honed neo-liberal tactic of disempowering resistance by labeling it as outside the ‘mainstream.’ The original Luddites were not resisting technology, but the decreasing of skill and devaluing of knowledge.
How would these original Luddites have responded to the proliferation of postgraduate degrees in the arts, particularly in film and video? My feeling is that these degrees are, in a sense, resurrecting the ‘workshop’ approach. They counter the assembly line method that allows the blithe production of films like Dumb and Dumber and the culture that greedily consumes them. Those of us enrolled in Masters and Doctoral degrees in film and video around Australia are Luddites in the sense that we want to do and learn, to be individually responsible for our work from beginning to end.
Peter Hegedus
Peter Hegedus, Doctorate of Visual Arts (DVA) candidate at Griffith University in Queensland, has created a much lauded body of work from within the university. His BA Honors thesis film, Grandfathers and Revolutions (1999), won prizes and screened widely in Europe. He “realized through [the film], and having the chance to reflect on the theoretical side of things, that this was something I should explore”, and took up a Masters degree. But the practical work was very demanding, not leaving enough time to focus on theory. Hegedus deferred while producing and marketing Inheritance: A Fisherman’s Story (2003), which won even more prizes, and was short-listed for an Academy Award in the documentary category. He was consequently offered a scholarship and entry to the DVA, which he began in 2004. About the DVA, Hegedus says: “The degree develops as you go. I may have 3 or 4 projects to submit in the end, but I may not. I’m doing the best I can.” Working out what the submission will finally be is, in a way, part of working out the nature of his practice. He started out with the intention of making a documentary and writing a work called Towards a Model for Contemporary Documentary Production, but “things have changed. I am interested in fiction and non-fiction, and my thesis will probably expand to look at both. I have a slate of projects and these will have an effect on the DVA and on me as a filmmaker.”
Perhaps as a consequence of being associated with a university since high school, Hegedus is thoughtful about the connection between theory and practice. He believes that “there is a contingent of people who specialise in the theorizing of film, and it is important to have dialogue with them.” His ‘theory’ is pragmatically oriented. It is theory in the original sense of the word: theoria: (Latin) a looking, a seeing, an observing or contemplation, hence a speculation. Hegedus’ ‘speculation’ is close to the bone for practitioners in the industry. His ideas are organized around 4 key issues: “control, conscience, commerce and creative treatment.”
This theory/practice mix is one of the most significant features of the postgraduate programs, and may be one of their most important contributions. If these programs can develop filmmakers who are at once ‘industry ready’ (skilled and experienced), and industry wary (critical and reflective), the industry and its culture could change. In the shorter term, there is a sense that for everyone I spoke with, the support structure the programs provide are shelters from a certain thoughtlessness about “control, conscience, commerce and creative treatment.” As Hegedus says “there is life out there, but it is always some sort of compromise.”
Jenny Coopes
Jenny Coopes, who has just finished the first semester of the new MA in Animation at University of Technology, Sydney, is taking a break from “life out there” after working at Fairfax as a political cartoonist for 20 or so years. Just after taking a voluntary redundancy offer, she ran into Gillian Leahy (filmmaker and Associate Professor at UTS) who told her about the course. “It was a little moment when life changes.”
Coopes says, “When I first started the course my idea was to animate editorial cartoons for the television news. I may well still do it.” But she is not exactly career oriented. “I’m very conscious that a lot of students are here to prepare them for a job, but that’s the last thing on my mind. I’m hoping that my final project will be a film worthy to be shown somewhere, but I have no idea after that. I may go and do a doctorate because I love being a student. Although I thought this would be a lot easier than it is. Working is easier.”
Coopes had never been to university. UTS took her as a postgraduate without her being a graduate, which, she says, is “a very sensible thing to do because they get people from all strains of life. Most of the students are from graphic arts backgrounds and also computer literate. I had never used a computer because of drawing. But my fellow students had not used conventional art materials, paper, crayons, pastels.”
The diversity of skills and ages within the programs is actually another strength of the postgraduate degrees. The students learn a lot from each other, form teams that go on to work together, and influence each other aesthetically. As Coopes says, “the course is changing me a hell of a lot. Being with people half my age…got me back in tune with a younger culture, and another way of looking at the world. My thought process is slightly different, which is a great thing. Political cartoonists have a use-by date unless they change their style.”
Dustin Feneley
Dustin Feneley, Night
Dustin Feneley, the youngest of the 4 postgraduate students I talked to, is also very aware of the impact the other students in the MA at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) are having on his thinking. “It’s a small group of totally committed, like-minded people, passionate about what film is and what it can be, what it can do. Each individual’s sensibility, their sense of drama, conflict, humour sparks a fantastic amount of debate.” In our conversation Dustin pours forth ideas, energy, enthusiasms and convictions with generosity and insight. He was an actor as a teenager, did his BA at UTS, and then went straight on to do a graduate diploma at the VCA. Even before his graduate diploma film Night was short-listed for Cannes, he was accepted into the VCA’s new, highly competitive coursework MA. He speaks warmly about the program. “At the VCA we do get practical training but the culture of school is for graduate students who want to be writer-directors. The VCA has given me a sense of belief in myself and what I could do…I thought I had been telling my own stories but I realised I had not been until getting into a situation where no one is pulling their punches, where they ask, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you saying?’”
Another reason for staying ‘inside’ comes up later in our conversation and resonates with the experience of everyone I talked to. Feneley says, “I’m dreading being kicked out at the end of the year with a film and a piece of paper because I will have to join the queue and strategise and navigate a path that resembles a career.”
Peter Templeman
Peter Templeman’s choice to enrol in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) writing program after successfully finishing the 2-year MA in directing actually seems like a clever way to “strategize and navigate” the industry. Templeman says, “I am out in the world, but being enrolled at AFTRS in writing helps pressure me to have my feature finished by the end of the year. Not being forced to hand it in at the end of the year would mean not doing it. I have had a bunch of other opportunities…but there are benefits to being here, the office, the pressure, the tutorage, the feedback.”
One aspect of Templeman’s experiences that mirrors those of Feneley at the VCA is that “critical analysis from really experienced people coming in from the industry and analysing your films and looking at and sledging your work is a really positive thing.” But some of the rigours that Templeman enjoys at AFTRS are almost the opposites of the pleasures that Feneley talks about in the VCA’s “auteur based culture.” One of Templeman’s current AFTRS projects is writing for a TV series and “I am learning a lot from that because I’ve never written for someone else before. This series is not my idea or creation, it is a real crafting challenge.”
Templeman’s bio, which came from AFTRS on his agent’s letterhead contrasts with his own self-effacing tone. It begins by saying: “Peter was recently awarded the Australian Film Commission’s Excellence in Directing at the AFTRS 2005 graduation. His last 3 films, Splintered, Milkmen and Gifted Thumbs have won 16 festival awards between them, including 7 Best Films and the Slamdance Grand Jury Award for Splintered, placing it in front of the selection panel for next year’s Academy Awards.” Templeman just says the awards are “encouraging, and you need that kind of encouragement to justify not getting a real job.”
Templeman, Feneley, Coopes and Hegedus are all deepening and extending their practice, creating new work, and enjoying some level of financial/facilities support in their postgraduate programs. To these benefits they individually add the benefits of working within structure, navigation of a career, undergoing the rigours of tough analysis and criticism, changing entrenched views, creating a community of collaborators, and restoring the balance of theory and practice.
What about learning?
There are a couple more things I would add to the list from my own experiences of 3 postgraduate degrees: there is the act of learning itself, and there is something ineffably humane about the whole undertaking. The funding bodies would do well to look at it as a model. The postgraduate degree is a workshop/apprenticeship model which trusts the apprentice.
The apprentice is not a novice, indeed they are often very close to their mentor’s level of achievement. In the workshop we draw on the works of many masters and consult with mentors, not to mimic, but to discover ways of working. The scholarship is provided for living expenses with no questions asked about how it is being used as long as you’re still alive and present. The focus then is on the project and the thinking around it. The facilities are provided. There is regular reporting on progress, which means that there is oversight concerning whether or not your head is above water. The accumulated wisdom of people with more and different experience from your own is accessible and forthcoming. Research and in-depth reflection are not just encouraged but required. At the same time a product is also expected and given a rigorous set of deadlines.
Interestingly, no one I talked to had much information about how his or her final projects—films and writings—are assessed. Unlike the days when admission to a guild was a goal that would bring status and financial rewards, none of us got involved for the purpose of being awarded (‘admitted to’, as they say) a postgraduate degree. Clearly, the degree itself is not the point. Three of the 5 of us see teaching as an option for supporting filmmaking when we are post-postgraduates, and the degrees may be useful for that. But the long term outcome of the burgeoning of postgraduate degrees is not necessarily more teachers, but more filmmakers, and from all evidence, better, more thoughtful, more culturally enriching filmmakers.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 17,
© Karen Pearlman; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Janet Merewether’s Jabe Babe
Writer-director Janet Merewether has created a film evoking the magical aura of childhood, for a childhood never really had by its subject, Jabe Babe. To do this, Merewether and her collaborators meticulously craft a fantasy world, richly theatrical in its detail and colouring and insert into it classic documentary detail—personal interviews, experts, medical information and old photographs.
Jabe Babe, at her elegant best, addresses us directly, framed by radiant green foliage and against a pink background. But soon she appears as a giantess dwarfing a technicolour maquette city, stretching out langorously between buildings, manipulating vehicles, and lifting the roofs off houses to reveal a monitor in each. Here we see her, in black and white, before a series of homes where she had lived as a foster child to short-term parents who were either wonderful (once) or appalling (most of the time), after being taken from her brutally cruel and schizophrenic mother at 7 years of age. In between these reflective moments, of memories of families into which she could never fit, vivid scenes suggest a rich fantasy life as, among others, cowgirl dominatrix and neo-Gothic mortician. In an hilarious King Kong episode, Jabe Babe peers into a skyscraper window, smashes it, plucks out the man inside and swallows him. She comments that she’d been destructive in relationships.
What the documentary material reveals is not just the problems of the foster child or the very tall child, trouble enough in themselves, but the delayed awareness that Jabe Babe suffers Marfan Syndrome—bodily disproportions of various kinds, damaged eyesight and a dangerously enlarged aorta. As a geneticist explains, had she be born a generation earlier Jabe Babe would now been dead. Even so she lives with the prospect daily. It’s not surprising then, she says, that given her childhood (including sexual abuse) that she adopted the role of dominatrix to exercise control over others, and that given her sense of mortality, she began to pursue a career in the funeral industry.
The carefully structured alternation between onscreen narration, numerous fantasies and ample documentary material gives the film a firm rhythm but never lessens the surprises as we see a life taking positive shape, and a wiser, friendlier 31-year old Jabe Babe emerging from the “spiteful, nasty” girl her best friends encountered in the 17-year old. She later leaves the life of the dominatrix behind (it clearly served a purpose), embraces a heterosexual relationship, studies for a career as a mortician and thinks about having a child (a surreal moment with her dressed as Alice in Wonderland cradling a piglet), although she is utterly realistic about the implications of that as a fantasy.
Wonderfully shot by Jackie Farkas and exquisitely (and epically) designed by Kari Urizar, Jabe Babe is exemplary, inventive documentary filmmaking, a rich hybrid of imaginative projection and documentary reflection. Every level of production (including editing, music, sound design) commits to Merewether’s vision of life as a contemporary fable: “This story belongs to Jabe Babe, who started small, but grew and grew…” It’s a great addition to the body of experimental work that Merewether has created over many years, a work to which she brings both her sense of humour and formal inventiveness.
Jabe Babe, A Heightened Life, writer-director Janet Merewether, director of photography Jackie Farkas, editor Roland Gallois, costume & production design Karla Urizar, sound designer Liam Egan, composer Felicity Cox, producers Janet Merewether, Deborah Szapiro, Georgia Wallace-Crabbe, in assocation with AFC, FTO and SBS Independent
Jabe Babe—A Heightened Life, official site
Information and DVD sales:
http://gogirlproductions.com.au/jbhome.html
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 18
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
In May this year, I undertook a program of visits to a number of universities and film schools in England that offer production courses in documentary filmmaking. The trip arose primarily from contacts I had made over recent years at documentary conferences and other events. It wasn’t meant to be particularly systematic and the visits were necessarily brief (maximum one day) but it was an illuminating exercise nevertheless.
One area I was particularly interested to explore was that of higher research and, specifically, higher degrees by practice. It’s 4 years since a Masters by Research program was instituted in the VCA Film and TV School and currently 15 students are enrolled, most of whom are engaged in narrative screenwriting projects. In Australia, the notion of the PhD ‘by practice’, sometimes called a ‘production PhD’, is also becoming more common and the VCA now has 3 PhD students in film (under University of Melbourne rules they can submit a practice project plus 40,000 words instead of the standard 80,000 word thesis).
This development brings into focus the ‘thesis film’, a somewhat problematic concept but one in which there is growing interest and perhaps considerable potential. Some consider it as another way of making films at a time when the kinds of independent documentaries made through mainstream funding sources are restricted due to the hegemony of the broadcasters and funding agencies.
In Britain there is a growing recognition in film departments that a PhD by practice varies significantly between institutions (and sometimes even within institutions). I visited the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster where a symposium had just been held “to share information and debate ideas about supervising and examining PhDs in the moving image practice area.” The symposium had been organised because nationally, “departments are working with a number of different models of the relation between theory and practice, and with somewhat differing expectations about what is submissable” (“Supervising and Examining Practice-based PhDs in the Moving Image-Symposium”, www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-825).
From the perspective of documentary practitioners like myself, whose interests lie less with the theoretical, the question of most interest is how further study might contribute to the development of one’s own filmmaking. This is particularly important because creative development is not encouraged by an industry increasingly using government funding as a means of subsidising the manufacture of television programs rather than supporting independent filmmaking.
The ‘thesis film’ is clearly no panacea for this situation. However, its growth could perhaps contribute to a diversification of documentary making and the development of the form. The problem with seeing research by practice as an opportunity to make films in an under-funded area lies in the nature of the PhD tradition itself. As with a written thesis, the thesis film cannot simply be a record of the research undertaken. It has to be a work of original research in itself, which adds to the existing knowledge and understanding of the form in an original and significant way. Steven Maras at the University of Western Sydney has recently written about this. As he says, “the thesis film is more than just a film with a thesis (or argument). The film is the thesis” (“Screenwriting and the ‘Thesis—film’: Notes on a genre to come,” Cultural Studies Review, Vol 10 No 2, Sep 2004). The question for the documentary practitioner then becomes, how does one make a film that serves the purposes and requirements of a PhD but is also accessible to a general audience?
Maras describes the thesis film as one that “seeks to ‘think’ in the medium of presentation. This might include aspects of talking head intellectualism but goes further in performing the ideas through the devices and techniques of an audio-visual medium. By ‘performing the ideas’, I mean more than presenting an audio-visual analogue or illustration of a particular idea, or even a poetically evocative elaboration of the theme, but a gesture that furthers the overall thesis of the film, or elaborates on the complexity of the issue.” In other words perhaps, the ideas determine the form rather than the form merely illustrating the ideas. Such films may be essayist or experimental in nature, but not necessarily.
This notion of the thesis film is not new of course. There are a number of significant examples in the annals of Australian documentary that qualify but which were not funded through University Departments or higher research grants. They include Ross Gibson’s Camera Natura (1985), Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986) and John Hughes’ One Way Street (1992). Not only were these films funded through mainstream funding agencies such as the Australian Film Commission but they were widely appreciated by general audiences, including at film festivals, and, in the case of One Way Street at least, by an ABC TV primetime audience.
It is almost impossible to imagine films like these being commissioned, funded or screened via the mainstream today, such has been the effect of market forces on public broadcasting in Australia. Sure, there have been some interesting developments in ‘hybrid docs’, ‘docusoap’ and ‘reality TV’ formats but the notion of making documentaries about complex ideas, never mind the notion of ‘thinking’ with film, has become anathema in an era when homogenisation and globalised franchising of formulaic genres rule the day, along with ratings. Nowadays one rarely experiences such films even at the major film festivals.
So the growth of interest in the production PhD and the thesis film might be timely. As Maras says, an important aspect of this development “comes from the notion that while the dominant medium of thinking, reading and writing for the past 2 centuries has been the book, it is possible to think in other media. Indeed, electronic media forms such as hypertext change the rules of the game for the presentation and argument structure of scholarly work.” In this regard, other forms of higher degrees by practice such as interactive works are also becoming more common. No wonder institutions are now scrambling to establish the ground rules for this kind of higher research, in order to maintain the standards of the Masters or the PhD as “original research” and to satisfy those traditionalists who see these as essentially theoretical endeavours requiring written exegesis.
In contrast to the potentially dulling hand of institutional requirements it is interesting to note that a thesis film might actually be fun. One PhD student I met in England is looking at science documentaries. Having identified this as the most conservative, formulaic and rigid form of the documentary—despite the myriad devices used to jazz them up—this student is looking to devise a new form that will transcend the illustrated talk and be more ‘open’ whilst not betraying the requirements of scientific methodology. An interesting project, though needless to say, he hasn’t cracked it yet.
There are of course a lot more questions about research by practice in film which I can’t go into here, not least those concerned with the practical issues of cost, technology, equipment and production values. But in the context of tertiary institutions in Australia such as the VCA, which provide production courses in the various forms of filmmaking and/or new media, all this is more than just interesting. Why? Because we should not simply be concerned with providing industry training but in playing a significant role in the development of film practice—in other words, contributing to the debate.
In the words of Dr Erik Knudsen, whom I met at the Adelphi Research Institute at the University of Salford in Manchester and who was the first person there to attain a PhD by practice in filmmaking in 2002: “The notion of media practice programs merely being training opportunities for aspiring young people intoxicated by the lure of the film and television business while the industry defers its training responsibilities to the higher education sector has evolved. I believe higher education can forge a strong presence within the overall media sector by defining its role as the place where innovation, research and development is taking place. If higher education had strong roots in such practice-based innovation and research, the quality of the programs would strengthen and the results, hopefully, would become apparent on our television and cinema screens” (“Doctorate by Media Practice—A Case Study”, Adelphi Research Centre internal paper, University of Salford).
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 19
© Steve Thomas; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Carol Jerrems
Like any number of artists, photographer Carol Jerrems is familiar to an intimate circle, acknowledged by the cognoscenti and largely unknown to most Australians. Jerrems died in 1980 at the age of 31. Kathy Drayton’s film portrait, Girl in a Mirror vividly documents the life and work of this remarkable artist drawing on Jerrems’ considerable collection of photographs, short films and diaries, donated by her family to the National Gallery of Australia.
Kathy Drayton came upon 3 of Jerrems’ images in the AGNSW’s survey of 20th Century photography, World Without End. Her interest led her to the NGA collection and curator Gael Newton. Her 55-minute documentary features 73 of Jerrems’ original prints, many never seen before, plus 166 new prints made from negatives in the archive by photographer/master printer, Roger Scott and the NGA’s Barry Le Lievre. Drayton adds images of Jerrems herself from other collections, excerpts from her diaries revoiced by Justine Clarke and interviews with a number of Jerrems’ photographic subjects—largely friends and fellow artists from the days when most artists lived in collective households and art and life were pretty much inseparable.
Notably, Drayton also stages in the film a number of recreations that draw on the photographic process. Carol Jerrems understood the photographer/subject relationship as an exchange and you sense she’d have approved of the filmmaker’s efforts to get inside her pictures. In one sequence, Drayton interviews the subjects of Vale Street, probably Jerrems’ most famous photograph. A bare-breasted young woman (Catriona Brown) faces the camera with calm bravura. Two teenaged boys behind her are shirtless and tattooed. The look the 3 share with the photographer is both ambivalent and suggestive. Intercutting with the interview to J. Walker’s (Machine Translation) insistent score, cinematographer Andrea Howard’s camera moves across Jerrems’ proof sheet. Like a little movie, the stills animate the incidents that culminate in the iconic shot. Time collapses as we re-live and simultaneously reflect with the subjects on their moment of “fame or infamy.” Mark Lean and Jon Bourke, former Sharpies from the tough West Heidelberg Tech where Jerrems taught at the time, now mild-mannered and middle-aged, recall how they could hardly believe their luck when Jerrems passed around a joint and the girl from the other side of the tracks slipped out of her shirt. When we get to the famous image, we fall through a small black square in the proof sheet and into the next sequence.
Says Drayton, “Throughout her life, as her photography evolved, (Jerrems) moved from observer and recorder of the historical moment, to a very personal open style: collaborating with her subjects in their representation, and often including herself in reflections in the frame.”
The film also reveals a complex personality and the way its contradictions inevitably impacted on her practice. Lean and Bourke talk about the way that their teacher imaged them as much tougher than they really were; former colleagues and lovers speak with chagrin of having to come to terms with the way she used her sexuality as an entrée into the intimacy she desired for her photographs.
All these elements combine to make Girl in a Mirror both fitting tribute and fascinating response to the work of a significant Australian artist. An assured first feature documentary from Kathy Drayton, the film premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival followed by screenings at Melbourne, the forthcoming Brisbane, Auckland and Wellington Film Festivals and has already attracted some international interest. The film screens later this year on ABC TV.
Girl in a Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems director Kathy Drayton, produced by Helen Bowden (Toi Toi Films)
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 20
© Virginia Baxter; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
I mainly supervise PhD candidates in music or those using some interdisciplinary approach with music and sound. The supervisory process for a creative based research degree presents 2 areas for discussion. The first concerns the artist’s creative work; the second is the placement of the creative work within the research context. Too much attention to the latter can result in pseudo intellectualisation or misunderstanding of the creative work and the artist’s relationship to it.
There are 2 types of research students in creative practice, depending on their development as artists: early and advanced (mid career artists are usually too busy “making it happen” to consider a PhD). Early career artists are often concerned with the development of technique and see research as a viable career step. Advanced career artists come to postgraduate research for different reasons. In many situations the reason is consolidation. Often, they have exhausted all opportunities in their practice in Australia and are looking for a process to take them deeper into their work. Needless to say, continuity of employment as an artist in Australia can be quite difficult. Postgraduate research in creative practice can offer that continuity.
Mutual understanding
The research investigation must come from the practice. My supervisory approach necessitates an understanding of the artist’s creative process. This involves: (1) observing the idiosyncrasies of the candidate’s artistic practice; (2) identifying the salient features of that practice; (3) identifying hidden strengths, patterns and weaknesses; (4) addressing any technical issues that may be causing a hindrance; (5) problem solving by reviewing the candidate’s previous work, discussing other artists’ works, or developing a familiarity with existing works relevant to the enquiry. For some people these indicators are not necessary to research supervision. I consider all to be important. They lay the foundations for a viable research investigation and methodology. Sometimes, the candidate is totally aware of their practice and area of research investigation. While this makes the early stages of a PhD journey relatively easy, the representation of the work as a research enquiry still demands a lot of input and interrogation.
The right question
Once there is mutual understanding, it becomes possible to begin a research enquiry: some people call this the research question. The process of asking the wrong question at the wrong time can lead to misconceptions. For me, the issue is “when” and “what type of questioning begins the process?” The only question in the first part of the PhD process is: “how can the artist do something better?” Defining the research investigation is relatively easy once candidates are fully aware of their processes. It enables them to understand their context and how they got there. Nevertheless, the research process involves a continual series of questions resulting from the work until ultimately, an appropriate question is asked. Questions such as “what does the work mean?” or “how do I tell someone else what I am doing?” come later. These questions can be problematic due to the requirement for candidates to initially express their creative work as a research question and formally present the interrogation in a written language outside of the artist’s own creative language.
Show, tell & name
The symbolic representation of a creative work is the artist’s primary mode of communication. It can express subtlety, irony, contradiction, ambiguity, paradox, etc. While in some instances the candidate is able to clearly articulate in formal language aspects of a work, it is often counterproductive to initially expect the candidate to be equally articulate in their linguistic or literary skills. Reporting in many universities is text driven. Many candidates spend more time writing about their work than making it. Formally expressing these nuances through written text is another level of structured communication. For these reasons I ask the research candidates to constantly talk about or informally present aspects of their work. Informal communication permits experiment and play with language. This is the first step towards articulating a methodology and must always be discussed in the presence of the work. Through the spontaneity of talking, an interpretative model can be articulated without the candidate knowing what that model may become.
All this is part of the process of ‘naming’, an important step in creative development. Naming is any symbolic representation of the creative act in which that act is described in a medium outside of its own reality. For example, music notation is a visual representation of sonic events. This applies to the exegetical component, which places the creative work in context. It is often the case that candidates, when passionately saying what they want to do, are usually ‘naming’ what they have done. Accurate naming facilitates the next best course of action. If something is wrongly named, it may create misconceptions about the artist’s creative process.
The exegetical perspective
Once the idiosyncrasies of the candidate’s work are understood and both parties are agreed on the naming, the translation from a creative work to one within a research context involves: (1) extracting from the work criteria for evaluation; (2) relating the criteria to some worldview via some exegetical perspective; (3) applying the criteria to other contexts external to the candidate’s work. These steps are non-linear and can operate simultaneously. The criteria for the exegetical perspective are derived from the creative work. They form the basis for a singular or hybridised methodology and enable evaluation and discovery.
I use the term “exegetical perspective” because “exegesis” implies the presence of a written text separate from the creative work. This separation tends to emasculate the creative work of its own embedded knowledge as more importance is given to the reporting of the work within the exegesis. While it is relatively easy to write an exegesis separate from the creative work, one danger is that candidates can become disenfranchised from their own practice. The experience of the work is the knowledge gained from encountering, engaging with or observing events or actions. An exegetical perspective can be achieved through explanation and experience. If we are to argue that artistic work has its own embedded knowledge and is therefore research, then the explanatory dimension must be present within the experience of the work.
There are a variety of ways to experience an argument, articulate criteria or report a point of view. The exegetical perspective does not always have to be a written text because, like the creative work, it is an interpretation. Metaphor, analysis and criticism are some devices that explain difference and similarity. The exegetical perspective can also be another creative work by the artist that provides critical context. It can permeate the portfolio in a number of forms ranging from commentaries, analyses, critiques, intertextuality, deconstructed performance, etc. The rhetorical devices for investigation can be analogy (the more scientific approach), parodic, oppositional or discursive. Whether it is the complex intertwining of all components or a separately written exegesis, the research is the relationship between the creative work and the exegetical perspective.
A creative work is full of sensations, signs, ruptures, phenomena, ambiguities and contradictions. Their combination produces ‘meaningfulness.’ The task of the creative research candidate is to formulate an exegetical perspective, a lens that provides discovery and coherent understanding, yet at the same time embraces the creative work’s contradictions, anomalies and ambiguities. It is important to remember that the ‘making’ and the ‘writing about the making’ are not the same. They are separate. The supervisor’s role is to ensure the exegetical perspective is in dynamic relationship with the creative work and that experience, explanation and interpretation can also be included in the research reporting.
This article is an edited version of a paper originally presented for the Centre for Innovation Research and Commercialisation (CIRAC), Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology in 2004.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 2
© Richard Vella; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Rolf de Heer
photo Jackson
Rolf de Heer
To sustain an art cinema career in an Australian context demands an ingenious balancing act. It is necessary to judiciously work to a low budget, create innovative content and style that will attract the international marketplace, and maintain a sensibility that appeals to an Australian audience who display, at best, a distinct indifference to their local industry. It takes a consummate risk-taker, problem-solver and troubleshooter to fulfill this formula.
One filmmaker, of a precious few, who has successfully endured calculated risk-taking is Rolf de Heer. The only Australian director to have been in competition in all 3 major European festivals, he has commenced production of his eleventh and most logistically challenging feature to date. Ten Canoes the first Australian feature film to be spoken entirely in an Indigenous language, is set centuries before white contact with the continent, and utilises an entirely non-professional cast. The shoot’s location is on the edge of the Arafura Swamp, near the Ramingining community in North East Arnhem Land. Within this primordial landscape resides the largest concentrated mass of crocodiles in the world. From the film’s base at a local cattle station, De Heer explained the shifting nature of the project and the ways he dealt with significant production challenges, from the story itself to his stylistic approach.
“Ultimately, I wrote a script that conformed to the parameters that were set for me,” he explains. De Heer’s premise was to use the local Yolngu people as actors, but to come up with a story that they wanted and were able to perform. Quite a traditional group, not only were they non-actors but the concept of pretence was fairly new to them. “Here there’s no such thing as fiction; [stories are] all real in some way.” As a result, he incorporated familiar local history into the script. In particular, he sought inspiration in the photographic work of Donald Thomson, an anthropologist who did extensive work in Arnhem Land, North Queensland and the central desert in the 1930s. Thomson is remembered so fondly by the Yolngu that they refer to an epoch as “Thomson Time” and have songs about him that they hand down to the new generations. “It fits completely into their mythology now…and it’s because of those photographs that have made their way back here and their identification with their relatives in them.
“In particular there’s a sequence of photographs about goose egg gathering…It was something that hadn’t been done properly for decades and they’ve been talking for years now about restarting it….I learnt pretty quickly that that’s what they wanted to do…[a practice] that’s terribly important to recreate.” Thomson’s photographs also formed a visual guide for this section of the film. Most notably, de Heer maintains the pristine black and white and formal composition of the original stills. “I was very much drawn to shooting in black and white because I wanted to preserve the Yolngu’s vision of that past…most of the shots are still-framed, a number of them very directly inspired by the Thomson photographs.”
The canoeists leisurely drifting though the swamp, searching for nests, in striking black and white panoramic long shots certainly makes a strong image but cannot sustain a feature narrative. De Heer decided upon a second dramatic line to weave into the narrative, but encountered a problem. “The past, or ‘Old Time’ as the locals call it, has been idealised to such a degree that everything good happened in the past and nothing bad ever happened…this formed part of what I had to put into the film. There was nothing allowed that had the remotest thing to do with dramatic conflict… So I had a real problem creating a film around the ethnographic details the cast wanted, and what I knew cinema could and should be doing.”
To get around this, de Heer sets his second narrative strand in the mythical past because, as the Yolngu explained, there anything can happen. So one of the canoeists in the Thomson-inspired segment tells a younger gatherer a story set in a Dreaming-like scenario, and that forms the primary on-screen action. This tale is shot in colour not only for the rationalist reason that it’s “becoming harder and harder to sell a black and white film”, but as a stylistic contrast to the main narrative. Rather than static framed compositions, the mythical section frames a larger cast, contains constant movement, and makes prolific use of steadicam to go with the vibrant colouration. “The idea was to have a shot for each scene…each shot taking some hours to do but each with a lot of inherent internal interest”, de Heer explains.
So, there was a script and a methodology. But there were other problems. “It became clear in pre-production that there was no way we could pull this off”, de Heer recalls. “We were in deep, deep trouble if we tried to shoot the script the way it was.” Amongst the difficulties was communication. David Gulpilil, who was an inspiration behind the project (“He rocked up with a photo of Thomson’s one day and said ‘Look, we need 10 canoes!’”), was to be co-director but withdrew for various reasons. “I had no one who could straddle the film world and also speak the language.” Not only was speaking to the actors made more difficult, but constructing an appropriate cast proved a challenge. “We had trouble getting 10 canoeists in the first place, let alone cast for large camp scenes.” These problems were further compounded by the pitfalls of directing non-actors; “to get them to do things like repeat action; to get continuity between cuts: forget it.”
Directors have to be able think on their feet, re-strategise and prioritise, and fortunately these are de Heer’s strengths. There was no time to rewrite the script, so he decided to use the same mythical story as a basis, but “stylise it, surrealise it, shift its tone from cinema reality to a more heightened, exaggerated way of doing it…this was done so we could patch holes more easily.” De Heer elaborates on his shift in method:
“What I decided to do, was leave the black and white section the way I planned it, make it the most difficult part of the shoot and make it happen some way. It took a disproportionate time in the schedule for the amount of the screen time it takes because some of that stuff was incredibly difficult to set up. Then the other section…there’s just a lot of little vignettes in a way. There’s very little cutting in a scene, there’s a bit, but not much at all… [I would] get what dialogue I could from it, but I was planning to have some sort of first-person narration anyway…to tell the story where it needed to be told, and illustrate that with these vignettes. For example, yesterday we had this situation where it was meant to be a vignette without dialogue but I couldn’t get it to work, added some dialogue, and then it did work so I won’t have to put some narration into that one. But today we had one where the dialogue didn’t work at all, in fact the actor involved couldn’t do it. But once I got rid of the dialogue and made it almost pantomime, it was fine. So we can use narration where we need to when it’s not clear in the story.”
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The film is currently in postproduction and is scheduled to premiere in March, 2006. Ten Canoes, director Rolf de Heer, co-director Peter Djigirr, producers Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 22
© Sandy Cameron; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Anthony Lucas, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
The REVelation Perth International Film Festival has been growing in stature since its beginnings in 1997 as a small showcase of independent film, hand-picked by artistic director Richard Sowada and screened, entirely in 16mm format, in the basement of Perth jazz club The Greenwich. Since then, REVelation has developed into a cutting-edge international festival with a strong reputation for innovative programming. Although the festival spans genres, its signatures are political documentaries, music-related films and its linking of cinema with performance (various “microcinema” evenings combine screenings with DJs, guest speakers and, this year, SBS’s The Movie Show recorded at the Fly By Night Club in Fremantle).
The 2005 program included some heavy duty works, from the gritty Hungarian film Kontrol and the much talked about ‘bio-doc’ Tarnation to observational documentaries like Gunner Palace and In The Shadow of the Palms which chronicle the lead up to and aftermath of the war in Iraq.
Archival documentaries with a strong left-wing feel, like Lech Kowalski’s punk profile DOA, Sandra Jackson’s powerful Negroes with Guns (on civil rights agitator Rob Williams and the rise of the Black Panthers), and The Take, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s exploration of the Argentinian economic crisis, dominated this year’s offerings. A strong selection of Australian work appeared primarily within the animation and short film programs.
Get Your Shorts On!, held annually since 2003 by ScreenWest in conjunction with REVelation and The Film and Television Institute of WA (FTI), is the premier showcase of local short filmmaking in the state. This year, the program featured a mix of idiosyncratic animation, outstanding Indigenous documentaries and a number of psychologically complex dramatic works with a dark, almost gothic sensibility—a strain that also ran through the animation program.
Short films like Chris Frey’s Phaid and Andrew Milner’s Sleeper were slickly spooky. Phaid is a grim, surrealist exploration of a young girl’s reaction to her father’s all-consuming depression and his dependence on medication, while Sleeper examines the blurry line between real and imaginary in the distorted psyche of a young man. Stylistically, these films leave a strong imprint, but they lack the emotional impact of the Indigenous works in the showcase, Gary Cooper’s Sugar Bag and Ashley Sillifant’s Broken Bonds.
Sugar Bag, which won Best Director for Cooper at this year’s WA Screen Awards, is the compelling narrative autobiography of 70-year-old Laurel Cooper, a light-skinned Aboriginal who as a girl was taken from her parents to the Moore River orphanage. Her parents had hidden her in a sugar bag. This beautifully crafted mix of oral storytelling and dramatic reconstruction generates a wealth of meaning and emotion, especially through its focus on the striking faces of the actors playing Cooper’s mother and father.
Like Sugar Bag, Sillifant’s Broken Bonds is another powerful documentary drama of memory, history and family. It tells the story of a young Aboriginal man whose exposure as a child to his father’s abuse of his mother only strengthens his resolve to make something of himself. Many years later, he becomes a successful boxer, but he cannot escape the dark memories of his childhood, or the belief that the only way to escape his past is to literally fight his way out of it.
The gothic noir of Phaid and Sleeper and the psychological density of Sugar Bag and Broken Bonds was paralleled in a number of the animations. The Legend of the Scarecrow, by Spain’s Marco Besas, is palpably infected with the spirit of Tim Burton, and its theme of melancholy outsiderdom and visual sense of foreboding are echoed in the intriguing L’Homme Sans Ombre (Georges Schwizgebel, Canada, 2004), the most self-consciously aesthetic, or painterly, animation in the collection. Made up of constantly shifting paintbrush strokes, it references some of the great art movements of the 20th century, from abstract expressionism and the ghostly surrealism of Giorgio di Chirico to the late-60s psychedelia of Alan Alridge. It’s less about concrete storytelling than it is about revelling in the purely visual, sensory qualities of the animated form.
Although the highlight of the animation showcase was undoubtedly the sophisticated, computer-generated Canadian Oscar winner Ryan (secured by Sowada before it won an Oscar), there is something to be said for the simplicity of the traditional cartoon animation. Indeed, Sowada seems to have deliberately chosen the quirky and the old-fashioned over the cutting-edge and computer-generated for this year’s festival. Works like Handshake (Patrick Smith, USA, 2004) and Herman: The Legal Labrador (David Blumenstein, Australia, 2004) are almost crude in style. The former, in which 2 young people shake hands at a bus stop and become inextricably glued together, has the same SquiggleVision style as late-90s TV cartoons like Dr Katz: Professional Therapist, while Herman: The Legal Labrador relies more on the humour of its premise (a crime-fighting, trouser-wearing dog is able to communicate with humans).
Seeing Ryan (Chris Landreth) halfway through the program prompted the realisation that I had been watching a handful of nicely executed cartoons, not, as I’d hoped, a showcase of boundary-pushing experiments in form. While the Colombian CGI work El Ultimo Golpe de El Caballero (The Knight’s Last Blow; Juan Manuel Acuna, 2005) is a triumph of video-game noise and action over substance, Ryan proves that computer-generated animation, despite the ‘absence’ of the artist’s hand, can be mind-bogglingy innovative, making us think while we gasp at its technical wizardry.
Ryan works on a meta-level, as an animation within an animation. Ryan Larkin was a successful animator in the 1960s and 70s who fell prey to alcohol and cocaine abuse. The film begins with Larkin being interviewed in some sort of asylum for the mentally and physically disintegrated. He is creatively dried up, body parts are missing (including a large chunk of his head, and the skin around his arms) and the coloured tentacles of some strange electric shock force spiral out from what’s left of his hair.
In chronicling Larkin’s heyday as a psychedelic animator, Ryan moves between styles grotesque, sci-fi, apocalyptic and surrealist (in one scene, Magritte’s famous businessman with an apple for a head can be seen sashaying down the street). Ryan is an exemplar of the future of 3D rendering in animation.
The other standout in this collection is an intriguing Australian work, Anthony Lucas’s The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. It fuses early 20th century modernism with Jules Verne Victoriana in its visual style, with sepia-toned cardboard-cutout characters in silhouetted profile, and themes of scientific travel, romance and adventure. Morello is a spindly, buttoned-up figure on an intergalactic voyage to find a cure for the disease plaguing his homeland, accompanied by a spooky scientist with a blacked-out Sigmund Freud profile and a sadistic, overweight captain.
With its heavily stylised combination of Indonesian-style shadow puppetry, expressionism, and a gunmetal grey, black and sepia-toned palette, Jasper Morello is an incredibly atmospheric and original piece of animation, the deserving winner of a number of recent Australian animation awards. It exploits the freedom of animation, the Verne genre and artform references to suggest other times, which now seem like other worlds.
On the whole, neither the animation showcase nor the collection of WA-made shorts proved to be much of a revelation, but a few truly original gems were on show. Indigenous short filmmaking is palpably alive and well in WA, with directors like Sillifant and Cooper obviously ready for the leap into the longer format, while the legions of aspiring Australian animators would do well to take a leaf from the sepia-tinged book of Jasper Morello creator Anthony Lucas.
Animation Showcase, July 1; Get Your Shorts On!, WA Short Film Showcase, July 7; Luna Leederville; REVelation Perth International Film Festival, June 30-July 10
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 32
© Pip Christmass; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Micha Wold, Alice et Moi
The St Kilda Film Festival did not get off to an auspicious start. Opening night was supposed to showcase the cream of Australia’s top 100 shorts but the session was characterised by tired scenarios and an almost total inability on the part of the filmmakers to fully examine the implications of their storylines. Soft writing, soft acting, the soft option—they all lessen the blow. We were also treated to ‘gimmick filmmaking’, whereby the demands of a sponsor shoehorn the content into lame outcomes, like the Micro Movie promotion. Sponsored by Siemens, this was really a promotion for their latest phone, which can shoot a minute or so of video. There was a competition for the best 90-second film made with it, and that can’t be healthy for Australian short-film making, already afflicted by the accursed punchline disease (call it the Tropfest Syndrome). Ninety-second films are all punchline and that’s sad.
But what do I know? I’m a critic. I’ve never made a film. I know what I like, though, and that’s why I was smitten by the festival’s International section, especially the Aspen and Interfilm components. The Aspen program, direct from Colorado, featured highlights from the 2004 and 2005 Aspen ShortsFest, and kicked off with Bill Plympton’s animation Guard Dog (2004). You can’t really go wrong with ‘Plymptoons’—the man has a singularly warped worldview that magnifies the most innocuous of details and turns them into outrageous, off-centre treatises on life and the universe. In Plympton’s world there are no beautiful people, just grotesque, pinched shells of human beings meeting extreme fates in very vivid fashion. Guard Dog was no exception—long live this man and his nasty sense of humour.
The best of the rest included Rob Pearlstein’s Our Time is Up (2004) in which a psychologist discovers he has 6 weeks to live. Life is literally too short for him to listen to his whining patients, and he watches in glee as one fruitloop after another implodes, driven batty by the rising bile of their neuroses. Underground (2004), by Aimee Lagos and Kristin Dehnert, was a rip-roaring cat-and-mouse tale played out in the dank subway of some unnamed city. Two heavies pursue a woman from train to train; she’s totally wound up—these men clearly mean her harm. This tense buildup results in a jaw-dropping finale, a punchline of sorts, but one that’s guaranteed to smack you about and leave you punch drunk.
The other Aspen notable was John Harden’s La Vie d’un Chien (The Life of a Dog; 2004), a silly homage to/parody of Chris Marker’s legendary time-travel photo-roman, La Jetee. Here, a scientist invents a potion that turns people into canines for 24 hours; human-dog cults subsequently spring up around the world. There were a few bestiality jokes but the real fun for the filmmaker seemed to lie in aping Marker’s style. But the grafting of a tacky sci fi storyline onto a source as sublime and metaphysical as Marker’s seems pretty indiscriminate and a tad disrespectful (as the director acknowledges in the credits; “To Chris Marker—sorry for all this.”). Still, you’d be hard pushed to find an Aussie filmmaker who’d dare to reference such a source, so my verdict is: tacky Marker is better than no Marker at all.
Interfilm Berlin was something else again, presenting explosive, affecting scenarios with maximum impact—fully integrated units that totally transcended the limitations of budget or the short-form medium. The Confrontations concept has been a feature of each Interfilm festival starting in 1999, when right-wing street violence was on the rise in Germany and the Yugoslavian civil war was peaking. The program invited filmmakers to essay their thoughts on the New World Mood—and it’s just as relevant today, with the War on Terror ensuring that we all continue to bite the bullet.
There was nary a punchline in the entire bunch. Some that stood out: Lara Foot-Newton’s And there in the dust (2004), detailing the growing malaise of child rape in South Africa but avoiding graphic sensationalism or empty sympathy with stunning use of stop motion and narration; Gabriela Monroy’s Un Viaje (A Trip; 2003), a Mexican film about a man taking his autistic son for a ride on the subway, resulting in a hallucinatory journey for all concerned; and Soyons Attentifs (Beware, 2003), by Thiery Sabban, which used a similar structure to the aforementioned Underground, heightening the tension inherent in the urban jungle, then defusing it with a goodly dose of humanism. Another highlight was Micha Wold’s Alice et Moi (2004), a Belgian film about a guy on a road trip with his nagging aunts, gradually losing the plot as he tries to cope with not only his overbearing, old-school relatives but also a split with his thoroughly modern girlfriend communicated via mobile phone. There were mad skills in this one—everything from acting to cinematography to writing, each crewmember at the absolute top of their game. Even the Interfilm shorts that didn’t quite work deserved applause for their willingness to innovate, like Pascal Lievre’s L’Axe Du Mal (Axis of Evil, 2003), featuring Dubya’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech sung to the tune of a cheesy, 1980s Jermaine Jackson/Pia Zadora song.
After, I met some Aussie filmmakers and we were all bowled over by the quality of the Interfilm program. Everyone was inspired to make something of similar quality, and that’s the real value of the St Kilda Film Festival. Sharing the vision of filmmakers overseas is a golden opportunity—especially at the grassroots level of short-film making—and we can only hope it impacts on the increasingly insular, out-of-touch Australian filmmaking scene.
St Kilda Film Festival, May 24-29
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 24
© Simon Sellars; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The OnScreen Course Guide: Filmmaking & Screen Studies is available as a PDF.
Please see RT69 for part 2 OnScreen Course Guide: New Media Arts.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 25-
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Ian Gwilt, Scrollingheaven
Frankly, it should be no surprise that new media artists gravitate towards academia. The net was created by academics, for academics—manifesting collegial networking and the intertextual nature of their theories. At the risk of foreshadowing a potential epiphany at the close of this article, this mature marriage between thought and technology emerges as perhaps the major attraction to postgraduate research for new media artists.
Motives
Tracey Benson, a PhD candidate at the Centre for New Media Arts, Australian National University, comments that “many artists working with new media have a strong conceptual rationale supporting their work”. Ian Gwilt, a PhD candidate at the School of Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales (UNSW), wanted to channel his “theoretical, research and creative activities through the vehicle of a postgraduate qualification.” Joel Zika, who is studying a Master of Fine Arts by research in Digital Imaging and Multimedia at Monash University, was intending to embark on a “lengthy and concise body of research” anyway and quite simply wanted to be acknowledged for it. Obviously an artwork is a certification of research undertaken, of a different kind. If new media artists research anyway, why enter an institution, and what are the benefits of a postgraduate qualification?
Chris Caines, who is researching towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), thought his work could “benefit from being explored in the context of ideas bigger than those [he] might consider in just making a project alone”. Caines’ creative projects have oscillated between film, video and new media, with interactive narrative being a common thread. Recently, handheld media has piqued his interest, culminating in a locative media project, go this way, commissioned by ACMI in 2004. Likewise, Gwilt is interested in the “crossover between the human experience in both the digital and physical environments and the relationship between these 2 spaces” and explores the big ideas of theorists such as Lev Manovich, Pierre Levy, Michael Heim and Walter Benjamin. Gwilt creates interface paintings, large scale digital prints, video animations and 3D Rapid Prototype sculptures that foreground the Graphical User Interface (GUI) as “a vehicle to comment on the formal, social and speculative aspects of a computerised culture.” His research, Gwilt reflects, has allowed him “to contextualise [his] work from a variety of perspectives…from a historical, theoretical and conceptual position.”
The right niche
All the new media artists I interviewed unanimously volunteered the supervisor as the critical factor in their choice of institution. Gwilt thinks it is “crucial to establish a good fit with your supervisor who is knowledgeable about and interested in your area of study”. Benson warns that the relationship with your supervisor “can make or break your project.” A good relationship with a supervisor, she elaborates, nurtures your creativity. The number of funded places, the status of the university, and facilities were also cited as deciding factors. But what of the defining structures?
The dissertation incubator
Zika has been creating animations and printed works in installations and performing with video and animated content for 6 years. He is researching new ways of imaging the scenography of ‘Gothic cinema.’ At the moment he is looking at “early amusement park rides (ghost trains, haunted houses) as interesting examples of immersive cinematic spaces.” Just like the click clack of an old ghost train, with skeletons jumping out of the pitch black, Zika wanted to rattle along the dissertation methodology with the “pressure of committing to a set of works” at certain turns. This downward pressure of the tropes of a dissertation—‘scope’, ‘aim’, ‘goal’ and ‘methodology’—fashion a unique incubator for artworks, which can have positive and negative effects.
Zika notes that it “slows you down and makes you focus” and that he is “focusing on the links between ideas which [he has] had on the table for years”. For Caines, academia presents an “opportunity to develop an area in a formal and rigorous way that forms a strong underpinning for future work.” Rhys Turner has just completed a Master of Visual Arts Electronic and Temporal Art by research degree at the Sydney College of Fine Arts. He started creating digital works 4 years ago and is currently experimenting with “alternate interfaces, and social interaction within a new narrative mode.” His latest work, Video Stereo, uses a modified 1960s stereo cabinet, a Technics 1200 and a computer. The work, which was part of PICA’s 2005 Hatched national graduating artists’ show, invites the user to interact with the video by scratching, DJ-style, the vinyl platter. Turner says his experience in academia has given him a more professional approach to his arts practice. Inversely, he laments the bureaucratic complications involved in obtaining funding and, as for Gwilt and many others, the tight definition of research often excludes aspects of his creative practice.
Creative limits
How is the creative process different in academia? Academic requirements, for Benson, limit the “opportunity for free-forming ideas” but the active community of forums and seminars has contributed greatly to her research and skills development. Caines has found funding and research models encourage the approach of a “creative product as simply a means to those research ends.” On the other hand, Gwilt observes “[t]he process can take on a more elevated position and become the focus of the creative activity, as opposed to the production of discrete finished pieces”.
How does academia nurture the creative process? Gwilt feels that funding to attend creative conferences and even have a sabbatical is valuable. Primarily, however, the “creative and responsive environment cultivates a sense of enquiry and constant re-evaluation” and so provides a “healthy challenge.”
For Turner there is “encouragement for new creative processes and ideas” and “productive criticism.”
When asked about the relationship between her creative work and her thesis Benson described it as “dysfunctional.” However, unlike a dysfunctional human relationship, an exegesis and creative work never separate. For Benson, the insights she gained from her theoretical investigation into the effects of online communities, activism and accessibility informed her studio work. Out of “interest and concern for one of the case-studies” in her thesis there grew an impetus to create her latest web-based work, Swipe (2004-5). Zika is hoping to build a symmetrical relationship between his practice and theory, where ideas he discovers through his creative experimentations are explained in his theoretical conclusions while other findings are expressed purely through his creative work. Turner sees the dynamic as hierarchical, with “theory as an important step in solidifying art practice and storytelling…secondary to art practice”.
Exhibiting, more or less
Are these artists exhibiting more or less since commencing study? Benson finds that she is exhibiting less because she is wary of distracting herself and straying too far “off-topic.” Gwilt finds the rigour of study drives his creative output and so he is exhibiting more. However, due to time constraints, he is exhibiting more locally and less internationally. Zika is exhibiting more and claims this is due to links he’s made whilst at university.
The network benefit
Besides the inspiration to create, what do they take from their experience? Most important for Turner is the ability “to create no matter where, why or how.” But, just like the unanimous nominating of the choice of supervisor for selection of institution, all the artists are in chorus about the primary benefit of the academic experience: networking. I was surprised by this, but, given the new media artists I interviewed were already somewhat established before commencing postgraduate studies, the desire to network would be paramount. However, I must note for those who are in a position like myself, where they are both emerging artists and researchers, “networking” plays a larger role shaping my creative and theoretical expressions than broadcasting them. This dual function of configuration and portal renders academia as a kind of GUI (Graphic User Interface) to potential novel creations.
Clarity
Finally, would the postgrads recommend the experience to others? Turner would, because it “lets you focus on what you want to specialise in…You meet lots of like minded people and you get to create your own work in your own space with good feedback and facilities.” Gwilt suggests that you should be clear on what you want to study and why—the topic should be something you’re willing to spend 3 to 4 years on. And, as all the artists have agreed, “find the right advisor to suit your needs.” Benson would recommend the creative degree “to artists who want to push the theoretical and conceptual aspects of their work.” She says that there are “some exciting things happening in tertiary education at the moment, particularly in the field of digital and new media arts.” The best elements of academia for artists, offers Caines, is “the collegiality, the free flow of ideas and debate [and] the freedom to explore work outside the constraints of the market.”
Chris Caines: http://madeupstuff.com/
Ian Gwilt: http://www.iangwilt.com/
Rhys Turner: http://www.rtek.com.au/
Joel Zika: http://joelzika.cjb.net/
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 32,
© Christy Dena; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Terry Atkinson
On the way in to the First Hand Launch, I noticed that the steps of ACMI at Federation Square had become a meeting place: crowded with large groups of people, most notable was the age range: from children to elders and everyone in between. It was a taste of things to come.
Involving Koorie Heritage Trust, Aboriginal Affairs, ACMI, and Koorie communities in Melbourne, Heywood and Ballarat, First Hand has 2 major aims: “to give young Koories the skills and confidence to express themselves and to empower the Indigenous community to explore questions of culture and identity.”
The project began in late 2004, when young Koories, between the ages of 11 and 27 underwent training in media production and cultural studies. They were joined by community elders including Uncle Wally Cooper, Aunty Joy Wandin-Murphy and Uncle Sandy Atkinson, who brought wih them their knowledge and facilitated discussions about culture. By 2005, 5 short films had been produced.
In Old Man, Amy Gordon asks Uncle Kenny (Elder Kenny Saunders) to speak about growing up on Lake Condah Aboriginal mission. It’s the kind of story that’s best on film, because Kenny Saunders shows us everything: the ruins of the mish, the site of the old church, the whole place. He shows us where his family slept, how he used to count the stars through the chimney in the summer months. And he also shows us where, not so long ago, as a child, the “police drove up over this hill, with a very, very well dressed lady” and took away the children, Gloria, Eunice and Ronnie Foster, leaving him and his community devastated. This is real history, stark with the detail of experience, in the presence of place, told by someone who still carries it in his body. Amy says she “never knew [Lake Condah’s] amazing history”; neither did we. As Uncle Kenny tells us of the social relations that existed in the old communities, for instance the midwifery and the doctoring, it’s just the beginning, he suggests, of exploring the history of Koorie culture denied by the colonisers for reasons he still can’t understand.
In the film In This Place Again, Tim Kanoa’s journey begins when he hears Shane Lovett’s inspiring songs. At the Bendigo Correctional Facility, accompanied by the songs, Tim and Shane talk about culture, about music, about prison, about family—Lovett shows pictures of his daughter who wants to be a vet. It’s great to be sharing this, because in every interaction there’s a transmission of culture, of discussion around what it all means. It’s particularly sad when they have to split. It takes us back to the beginning of the film when Tim is standing alone after his visit, looking like he’s trying to absorb the whole experience outside the looming Bendigo Prison where his friend is incarcerated: “I just wanted to get a shot of the place.”
In Memories we walk with Jacy Alberts-Pevitt’s grandmother as she teaches her grand-daughters about the country she’s grown up in, their country: “Heywood, The Old Place, Lake Condah, just home.” She knows everything about the place: what’s happened, what’s there, what can be made. She shows the girls what reeds to use to weave baskets, tells them stories, shows them where they’re not allowed go, places she’s never been. An outsider could never know this world. But the girls are learning, and they’re learning as their grandmother learnt, directly from generation to generation.
In Possum’s Tale, Josie Atkinson recounts an attempted trip up river, as a child, trying to find her way back to her father’s land. This film is about Josie’s connection to land, her yearning for it, and her separation from it. She has to get back. When we see Josie and her daughter together, embracing in their country, we see how land and culture and family are inseparable: “My country is my family and my community … I’ve got to get back … Return to my country.”
No Dedication (No education), by the Ballarat Aboriginal Co-Op Youth Group, ages 11-18, documents a great performance by MC Johnny Mac for kids and their parents at the Ballarat Aboriginal Cooperative. The theme was education, and the kids took footage of the day and interviewed their parents about it. It’s all here, it’s cross-generational, contemporary and music-video style: a vision for a culture-strengthening future.
Inside the music, stories, history, social relations and traditional knowledge, there are cousins, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunties, parents, children, elders. These are films about connection, about memory and the past, about the future. The network of complex relations. They are films about culture.
First Hand, project manager Chris Patterson; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, June 30; Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne, July 4-Sept 4
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 33
© Michelle Moo; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Radiant Cool: a novel theory of consciousness
Dan Lloyd
The MIT Press, 2004
There’s a standard in detective shows—bring in the Profiler, get inside the criminal’s head, root out that psycho-consciousness. “See those bite marks, that misplaced shoe-tree. We’re looking for someone who loves their mother.” So when Dan Lloyd—academic philosopher—wants to write “a novel theory of consciousness” he turns to crime fiction, the natural genre of phenomenology, and writes Radiant Cool, a novel that starts with a murder and ends with a reference list—a couple of hundred pages of crime fiction, then a hundred or so of explanatory notes.
The first two-thirds of Radiant Cool are a crime-noir frame for Lloyd’s take on consciousness. Page one and the disgruntled, always wears black, Miranda Sharpe finds the body of Max Grue, her PhD supervisor. The body soon disappears, leaving Miranda to search for Grue in a series of set pieces that are sometimes a bit clunky stylewise, but mainly fun and pacy. As with the noirs of old there are lots of deviously motivated strangers ready to make friends with, and later betray, the heroine. Guns go off, computers appear to crash, world domination is thwarted. And in classic noir style it doesn’t end well for our heroine either.
Overt, oblique and insider references abound. This is not a novel of character development; the characters are there for symbolic reasons, complete with loaded names. The hardcore psychiatrist, Clare Lucid (the bravery of cornball jokes), is a parody of mind-as-software types—who needs wetware, the mind could just as easily run on a suitably organised collection of sandwiches. When Miranda fakes a problem for an excuse to see Lucid the first few lines of the therapy session mirror the output of a session with ELIZA, an AI program written in the 60s that faked being a Rogerian psychotherapist.
MIRANDA: I don’t quite know where to begin.
LUCID: Is it because you don’t quite know where to begin that you…
The Russian detective is Porfiry Petrovich Marlov (the detective in Crime and Punishment plus Philip Marlowe). The scientist, Zamm, sees the brain like an engineer’s block diagram (he’s named after an applied maths journal). The name of the missing Grue comes from a famous problem in induction set by Nelson Goodman—grue refers to a property that depends on time. Max Grue’s big insight is that consciousness depends on time. Grue is also a particularly self-absorbed philosopher and his death, blinded by stroke, unable to contact others, rambling on deep within his own subjectivity, is strictly Liebniz’s “windowless monads.”
On top of the insider jokes (there’s a great reference to Young Frankenstein, plus suitably nerdy names for computer systems) are great chunks of explanation that act as background to the processes Lloyd has gone through to develop his theories. Marlov teaches Miranda about multidimensional scaling, a method for visualising complex data sets. A lot of space is devoted to how Jeff Elman’s recurrent neural nets encode time and context. It all sits fine within the novel and would sit just as well in an introductory textbook.
The various explanations get elaborated in the final non-fictional section where Lloyd gets more formal, puts phenomenology first, neuroscience second, and uses stats as the great decider. Makes for a nice change from the great mass of books that use—shudder—quantum physics to explain where all the juju mind stuff goes on. Lloyd works through defining consciousness then tackles some explanation to material cause. Start with superposition—the way that perceptions can have lots of interpretations all at once. Is it a bird, is it a plane…how can one sensory input be so loaded with possibility? From neuro the explanation is that superposition follows from the way experience is coded in the brain—sensory inputs get recorded strongest on the path they come in on, gradually mixing it up with traces the further away from the input pathway they get. Elaboration and contextualisation. Traces are bidirectionally connected so that activating one activates others according to the strength of their past association. Seeing “is it a bird” activates neural traces corresponding to all previous “is it a bird” experiences, and traces are being activated by the other stuff that is going on not directly connected to the visual input. Activation spreads, priming indirectly related traces—say the activations that occur when seeing a plane overhead. Those activations are ready to go but not up to threshold yet. With the sound of a plane new neural patterns are strengthened, others weakened, and “it’s a plane” pops out. Superposition as a traversal through plausible cause.
But the really big deal for Lloyd is Husserl’s idea of temporality, how consciousness has to be able to link events together so that we hear a melody rather than a succession of discrete and unrelated frequencies. Lloyd reasons that if consciousness is in the brain then temporality should show up in the unfolding of neural activity in time. Activity will be similar to itself in the short term, but always moving forward, never to repeat. He finds evidence in functional magnetic resonance images taken of people performing a range of experimental tasks. He runs the stats, dynamical systems and multivariate scaling as per the novel, and finds what he wants, never the same brain twice but always most similar to itself when closest in time. Lloyd takes this as evidence for temporality and, by extension, consciousness. However he has only shown that brains slowly change and maybe slowly changing is just the way brains are, conscious or not. Learning and experience must change the brain but they can happen without consciousness. Getting a scan, head stuck in a magnetic field, hydrogen atoms synching up and spinning out of phase as the blood’s perfusion of the brain slowly changes—that fits the ‘learning experience’ tag.
Does Lloyd have a novel theory and compelling argument? Not really, but with Radiant Cool he does give a nice intro to the field of consciousness studies. After which try Walter Freeman, Francisco Varela, Tim van Gelder and others.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 34
© Greg Hooper; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Mrongovius and Recht, Unfurl
“Step through the looking glass”, says the Vanishing Point press release, offering us a role as a latterday Alice in worlds conjured by new media art in Experimenta’s latest show. The digital revolution in the hands of artists has generated a new sense of amazement, of awe and the uncanny—from sideshow to sublime. It’s entertaining, sometimes hands-on, with a thin dividing line between arcade game and serious artwork. What’s more it’s art that draws on the very technology that ennables and haunts our everyday lives.
After the success of its touring exhibition, House of Tomorrow, which featured mostly Australian artists, Experimenta presents in Vanishing Point, an international collection of new media artworks, a cinema program, and, direct from Paris, Festival Némo, France’s audio-visual festival of short innovative European screen works. As well there’s Aural Gazing, an immersive collection of solo and collaborative works from Japan.
The international artists in Vanishing Point are Ji-Hoon Byun (Korea), Wu Chi-Tsung (Taiwan), Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser (USA), Julie C. Fortier (France), Luke Jerram (UK), William Kentridge (South Africa), Julien Maire (France), Minim++ (Motoshi Chikamori, Kyoko Kunoh), (Japan), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Japan/Vietnam/USA), Junebum Park (Korea), Hiraki Sawa (Japan/UK), Lee se-jung (Korea), William Wegman (USA), and Yang Zhenzhong (China).
South Korea has embraced new media art with a passion. Ji-Hoon Byun’s Duk-eum was a highlight in MAAP04 in Singapore (RT64 p27). Don’t miss the opportunity to play with its waterfall of light. Junebum Park’s droll short video fanatasies have been amusing visitors to the ACP’s Mirror Worlds (see p37).
The strong line-up of Australian innovators includes Stephen Barrass, Chris Gunn ; Penny Cain; Tim Costello, James Robison with HitLab (NZ); Daniel Crooks; Alex Davies; Leslie Eastman, Natasha Johns-Messenger; Shaun Gladwell; David Haines, Joyce Hinterding; John Howland; David MacLeod, Narinda Reeders; Martina Mrongovius, Sruli Recht; Daniel Von Sturmer; and Craig Walsh. RT
Experimenta, Vanishing Point, BlackBox, the Arts Centre; Margaret Lawrence Galleries, VCA; NGV International; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces; Frankston Art Centre; September 1-30; www.experimenta.org
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 34
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Trish Adams, machina carnis
You enter a large, very dark room illuminated only with strategically placed red down-lights. To the left hang 2 swathes of diaphanous fabric: small images of red cells floating against blackness. Towards the right hand corner stands an object curtained off by a large acrylic sheet hanging from a chrome rail. Through the heavy red plastic you can make out a horizontal hip-height structure—a bench or table. The room is quiet but for a dull, distant hum. Suffused with the pure red light and cordoned off, the bench looks a little like a modernist altar.
As you approach you see it is a bed of the kind found in doctors’ surgeries, with a surface of padded black no-nonsense vinyl, and thin steel legs. A large flat monitor is positioned horizontally above one end. Once you’re on the table, your head positioned beneath the screen, a circular image is projected—a petrie dish—full of smaller shapes. Placing the hanging stethoscope microphone over your heart, you watch the cells ‘respond’ to the pulse as the beats boom and echo in the gallery space. The latest in Trish Adams’ explorations of biotechnology, machine carnis continues to explore the “vital force” of biology, this time through an immersive experience bringing together audience participation and actual living cells.
During her recent collaboration with the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland, Adams “was inspired by the latest research that indicates adult stem cells are capable of “changing fates and becoming other types of cells.” For the installation, “stem cells were taken from my blood and cultured in the laboratory.” With the help of scientist-collaborator, Dr Vic Nurcombe, these cultures were incubated with special substances, “and after 5-6 days my stem cells developed into heart cells. Subsequently they began to beat, synchronise and cluster so that I could watch them throbbing in real time under the microscope.”
The pulsating aqua, white and maroon images shown on the monitor above the participant and on the hanging translucent screens are digital videomicrograph images of those cells, pulsing in time to the prone viewer’s heartbeats. Also evident in the microseconds after each beat is a faint image taken from a webcam above the bench of the participant’s face, combining imagery of the outside and the inside of the body. Adams hopes that viewers will explore “their personal reactions and interpretations whilst interacting with the cardiac image data which responds to their presence.” The viewer can also “observe that cultured cardiac cells have grown into a microscopic simulacrum of a beating human heart, as if the vital, functioning interior engine of their own body were laid bare before them.”
Adams’ ongoing investigations into corporeality and the materiality of the human body and probing of “both the unknown possibilities of virtual presence and recent developments in biotechnology such as stem cell research” are informed by her sculptural background. This is evident not just in the exquisite simplicity and attention to detail of the objects—bench, microphone, monitor, curtain—or the confident, dramatic way they are assembled, but in the manner normally abstract scientific ideas and contemporary debates are performed in the objects and processes of the work.
Brilliant sculpture often invites touch and machina carnis is constituted not by rhetorical address but by actual touch. The stethoscope microphone is rather sensitive to pressure—too little and it won’t register, and too much will prevent the movement of the diaphragm which is necessary to make normal breathing audible. The genuine interactivity which places the viewer right at the centre of the work is also an unusually sensual experience (it’s not every day one bares one’s breast in public in the name of art!). There is a delightful synaesthesia in ‘seeing’ one’s heartbeat, too.
Unusually for video art, in machina carnis the video, rather than being the defining activity, is sensitively incorporated to enhance the interactive experience. Adams’ sculptor’s eye is evident: she wanted “to work with moving images. I wanted to be able to create environments or ‘sensitive spaces’ that took advantage of the fluidity, ambiguity and ephemerality offered by mediums using projection as a counterpoint to materiality and corporeality.”
The restrained palette of the entire installation and complex videomicrograph images underline the critical role contemporary 3D animation has had in organising our perception of the appearance of cells. Biotechnology, as a place where epistemological, ontological and political debates converge, is a key concern of a number of artists seeking to challenge and complicate often simplistic views. This intimate engagement of the participants provides a novel and timely insight into genetic technology, which Adams hopes will “re-privilege the aesthetic experience of corporeality in the discourses surrounding genetic manipulation.”
Trish Adams, machina carnis, installation, Rehearsal Room, Brisbane Powerhouse, July 5-9; quotations from the writer’s discussion with the artist.
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 35
© Danni Zuvela; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Eduardo Kac, Move 36, transgenic installation, 2004 (detail)
courtesy Julia Friedman Gallery
Eduardo Kac, Move 36, transgenic installation, 2004 (detail)
Controversial creator of an “artist’s gene” (Genesis, 1999) and a fluorescent rabbit (Alba, 2000), Eduardo Kac is a new media arts visionary. Working and speculating in the areas of interactivity, telepresence and transgenic art, he exhibits internationally and lectures and conducts workshops on his own and other artists’ works and the issues arising from them. Documentation of his work can be found at www.ekac.org. Eds.
Eduardo Kac’s Art and Biotechnology Workshop at Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation brought together bio-art practitioners, writers and theorists to “discuss the complex and fascinating relationship between biology and art in the larger context of related social, political and ethical issues” (press release). Kacs opened the workshops by recontextualising and demystifying bio-art, placing it in a continuum of works by artists who have used living beings in many different ways. Kacs explains biotechnology as an understanding of life such as to be able to harness its processes—to take a simple example, as in the making of yoghurt or plant grafting. In 1644 grafting was already ‘naturalised’, as seen in paintings showing farmers grafting orange twigs onto lemon trees, joining discrete elements to produce new viable life forms. Analogously bio-art is medium specific; only certain strains will survive the grafting process.
The American photographer Edward Steichen is cited by Kacs as one of the first artists to create a new life form and present it as art. Steichen bred delphiniums and exhibited them at MOMA as artistic works in the 1930s and 40s. He also wrote scientific articles about his findings, thus straddling the worlds of art and science. Steichen used cross-pollination and often deliberately employed chemicals to cause ‘unnatural’ mutations. You can still own a Steichen; the seeds are available on the internet, distributed through a seed supplier, begging the question—is the buyer then committed to keeping the artwork alive? A question that must also inform the work of contemporary bio-artists.
Steichen was part of a larger movement in the 1930s to appropriate life as art, where art moved from representations of the body to the body itself and its processes. The 1960s saw the culmination of this engagement, evident in works such as Manzoni’s infamous signed collection of his canned shit. Around the same time Kournelis exhibited 12 live horses, unadorned, nothing but the living objects in the gallery. Here the focus turns to the smells, sounds and sights of life, away from the discourse of art. These works highlight the issue of distribution, another concern of bio-art. The residue of the Kournelis horses resides in the photographs, oral histories, conceptual discussions and media records that are materially connected to the event. The artefact of bio-art is the record, the history-making aspect of the work which acts as evidence. How does this artefact become part of an artistic economy? How can funding bodies be persuaded to support projects with a predetermined life span or invest in artworks that, like Kacs’ own, live for up to 2 years, surviving only in photographic records and written documentation.
Eduardo Kac
Photo: Carlos Fadon, Courtesy Galerie J. Rabouan Moussion
Eduardo Kac
On day 2 of the workshop, Kacs focused on the 60s, the 70s and ecology. During this time both scientists and artists focused on the effects of organisms on each other, and how living beings interact with their environment. A classic artwork of this time was Alan Sonfist’s colony of soldier ants trapped in a terrarium with a mound of fruit. Here the agency of the artwork is left to the life forms inside it, with the uncontrolled outcome of ants arranging and rearranging the fruit as they use it. These self-regulating systems were often ephemeral, such as Sonfist’s Mould Paintings, where the bacteria eventually destroyed the canvas, reconciling art with natural processes when conventionally its focus is preservation.
The ecological artworks also served to highlight processes that are usually hidden, such as Helen and Newton Harrison’s Survival Units, in particular the fish bred for the purposes of the exhibition, killed for the same purpose, and eaten. The public protested against the method of electrocution originally chosen by the artists as the most humane way of killing. Traditional methods of killing fish were then used. Bio-art has provoked many such protests from the public because it makes visible processes that are usually hidden.
Day 3 of the workshop focused on art and genetics. Paralleling the earlier work of Steichen, George Gessert bred irises in the 1970s, taking notes on each breed and photos for exhibition. He counter-bred against the mainstream, trying to retain characteristics that were usually bred out in a kind of imaginative resistance to homogenisation by large companies and breeding associations. Contributing to a greater state of biodiversity, Gessert also penetrated the seed market. But his work also highlights the hostility of the gallery environment for living artworks. Gessert knocked holes in gallery walls and, in Japan, delivered light from the roof via optic fibre cables to the gallery space to keep an iris alive for the duration of the exhibition.
David Kramer’s bacterial paintings of the early 90s also call into question the traditional system of collecting artworks. Agar, ecoli and nutrients are sealed into their containers once growth has produced an aesthetically pleasing form. But the bacteria are still alive and growth may continue after the seal is broken. One of Manzoni’s cans, kept for too long under hot gallery lights, exploded! How does bioart change the custodial role of curator or collector? Will collectors purchase works that will fade, destroy themselves, die?
A more common concern in a time of hysteria about outbreaks of disease asks if the work is safe? Eduardo Kacs sees part of this as paranoia stemming from a lack of familiarity with a molecular vocabulary. We deal with bacteria every day when we clean our homes, but ‘Ecoli’ are more worrying even though involved in our digestion. However, Kac believes that at the moment we do not have enough awareness of biological processes to be able to foresee consequences of manipulating them.
Day 4 of the workshop targeted an inevitable issue in bio-art—consciousness. Kacs reported communication between bacteria ennabled by the growth of protrusions for connecting and communicating with each other and exchanging genetic information. He sees “the field of biological studies…changing from a life science into an information science.”
The project for bio-artists at the moment is to open up the art establishment to new methods of distribution for living artworks, outside of the hostile gallery environment. As bio-artists navigate the cellular world, it seems they must also navigate the unfamiliar territories of collaborations with scientists, the grey areas of the art-science nexus and an artistic economy that exists beyond the artefact.
Art and Biotechnology Workshop with Eduardo Kacs, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, May 18-21
RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 36
© Kristy Darlaston; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
