The highly successful 2019 exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, which celebrated the interplay between RealTime and the artists Martin del Amo (image above), Vicki Van Hout and Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters), is now exhibited online. A generous offering of essays, performances and audio interviews sustain the legacies of the participants and provide an excellent resource for students, researchers and the public. We also interview instigator and co-curator Dr Erin Brannigan about her motivation for mounting this innovative exhibition. In another bold archival venture, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari have created Timely Readings, a visual mapping of live art in Australia drawing on the vast RealTime archive. We expand artist Sam James’ place in our archive with an in-depth interview about his remarkable 2019 solo exhibition Interminable Present and the pre-COVID-19 conceived work Panic Embrace, produced for the 2020 BLIK BLIK light festival in the Czech Republic.
Thinking about panic, art has never seemed so ephemeral, fraught and vulnerable and further endangered by arts ministers state and federal (from kickstarters Brandis and Fifield to Harwin, Marshall and Fletcher) who have tossed out the arm’s length principle in favour of direct control, even as funding rorts proliferate in ministries elsewhere. Yet again, artists are being told that they have to make their case to government for funding, with the same figures, the same arguments and to no good end. We might better ask, what is it in the Australian arts imaginary that never quite manages to embrace the arts with generosity, let alone passion? There’s a bigger argument to be had about our culture. Our compassion for our fellow players in the arts is deeply felt. We hope you can sustain your creativity through these art-defying times. Keith & Virginia
–
Top image: Martin del Amo, talk/performance for In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, photo Jackson Mann
The 2019 exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime is now online, featuring performances, interviews and documentation from the exhibition in a superbly produced digital record that enriches the archives of RealTime, Martin del Amo, Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson, Mirabelle Wouters) and Vicki Van Hout, providing an invaluable resource for artists, scholars and the public.
The exhibition, including four performative events, was held in UNSW Library’s Exhibition Space from 25 February-25 April 2019 to mark the closure of RealTime and to celebrate the national magazine’s “crucial role in documenting and providing critical commentary on work in dance, performance, sound, music, film, digital media and visual art that carved out new terrain in those fields” (Introduction, Erin Brannigan, co-curator).
In Response… intensively addressed the relationship between RealTime and a group of artists whose work had been covered by the magazine over many years. With installations created by the artists, performances and, available on iPad for exhibition visitors, performances on video and new artist interviews conducted by Erin Brannigan, the outcome constitutes a deepening of the archives of each of the participants.
The online version of the exhibition captures this layering of the exhibition experience. With the briefest of scrolling, a single page opens up a wealth of performance, talk and documentation. UNSW Library Special Collections and Exhibitions curator Jackson Mann, who co-curated the exhibition with Erin Brannigan along with the artists and RealTime, has produced a highly organic online experience, easily accessible and a delight to explore.
Vicki Van Hout, Henrietta Baird, talk/performance for In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, photo Jackson Mann
The exhibition catalogue features essays by John Baylis (Branch Nebula), Lizzie Thompson (Vicki Van Hout), Amanda Card (Martin del Amo) and our own reflections on the reviewing experience. As well, an extensive Audio-visual Collection, held by UNSW Library, provides even more interviews and recorded performances.
For us at RealTime, the exhibition and its online archive have resulted in a welcome expansion and enriching of the magazine’s archive and the furthering of its legacy, for which we are deeply grateful. Our thanks go to Erin Brannigan and Jackson Mann, the participating artists, the School of English, Media and Performing Arts and, for their considerable support, UNSW Library and University Librarian Martin Borchert.
We’ve been inspired by the experience, as Erin puts it in her introduction to the exhibition, of “contribut[ing] to innovations at the interface between performance, the archive and the gallery.” We felt right at home with such exhilaratingly productive hybridity.
Top image: Mirabelle Wouters, Lee Wilson (Branch Nebula), In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, photo Jackson Mann
From time to time, we and a few friends have fantasised about making a map of Sydney’s contemporary performance and live art community and its inevitable ties, in several decades of intensive hybridising, with innovative dance, physical theatre, experimental music and media art. A further inevitability is the connection between live art and performance practitioners right across Australia, and then with overseas artists. It’d likely become a very big map.
Undeterred, live art practitioner Sarah Rodigari and artist, writer and curator Madeleine Hodge (collaborators as Panther) have boldly initiated the mapping of Australian live art using RealTime as their source in Timely Readings: A Study on Live Art in Australia. The guide was commissioned by London’s LADA (Live Art Development Agency) as a Study Room Guide in the form of a poster and a booklet which includes Sarah and Madeleine’s interview with us.
The large, limited edition poster (45x30cm), designed by Ella Sutherland, evokes on one side a vast range of Australian performance activity with columns of performance titles, each numbered, generating a strange poetry.
Bold blue and white scalloping across the background evokes a sense of actual but uncertain boundaries and movement, but also of bracketed inclusion. Within the scalloping, inverted and reversed, is text from the other side of the poster, as if the poster is partly transparent and the content cut-up.
That second side provides the front’s numbered references to RealTime responses, specifying 666 chronologically ordered reviews, their edition numbers and pages, or the web dates, on which they appeared.
Poster (detail), Timely Readings, Madeleine Hodge, Sarah Rodigari, Live Art Development Agency, courtesy Live Art Development Agency, UK
The poster is both poetic and precise, and clearly the product of considerable artistic and practical investment. Selecting and then detailing the works and sources must have been labour intensive, let alone the collaborative task of generating imagery to suit. The booklet accompanying the poster, explains Hodge and Rodigari’s motivation:
“Since its beginning in 1994, RealTime’s extensive coverage through descriptive arts writing has not only influenced Madeleine and Sarah’s personal trajectories as emerging artists, but has also tirelessly spoken to and recorded a generation of experimental Australian performance locally and overseas. As artists, Madeleine and Sarah began practicing not long after RealTime was established and they both have a close personal association with the magazine as readers, artists and writers. Through mining the archives of RealTime, in reflecting on what is there and who is missing, they critically engage with how they can approach, read and disseminate this history from a self-reflective perspective.”
When interviewed by Madeleine and Sarah for the guide, we felt prompted to add some contextual detail to the map by describing the considerable interplay between UK and Australian live art, particularly in the first decade of this century, but beginning for us in 1997 when RealTime was commissioned to run a review-writing team of English and Australian writer to cover LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), and where we first encountered LADA and the live art movement.
We greatly appreciate Sarah and Madeleine’s initiative, commitment and vision in bringing this project to fruition. We hope it’s just the first of many like ventures to further explore the barely mapped terrain of Australian live art and contemporary performance and experimental theatre, dating back to the 1960s, and which continues to evolve in fascinating ways.
Top image: Poster (detail), Timely Readings, Madeleine Hodge, Sarah Rodigari, courtesy Live Art Development Agency, UK
On the occasion of this week’s launch of the online archive of In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, our interview with Erin Brannigan, who initiated the 2019 exhibition, provided an opportunity to discuss contemporary archiving and Erin’s passion for it. The strength of In Response… was that it generated a sense of RealTime as a living archive, not simply a repository of historical knowledge and experience but a publication with which to actively engage. In Response… has provided an innovative model for future engagements with performing arts archives, which includes expanding and deepening the archive with new material.
Erin is Senior Lecturer in Dance in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales, an author of books, articles about and reviews of dance, curator of screen dance festivals, a long-term writer for RealTime and an integral player in Sydney’s independent contemporary dance scene. She believes that the time is ripe to intensively archive the dance record. Erin exemplifies that drive, revealing in this interview the considerable range of her involvement in archival and related projects.
The digital archive, Erin says, has the capacity to provide easy access to dance for a wide audience. It can circulate performance caught on or made for video or film as well as writing that responds to it, thus circulating knowledge and driving legacy and, not least, much-needed support for the form. Digitisation is an invaluable tool, but in this interview, Brannigan points also to the importance of collaboration between organisations, and between artists and organisations — as exemplified in the In Response: Dialogues with RealTime exhibition in 2019, which Erin initiated — with a special role for universities and libraries. What, I wondered, were the sources of Erin’s passion for history and the archive.
Are you a preservationist by nature? Your books and other projects around dance suggest so.
I’m a bit of an historian and I do like to get to the historical heart of whatever it is that I’m working on. So, I think in my dance film book (Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, NY, OUP 2011) and in my current work, I’m definitely tracing tendencies back to some historical point. In terms of Sydney and Australian dance I do feel an impulse to record, document and preserve because I feel strongly that it’s an area of the arts that traditionally has not been well served by documentation and preservation. So, the short answer to your question would probably be yes.
What is your current project?
I’m working on a couple of books on dance and the gallery. One is quite historical —looking at mid-20th century activity between dance and the gallery in America. The second is looking at the contemporary situation in terms of art theory. It’s attached to a project, Precarious Movements, that I’ve really delved into in the last 12 months with art institutions. It definitely has a preservation agenda, working with major art organisations here and in the UK on protocols specifically around collecting choreographic work. So, there’s definitely a through-line there.
Where does this impulse come from? Did you start out as a dancer?
I started dancing very young. I think I was three years old when I first did my dance classes, and then later dancing after school at Bodenwieser Dance Centre in Chippendale, which was really the only place to study contemporary dance at that level in Sydney. And of course, that was an amazing time. Margaret Chapple was such a wonderful, generous woman and so many of us benefited from the culture that she set up at the centre. Dean Walsh was there and a lot of other people (too many to name) who moved through that school.
When was this?
The very late-1980s. I was thinking about this recently. Margaret Chapple had all of the dance theory books in her office and though I didn’t read any of them at the time, I was very conscious that she was interested in all facets of dance — dance theory, dance history — and I think that really informed how she ran the centre. I was always kind of curious about where she had come from. She was really a bit of a ‘relic’ from the modern dance era with an embodied kind of ‘European’ modern dance technique and style, which I did find fascinating. I remember doing some of her repertoire from Gertrud Bodenwieser — things like The Blue Danube (LAUGHS). I actually loved it. I loved dancing pieces from other eras. But it wasn’t the bulk of what I did. I really loved more contemporary styles and jazz and tap. So, yes, I did study dance and lots of different types of dancing. I thought I was pretty good but I wasn’t very good at auditions and I didn’t really have the drive to make it as a professional and didn’t find the right work for me in Sydney. I wasn’t that interested in dance theatre and ended up doing a lot of commercial work and going back to university, because I was teaching more dance than actually dancing.
So you let dancing go?
I let it go and I did grieve a little bit, but I was also conscious of needing to have a bit more security, knowing that I wanted to have kids and all that.
When you first came to our attention you were writing, I think, for The City Hub, the street paper, and at some stage we came into contact and you started writing for RealTime, which became several decades of involvement. Does the impulse for preservation partly come from this, from having written for journals of record both popular and academic?
I guess so. I was at the University of Sydney in the Power Institute doing Fine Arts and Film Studies. I loved Ancient History in high school too. I guess I’ve always loved history. When I finished my BA, I did Honours with [film scholar] Laleen Jayamanne. I did a project on Australian cinema, which was also historical. I could see this gap where there weren’t many people writing about dance. Jill Sykes, of course, was writing [for The Sydney Morning Herald], Deborah Jones was writing [for The Australian], but I felt there needed to be some younger voices. So I started writing and trying to get gigs with Metro in the Sydney Morning Herald and found The Hub, which was somewhere you could kind of do what you wanted. Not being paid for it very well, of course but it was a good place to cut my teeth and there were some very good people working there at the time.
I loved the Performance Space and was hanging around there a bit. [Performance Space Director] Angharad Wynne-Jones supported me and I think my first ever article was for the Performance Space Quarterly. It was [Assistant Director] Jonathan Parsons who edited one of my early pieces.
And then, of course, everyone wanted to write for RealTime and you guys were amazing. I learned a lot very quickly once I started writing for you because I certainly wasn’t getting that sort of feedback from City Hub. I was allowed to write whatever I wanted but there wasn’t much guidance. So, that was the beginning of that mentoring relationship that I had with you and Virginia.
You began to write extensively for academic journals and for a substantial period you focused very much on dance film, to which you’ve made a considerable contribution both in Australia and beyond through ReelDancewhich you founded for One Extra Dance Company in 1999.
Again, there’s the issue of accessibility, which is what I loved about dance film. I could see the most recent European work through the films that these choreographers were producing — Wim Vandekeybus, Alain Platel, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, DV8… That was the only way that I could see that work. And I was very privileged to have access as a curator making programs for Sydney Opera House and other partner venues. I thought it was a really great way for Australian work to travel too and that became part of what we tried to do with ReelDance: curating programs of Australian dance on screen for international festivals. We were working our way towards distribution. We had a couple of ReelDance DVDs that were distributed through Art Films. I was always aware of that capacity for dance film to both document work but also distribute it. And I suppose advocacy for dance is another part of my interest in documentation and preservation.
How many years were you with ReelDance?
I was there from 1999 until 2008 and during that time, I wrote my PhD thesis, which turned into the book on dance film. They were very complementary, doing the research and running the festival. I was teaching as a sessional during that time but when I got my full-time job at UNSW in 2009 I had to give up the festival.
The writing I’ve done as an academic during that period and beyond, what I’ve brought to it I think is a love of thick description. Often that’s what people like best about my academic work (LAUGHS) and reviewing is where I honed that skill. I have a deep suspicion of academic writing. I think it can tend to neutralise the voice somehow. So in this part of my academic career, I’m trying to find a way back to a more creative approach — with more or less success — but it’s an aim.
I think any kind of archival project is expansive by nature. I feel like I need to get going with more of that work if I want to make any substantial contribution. So, I have been working with the library to update the moving image collection, the ReelDance collection and now we have the RealTime exhibition archive. And, of course, I have colleagues I’m working with. Caroline Wake has been working with the Performance Space on their archive. Jonathan Bollen is very involved with AusStage. I believe Meg Mumford is in discussion with Milk Crate Theatre about working with their archive materials. And there’s The Wolanski Collection, which both Caroline and Jonathan are involved in. So, there are quite a few of us working in this area, putting our heads together about how we can use the university as a platform to consolidate some of that work. As you know the UNSW Library and University Librarian Martin Borchert have been incredibly supportive, particularly Special Collections and Exhibitions curator Jackson Mann with his work on the digital collection of In Response: Dialogues with RealTime.
Rather than having a sense of urgency, it feels like the time is right. There’s interest, the artists are interested in archiving. It’s become a bit of a hot topic in the arts – how to keep performance alive in the archive. There are some very good examples in dance: William Forsyth and Siobhan Davies. And Amanda Card [Senior Lecturer, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Sydney] and Julie-Anne Long [Senior Lecturer, Media, Music, Communications & Cultural Studies, Macquarie University], whom I work with on the Sydney Dancing project — they both bring so much, as an historian in Amanda’s case and Julie-Anne’s deep networks historically in Sydney. So it feels like the right time, the right combination of elements.
However, does the preservation impulse partly come from a fear that dance is perhaps endangered, particularly in Sydney?
Oh, I think that’s definitely a part of it. And that’s always been underwriting the Sydney Dancing project. We wanted to capture so much of the work that’s just become ‘invisiblised’ over time. It’s a drive to make dance more visible.
There’s another project I’m tinkering with called “How to look at dancing,” based on a couple of things I’ve read. One of them is a book by Justin Paton who’s a curator at AGNSW. He wrote a book called “How To Look At A Painting.” I’m very conscious that the approach to anything like that is about readerships and I don’t want to talk down to people, but I think there’s a genuine curiosity and confusion about contemporary dance. I did an interview along these lines with Michael Cathcart on the Stage Show on ABC Radio National last week. We’ll see how this little project goes: visibility and advocacy are definitely part of it.
Erin Brannigan participating in Branch Nebula installation activity; In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, photo Jackson Mann
We really appreciated your initiating In Response: Dialogues with RealTIme, a wonderful three-month exhibition with four events and performances, a printed catalogue, a material exhibition, everything documented digitally and audio interviews you conducted with the artists. This seems a very particular kind of archiving — an archival event. Rather than storing and putting away, it’s as if the archive is being interrogated at the very moment that you launch it. It’s a very interesting model. What was your intent with this kind of approach?
The main intention was to honour RealTime and your work, which has been so important to so many people in Australia and my experience in Sydney working so closely with you both and having various roles from itinerant proofer to collaborator on the Bodies of Thought: Twelve Australian Choreographers book. I think I had in my mind, particularly around the Sydney Dancing project, some kind of exhibition model that was about mapping networks and keeping the choreographic as a kind of score for the exhibition. I was trying to imagine what that might look like, along with Julie-Anne and Amanda. Then the new exhibition space at UNSW Library seemed like an opportunity to use the partnership with the university around the RealTIme archive to make an event that would ultimately draw more attention to the RealTime work that was now available. That was the intention and it became an amazing collaboration with the artists — Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters (Branch Nebula), Martin del Amo and Vicki Van Hout —who responded with such extraordinary generosity and put so much work into the exhibition.
It was a really amazing collaborative process — I could never take full credit for the output. Each room was co-curated with the artists themselves. And I learned a lot about the potential for the approach, particularly through Vicki’s room which comprised a soundscape and part of a set that she made for a couple of weeks in the lead-up to the exhibition. It was interactive during the exhibition and then there was the de-install, which was another process. Vicki was particularly educational in terms of, I think, new and exciting models for performance archive exhibitions.
Do you see your quite distinctive exhibition as archive as a model for future events?
I hope so. I’m doing some oral histories for the State Library to fill the gap there in their holdings. In our partnership with [choreographic research centre] Critical Path, we had 12 Sydney-based choreographers self-archiving. Now we’re working on a self-archiving kit for artists to help pull their work together.
And I’m hoping that maybe that partnership with the State Library might develop into more possibilities with exhibiting archives. It’s all about context and collaboration. It’s already taken quite a long time for us to get to where we are now with the Critical Path project and I think it will take more time for us to arrive at the right kind of combination and timing and post-pandemic context. Yes, I would love to do another like In Response….
In your model, the archive and the response to it are digitised and made publicly accessible. What’s the appeal of the digital preservation?
Stability, I guess. In a lot of the research work that I do I depend upon stable artefacts that I can access. I visited the Robert Rauschenberg archive in New York to see how many resources a visual artist of that stature has in terms of staff and space. Much of his work has been digitised and is available readily online, which makes it easy for people to write about it, which means it’s written about more, which means it circulates more. I can see the power of the archive in terms of driving the legacy of particular artists. I think someone like Yvonne Rainer was always very conscious of that. Marcel Duchamp was self-archiving from the beginning. I think dancers could all be smarter about setting up their legacies. Amanda Card feels very strongly about this, about setting the record straight.
If you’re watching dance archivally, of course, it’s not the same as seeing the original but it can still convey quite a lot.
Yes. Pina Bausch had basically put a freeze on any documentation of her work circulating. After she died it was just amazing to see her reputation explode internationally with the showing of the Wim Wenders’ film Pina [2011].
It’s really something that performance needs to take up; the visual arts has really had the monopoly on catalogues and retrospectives. It’s something we can learn from.
Are there any limitations involved in digital preservation?
Yes, of course. That’s really what’s stopped performance taking it up. There’s always something you will never capture and that’s also the strength of performance, that it can’t be locked down and put in a cupboard. So, definitely there are limits but I just think it’s important that we remember our performing artists. It’s cultural memory that RealTime has played such an important role in. Lee and Mirabelle said that much of their work has only really ever been written about in RealTime. And that’s extraordinary for artists of their stature. So, thank god for RealTime having done its job of preserving.
Thanks to you, Erin, for In Response: Dialogues with RealTime and for working on so many fronts to support, preserve and promote performance.
–
Dr Erin Brannigan is a Senior Lecturer in Dance in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts and works in the fields of dance and film as an academic and curator. She was the founding Director of ReelDance (1999-2008) and has curated dance screen programs and exhibitions for Sydney Festival 2008, Melbourne International Arts Festival 2003 and international dance screen festivals. She wrote on dance for RealTime 1997-2019. Publications include: Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century (Sydney: Currency House, 2010), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and co-editor with Virginia Baxter, Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers, (Kent Town, SA; RealTime Wakefield Press, 2014). She has published articles in Performance Philosophy, Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Screendance, Senses of Cinema, Performance Paradigm, Runway, Broadsheet, Writings on Dance, Choreologia (Japan), Oxford Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (2nd Ed), Brolga and International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.
Top image: Erin Brannigan, launch of In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, photo Jackson Mann
The RealTime Archive is a unique record of critical responses to the works of innovative and experimental artists, companies and festivals in Australia and beyond from 1994-2017
RealTime formally ceased publication at the end of 2017, but has followed on with occasional editions 2018-present, focused for the most part on preserving and promoting the archive.
The RealTime archive has been preserved in a number of formats and locations, determined in part by changes in digital technology and means of preservation across the decades.
ARCHIVES: General
The digitised print magazine (1994-2000), online versions of print editions (2001-15) and exclusively online editions (2016-present) can all be found here on the RealTime website.
Digitised editions of all print editions are preserved on the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website [see below].
PRINT EDITIONS ONLINE
RealTime was published as a free paper bi-monthly in print 1994-2015 in 130 editions at print runs of 48-56 pages that peaked at 27,000 copies per edition distributed to 1,000 locations nationally.
RealTime editions 1-130 on TROVE
In recognition of the cultural value of the magazine, the 130 RealTime print editions have been digitised for the Australian National Library’s TROVE website. You’ll find them here. Click on BROWSE THIS COLLECTION. Although not searchable, the viewing options are excellent, enabling some ease of searching. This record of the magazine conveys its design sense and the advertising culture of the period. To search RealTime, see below.
RealTime website, RealTime editions 1-40
Digitised print editions 1-40 (1994-2000) are also available on the RealTime website, with limited viewing choices and no search facility choices but with brighter resolution. You’ll find them here.
JOINT PRINT/ONLINE EDITIONS 2001-2015
All print editions 41-130 (2001-2015) were simultaneously published online from 1996 on, in a different format and often with different advertising. Go to Archives. These editions are searchable.
NOTE: When we built a new website in 2017, the transfer of content resulted in loss of detail in some photographs. You can visit the original website, which is also searchable, to see the original reproductions 2001-15.
ONLINE EDITIONS 2016-PRESENT
In 2016-2017 RealTime was published exclusively online, issued weekly at 40 editions per year. Each edition appears in the subscriber mailout format. Occasional editions have been published 2018-present. Go to Archives.
SEARCH
In 2018, we upgraded the search mechanism of the RealTime website, adding filtering for Titles, Author and Content. Given the vast volume of content, the initial absence of tagging and then different systems of tagging over the years, searching won’t always find what you want. Given RealTime’s reach, you can sometimes turn to Google, which will find the artist or the work and then take you to RealTime.
More features can be found on the original RealTime website here. They include reviews from RealTime’s commissioned national and international review-writing workshops in Bristol, Jakarta, Vancouver, Cairns, Darwin and elsewhere, and from writing teams reviewing other festivals, including three iterations of Melbourne’s Dance Massive.
OTHER ARCHIVAL SOURCES
In Response: Dialogues with RealTime
This exhibition, which included four performative events, was held in UNSW Library’s Exhibition Space from 25 February-25 April 2019 to mark the closure of RealTime, celebrating the national magazine’s “crucial role in documenting and providing critical commentary on work in dance, performance, sound, music, film, digital media and visual art that carved out new terrain in those fields” (Introduction, Erin Brannigan, co-curator).
The excellent online record of the exhibition includes filmed performances, audio interviews, a catalogue and other documentation which you can find here. Further material is to be found in the accompanying Audio-visual Collection.
LADA Study Room Guide: Timely Readings, A Study on Live Art in Australia
Commissioned by London’s LADA (Live Art Development Agency) and with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, Timely Readings is a Study Room Guide created by Australian artists Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari.
The guide can be downloaded at no cost from the LADA website. It includes an interview with the RealTime Editors in which they detail the Live Art exchange between Australian and UK artists, organisations and festivals.
The accompanying limited edition poster (45x30cm), designed by Ella Sutherland, evokes on one side a vast range of Australian live art and contemporary performance activity and, on the other, provides references to the RealTime coverage of it, specifying reviews, edition numbers and the pages on which they appeared. There are 666 reviews listed in chronological order.
There isn’t a digitised version of the poster with links to its content, so the easiest access to the reviews is via RealTime on TROVE for the digitised print editions 1-130, and thereafter the RealTime website Archives for the online editions 2016-18.
[Please note, Timely Readings lists 146 RealTime editions, for the consistency of its record. There were 130 print editions 1994-2015. The 90 online editions 2016-18 are identified on the RealTime Archive by dates of publication, not by editions, since these were not numbered.]
–
Top image: Exhibition, In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, photo Jackson Mann
With a video camera and a Mini Maglite torch as wand and abetted by collage and superimposition, Blue Mountains-based artist Sam James magically engages with thought, time, objects and spaces — Australian, Icelandic and Czech. Overlaying images with radiantly expressive unfolding lines and emergent shapes, James draws with light to engender visions which, though their titles reference the everyday, politics and philosophy, play enigmatically with perception.
James’ animations remind me of the childhood thrill of sparklers, of their explosive white radiance and even more the retinal afterglow of lines waved and slashed through night air. I envy James’ ability to preserve on video his sustained, delicate space marking, and revel in his sensual perceptual play with texture, depth of field and layered visual and sometimes aural simultaneities.
For a visual artist who much of his time works closely with dancers, musicians and contemporary performance makers as documenter and collaborator, Sam James has found through light drawing a way for himself to perform, semi-improvising, barely if at all visible, but leaving on video sustained trace lines of his presence in, as he suggests in the following interview, a transparent act of disappearance.
Sam James, installation, Interminable Present, Articulate Project Space, photo Sam James
I visited James’ solo show Interminable Present at Sydney’s Articulate Project Space in September 2019. Very much taken with it, I interviewed the artist at my home in January this year. Added to, it via email, is an account of James’ experience of the BLIK BLIK festival of light in March this year in Pilsen in the Czech Republic. He’d been invited to make a new work onsite but Covid-19 shut down the festival. However, he completed and staged the aptly but incidentally titled Panic Embrace without a physically present audience before flying into two weeks’ quarantine in a Sydney hotel.
Sam James, Seeing Old Friends in Sydney, video still, Articulate Project Space
Let’s start with Seeing Old Friends in Sydney, to which I’m particularly attracted with its moon, silhouetted branches, reflecting leaves and, gradually emerging before them, dotted and flaring lines of light resolving into an abstraction casually juxtaposed with nature. Why the title?
The notion of ‘visiting old friends’ was a simple beginning point for the project, something I can do around this area of Sydney—Stanmore and Marrickville. All these works are site-related—this experience, this time, being here in this place. I’d never slept here in [friend artist Denis Beaubois’] back shed in Marrickville before. So, this is a new experience and it’s where I’m thinking about making the work, lying on top of a hard futon in his back shed.
Is it a window view or taken outside?
It’s me getting up at three in the morning and stepping out into the garden and looking at the sky. Denis and I have been communicating a lot in our bread-and-butter video documentation jobs, helping each other out pretty often. The curved lines here are where we intersect on email, asking each other, “Can you do this gig? Can you shoot this thing?” Then all the other lines are the few days where we actually have more sustained contact, proper instead of incidental conversations. And a tree for me is always a reference to networked consciousness, expanding limbs reaching out to make connections.
A sense of place, self and friendship?
Yes, meeting points. The lines are coming from different directions and different angles. The dots end up being part of a similar thread.
It’s quite beautiful. It’s as if you’ve traced insects flying through the night air, making patterns or, actually, a hieroglyph because the drawing movement resolves into a near formal shape.
Exactly. It is something like a hieroglyph because it’s the image of a mark. A hieroglyph means something but it’s also an illustration. Most of the works are expressions of thoughts, I suppose. If you have a thought, how do you illustrate it? You don’t have to draw a naturalistic picture; it could just be the feeling of the thought or the energy of it.
Tell me about the process? You step out of the shed and there’s the moon, the stars. What do you actually do?
[With] most of the more advanced light drawings, I first do a free sketch. The actual process of the light drawing is so chaotic, sometimes it’s good to have a plan before you start. If I want to make it look like ‘this’, I’m going to have to move like ‘this’ at ‘this’ speed.
Sam James, sketches for light drawings, Articulate Project Space, courtesy the artist
These are three sketches I did in the Blue Mountains recently—Art, House and Work. They’re about the different ways I’ve been trying to juggle these three aspects of my life: place, self and friendship. The drawings look almost figurative and my drawing style a bit cartoon-ish. So, anything that can reduce my control over the line makes it more interesting—as if I am drawing lines in the sand on a beach at night and go back in the morning to see what the picture has become.
Was that the principal reason you began ‘blind’ video drawing, to free yourself from the constraints of formality?
Pretty much. It started from wanting to develop a way to feed back into video images because, before this, most of the time I was just recording objects and spaces and combining them. I was trying to find a way to re-enter those virtual, recorded spaces and have another effect on them, literally just wanting to be able to draw onto the image. I used to draw onto slides in the 1990s, scratching back into the photograph.
Again, the issue of reducing control.
I’ve always been interested in lack of control in the outcome. It’s a question and an answer in a way. When I see the answer I think, “Oh, that’s so much more interesting than I thought it would be.” It’s different from what I’d imagined. This makes me want to add another comment or a line or a mark or a gesture, into the image.
Where did the process of drawing with light start for you?
And the third element would always be, “Okay, how do I get the collaged object to not just be static? How can I make it move in a space?” I tried lots of key-frame tracking and conventional ways of animating objects, but they looked too slick and digital and I felt like it was really distracting from the photographic sense of what’s going on in the image. So, I’d draw with a torch and use the light point as the locking position for the tracking of objects. That’s how it started. I could, say, make an object move around with my human-drawn pathway rather than a digital pathway just by tracking the light point.
Then I realised the camera usually captures me drawing with the torch. I’ve never really had many photographs taken of me, so seeing myself doing this stuff, I started thinking, “Does that actually make it more interesting—to see the drawer doing the drawing?” It sort of evolved from there.
The history of video art might be crudely divided into the performative and image-making; here you’re engaging with both simultaneously.
Artists like Joan Jonas have been really inspiring for me, and Robin Rhode for his superimposition of drawings onto real environments and surfaces.
Sam James, Reaching Over Somewhere I Don’t Want to Go, video still, Articulate Project Space
You appear in the work made on a pedestrian bridge, in Reaching Over Somewhere I Don’t Want To Go. But in others, like Visiting Old Friends in Sydney, you’re not visible, although your agency is — as a moving trace.
The thing is, in those other works I am actually present, but I’ve just crushed the black, keyed it out, so I’m invisible. But it’s transparent. It’s good to see the action of the drawing and to get the feeling that ‘Oh, that doesn’t look like a digital i-Pad sketch.’ It feels more rustic, or like someone’s hand is actually doing it. Also, there’s blackness, darkness, the undiscovered area or the unconscious.
Sam James, Waterbelly, Articulate Project Space, photo Sam James
Waterbelly was made in Honeymoon Bay while working from 2014 on a Bundanon Trust local project, Hyperreal Tales of the Shoalhaven. I loved the rock formations on the coast. I don’t know the kind of rock, but it’s that crumbly, dark, volcanic type of matter. There’s a space between two massive bodies of rock with the water flowing in.
I was working with choreographer Philip Channels over three years on the video installation project. It being a community engagement project, I was forced to think, “How do I creatively connect with a community I don’t know; how do I impose a personal creative agenda with non-artists?” I used this ocean rock gully as a kind of environmental space for the answer and drew into it an expression of the resource we find in community. It’s pretty primal.
It’s as if the inflowing water is releasing an electrical charge between the rocks, which is very striking. The vertical lines are fairly formal, but the rest is turbulent. It has a very organic, spontaneous feel.
I’m also attracted to it because this one had a really downward energy. I’m less interested in iconographic artwork or strong metaphors. I’m always looking for the things in between obvious references and I like that downward energy. It maybe doesn’t offer much to some people but to me it’s like entropy.
I was very attracted to it. Maybe that says something about me too.
That’s the kind of thing that interests me most. It’s something that’s unusual enough to not know exactly what it is but you do get a sense of it.
Sam James, Practicing Liberty Then to be Jailed/Giving Refuge/Giving Asylum, photo Keith Gallasch
Tell me about Practicing Liberty Then to be Jailed.
It came from visiting the House of Terror Museum in Budapest when I was working with Back to Back Theatre in 2017. The House of Terror is a popular museum, covering the extensive history of wars in the region. It’s different from the way Australia loves to memorialise and glorify war and focus on heroes; this place had much more the feeling of a kind of deepening of understanding of the human condition through suffering. It’s an ongoing thing that Hungary is living with. And at the time I was there, there was that massive influx of Syrian refugees. It was interesting to see a museum that was dedicated to this darker unconscious, which I think isn’t recognised as much in Australia. I ‘drew’ onto a wall in a prison cell which was retained as part of the museum when it was built.
I like the way the light brightens and flares orange and red. Strangely the line patterns in this work and some others remind me of paintings by Paul Klee.
While they’re the kinds of paintings I might aspire to, I don’t have that kind of consciousness in the moment of drawing. It’s only in accidental moments that flares happen, when the light might point slightly towards the lens and the lens might have a filter on it or it will pick up a flare, but none of that I’m conscious of at the time.
Is each work a one-off or do you try a number of ‘takes’ on location?
Most are one-offs but my choice usually sits somewhere between: the first go is the most interesting but maybe not very accurate; the second is maybe slightly less interesting but more accurate. I usually don’t go to third or fourth takes because I feel like I’m trying to control the process too much. So, it’s the first or the second which is usually chosen.
These are palpably performative works even when you’re often not visible. How did you arrive at your current approach as performer?
My work for my Master of Arts at COFA [now UNSW Art & Design] in 2012 was called Artefact Cartoons because I was only working with objects and spaces and animating them together. What I really missed was the human presence. I was used to working with performers who’d come in and make my work look fantastic. Because I’ve always worked with dancers, I’m used to the energy of dance activating background images and other objects that I’m working with. I did work a bit with dancer Victoria Hunt on light tracking, and then realised that I could do it myself.
You’ve got a camera on a tripod and you’re in front of the camera; what are you using to draw these images?
My most used tool is the Mini Maglite torch, which is only about this big [approximately 14cms long], because you can control the beam. It can be narrow or wider. My i-Phone light is also quite good. It has quite a wide throw so if you have a certain wide lens and you stop the lens down, you get quite good sun stars, eight or 10-pointed with which to trace out images.
When I was in the Czech Republic in 2018, there was a cupboard in the room where I was staying full of old, mostly worn-out art materials, but also a whole box of different kinds of torches with different-sized beams, so I used a few of them as well. And sometimes I just use the light source to reflect off objects, for example shine it onto my hand to get a smear pattern.
Sam James, Detainee Hunger Protest, photo Keith Gallasch
Compared with other works, there’s a lot going on in Detainee Hunger Protest. How did you produce so much detail? The background also seems more impressionistic.
It’s a whole lot of construction mesh I’ve double-exposed to make a more complex, lined background, but in shadow, in negative. Then the foreground is the positive white line sitting front. I’m trying to combine two levels of complexity. When I went to the Czech Republic, I was trying to be more ambitious about making more highly detailed images rather than simple gestures. I was trying to make something more complex, like a field of lines.
Quite a challenge, I imagine.
Yes. There are three panels. The first and last were lines about trying to deal with bureaucratic systems with their perpendicular, hierarchical corridors; I suppose that’s what I was thinking. Some of those lines head in a certain direction but then they have to turn back on themselves and go in the opposite direction. But they try not to deviate too much into free-form. They’re pretty much strictly limited.
And you’re doing this blind, just keeping a shape in mind all the time?
Yes. But each of those panels is a composite of probably three or four drawings. I’d draw for one to two minutes and will have filled up my screen, and then I’d do another one and then layer them together to build up a big canvas. In the central one I was trying to get really straight lines to give more of a feeling of acute fear or some kind of terror. I can do fragile, sensitive lines quite easily, but I was also trying to move towards something that was non-human, more mechanistic, more terrifying in that way.
How did you create the star shapes?
I had a camera above, filming the floor, and used my phone torch with its light on the floor facing up and sliding it in an easily controllable geometric shape, making it a more locked, inflexible line.
I’m always trying to get out of the two-dimensional or three or four-dimensional, trying to create lots of dimensions at once. In my Masters, I was trying to avoid any kind of representation of how we read the world in a bi-focal perspectival way. We assess everything from one point of view all the time when, really, every living entity has its own energy or sphere that it operates in and they’re all overlapping and intersecting. I’ve always tried to penetrate those boundaries. I can hold the torch and walk towards the camera and draw lots of lines coming towards it, but in the end you’ll only see a two-dimensional relief. You don’t always get the sense of three-dimensionality. So, by layering things up I’m trying to technically break through that limitation.
Sam James, Reaching Over Somewhere I Don’t Want to Go, photo Keith Gallasch
Returning to the footbridge video, you achieve a very unusual sense of depth of field. Is this work more experimental and less preconceived?
Just a pure exploration of space. I was on Parramatta Road, which is my least favourite road in Sydney but, ironically, this is where the Articulate Project Space gallery is located. This is the environment I had to work with.
The footbridge goes over to Fort Street High School but it’s one of those bridges that takes a lot more energy to get up and onto and to cross over than the few seconds to cross the road. I was thinking of it as a kind of Piranesi-style architectural space, trying to navigate while avoiding stepping onto Parramatta Road.
Piranesi with a touch of Escher; a feeling of “What is this and where is it going?”
I’m using the Go-Pro 360 camera. That’s why it has that Escher sort of warping, bubble look, turning straight lines into curves.
Sam James, Icedragon/Snowflow, Iceland, video still Sam James
You included in the exhibition examples of work you did in a residency in Iceland.
I felt like I had to include something in the show from the first residency I did, which was in Iceland in 2015. I showed a half-hour film of light drawings of different spaces in and around Reykjavik. I was still experimenting a lot in those days and I was naïve, I suppose, which I miss. The hard thing for me now is dealing with knowing what the likely outcomes are, being more familiar with the results. So, I have to keep on working out ways of removing those controls.
I’ve loved doing the residencies in Europe I‘ve had since 2015, I realise, because I feel so out of my depth a lot of the time—trying to experience a new culture while knowing nothing about its history except for trivial, superficial facts; thinking about how much you can understand just by looking at monuments or reading tourist information.
You were invited to the Czech Republic to make a new work. Tell me about the festival and the work.
BLIK BLIK is a big outdoor light festival that usually attracts 30-40,000 people to Pilsen in the Czech Republic. I had done a residency there at the end of 2018, after which the festival invited me to be one of the 13 artists in the 2020 festival.
It’s a light festival in which artists are creating things like architectural fluorescent tube structures. As far as I know I’m one of the few showing video. I was planning to use wax paper clusters to project onto, to try to map the resulting images onto comet-like floating balls and have, as well, a separate monitor which showed the full picture so that the audience could see the difference between a more phenomenological experience of a work and then a more readable, cinematic view. I might still do that but it’s hard to make wax paper survive wet weather.
What attracts you to show in the Czech Republic?
I’d been to DEPO2015, run by one of the organisations that’s co-curating BLIK BLIK. One of the things I like about Czech work is that it’s very object- or sculpturally-orientated, labyrinthine and combinatorial; and artists are into collective ways of thinking about space and objects and how they work together. From a set design perspective, there’s the creation of a space with multiple things being activated. The polyvision of stage designer Josef Svoboda (1920-2002) really interests me with its multi-spatial parallelism — lots of things going on simultaneously.
What’s the way forward after BLIK BLIK? Is light drawing an area you want to keep exploring?
I think so. In a way it’s infinite in that drawing can be an exploration for your whole life. You don’t ever need to end it. Every line you draw is an unknown in a way.
There’s obviously room to move in the ways you can deploy it, in your own art and also for theatre and dance-makers. You’re creating a distinctive niche for yourself.
Yes, but I’ll still rely on working in theatre and dance. I don’t make money from the artwork and I think I have a different kind of ego from most visual artists. I find it really stressful making visual art. I’m continuing to work with writer-performer Talya Rubin. We did Bluebird Mechanicals in 2017 [read Victoria Carless’ review], and there’s a new project titled At the End of the Land for Melbourne’s Arts House. I’m also working a lot with Theatre Kantanka director Carlos Gomes on 360VR (360-degree virtual reality) projects.
Noreum Machi and Synergy Percussion, Earth Cry, Korean Tour 2016, projections Sam James, photo Sam James
You’ve also collaborated with contemporary music groups.
I’ve made two video works using light drawing with Ensemble Offspring (2017-19) and one with Synergy Percussion in Korea (2015-2017) in collaboration with the South Korean shaman drumming group Noreum Machi [reviewed in RealTime]. Synergy had a big triptych screen for three projectors constructed for the tour. I’d never worked with musicians before. It’s been a very equal partnership: a visual medium connecting with a sound medium. Working with performance there’s a whole other dramaturgy involved. So, I’m interested in doing more collaborations.
[Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring’s Offspring Bites are commissioned video responses to works by Australian composers. For Juan Felipe Waller’s Detone/Retune, James produced in 2015 an ever mutating, image-rich contrapuntal “reaction” to the piece. The composer wrote in appreciation, “I call it a reaction, because in no moment did I give [James] an explanation of my music, and from the start he was spot on in creating a very organic imagery that complements my ideas in varied layers, adding a sense of suspense, enigma and predictability, thus enhancing the musical experience for internet audiences with crisp new qualities.”]
[For Offspring Bites 2 (2019), James reacted directly, on his own terms, to the intent of Bree Van Reyk’s Light for the First Time which the composer describes as “imagin[ing] the experience of opening one’s eyes for the first time, which occurs at around 28 weeks’ gestation. The unfolding of the piece reflects a desire to be able to relive that moment endlessly, in slow motion, as if bathed in the brand-new memory of light.” James wrote of his “attempt to create pre-figurative imagery without any conception of the infinite phenomena of the material world. It is like being in a bubble of pure perception without reflexivity. To see, but without a concept of matter, the sight of a being which is yet to be born.” The fusion of Van Reyk’s transcendentally vibratory score and James’ magical evocation of emergent sight represents an exemplary interplay of music and video. On his blog, James reveals that the video was “made only with a Leica M digital camera, physical lens distortions and real time movement,” and pays tribute to the composer: “This is probably the most subtle and sensitive piece I have made, thanks to Bree.”]
Do you feel that light drawing has been singularly important in your evolution both as a solo artist and a theatrical collaborator?
Yes, it is one of the core techniques I use. So far, it’s the only way I’ve been able to think of how to break into and play within the frame of video. When I’m making video work for dance and other performance the emphasis is on making connections with the performing body. The light drawing is an action that is as close to performing as I can get. I still aspire to Joan Jonas’ approach to live drawing: it’s a way to draw video closer towards actual phenomenological experience and I think the ‘action’ of the drawing is what really matters. So, it applies as well to my collaborations with performance and its value can also enliven the static experience in gallery installations.
CODA: LIGHT DRAWING IN VR SPACE
What was your experience of BLIK BLIK?
The festival was interrupted by the Covid-19 outbreak and the lockdown after I had arrived. But I could still make the work, Panic Embrace (2020), in the festival’s workshops and present it in one of the then empty theatre spaces.
First, I was thinking about how to make the installation as immersive as it would have been in the forest in Lobeszky Park. I thought of setting the screens up in the theatre for a 360VR experience. This was a technical and conceptual jump forward, offering the possibility of more dimensional qualities through layering and collaging inside VR space as well as the potential, in the future, for making virtual installations; very appropriate in lockdown.
During this time, I was watching the 2020 Biennale of Sydney via phone videos on social media and thinking that there is a way to connect with the essence of an art work, even if it is remote. BLIK BLIK might be remounted but there are costs involved in doing a physical version again. In the meantime, Panic Embrace exists as a standalone 360VR experience best experienced on a smartphone.
Panic Embrace
Sam James’ Panic Embrace is unnervingly immersive, even on a small smartphone screen. For over five minutes turbulent images of fire and flood are projected onto a grid of suspended clothing emphatically void of bodies. The garments at one stage flare with a sense of the ghostly presence of lost wearers. At another, James’ light drawing rapidly fills the space, ambiguously suggesting art generating order and reducing panic in the face of chaos, or perhaps representing a decimating virus (see James’ own account below). Aural turbulence—flooding, thunder—is counterpointed with the eerie musicality of rattling metal, on the one hand evoking calming wind chimes, on the other the restless remnants of destroyed buildings. Whatever this push and pull, it feels akin to the “leaning in to anxiety” encouraged by psychotherapists to break panic loops. More metaphysical are the consoling words of American spiritualist Ram Dass circulating through James’ images: “Death is a ceremony in which one takes off one pair of clothes and adopts a new one. The ego sees death as suffering and the soul sees death as the awakening…of a new perception.”
On his blog, James explains that the overlaid drawings were “made with the sense of waking and sleeping brain cycles and repatriation, like a person passing through life-threatening experiences, possibly dying or being transformed and coming out the other side. They are made in the liminal state of brief hesitation, realising one’s life is at stake.”
Even though the work’s conception pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic, James is only too aware of the palpable connection with recent and current events. He writes, “From the initial RFS command during the bushfires in NSW, ‘stay and fight or leave now’, and seeing people driving through walls of flames, bleeding into a global Coronavirus pandemic, suddenly everyone is faced with mortality, not just refugees and those fleeing terror.”
Another kind of perception is also understood by the experience Panic Embrace offers, writes James: “Using a 360-degree equirectangular canvas dissolves the singular perspective, cuts up and time-slices the space and draws light lines continuously through it, transecting our assumptions of continuity. All is fragmenting, all is simultaneous. And a lived-in process.”
Panic Embrace, BLIK BLIK, Pilsen, Czech Republic, March 2020, supported by Create NSW, DEPO2015 and BLIK BLIK
Top image: Sam James, Interminable Present, Articulate Project Space, photo Sam James.
–
From the RealTime Archive:
In a 2009 interview, Sam James reflects on his education (which included three and a half years in architecture school before ‘fleeing’ to visual arts) and the importance, for all of its transience, of live performance collaborations. He observed, “All of my film and performance work has been an essential philosophical decision about survival.” Following is a brief account James wrote of the phenomenological impulse that drives his work. Then, Virginia Baxter, Martin del Amo and Jodie McNeilly convey their responses to James’ deep engagement with dancers.
