makeshift journal

Eating with Intent

Tessa Zettel
[Published in Das 500, December 2011]

In recent years, much of the work I’ve made in collaboration with Karl Khoe has been eaten. Not by us (the host rarely gets a chance), but by people who’ve been invited into an unusual space of exchange facilitated by the presence of food – dawn breakfast on a dry salt lake, nighttime afternoon tea in a 19th century basement, pikelets and sugarbag honey on the grass at Circular Quay. Of course all these situations have also produced conversation, often a particular kind of semi-directed discussion around where we are and by what circumstances we have arrived there. Food in this instance is an offering given to induce engagement; more than that, it is a point of entry into the parameters of the conversation: what do you need to sustain yourself, where can you find that in the place you’re in, what kinds of located knowledge have been overlooked or erased?

Earlier this month the place we were in was the dry salt lake, in Esperance, WA. Our journey there had something of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo about it – weeks of persistent enquiry into the edibility of the landscape, in archives of photographs taken when the town was young (ladies with starched collars taking tea on the verandah, men picnicking with camel under the tasty mooja or Christmas tree), and negotiating to borrow articles of furniture and tableware that were once old grocer Daw’s or great-aunt Annie’s. Tramping over the salty mud with bentwood chairs and lace tablecloths and jars of pickled bloodroot or wattleseed-flecked madeleines, we were as knowingly out of place, and time, as those early settlers and indeed today’s residents whose food is trucked down from Perth. The meal itself, for guests who had given time to the foraging of its ingredients, was filmed as a series of frozen long-exposure poses, tablecloth flapping in the Esperance wind. In attendance were the feisty secretary of the wildflower society, the Indigenous pastor and community gardener, the renegade commercial plant hunter and the local high school art teacher. The imagined audience of their repast (alongside the more prosaic gallery-goer) was one Claude-Antoine-Gaspard Riche, naturalist with the d’Entrecasteaux expedition who found himself lost and disoriented on the shores of Pink Lake this very day 219 years ago, thirsty and hungry and surrounded by food he could not recognise.

On another level, the collaborative doing entailed by making and sharing food with such ad hoc and provisional participant ‘communities’ is a way of practicing practices that aren’t so familiar anymore, and that could perhaps be useful in the development of futuring (sustain-able) modes of living. Our first deployment of food preservation was Making Time (2010), an experimental gallery-kitchen at PICA where ideas drawn from design philosophy were swapped for help making street-gleaned mulberry jam. This came close on the heels of Gwago patabagun ___ We will eat presently (2010), a mobile pikelet cart with native bees producing honey to sweeten a program of site-based picnic discussions on the MCA’s front lawn. Most recently food and dialogue were key ingredients in The Delirious Bakery (2011), home to the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society whose weekly meetings teased out darker histories of how the Rocks have been lived, in relationship to broader geographies and timescales.

The trajectory of these projects – marking time to slow down and be attentive, accounting for pre-existing cultural knowledge – maps out a new kind of quality economy in which place, and our own (dis)placement within it, is a source of redirective potential. That is, by enacting other ways of feeding ourselves within specific micro-fabulist scenarios, we can begin to (bodily) reimagine our collective understanding of the worlds we inhabit, industrialised and elaborately designed but largely dysfunctional in any long-term sense, that in turn design our daily lives and the politicised spaces we eat in.

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Sojourn in Esperance Bay will be exhibited as part of the IASKA spaced: art out of place exhibition & symposium at Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth, 4 Feb – 11 Mar 2012.

IMAGE CREDIT:
Sojourn in Espérance Bay, Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe, 2011. Production still.

Michael Stevenson, MCA

Michael Stevenson
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
6 April – 19 June, 2011

[Highly Commended for the 2011 Frieze Writer's Prize]
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There is something serendipitous in Michael Stevenson’s twenty-year retrospective being the final exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art before it closes for long-awaited and controversial renovations. As the institution prepares to reinvent itself with a new wing laying claim to a little more of that glittering waterfront real estate, Stevenson’s work is quietly undoing boundaries inside – between the public and private spaces of the gallery, between historical fact and imagination, and between the economically rational and absurd. This is a curiously fitting exhibition in many ways, circling around issues pertinent to the MCA redevelopment but also to the role of art in relation to society and its possible futures.

Curator Glenn Barkley charts a rich, dense journey through Stevenson’s diverse years of practice, in which changing fortunes, myth and unusual transactions recur in thoughtful and provocative configurations. As Stevenson notes, it is a show characterised by doubling. The most obvious example might be the artist’s ‘renovation’ of the gallery from within, opening up wall segments to reveal building infrastructure and appropriating a basement storage area for the display of works encompassing sculpture, installation, drawing and film. The installation is presented as ‘a new artwork articulated across two levels’, framing the objects within it (both what is art and what is not) in ways that are opportunistic and surprising.

Our first encounter is with The Gift (2004), Stevenson’s full-scale reimagining of the raft built by artist Ian Fairweather for his unlikely voyage across the Timor Sea in 1952. Further on, a painstakingly recreated letterpress print of The Times article, Timor Sea Crossed on Raft (2004), tells of Fairweather’s intention to ‘call on an old friend in Indonesian Timor’ equipped with only rudimentary navigational skills and a ‘30s compass. Made with parachute sail roped to a base of aircraft fuel tanks – materials literally fallen from the sky – and resting on stacks of National Geographic magazines, this museological artefact gains particular poignancy amid contemporary debates around ‘illegal’ boat arrivals from that region. The work also resuscitates an epic adventure that sidestepped conventional monetary exchanges; the original was kept by Rotinese fishermen on whose island Fairweather washed up, destitute and eventually deported to London, where his passage was paid by ditch-digging in Devon.

This narrative of blind optimism followed by a dramatic fall, of exuberant over-investment or the extra-market circulation of the gift, repeats itself throughout the exhibition. A New Zealander based in Berlin, for Stevenson the Pacific is another trope looming large; here is where Marcel Mauss theorised gift exchange, where the 18^th century South Sea shipping bubble brought financial ruin to many, where in effect nothing is certain. In Revolutions in New Zealand (2002), screen-prints of 1982 headlines sandwich together shock at the crumbling of the national stock market with commentary on visiting German artist Jorg Immendorff, another figure emblematic of the art world’s interdependence with broader economic and political dynamics. Declaring SUSPICION PUSHES DOWN MARKET, JORG BOUYS AUCKLAND’S CONFIDENCE and “I HATE CHEAP CHAMPAGNE”, these are historical objects deployed to tell a story in which the pathos of human folly is weighted equally to the forces of globalised macro politics.

Upstairs, the disjuncture between the specific and the universal returns in photorealist drawings of newspaper images (of the politically motivated vandalism of Guernica and ‘cash will crash in a flash’ on a TV screen, amongst others), in paintings of hymnal books tracing Stevenson’s religious upbringing, and in the poetic and allegorical film On How Things Behave (2010). Looping and somnolent, this work is a collection of tales that begin with Man, a hermit artist to whom the tides, and their bounty from passing trade ships, are given ‘in perpetuity’, until the arrival of a catastrophic oil spill. Against sliding shots of a concrete sea wall (one of several limited views), the narrator slips into the ‘80s economic crash and Hume’s proposition on the absolute uncertainty of the sun rising tomorrow. The crux of the film, resonating across the exhibition, lies in Man’s stunned rebuke to the Sea: ‘How can I account for this? Why did you not think to forewarn me?’

Stevenson is an artist for whom the business of recounting, and of accounting for, is taken seriously and with a wry wit. In the Annex, Barbas y Bigotes (2011) and its inverse, Sin barbas y sin bigotes (2011), are two large display cabinets whose contents do include beards and moustaches, alongside nods to other works and their origins: an empty bottle of Möet, a Guatemalan banknote, a model of The Gift, maps and videos with titles like Portrait of the Artist as a Tax Evader. Here also is Contadora (2011), a money-counting machine now flipping words, a (double) doubling of two works secreted in a downstairs ‘gallery’: Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad (2008) and The Fountain of Prosperity (2006).

Discovered only by closely inspecting the room sheet or chancing upon the goods lift, both works are worthy rewards for the persistent traveller. Introducción… is a video reflecting on probability and political intrigue on the South Sea island of Contadora off Panama; The Fountain of Prosperity an elaborate hydraulic instrument demonstrating the workings of the Guatemalan national economy during the 1950s CIA-led coup in that country. Dimly lit beneath exposed air-conditioning ducts, this replica of the ‘Moniac’ machine purchased at that time by the Guatemalan bank – deliberately left unattended to run down – is very much at home though certainly out of place (and time), orange liquid dripping through tubes and filters to a low motor hum.

In the film we are told that ‘in the finite world, no shuffle is fair. The deck is always stacked’. Hands play out a perpetual game of cards as a voice in Spanish meditates on the machinations surrounding the Shah of Iran’s political asylum under General Torrijo in Contadora in 1979. Drawing largely on the recollections of Torrijo’s bodyguard, a professor of mathematics and philosophy, the work unfolds in much the same way as the entire exhibition: with perambulations that are cyclic and oblique, and meticulous in their materiality.

For Stevenson, doubling provides access to the historical; the doubled form is permeable and can be manipulated to at once represent and critique the original. Here is a way the past can be approached as more than an accumulation of data by which to predict future trajectories, but rather as an opportunity to step outside complacency and the expectation of continuity, to perhaps process the finitude of the flawed systems we rely upon and rethink how we might structure our relations with each other and the world that sustains us.

– Tessa Zettel

IMAGE CREDITS
TOP LEFT:

The Fountain of Prosperity, 2006
Plexiglass, steel, brass, aluminum, rubber, cork, string, concrete, dyed water, pumps and fluorescent lamps
2.5 x 1.6 x 1m installation view, Vilma Gold, London, 2007
Image courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
© the artist

TOP RIGHT:

On How Things Behave, 2010
still from HD and 16mm film transferred to DVD
Image courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; Vilma Gold, London; and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
© the artist

Remembering Ahead (Or How I Never Learnt to Play Bridge)

[First published as catalogue text in Kathryn Gray (ed.) Rules of Play, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney 2011]
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North: so spades is always the highest, isn’t it?
South: no that’s only in the bidding
West: you’ll learn by playing, you will.
North: let’s just have a crack
East: that’s not a bridge term

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West: Now, as I understand it, I could start modestly, because that seems to be the way … it’s a modest game

Orchestrating an impromptu game of bridge between artists, overworked and time-poor, and all but one of whom have never played before, may not at first seem the most expedient way of advancing a catalogue text for an imminent exhibition featuring said artists. Nonetheless, an unlikely proposition born of delirium and misadventure has somehow become a concrete actuality, and here we are on a Saturday night, clumsily acquainting ourselves with the rules of a rather old-fashioned game that originated in nineteenth century Russian ‘biritch’ and whose modern form was popularised throughout Europe from the late 1920s. A game of skill and chance described as ‘tactical, with inbuilt randomness, imperfect knowledge and restricted communication’,¹ which also happens to be a neat characterisation both of Rules of Play as a curatorial event and of the individual artist projects it brings into being.

South: It’s always good to lead with your heart

We have at our disposal a digital copy of Learn Bridge in One Hour, ² some hastily prepared soup and one player’s recollections of heavily bastardised high school matches. Seated as instructed around a square(ish) table in the cosy surrounds of the Bill + George Librarium, we also have a set of starting parameters that curator Kathryn Gray offered all the artists, Australian and Austrian, for the exhibition’s first iteration at Bell Street Project Space in Vienna late last year. Her directives to ‘identify all specificities and objectives’, ‘make sure that everyone understands’, ‘do everything required’, ‘feel the affect’, ‘remember what came before’ and ‘repeat more than necessary’ seem oddly appropriate at this juncture, working as we are in teams (North-South, East-West) to negotiate unfamiliar terrain where memory, commitment and shared learning have a high exchange value. Also, as we are all on stolen time in this nebulous work/play zone, we might as well enjoy it.

South: This is a total novice round, this is fine. We’re fumbling our way through it, and some order will emerge

The person who has brought us here, albeit unwittingly, is my great aunt Dora, a champion bridge player until the day she died aged almost ninety-eight, just over a week ago. The game was serious and a touch mystical for this extraordinary woman who spoke seven languages and studied Medicine in Paris, Jews being unable to attend Polish universities. It was at the bridge table that her husband Oskar (a ballroom-dancer from a family of wealthy Russian industrialists) had managed to acquire another player’s unneeded identity papers which, with a little forgery, would enable their passage away from the glinting opulence and terror of 1930s Warsaw and later Vilnius, to this faraway place that would become their home. ³ Over the years we’d often talked about her teaching me to play, but time, as it has a habit of doing, slipped away.

East: Bold move there, South!

To add to its improbability, our game has followed directly on the heels of an erudite three-hour ‘rave’ by legendary Indigenous historian and activist Gary Foley, in the very gallery where Rules of Play will take place. Foley opened with a quote, ‘the past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down’ and indeed his own lived memory is one painfully elided by official histories. ⁴ To remember what came before is no straightforward act of recall but a generative exercise in (re)construction. There is resonance here with the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer, as cited by design philosopher Tony Fry in Design as Politics: ‘memory must be formed … One has memory for some things and not for others’. ⁵ To this basic formulation Fry adds, ‘there is no Sustainment without memory’, arguing that ‘in the bleakness of ‘the structurally unsustainable present’ it is crucial to develop ‘another way’ and to defend a memory of an otherwise’. ⁶ This puts remembering – of a particular ‘otherwise’ kind – at the forefront of future-making; and learning how to do it will require imagination and new value judgements, tactical skill and a recognition of the limits of one’s own knowledge.

South: so that means, we’re projecting into the future, and going, I’m confident, especially when you call out Spades, of having the highest cards.

The online introduction to Rules of Play notes that though establishing frameworks in the present, these artists reach out in a double motion ‘back to what has already happened’ and ‘towards a speculative reimagining of what may yet be possible’. ⁷ Appropriating past practices and reformulating them into new, futuring forms represents a kind of ‘otherwise memory’ that can be found in the work of several artists in this show. For Sarah Rodigari, in Strategies for Leaving and Arriving Home (2011), walking a distance travelled hundreds of times by plane without thinking forced the artist to consider quite literally what she is capable of. Enacting with cheerful unpreparedness the romantic pilgrim of Walden-like hikes through high and low country (but also the manifest experience of those fleeing persecution or unrest, and indeed of anyone needing to cross country before, or perhaps after, the epoch of cars), Rodigari also played the roles of ‘host, facilitator, organiser, caterer, adventure and tour guide’ for those taking up an open invitation to accompany her along the way. While the artist was bounded by her structure and subject to its rules (more or less), participants were free to do as they pleased, shifting the nature of the walk and its parameters, and in a reshuffling of the values of exchange, ultimately engendering change in the artist’s own being. ⁸

West: That worked! That was an idea that worked. Amazing
East: You do what you do, to manipulate the game.

In New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson’s film Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad (2008), shown earlier this year at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the narrator ponders over a perpetual game of cards that ‘in the finite world, no shuffle is fair. The deck is always stacked’. Navigating an advantageous path between the organising principles of economic and political power and everyday survival tactics extending finitude within them might be a question of remembering ahead and understanding what François Jullien calls the ‘potential born of disposition’, a dynamism stemming from the configuration of things that describes one’s ability to best exploit whatever conditions are encountered. ⁹ Playing new kinds of games, with imperfect knowledge and restricted communication, and seeing where they take us, can reveal just how structured our ways of living are by the inbuilt rules and mechanisms of the world-within-a-world that we have created. If those ludic spaces also generate other forms of exchange and understanding, they then offer up possibilities for how we might remake existing organising parameters to our own advantage, in other words extend ‘the time of enabled Sustainment’ which is not fixed in the future but ‘in the past as it passes from the present’. ¹⁰ That is, if we can remember how to get there.

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East: But then, it’s all about the long game, people get an idea of how you play.
North: That’s right, we’re all taking notes. In five years time…
West: No, in ninety years time! I like the idea of preparing for a happy retirement. We can start building some nice, leisurely activities that keep our brains alert.

North: I think I mixed up clubs and spades.
South: it doesn’t matter now. In the context of eternity…

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Land-escapes

Land-escapes: à propos of time, the city and its other
Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe

[First published in Zanny Begg & Lee Stickells (eds.), The Right to the City, 2011, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University]

At one end of a darkened room or corridor is a curious construction attached to the wall and spot lit. The object is the reverse side of a wearable mask/piece of personal architecture, built up from an old stereograph viewer with found materials (timber, urban waste, things picked up in the bush etc.). It affords some protection from the elements – perhaps it has an awning, a small solar panel powers a light, a receptacle catches water – and formally or materially references certain masks held in the collection of the Macleay Museum. The mask could be characterised as anachronistic and tragic, invoking survival and escape as well as resourcefulness and desperation.

The stereograph component (left intact) holds one of a series of black & white stereographic images depicting ‘wilderness’ landscapes in which a small figure can be discerned standing in the receding background, facing the viewer and wearing the very mask the viewer is now looking through. The photographs are all taken on the fringes of the city, in locations such as the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury River. They refer to a collective imaginary that is neither fully past, present or future, in which inhabitants of ‘this place‘ (Sydney) feel – almost – at home amongst tall trees, dense undergrowth and rocky paths. Also evident in the image on inspection are traces of the built environment: defunct or decaying machinery and components of infrastructure (a burnt-out car, the remains of an old gas streetlamp).

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Some weeks ago, Matt Poll, Indigenous Curator at Sydney University’s Macleay Museum, shows us a neatly arranged drawer of stone tools, collected around the Blue Mountains over decades by geologist/lecturer Father Eugene Stockton, and now the subject of a minor scientific scuffle over age and authenticity. Our conversation also takes in the not uncommon disturbance of historical Aboriginal skeletal remains during building excavations for new public works, whose repatriation the Museum then manages. Hanging above the staircase is another quiet reminder that this city’s foundations are lodged uncomfortably in the living ground of its dispossessed other – a huge latex mould (a 1940s Boy Scout badge-earner) of an ancient rock carving, long since asphalted over by Epping Road.

More dubious delights are encountered in the offsite storeroom: elaborate New Ireland masks and a puffer fish helmet from Tarawa island, beads exchanged for country by colonists, and a copper plate proudly declaring ‘this land 22,000 acres was bought by C. Delatore from the chiefs and people’. Back in the public display Matt points out a wrinkling photograph of a bushland scene somewhere in Wentworth Falls, where archaeological sites have shown at least 22,000 years of human occupation, and where we ourselves spent two years evading rising Sydney rents to live amongst the hippies and the ghosts of escaped convicts striking for China, just over the hills …

At the time of writing, we two are literally escaping from the City to the Country, or since we are in Australia, to the Coast (better still, to one on the other side of the continent) – en route to Esperance, WA, via a languorous train journey that cyclone-related track wash-outs stretch out a little longer. A tinny announcement marks the passing of Metropolitan Sydney’s invisible border, as suburban backyards and industrial lots slip past the double-glazed frame before bleeding into project homes, ramshackle tin sheds and eventually the manicured green of the Southern Highlands. Over several days there are incidental stops (demanding contemplative time that is purpose-less or at least less purpose-full) in Adelaide, in the so-called ghost town of Cook at sea in the Nullarbor plain, and in Kalgoorlie, site of Australia’s worst race riots in 1934, where cavernous pressed metal ceilings look down on racks of dusty two dollar shop plastic.

Books stacked in a pile above the fold-out sink in our capsule hotel-sleeper cabin, relative weight balanced by potential usefulness in the development of a new project that has been percolating for several months: Simon Schama, Landscape & Memory (1996), 653 pp., a brick of a book; Flaubert’s 1881 Bouvard et Pécuchet (Gallimard French edition and 1976 English translation); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (the Peebles Classic Library, undated); Griffith Review 27: Food Chain, Autumn 2010, 245 pp. paperback; Tony Fry et al., Metrofitting: Adaptation, the City and Impacts of the Coming Climate, (2009) 49 pp.; Claude Levi Strauss, The Way of the Masks, (1983 translation); Mortality exhibition pamphlet, ACCA, 2010. Of course we need them all, and curse for those left behind.

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ACCONCI [1997]: ‘“Land ho!”: the sailor’s cry of discovery, from high up on the mast, as the ship approaches its goal after a life at sea. This is the beginning of the word “landscape.” In order for discovery to be possible, land has to be considered first as far away: land has to be far off so that it can be seen all at once, as a panorama. Land recedes and becomes “landscape.” “Landscape” equals “land-escape”; the land escapes, out of your reach: the word “landscape” pulls the land away, or pushes you back away from the land.’ ¹

THOREAU [1881]: ‘From the desperate city you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. … It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them. … The New Hollander goes naked with impunity while the European shivers in his clothes.’ ²

LEVI-STRAUSS [1975]: ‘Each type of mask is linked to myths whose objective is to explain its legendary or supernatural origin and to lay the foundation for its role in ritual, in the economy and in the society … “everything seems to come easy to those who have the mask”’. ³

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In employing a kind of ‘shuttling’ between time scales and fictional but still recognisable worlds, the work seeks to confront what theorist Tony Fry has called our innate ‘chronophobia’ – an inability to think much beyond the limited timeframe of our own lives and a key determinant of the ‘defuturing’ urban trajectory now in full swing. It attempts to create space (and time) for participants to rethink who and indeed where they are, on the basis that to remake the city is to remake ourselves. It asks what we, here, could potentially be, in what other ways we could ‘dwell’ (the fantastical as well as the pragmatic), and by implication what the urban infrastructures or built worlds supporting our new, changed selves might look like.

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SACKS [1996]: ‘Now, as I wandered in the cycad forest on Rota, it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or aeons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes.’ ⁴

FRY [2010]: ‘In making ‘our’ world of habitation futural we not only have to create its object-being as a physical and mental reality but equally fabricate another way of becoming. Here then a fundamental fact of design which bleeds into the imperative of forming new imaginaries, visions and processes of realisation. In such a project self-making, the agency of others and world-making cannot be divided.’ ⁵

ACCONCI [1997]: ‘… our projects perform a site, it’s as if we’re trying to coax the project out of the site, as if it’s been there all the time … the project is built within the site, by means of the site – the architecture grows out of the space around it. On the other hand, it’s as if our projects build a scaffolding over the site: it’s this scaffolding that can support another site, either on top of or within the old one – a future city, a city in the air, precisely because it wasn’t there all the time.’ ⁶

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In another room of the Macleay archives lie at rest strange and cumbersome camera equipment and filed stacks of photos reaching back to the early days of the colony, when Sydney was a cluster of huts captured on glass in silver emulsion, when everyone wore hats and horses and trams shuttled busily up George Street, when the edge of town was being carved out of the hostile ground daily. This fragile built history sits awkwardly alongside a collection of early postcards on permanent display, documenting the purportedly ‘disappearing’ way of life of those that occupied this place otherwise for many thousands of years. Outside, in the glinting Broadway traffic and shopping centre melee, to imagine such a city sustaining any view 22,000 years hence does not come easy.

Twice removed, and looking sideways to boot, seems a useful place to acquaint oneself with the death of the city (such as it is), as well as that which came before it; with the city as landscape (constructed, as all landscapes are) and with the land-escape that the myopic city appears to afford. To escape our own diminishing finitude will require something else to be built over and within this artificial home, an architecture of the body which has roots (and sense) all the way down, through time and land that is as much our others’ as it is ours.

If time permits there may in fact be three or four different masks/viewing devices on display in the gallery. There is further potential to take the objects to nearby outdoor locations as a one-off public event, with passers-by invited to view these ‘otherwise’ images through the masks, framed by the city street.

IMAGE CREDIT
found postcard, Nellie’s Glen. Collection the authors.

Futuring Sydney Otherwise

(Par-re-buga or Pa-rai-bu-gah or Par-ri-beu-go – Tomorrow) ¹

by Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe

[Essay originally commissioned for the NIEA hothouse and published in HotHouse Report to the City, 2010, (eds.) Jill Bennett and Felicity Fenner, NIEA, UNSW, Sydney; also an extension of a presentation delivered at theHothouse Symposium, Sydney Opera House, on 27 July, 2010.]

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This paper is a response and challenge to the proposed future of Sydney mapped out in Sustainable Sydney 2030: The Vision. It puts forward a perspective on more dynamic and critically informed approaches we might take to city space and public art, based on our practice working between the fields of art, design, education, philosophy, history and science. Reflections on our past projects, each an experiment in testing the edges of what a future, futuring²city might look like, are presented alongside an elaboration of ’5 Redirections’ extending the ’5 Big Moves’ structuring the City’s The Vision document. The redirections we propose are:

1. The City That Thinks-In-Time
2. A City That Can Feed Itself
3. The City Becomes Hyper-Mobile
4. A New Quality-Based Economy
5. The City Able To Reflect and Adapt

These Redirections contain within them several smaller propositions, prompts for the kinds of ‘micro-change’ enacted in everyday life – and ‘networked’ to facilitate broader shifts – that the National Institute for Experimental Art (NIEA) identifies as key to developing the curation or ‘care of spaces’ as a form of civic responsibility and transformative agency. Such moves could be made by a new kind of ‘public artist’ working in relation to cities and shared spaces within them, opening up micro-spaces (both physical and social) that allow other ways of being and doing to be imagined, encountered, absorbed into everyday life, and ultimately informing structural re-makings of the city.

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1. THE CITY THAT THINKS-IN-TIME:

‘That event of time which is our lifetime gives us a totally inappropriate measure of worldly things in the medium of time. As a result, we human beings are extraordinarily bad at seeing things in time.’³

And so, to unpack the concept of the sustainable in relation to time, to the city, to design and to creative practice. The Vision takes as its reference the standard Brundtland definition of sustainability, which speaks of intra and inter-generational equity, precaution and conservation of diversity.⁴This approach fails to account for the question of time and human-centredness, which is key to understanding sustainability as rather an ongoing process of securing viable human futures. Such top-down definitions also elide the more politically uncomfortable but necessary task of identifying those socially and culturally embedded practices that essentially act to take away futures (i.e. maintaining the unsustainable trajectory of the status quo, in other words sustaining the unsustainable), and redirecting them towards establishing the rise and dominance of what we might call ‘agents of futuring’.⁵ Given the rapidly deteriorating crises of the many interconnected ecologies on which we depend, what is needed if we are to succeed in securing ourselves more time, or less finitude, is fundamental change in how we ‘think and act in the way we make our world and as we impose it on the world in general’. Considered as ‘to be, we have to be another way’, this is clearly a much larger and more confronting project than attempting to satisfy a diversity of (relatively) short-term needs, or simply adding ‘sustainability’ to the current economic paradigm of perpetual growth.⁶

‘As the future must be left open, our histories should act more like ceaseless iterations rather than authoritative narratives. We should teach history from the perspective of a future that can sustain us; and although we don’t know what that future looks like, we can continually propose new experiments in how we create future from the past.’⁷

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gu-ru-gal: A long time back
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To begin, we might remind ourselves that the place we now call Sydney was once thought and lived in ways that would seem alien, even impossible to its present-day inhabitants – ways that, with some circumspection, we could call sustained, sustain-able, in a responsive and highly sophisticated dialogue with the land and the interconnected ecologies that sustain human life on it. This memory of course brings with it a rupture, concentrated around a day, 222 years before this one, when macro change sailed into the city’s famous serpentine harbour, and in creating something (a little European colony balanced precariously on the edge of sustainment), destroyed something else (the livelihood and wellbeing, and indeed languages, of one of the oldest human civilisations on earth) – along with the very things that sustained both populations, including an ancient freshwater stream which now runs silent and forgotten beneath the CBD asphalt. That moment of violent upheaval and displacement (its effects still ongoing and contested) creates the conditions that at a fundamental level shape how we live in and occupy this place today.

We chose to start our Hothouse Symposium presentation here because invoking, enacting and interrogating a multiplicity of possible ways of being is an underlying thread of the work we do together, and a process that must happen on a much larger scale if we are to become a city with a future. Our disposition is one of  ‘shuttling’⁸ – across time, culture and place – in pursuit of real and imagined points of intermingling, of exchange, of unexpected knowledge transfer and of generative tension or conversation.

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Ihe-bar-na: The present
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Gwago Patabȧgun – we will eat presently, 2010, MCA, Sydney

Forty-nine days ago, we two could be seen pushing a shanty-town-style food cart and native beehive past the Sydney Opera House, along the once-embattled promenade of east Circular Quay, past the ferry commuter and didgeridoo throngs. It came to rest and opened for business on the lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, once the Maritime Services Board office, or where even earlier sat the Commissariat Store protecting the fledgling colony’s necessary provisions, or where earlier still amongst the trees and kangaroo grass there was an unlikely dance amongst strangers. ⁹

Its windows unfolded, solar panels having soaked up the sun and paper lanterns aglow, passers-by were able to stop for free, freshly-cooked pikelets with native sugarbag honey, to the sounds of tiny native bees collecting nectar from nearby poppies and jacaranda. Some arrived prepared, bearing their own small plate as instructed by the artists. At certain times, louder conversations filled the space, with guests at a series of public picnic-discussions sharing other ways this place could be known: by the gleaning practices of hungry Europeans to whom the bush became in hard times a ‘supplementary larder’, by public housing tenants who lived up in the Rocks in the turbulent 1970s, by the futuring practices that could take place here in a city able to sustain itself beyond the next 20, 50, 200 years, and by broader conceptions of time that account for the vast forest valley stretching out 15,000 years ago into today’s deep harbour, when arctic ice kept sea levels 146 metres lower. All this as mouths puckered at the unfamiliar taste of the honey that stretching far beyond memory and up until 1810 when the first European beehives arrived at the nearby Governor’s residence, was the honey of this place.

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2. A CITY THAT CAN FEED ITSELF

The city cannot hope to be able to sustain change without the ability to feed itself outside of globalised food systems that are inherently inequitable, exponentially resource intensive and unsustain-able given the impending effects of peak oil and climate change. For the first time in history, more people now live in urban than rural areas, while cities keep expanding and eating up surrounding arable land that might previously have provided food. In present-day Sydney, the dominant modes of what we eat, where and how that food is produced are essentially defuturing (e.g. industrial agriculture displaces biodiversity over huge tracts of land and relies on petrochemical-based pesticides, our food is often heavily processed and packaged, travelling vast distances to get to our plate). Moreover, if the food pipeline was suddenly cut off, the future of the city would be very short. So to be a sustaining city, Sydney needs to fundamentally re-think where, how readily and by whose efforts its food can be grown.

At a micro scale, our everyday practices both contribute to and are a product of this bigger picture. Food has become ‘dematerialised’ in that we largely have no direct involvement in how it comes to be, in the way that it is. However alternative narratives of food and super-local food production are largely left out of The Vision – an odd oversight considering how much emphasis is given to ‘green space’, which is arguably little more than an urbancentric romantic ideal of sustainability/environment.¹⁰

Many of our projects are attempts to envision rematerialised ways of relating to, acquiring and eating food in this city, by no means an easy or straightforward task. Most recently, Make-do Garden City was an exercise in both thinking-in-time and futuring food, experimenting with the limitations of a single micro-institution’s capacity to feed its staff and neighbours. Elsewhere, these investigations led to us writing and twice leading a new core subject (‘Eating the City’) at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, where third year design students are asked to develop integrated design interventions that enable ‘futuring’ behaviours for specific communities around the everyday activities of producing, preparing or eating food in urban Sydney.

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Brānyé – Yesterday
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Make-do Garden City, 2010, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney

Make-do Garden City ran for 6 weeks, a long time to keep an edible plot growing and expanding inside the gallery – requiring much watchful tending and watering to make sure this impossible experiment in urban, indoor micro-farming would survive the duration. As the ebb and flow of pedestrians on Hay Street passed by our window, many would pause on their way to work, market, shopping or other daily city routines, pressing their face to the window to inspect, point and guess at the role of this little shopfront vegetable patch. Some of the tide would wash up inside and share their stories and our tea, and, if they came at the right time, take home cuttings of familiar plants with several names or a hand-made rice paper envelope of seeds, stamped with a woodblock image of Huang Zhouxing’s 1674 literary creation, the original ‘make-do garden’.

The free-ranging conversations we have in our own temporary garden hover around those of this ancient literary tradition, interpreted by Stan Fung as not just idealised places that ‘guide our efforts towards a better future beyond our concrete and less-then-perfect world’ but rather constructions of a complex to-and-fro space of historical thinking. Stan, who brings us regular gifts of yum cha treats, calls this conceptual movement a kind of ‘shuttling’, an idea we piece together with Tony Fry’s notion of the unfolding Sustainment to describe our own active disposition towards and across lived realities and possible future worlds.

Looping back, we recover other productive gardens grown wild and shadowy – those on the long-gone edges of Sydney that were managed and harvested by Chinese market gardeners who spent market nights in the boarding houses or ‘rookeries’ once filling the winding lanes around the gallery. From this rich humus sprout others recounted by visitors – one says our accumulation of objects recalls his grandfather’s chaotic balcony in Hong Kong, another proudly shows us a plastic folder showcasing his rooftop wetland in St. Peters.

The space we create here is restless in a literal sense too, animated by our presence as gardeners, hosts, interior designers, amateur historians, and artist-workers – building ‘living’ assemblages in the ‘Make Garden’ mobile workshop in response to exchanges we’ve had in the ‘Do Garden’. New constructions find their way onto the walls or the street outside, objects and furniture appear and are shuffled around to create different spatial and social interactions; over a few days a seed exchange takes shape, towards the end those sprouted into seedlings are distributed into homes across Sydney from an offering on the front step.

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3. THE CITY BECOMES HYPER-MOBILE

Urban transport is a major area for redirection and futuring, but dealing simply with congestion, parking strategies and integration does not address the root of the problem in relation to cars and petrol and the reasons we move from place to place across the city. We might be better served by encouraging multiple movements within small distances to get the things we need. Corresponding to this, architecture and services should move and adapt as needed throughout the city too, which would mean things getting lighter, more flexible and collapsible, and also more shared – creating spaces that sidestep the distinction between the commodification of space (private) and the possibilities available in common spaces (public).

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Ngíri wȧribaou – I will carry it away with me
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Open Office for an Editorial Committee, 2007, Civic Park, Newcastle

One of our first collaborative projects in this vein was Open Office for an Editorial Committee, a four-day nomadic, open-air magazine production office produced for the 2007 National Young Writers’ Festival in Newcastle. Staffed by an editorial team that included curious passers-by, the dematerialised ‘office’ was an experiment in new forms of social interaction and in making do with less (only so much could be carried; powerpoints were in short supply), eliminating that part our workplace responsible for most of its resource consumption – the building itself. Each morning the office set up shop in a local park, assembled from a collection of modified everyday objects of mobility (suitcases, a portable BBQ, laundry trolleys etc.), and shifting configuration and function in response to weather patterns, sprinklers being turned on, or the inclinations of its users – eventually producing a finished publication and converting into a distribution stall at the festival’s zine fair.

As designed artefact, Open Office put forward a proposition for unexpected and lighter ways of using our urban public spaces, enabling these practices within a real-time ‘scenario of design’. Fry describes scenarios of design as ‘an exploration of how design could be other than it is’, able to open up debate on ‘objects of common and critical focus’ and to provide a space in which ‘ideas can be given a concrete form and dialogues or narratives of change can be rehearsed in ways that enable participants to re-educate themselves via critical confrontations with things as they are versus how they could be’.¹¹Â  Such performative, exploratory practices (the terrain of artists as much as designers or planners) can be a platform from which to envision other ways of being and enact them in the present, as ‘micro-changed’ urban landscapes with futures.

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4. A NEW QUALITY-BASED ECONOMY

‘A new economic and industrial ethos has to arrive wherein quality displaces quantity. As said, the mantra of continual economic growth within a finite system is hyper-myopic. What has to be prompted is a slow down of the productivism that has driven the relation to the material world from humanity’s inception. Clearly, this is an enormous challenge, but there is no choice but to rise to it.’¹²

The linked imperative of making things oneself and caring for things is another thematic omission in The Vision document. Two of its ‘10 Strategic Directions’ do mention the potential of culture, creativity and economies: Direction 6 (Vibrant Local Communities and Economies) and Direction 7 (A Cultural and Creative City). Unfortunately the objectives listed under each of these Directions fall far short of establishing an adequate sustainable framework of the kinds we have discussed above, concentrating on mapping and signposting cultural capital according to existing patterns of behaviour. In other words, these Directions arguably sustain the unsustainable through a commodification/(conspicuous) consumption of culture. Many of these objectives feed into the same myopic principle of continual economic growth that inhibits a truly sustainable vision to emerge.

To confront this, a shift needs to be made towards what Fry and others have called an economy of quality, which would entail the revaluing of a ‘new craft ethos’ and transition from an emphasis on cultural consumption to cultural production. Ezio Manzini has indeed argued that transitioning toward something like a condition of sustainment we would require the development of cultures that sustain practices of sophisticated material understanding.¹³ Valuing the work of someone who does what they do very well and forming a new economy around those that make, have (a) craft and have knowledge would be a more sustain-able system of exchange. Firstly by distributing agency and abilities to sustain through individual citizens, secondly by generating self-sustaining networks of these individuals, and finally by reducing the throughput of materials as quality things tend to engender care, i.e. remain in use for longer, become ritualised, be repaired, maintained and adapted over time.

The creative fields of practice (art and design, but also cooking, gardening, farming and other skilled areas of craft) are well positioned here to drive innovation around ‘processes of ‘reversed development’’, reinventing and reframing past practices, materials and skills to move forward in new ways based on ‘sustainment’ as a continual ‘transformation of the designing and exercise of knowledge, things, and making practices of the everyday’. There are many instances of initiatives of this kind happening locally already, one example being Spoke + Spool’s ‘Stitch A Ride’ sewing workshops for modifying clothes for urban cycling¹⁴

Gua-go – Soon, or presently
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Making Time, 2010, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth

Thirty-one days hence, we will be on the other side of this continent, in another nation perhaps (Nyoongar country), staging an open kitchen laboratory where members of the public teach us how to bottle, pickle, jam and otherwise preserve foods. With a depression-era travelling preservation kit and collection of Fowlers jars, we will exchange our ideas on futuring or sustainment and colonial histories for the people’s once-valued pickling skills and surplus backyard produce. Moving between gallery and homes and public places of urban food production (both official and unofficial), our journeys and conversations will be traced in spidery lines on the jars slowing filling up for lean times ahead.

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5. THE CITY ABLE TO REFLECT AND ADAPT

‘Confronting this situation is not merely an intellectual challenge, it does not just depend on more research, for it also requires the imagination to see things as they might be otherwise.’[Fry, T. (2004) ‘Urbocentrism to Hyperurbanism’, Design Philosophy Papers Issue 4, 2004 http://www.desphilosophy.com]

‘Nothing from my world requires much in the way of permanent infrastructure – you build and unbuild it as needed. You adapt what’s available to your needs.¹⁵’

For a city to be futuring, it must have multiple futures ready to hand – all of which are responsive and adaptable, and can be submitted to rigorous critical revision and reflection. To map out a singular vision, assuming one can follow a carefully managed plan, is to constrain our capacity to adapt to changing scenarios or to make use of the many diverse perspectives of those with the ability to see things ‘as they might be otherwise’. This means design will have to encompass much more than planning or prefiguration, in conversation with other imaginative and experimental discourses. At present the city offers few mechanisms for generating, discussing, and testing out a multiplicity of futuring ideas and practices. One strategy might be the creation of dedicated critical and imaginative space within the city, urban (re)imagination laboratories where experts and community stakeholders from a range of disciplinary backgrounds can come together to extrapolate, experiment with, and make public the various futuring practices and systems suggested by the Redirections we have proposed.

Such places would be geared towards supporting a new kind of creative practice, one that generates other narratives, possibilities and experiments in imagining and imaging sustainable behaviours at a practical, everyday level – from the scale of the object, the room, the shopfront, or the street, up to the building, the highway, the neighbourhood or village, to the connected global city – which can in turn be made public, as a richer, more provisional and more relational counterpoint to an official position characterised by The Vision. By this we hope to present (confront) the future presently, so that we need not wait 20 years to see if the future unfolds neatly as planned, but rather build the capacity to ‘think in time’ and adapt to circumstances as they change inevitably and unpredictably – and in so doing, help build a change community to lend its voice and energy to the overall project of sustaining Sydney into 2030 and beyond.

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Wala – Then
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Colony Collapse, 2010, Firstdraft, Sydney

Sunday 18th July between 12 – 3pm: Recorded in Firstdraft Gallery’s attendants’ book is a note next to one of the 11 strokes made to count the number of visits that day: ‘6 year old boy on a scooter. Whilst he didn’t quite grasp post-modernism or the intricacies of sustainability, he loved the idea of a portable beehive.’

Colony Collapse was our first project using live sugarbag bees, and carrying the kind of excitement you might get in a museum or a zoo, was an attempt to create visions of sustainment that invade ‘our conversations and dreams’ as Tony Fry called for a decade ago. On opening night a group of onlookers tried luring the bees out into their flowering greenhouse – huddling around the mobile apiary we’ve built in a retro-fitted wheelbarrow and colonial-style meat safe – in the hope of generating enough body heat to raise the temperature above the requisite 18 degrees. The climate remains stubbornly below, both inside and out, and our guests of honour make little use of their custom-built 24-hr access pipe to the sharp Sydney winter and the nectar pleasures of Prince Alfred park under-renovation across the road, apparently unmoved by its hoarding promise of ‘a new liveable green network in the heart of the city’.

Like most of our projects, Colony Collapse was about rethinking the city, materialising scenarios of other ways of being in a certain site. It leapt in a double movement backwards and forwards, between times of potential food scarcity or instability through re-worked objects: a meat safe, jam jars, salvaged timber and a modified map of Sydney, traced by Lieutenant William Dawes in the very first years of the Colony when the threat of collapse by starvation was both possible and imminent, and social and political relations with the natives were more fluid and reciprocal than they later became.¹⁶ Its arrival at the gallery was preceded by a hazardous journey through the city itself, a transient oddity in the everyday rhythms of rush hour. Hovering between the practical and the absurd, the real and the imaginary, this small apparition is intended to infiltrate the present and future lives of the city, prompting conversations and desires about what those futures might look like, and how we might together bring them into being.

IMAGE: Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe, Gwago Patabágun ___ We will eat presently, 2010. Photo by Matt Venables

Travelling to Utopia and back

Utopia
Cao Fei
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
2 May – 27 June, 2009

[Highly Commended for the 2009 Frieze Writers' Prize – judges were James Elkins, Ali Smith & Jennifer Higgie]

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Cao Fei’s Utopia is both a place and a non-place. It is a daydream, a fiction and a collective longing. Then again, it has three rooms, it has light projected on walls and captured on photographic paper, and it can be arrived at through a winding labyrinth of gallery spaces at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. A joint project with Artspace in Auckland, this is the young Chinese artist’s first solo exhibition in Australasia, and it includes work made over a number of years in a variety of media: photography, film and virtual architecture.

Its first sited play between the imaginary and the real is a video projection, Whose Utopia (2006), which takes us into a light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta. Fluorescent tubes, ordinary globes and miniature halogens dance and whirl with mechanical grace, revealing a hundred tiny movements and component parts. Already, these are no longer the inert, mute objects we switch on and off each day. As workers faces and hands begin to appear, sorting and pushing and hovering as machine-like as possible, we can begin to see the outlines of a narrative around these ubiquitous everyday things that travel to us from so many miles away. As Part II begins, a pair of French tourists sits down beside me and offer popcorn; on screen a lilting piano accompanies the workers surreally performing their personal fantasies on the factory floor, individuals now with their own spreading stories and dreams. Amongst rows of mechanical arms and the continuing rhythms of factory life, they twirl in tutus, play rock star guitar and breakdance in slow-motion. With a yearning whistle, Part III brings portraits of the workers back in their monotonous surrounds, still and expressionless, and staring directly back at us over karaoke words to lulling Indie pop that keeps asking elusively ‘and to whom … do you … beautifully … belong’ long after I’ve left the gallery.

Fei is based between Beijing and her hometown of Guangzhou. Part of an emerging generation of artists born after the more dramatic episodes in China’s communist past, her work inspects the disparities and inconsistencies of the new China, as experienced by ordinary citizens inhabiting a rapidly changing industrialised urban landscape. Whose Utopia comes from a broader project shown at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, What are you doing here? (2006), in which Fei spent time interviewing the factory employees, making and distributing a newspaper, Utopia Daily, and organising the creation of theatrical performances and installations by (and for) the workers and their families. Rural immigrants with little control over their lives are thus introduced to a different kind of production, one in which their answers to questions like ‘where is your dream’ and ‘what is your utopia’ can ricochet to places as far flung as here.

In the next room, a series of large photographs, UN-Cosplayers (2006), depict figures dressed in the outlandish costumes of fictional characters from pop-culture, embedded (or abandoned) in the stage set of ‘ordinary’ street life. As with her 2004 film COSplayers, this series draws on the contemporary phenomena of cosplay (role-playing in costume) as a form of reimagining both individual identity and the often dehumanised environments we inhabit. In this instance the ‘players’ are older Beijing residents, and the scenes they animate have an eerie quietness – traditional hutong buildings have been reduced to rubble or piled with garbage, empty swathes of road stretch out beneath high-rises. In front, hybrid superheroes pose theatrically with borrowed props (a light-sabre, a laser blaster, a pick-axe), sometimes leaping on rooves or crouching through their built surroundings as though in a video game. Spiderman pops up again and again; in one photograph meeting himself in the way that new players in Second Life must use a standard ‘avatar’ (a fantasy self) also worn by others. In Housebreaker (2006), a Star Wars stormtrooper in electric blue bodysuit wields a shovel before a handful of bemused bystanders, one pauses his bicycle, another looks up from his newspaper; a third turns out to be the unidentified character from a different photograph, his shiny yellow suit and cap recalling some kind of comic wise-man from Monkey Magic. These images are saturated with colour, poised at a moment of stilled tension between crushing reality and a craving for transcendence that is itself pilfered and re-made from imported consumerist visual culture.

From this fractured fantasy of Beijing, the final place I am transported to is, quite naturally, the virtual world of Second Life – the digital heartland of dreams and desire – where Fei has constructed an entire metropolis on the Creative Commons island of Kula under her avatar ‘China Tracy’. RMB City (2008) is encountered here in ‘real space’ as a fly-through video swooping and diving on a rollercoaster tour of the heaving city amidst remodelled icons of Chinese culture and urban life. A huge bicycle wheel spins industriously, factory chimneys pump out flames, flying commuter trains zoom past, and a panda and the new CCTV headquarters swing off either end of a floating crane. Tiananmen square is a leisurely swimming pool, vehicles disappear into and out of tunnels, but there is a curious absence of people. Though wild and fantastical, the experience explodes with physical, felt fiction in every direction, a tumbling sensation akin to my own half-remembered dreams of flying over water. I want to ask, ‘how does this world work?’ ‘Who lives here?’ ‘Is it better than ours?’ ‘what kind of futures are we dreaming of?”.

On my way out towards mangrove-scented air, I pass the words ‘my future is not a dream’ flickering on the wall in the first room. Utopia is always a dream, but futures must eventually be lived. Circling this imaginary territory to re-inscribe the complexities of human desire onto the socio-political (and architectural) landscapes we occupy from Guangzhou to Brisbane, Fei opens up new ways we might conceptualise and orient our potential shared futures. How we get there is another story.

Image credit: Cao Fei, Housebreaker, 2006. Image from www.caofei.com

Package Tour

An account of the topographical features and earthly delights of Arcadia

Journey to Arcadia, nsw
Sean Rafferty
26 February – 13 March 2010
No Frills* Artist Run Initiative, Brisbane

[First published in 2010 as catalogue essay for Journey to Arcadia, nsw, No Frills]

Arriving at Port Jackson in 1788, it was reported that ‘every man stepped from the boat into a wood’, shortly after, ‘the woods were opened up and ground cleared, the various encampments were extended, and all wore the appearance of regularity’.¹ Clearings created vistas, providing a perfect view of this (first) Arcadia which neatly excised any trace of colonial violence. Not so many years later, the encampments continue their westward lurch, bringing the gleam of new frontiers and an appearance equally deceptive to willing eyes. This is where Sydney artist Sean Rafferty finds fertile ground, attempting to describe the landscape as have so many Australian artists before, while taking pains to remind audiences that any view is a product of where, when and how one is looking.

What we are looking at in Journey to Arcadia, nsw (2009) is an ordinary highway cutting its way through the rolling hills and verdant orchards of Country Australia, a single homestead peeping out from behind the foliage, local produce for sale by the roadside. Of course we are looking through a gilded frame, itself only visible through a peephole in a wall, bordered by a decorative fruit box cut-out, which is both an unusual manner of viewing a painting and an excellent place to set off.

This is a journey that takes in several Arcadias, crossing continents and times as well as the landscapes of memory and desire. The nearest to us is a village on the outskirts of Sydney, one of many peripheral towns one imagines named for its resemblance (real or desired) to a notional idyllic Arcadia. A place with thriving commercial interests in stables, ‘pet nannies’ and fruit produce,² one can also find here gambolling white horses and quaint hand-painted signs – as did Rafferty on a recent road trip – but then, perhaps it depends on what you’re looking for.

Passing through curtains, perhaps pulling over with a mind to pick up some stone fruit, we’ll enter this charming scene stage left, painted in flat, bright colours onto cardboard silhouettes receding as in a children’s pop-up book; from this angle we can peer under and across its cardboard plains and timber scaffold (the cheap utilitarian materials of the fruit and veg industry), as well as back towards the original viewing frame. In the scene itself, you might now begin to notice small details not visible to one standing front on: a southern cross scrawled on the highway sound barrier, fast food signs, an advertisement for ‘new’ land available from Homeland, and a swathe of monotonous housing projects tucked quietly behind a hill. These are the same flat roofs and squat, generic bungalows that make regular cameos in Rafferty’s work, from his Transitory Projects suitcase series (2006) to more recent sun-bleached cardboard suburbia-scapes, harbingers of the tension between a home of one’s own and the grim, potentially threatening, reality of urban sprawl.

Arcadia, the faraway place (there are more than one of these too), has always contained both the ‘shaggy and smooth; dark and light’. ³ The original Arcadia of Greek mythology was brutal, harsh and wild, populated by bestial gods and noble savages. By the time of Virgil it had come to be viewed as a utopia of leisurely pastoral abundance, where simple shepherds relaxed under the benign outer reach of the city-state (according with perceptions of the actual mountainous province of Arcadia in Greece). Both of these are landscapes of the urban imagination, useful devices for constructing and approaching a world beyond the one we inhabit from day-to-day.

Here in Oz, the Land has been imagined along both extremes: as a tough, heroic wilderness and a rustic pasture of milk and new beginnings, a home-land by adoption or conquest rather than birthright. Films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock reveal an almost clichéd anxiety towards our uncleared terrain, a kind of primal innocence which has not yet been clothed in the appearance of regularity or (sub)urban habitation. Conceptions of place are also bound up with national identity, resplendent against a backdrop of abundant produce coaxed from a hostile earth.

Behind such colourful projections sit a more narrowly pragmatic view of land as commodity, something that rolls off the factory line in parcels to be purchased at the next exit. As is literally the case in Rafferty’s fictional Arcadia, nsw, landscape in this scenario is reduced to a flimsy prop, disposable backing for a sales pitch that can be disassembled and remade to suit the requirements of the day. Although we aren’t in a showroom just now, and these flattened cardboard hills are more akin to a theatre set than the ‘standees’ (3D advertisements for upcoming features in the cinema foyer) that have informed much of Rafferty’s past work, from The Spectacle (2006) to the Projection series (2006 – 07). As with many of these earlier projects, it is the ‘emergence of a temporary theatrical space in the landscape’⁴ that fascinates the artist; what happens in this place of patently illusory experience and what insights might be gained from seeing ourselves at one remove, acting or simply standing awkwardly inside them.

Before breaking for refreshments, a brief detour: consider another type of topia linked to an export from ancient Greece: the secluded central courtyard or peristyle in Pompeian homes, lifted from the Greek town house. Limited in size by the high cost of city land, its view could be extended by painting garden scenes on the walls, even ‘complete landscapes with mountains and the sea in the background’. What’s more, windows ‘revealing beautiful scenery beyond’ were often painted on the interiors of the mostly dark surrounding rooms. ⁵ This is landscape as theatrical domestic space, fixed and airbrushed to locate the home in a setting more ‘natural’ and sublime than that which sits outside; and a rudimentary precursor to the illuminated boxes that increasingly mediate our relationships with the world. The ultimate integration of the screen into everyday life, the dedicated home theatre, is a central preoccupation for Rafferty and a symbol of our growing separation from where we actually are (what we might see through the ‘real’ window), permeating both the structures he builds and the way audiences use them. ⁶

Returning to our stage-lit aspirational heartland there is a palpable sense of promise; a wistful, almost painful desire for things to be easy and nice like they are in the pictures. The traces of messy and real human habitation that creep in at the edges seem, nonetheless, to bring a note of cheeky optimism, even as they disclose the absurdity of our relationship to land and country. What Rafferty gives us to take home is the thrill of going backstage, of noticing what falls outside the frame through repositioning ourselves in relation to the landscape. We’re still not in the landscape (otherwise we’d call it something else), but perhaps we’re on our way.

IMAGE CREDIT

Sean Rafferty, Journey to arcadia, nsw, 2009

Translations and myth-conceptions

avoiding myth and message: Australian artists and the literary world
7 April – 12 July 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

[Produced as part of the Eat Your Words writing mentorship program. First published in October 2009 in Artworker Issue 4 Special Edition: Writing for Art. Reproduced courtesy of Artworkers Alliance.]

Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn’t much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso. ¹

We might imagine that language is something solid, fixed, dependable even, when in fact it is rather slippery, and at any time can be disassembled and remade in ways that subtly or dramatically alter how we see and inhabit the world. Language is a structuring force as well as a destabilising one; it declaims: here, there is a beginning and an end, a right way of looking, a story worth telling.

avoiding myth and message: Australian artists and the literary world, a collections-based exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), traces a lineage of artists who have broken down the constituent parts of language – word-shapes, the typed page, the book, the sounds of speech – and reconstructed them as poetic devices for reimagining or making sense of their surroundings. Alongside these more concrete intersections between art and ‘the literary world’, it also features the work of artists who have cast sidelong glances at literature, poets who have crept up towards the materiality of visual arts, and the many gradations of porosity and overlap in between. Located in a distinctly Australian context, these diverse encounters appear in the form of artists’ books, loose pages, videos, drawings, posters, screen-printed telegrams, assemblages and floating text.

LETS WALK A SKY TOGETHER STOP
AND HAVE SILENT WORDS STOP
SOMETIME SOON STOP

(TELEPOEM 1969) “HEIDE” ²

Somewhere between Robert MacPherson’s folios of literary instructions and Ruark Lewis’s pristine renderings of fragmented sounds from overheard conversations, I am struck by the sheer weight of the words, of layers upon layers of voices demanding pause. This is an unusual exhibition that traverses much time, space and subject matter, speaking in a variety of tongues that include the unique (though under-studied) language of word-image combinations. As such it requires a kind of translation which is immersive and intuitive, and in attempting to process the whole I find myself drawn to specific, rather quiet works, such as Tim Johnson’s silvery, paint-weathered Poem (1977) – ‘At the start I begin … when all eroded earth has been surrounded / tropical mountains tropical monoliths / endless sea of calm / glimmering haze golden age / how can you tell anyone this…’.

Disclosing the instability and transformative potential of language is one of the key ways this exhibition works upon its audience, and is a potent and empowering statement for any exhibition to make. It acts in two other notable ways: encouraging us to see value and poetry in the everyday; and telling an art-historical story about the linkages between art and text in Australia’s cultural past, as yet not fully recognised or documented. This latter is the intent most fully articulated in the exhibition’s neat and comprehensive catalogue text and, as the curator Glenn Barkley offers, it is a story told here only in part, which by necessary omission asks for a fuller telling by another not restricted to the collection of a single institution. ³

All the burnt places
hang out
through the town

& tell the poets
meet in them
Everyone

is discovering
art is made
from abandoned things. ⁴

The (art-historical) story

Nonetheless, the exhibition does a good job of reasserting the role and breadth of local artist/writer collaborations and influences. Pivotal Sydney artist-run spaces from the 1970s, Inhibodress and the Tin Sheds, are revived here in a selection of important works that include poem paintings by Tim Johnson; a video by Tim Burns called Ask me anything about John Forbes (in which the poet was locked in a room and spoke with the audience via a TV); and Mike Parr’s Black Box of Word Situations (1971-91), featuring countless sheets of typed letterforms using various function keys on the typewriter, and amongst other things, confirmation letters from participants asked to destroy a poem at an appointed hour – the whole mass occupying almost an entire room. Seeing these antiquated pages (reproduced here in colour photocopies) brings to mind similar typed works by Simryn Gill, shown on this same floor only days earlier, in which the tight little letters seemed to dance too, ‘each rifleshot hammerstroke another notch / in the silence’. ⁵

Ephemera and small-press publications from this period like Magic Sam, platforms for writers to intermingle with artists, also act as an obvious historical counterpoint to contemporary zine-makers like Vanessa Berry (whose twelve-year back catalogue has been reprinted for the show). Additionally, some older text-based works – mostly poems (concrete or otherwise) by Rudi Krausman, John Forbes and others – have been newly translated here into vinyl lettering on the wall or floor.

Remaking language

Turning to those works that deliberately break down and reconstitute language, Sandra Selig’s surface of change (2007), literally slices voids into the pages of children’s science books to construct semi-‘found’ poetry from the fragments left behind – ‘your eyes act like you were real’ poised beneath a grainy image of a hand-held lens refracting light. A similar unhinging of (sensible) words can be found in the work of concrete poet ∏.O, who turns Ezra Pound’s The Cantos into unrecognisable sounds mouthed on video and tumbling across the wall in iz az ez oz (2008). In the catalogue text, Barkley draws a relationship between this work and that of poet John Tranter and artist Rosalie Gascoigne, positing that all three are ‘trying to find a new way to interpret the Australian landscape by fusing native and introduced sounds and textures’. ⁶

whitefella
housefella
strongfella
brick

blackfella
campfella
housefella
sick

blackfella
diefella
whitefella
trick ⁷

This process of (mis)using language to make sense of and come to terms with one’s place runs as an undercurrent through the exhibition – which itself acknowledges where it is, in space as well as time. Gordon Bennett’s Untitled (1989), a play on word and image (dismay, displace, disperse…) overlays critical resistance to European invasion onto the actual historical site, the nearby window directly overlooking the site of Governor Phillip’s first steps on contested land. Tucked away to the side of this same window is a lesser-known stanza of Slessor’s Five Bells, through which one can see the harbour and the Opera House (with its own high-profile artist/poet collaboration inside, John Olsen’s 1973 mural Salute to Five Bells). Its spidery words, ‘Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face / In agonies of speech on speechless panes? / Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!’, carrying particular resonance in light of both Bennett’s work, and that of Vernon Ah Kee opposite, whose vinyl cut text many lies (2004) and video whitefellanormal (2004) both grapple with and undermine the colonising force of language. These, and even Patrick Hartigan’s sound piece installed in the gallery toilets, Sounds 1–6 (1. Writing a word using Letraset; 2. Sharpening my pencil; 3. Writing numbers 1–10 using a graphite pencil; 4. Notes on my ruler; 5. Tearing sheets of A4 paper from top to bottom, slowly; 6. Tying my shoelaces) (2006), seem to reach out and grasp language as it is used from day to day, unpack it and remould it on-site.

Poetry in the infra-ordinary

So
we attach this worded regard
to an instant. ⁸

The artists whose work lingers most when I step outside the gallery into the glinting harbour light are those that recast the mundane stuff of the everyday as richly poetic material. Patrick Hartigan’s pseudo-scientific observation of his neighbour, My Neighbour Is a Painter (2006–07) is a curiously engaging work presented across multiple media – found objects in a cabinet (‘evidence’), grainy video footage of the neighbour in question, or rather his shuffling reflection in a window, and a series of pages pinned to the wall that outline ‘episodically’ daily life in the apartment building, centred on the neighbour but straying into more general philosophical enquiry, combining something of the field note and short fiction. Perhaps the story here works in part because it adopts a format that is the most recognisable and familiar of languages, a written text with beginning and end, not to mention narrative, characters and dramatic action. I wonder whether words, those which demand the viewer spend enough time to follow a passage from beginning to end, are things people have more confidence in interpreting as meaningful communication, the safely glowing beacons of myth and message.

How can we give an account of what goes on every day and goes on going on from day to day – the banal, everyday, obvious, common, ordinary, infra-ordinary, habitual background noise of living? How do we approach it, how can we describe it? … What we must question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, our timetables, our rhythms of living. ⁹

Robert MacPherson’s Mayfair Bar (1983), an obsessive recounting of a lunchtime sandwich routine is another work that both sits within a broader interrogation of the act of painting and suggests the richness and beauty in more marginal, even faintly autistic ways of reading daily life as colour, placement and pattern. Such evocative readings are also to be found in Bicycle (1992), Noel McKenna’s unassuming row of ceramic tiles on which a poem by David Malouf is written in ink alongside McKenna’s personalised and vaguely illustrative ink wash drawings. There is something here about two distinct poetic and artistic visions of the world combining to make an especially resonant imaginative response to something as ordinary as a bicycle, or if you like, ‘a stranger from the streets / a light-limbed traveller’.

This capacity to read what is ‘utterly ordinary’ in critical and poetic ways, something both artists and writers seem peculiarly adept at, is ultimately what sustains the passage of this exhibition beyond the walls of the gallery and the few hours we might spend with it. Its title is a somewhat ironic nod to conceptualism and the refutation of artifice, of myth-making from nationalism to creative genius, common to many explosive avant-gardes of the 1970s which sought to ‘breach the gap between art and life’ but inevitably perpetuated their own equally precious mythologies and manifestos. ¹⁰ It’s also a line from a poem by John Forbes, ‘a few signs’, which gain their transformative power from the closed loop formed by reader and author, whether in a bedroom or released to intermingle at a particular time and place with other artistic visions on the fourth floor of the MCA.

IMAGE CREDIT

Noel McKenna

Bicycle 1992

6 ceramic tiles

overall 15.2 x 82.5 cm

Image courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney © the artist

Field Work as Sustainment: The Futur(ing) of Art Practice

2. Field Work
Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan
4 – 18 October 2008
Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney

[First published in July 2009 in runway, Issue 14: Futures. Reproduced courtesy of The Invisible Inc.]

Seen at a glance, this rice straw may appear light and insignificant. Hardly anyone would think that it could start a revolution. ¹
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I’m eyeing off another piece of crumbly, caramelised cake laced with public mulberries (part of Working System), still warm from being baked in the oven at the back of this former community hall-turned council-run gallery. Tennis balls thud lazily just outside open glass doors that let in the afternoon sun and a steady stream of more would-be cake-eaters. It is the final day of Lisa Kelly and Dennis Tan’s second collaborative endeavour in the expanded neighbourhood of Newtown-Camperdown, and both mulberries and conversation are in plentiful supply. 2. Field Work is a continuation of their first exhibition project, ² and again the objects they present – homely armchairs, a table covered with official-looking papers and mulberry branches, team flags hung from the ceiling, a line of lemons that include a stray tennis ball – have arrived via a process of curious enquiry into what lies just outside.

Kelly and Tan recast the gallery as an evolving space that generates (and documents) an ongoing dialogue between the artists and the community. Rather than a static receptacle for finished works, it is a platform for contemplation and sometimes tense negotiation of what it means to live within a particular neighbourhood at a particular time. Relational modes of practice are at play in the sharing of food and the productive role given to conversation, with the exhibition unfolding as a series of small gestures, quiet moments and busy experiments.

A more intriguing reading can be found by turning to the project of ‘Sustainment’ ³, at present the domain of design philosophers including Tony Fry, Anne-Marie Willis and Ezio Manzini. Such theorists have recognised emergent creative practices that do not fit within existing delimitations of art and design, and are ‘sustain-able’ in that they enable behaviours and ways of living which are locally specific, less resource-intensive and regenerative of environments and the communities they support. Most recently, in Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Fry argues for the development of a widespread ‘design intelligence’ ⁴ that would deliver ‘the ability to read the qualities of the form and content of the designed environment in which one exists’ as well as ‘the means to make crucial judgements about actions that could increase or decrease futuring potential’. ⁵

Visual artists, especially those who work in an investigative mode like Tan and Kelly, seem peculiarly well-positioned in this regard. In Field Work, the artists unpack their surrounding (designed) world in a variety of rigorous and insightful ways, in conversation with one another, and with reference to their differing positions as local and visitor. For Kelly, whose work often discloses institutional frameworks, this means interrogating the building (its retrofitted hanging hooks abandoned as The Gallery System in favour of dowel on jute straps, Hanging System) and the bureaucracy of the local council (printed correspondence with whom constitutes The_Hall). As in previous projects, Kelly’s interventions mirror the (past) functional identity of this site – its flags, its paperwork, its emphasis on food and sports – considering how the space works, what its parameters are and how it could be stretched, made more elastic and dynamic.

Singapore-based Tan sets about inquiring into his temporary home – meeting the neighbours, talking/collecting/assembling/borrowing. He dismembers the art journal Broadsheet to make expandable paper screens following the pattern of the tennis court fence; upends an oversized council broom with a fluorescent light, later sprouting a head of branches. Objects appear and change and in the final days collapse into specially-made cardboard boxes. In response, the room sheet taped to one wall becomes covered in scrawled revisions that track changes in the naming and reorganisation of the space. This ongoing remaking has resonance with Heidegger’s analysis of phüsis – that all things exist within complex ecologies of exchange and are in a continuous process of becoming – an understanding crucial to sustaining and sustain-able artefacts. ⁶

There are nods to a lineage of conceptual/minimalist sculpture, many objects being material traces of an action or social exchange. Pennants suspended from the ceiling, The journey is the object, were lent by the older men from the bowling club next door, the result of Tan’s efforts to build lines of communication between the gallery’s disparate neighbouring communities, as are the hand-copied lawn bowls rules pinned to one wall – Theory and Practice (The front ditch is the ditch at the end of the green which is directly in front of the player when they stand on the mat). Tan promises a local tennis coach he’ll leave behind Working title: court ribbon, a fading pink ribbon woven through the court nets.

These dialogues are given shape through the artists’ own presence as active and ongoing interlocutors. Working on alternate days, Tan and Kelly intended to ‘shift the space from one of presentation to continuous production’. On my earlier visit, Tan happily became a live catalogue text/tea-pourer, his makeshift cutting mat turned into seating for an afternoon of meandering conversation. In this way transmuted objects facilitate the creation of a space for what Manzini calls contemplative time – ‘doing something (walking, eating, talking with people…) at a slower pace’. ⁷

Manzini writes of the need to envision future ‘scenarios of wellbeing’, locally-specific and regenerative of physical and social common goods. In 2. Field Work, Kelly carries out a tactile exploration of the neighbourhood, researching ‘public fruit’ ⁸ online and by foot and sharing her findings with visitors. Plane tree seeds gathered from nearby Camperdown Park, Planting Planes, are raised in jiffy pots in preparation for future projects ⁹, recalling the grown tree at the centre of 1. The Lively Plane. The recurrence of these slow-moving living components suggest a conception of time at odds with the usual two-week exhibition, the kind of time-frame evoked by Joseph Beuys’ planting of 7000 Oaks decades earlier at Documenta 7. Both Tan and Kelly play with the relationality of things over time and space, the dynamic complexity of interconnected causal relations not yet accounted for in Western rationalist thought, but central to design intelligence and to forming more sustain-able practices and the future scenarios that bring them into being.

Kelly’s work intersects most with the act of creative futuring in Potential__, a neat grid of hand-rolled, unfired clay balls that contain a mix of compost and grain, herb and flower seeds suited to dry conditions … millet, nasturtium, thyme, dill, sunflower. Devised by Japanese farmer and scientist Masanobu Fukuoka (whose tattered manifesto The One-Straw Revolution also appears in the gallery) as a form of non-invasive farming, they suggest ways of engaging with our landscape other than the rationalist planning dominating council planting and modern agriculture. Their reappropriation also illustrates the ability of the artist to find and extract ‘design and sustainment principles’ from historical material and then ‘transpose them into appropriate futuring forms’. ¹⁰

In the fading light, Kelly takes a small girl who likes gardening and a few other stragglers across the road into a fenced-off area of council land, overgrown with weeds and due to be sold off. Together we fling the seedballs into the wilderness and hammer in a bright yellow stake bearing a photocopied chapter from The One-Straw Revolution. This participatory gesture brings into being new ways we might live in our cities, grounded and enacted in the everyday. As my crumbling seedball flies off to places unseen, Field Work invades ‘our conversations and dreams’ ¹¹, envisioning a future where vacant lots are shared micro-farms and (re)valued commons include cooking and eating mulberry cake gleaned from neighbourhood streets.

IMAGE CREDIT

Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan, 2. Field Work 2009, installation view – Photo by the author

Interventions in things as ethics

0

(First Published in NAVA Quarterly, June 2009)

Cameron Tonkinwise once noted with just a little irony that ‘a culture that can, and needs to, have ‘ethics’ as the theme for the issue of a journal for example, is in trouble’. ¹ And yes, it is becoming increasingly evident, in a profoundly unsustainable world defined by short-term gain and long-term ‘defuturing’ ², that we are, indeed, in trouble. How to build pathways out of that trouble, towards sustainable (and ethical) futures, is something that Tonkinwise and other design philosophers have long been discussing in forums such as the online journal Design Philosophy Papers .³ What the above quote suggests is that ethics are embodied in lived experience and not a function of behaviour or rule-following, that to seek their conscious application is proof they are not inherent. As Tonkinwise points out, a growing knowledge of sustainability in our own society has not translated into sustainable ways of doing and being in the world. The problem here is one of embedding a cultural ethos that both produces ethical behaviour and negates the need for it to be taught or more or less superficially espoused.

At the core of this argument is an ethics of things – the idea that designed artefacts and environments are not only symbolic or inert instruments of social meaning, but a constituent part and shaping force of culture itself, that a viable ethos is in fact ‘not only sustained by a material culture, but exists in that materiality’. By beginning to understand how designed things have the capacity to be ‘already ethical’, directing us towards specific ethical behaviours and ways of being, ⁴ we can see all sorts of possibilities for those who engage in the practice of designing (at any level) to generate and sustain a materialised ethos. Interestingly, such an approach towards sustainability goes far beyond eco-impact reductions in how a product is made or used, and, through being embedded in the semi-conscious rituals of everyday material culture (rather than reliant on didactic moralisations), ethics by/in design is literally ‘the only sustainable form of ethics, the only form of ethics that can sustain itself’. ⁵

This theoretical landscape is explored further in Tony Fry’s compact new book, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, which posits ‘sustain-ability’ as an ongoing process of securing qualitative being or viable human futures, requiring fundamental change in how we ‘think and act in the way we make our world and as we impose it on the world in general’. Preferring the term ‘the Sustainment’ to distinguish this larger project from the simplistic environmental and political rhetoric of sustainability, Fry argues for directional change that involves redirecting those practices that act to maintain the unsustainable trajectory of the status quo, and applying these redirected practices towards establishing the rise and dominance of ‘agents of futuring’. ⁶

Since first encountering these ideas through the EcoDesign Foundation, ⁷ we’ve been intrigued by the ways in which redirective practice could be deployed imaginatively and pragmatically in our own cross-disciplinary work. One of our first collaborative projects in this vein was Open Office for an Editorial Committee, a nomadic, open-air magazine production office staged in a park for the 2007 National Young Writers’ Festival. ⁸ Staffed by an editorial team that included curious passers-by, the dematerialised ‘office’ was an experiment in new forms of social interaction and in making do with less (only so much could be carried; powerpoints were in short supply), eliminating that part our workplace responsible for most of its resource consumption: the building itself. Each day the office was assembled from a collection of hybrid, modified objects (suitcases, a BBQ, trolleys etc.), shifting configuration and function in response to weather patterns, sprinklers turning on, or the inclinations of its users.

As designed artefact, Open Office put forward a proposition for unexpected and lighter ways of using our urban public spaces, enabling these practices within a real-time ‘scenario of design’. Fry describes scenarios of design as ‘an exploration of how design could be other than it is’, able to open up debate on ‘objects of common and critical focus’ and to provide a space in which ‘ideas can be given a concrete form and dialogues or narratives of change can be rehearsed in ways that enable participants to re-educate themselves via critical confrontations with things as they are versus how they could be’. ⁹ That is, such performative, exploratory practices (the terrain of artists as much as designers) can be a platform from which to envision alternative, ethical futures and enact them in the present, as materialised ethos, or things with ethics.

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– Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge

IMAGE CREDIT

Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge, Open Office for an Editorial Committee, 2007. Photo by Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge