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Superhappiness and floors, joints and partitions CrONICAL August 24 2006
Discussion between Kit Wise, Catherine Hart, Meredith Turnbull, Ross Moore and committee members David Simpkin, Adrien Allen, Jason Maling, Katie Lee and Harriet Turnbull
AA: I was just saying to Ross before that there is no particular strategic framework behind these sessions. The purpose of them is to create another form of documentation that sits alongside the visual images, as another form of archiving. So, we attempt not to cast judgement on the work – not always successfully! It’s more about getting artists to offer their perspective so that when people look though the program archive in years to come a sense of what the show meant – in terms of the artists wider practice – may come through, perhaps also a retrospective sense of how the specific show related to the program as a whole.
KL: Could you all contextualise yourselves a little bit to start with?
MT: Cat and I had talked about potentially doing something at Victoria Park together, and she decided that she really wanted to work with this space (Conical), and so after a discussion we decided that perhaps we could work together anyway, and that perhaps I could contribute something to her show in some way. We had a number of meetings along the way where we were talked about the impetus behind the show, and a lot of the things that she’d been researching, and artists that she’d been researching, and she leant me a lot of books, and it came about from that really. I read those and looked at a lot of images, and took a lot of notes in our conversations together…
CH: In a way it’s pretty hard to ask someone to write an essay about a work that hasn’t yet been made yet. Adrien and I had a chat about that…
This dialogue really has come out of a past dialogue that started at school (RMIT) really, where Meredith and I studied in an installation art class and we felt that we could converse really easily and fluently together. I feel like that dialogue is sort of rare. So I felt really happy that Meredith could come on board and write something, and sort of solidify something about the work.
MT: And I thought it was interesting that Cat voiced a lot of her ideas to me as she was going through the process of making the work. It made her a lot clearer about what the work was about and what she was hoping to achieve with it, so that was an interesting process to go through with her too.
AA: And what was your involvement with it Katie? You came into this as the representative of Conical…
KL: That started prior to the dialogue between Cat and Meredith. Cat had been talking to me about this particular space in terms of a site-specific relationship to her work, and she had a series of works that she had begun to envisage in this particular site. We began discussing those pretty informally, and when she mentioned the initial idea for this work (walls floors and partitions), I started to get really interested in that particular idea.
At first the idea was specifically to do with the relationship between the enclosure and gallery space, particularly the roof of the gallery. There was almost a series [of works] that existed in Cat’s mind before this work eventuated. The works kind of shifted with our discussions, and this was interesting because the work that is here is almost like the third chapter of other works that didn’t get made, but that had a direct evolution to this particular work. I think that’s also something that’s quite exciting about where Cat will go with future works too, because it’s been something that could have taken a number of forms, and I think it still could take a number of forms. That was one of the things about it that I thought was exciting.
AA: So (Cat) did that make a big difference to the outcome? Having the dialogue with Meredith and Katie?
CH: Well without the relationship to Katie Lee I don’t think the work would have happened to be honest. I’ve been really interested in the space, [Conical] and have been following the dialogue that the gallery has been having, but I really wouldn’t have put an application in to be brutally honest, because I thought it was out of my league. But when Katie Lee said, well, put an application in at some stage, and I was thinking more about next year. But Katie Lee said if you’re up to it pretty soon, and you want a big challenge to do something in the enclosure… then…
KL: There was something about the immediacy of it, because it had come out of a dialogue, it didn’t feel like something that could wait another year. We’d already come through three or four potential projects through conversation, by the time next year came around we could have had a book full of potential works for that space, and it just seemed important to go with that one while it was still fresh, because there was something quite spontaneous about it. And there was something quite nice about the mammoth production that making the work became, and the spontaneity in it as well, that I thought may have got really laboured if we’d left it too long, after a year or so. I just don’t think it would have had the same freshness.
RM: Could I come in from another direction? Because I’m here as a sort of wacky theorist, and I’m also an artist, and also a friend of Kit’s so I must confess that I’ve had no involvement with the project at all, which I’m delighted to say, because I love to encounter things primarily. But I’m just intrigued with the way we’re talking about this space Cat, is that it’s fermented in everyone’s minds as a kind of real space before it was made which bounces off sort of really uncannily with Bachellardean notion of domestic space as already sort of uncanny. It’s as though we all know that space already and all you had to do here was build it for us again, so that we can then sort of enter into it.
So I’m sort of intrigued with this particular work how it seems so mechanical and precise and kind of organised, as a structure it’s sort of obeying the law of suburban domestic architecture, but you’ve pressed this impossible interstitial kind of space into it, in which the body might inhabit in some terribly pressed or impressed kind of way which then becomes a psychological tension or trauma to the unconscious.
And it reminded me very much when I saw it, of Christian Boltanski’s story of when he was a boy and he was hidden under the floor. In fact the whole family was hidden under the floor by his father, to prevent them from being stolen by the Nazi’s, and when they were invited to come back out again, they didn’t want to leave that space. So there is something terribly familiar about that space, and it seems to be circulating here as a sort of narrative.
CH: I think there’s’ an ongoing dialogue with that kind of work in this space (Conical). Like I would say that David [Simpkin] has definitely been addressing (this) with the other spaces that are not so activated. And I mean I created that in there, but at the same time I was referencing David and Katie Lee as well. Like boundaries and barriers. Like psychologically, where are you willing to go? It’s up to you. And just performative spaces and the absence of the body. About the potential to do that.
AA: I’m particularly interested in the diagram here. (Cat) you’ve chosen to use an image that reminded me of an exploded diagram in a car manual, the interesting thing about the exploding diagram is that it gives you a view around corners and offers you sightlines that you would never be able to get in reality. I get a sense of the diagrammatic in this work. And, you’re almost diagramming the whole history of the substrate. What holds us is this psycho-physical idea of the substrate. You know, (Gordon) Matta-Clarke digging down below and getting into the sewer, there’s a whole Bataillean Art History in the substrate. But you’re not really giving us that experience of digging below, it’s almost like a diagram of that history.
RM: That’s what I meant by the uncanny. What’s uncanny for me is that the wood is fresh, the space is fresh, it’s newly built. It’s kind of a modern housing development in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so why then such dark oppressive claustrophobic thoughts immediately associated to that space? It seems to be carrying a terrible latency.
AA: And that sense of a longing for this space (the Gallery space) in that space (the Enclosure),
KW: I really like the reference back to the diagram and the car manual, because for me that makes a link back to a social space. And a diagramming manual is something for everyone in society to understand… how to build a particular wall, and for me that sort of parallels the social nature of this architecture, it’s very much a building that has had a particular history that isn’t necessarily a gallery history. It’s a social value to this building, but equally in the way that this collaboration has been working in terms of networks and a social kind of field, so the object there for me is almost like the nexus of a much wider structure, which is a social structure around it.
AA: A nice way that that has been realised is through the ‘crawlspace’. In American basements, I believe the crawlspace is not underfoot, but is actually at mid level. So you have to crouch down to actually see into that space, but you don’t dig, it’s been elevated, almost a form of illustration.
David Simpkin: I like the locked elevator connotation that’s there. At least pictorially the chasm that’s there and the lift shaft that’s next to it. It’s stuck between floors, it’s locked. It’s the bottom of level thirteen and the top of level twelve, Being John Malkovich.
Certainly once you consider going in there it opens up a whole range of other things. From when you’re in this part of the gallery you see it more pictorially, transfer Kit’s light into the slot that is available.
KL: Harriet and I were talking about the lighting before. In terms of those levels, we are describing there being a top and a bottom and the dark centre…
HT: That was how I read it as well. There’s the light, then there’s the darkness and we were talking about whether that was something you really thought about (Cat) or whether that was part of the lighting limitations.
CH: That was one of my biggest fears, ‘I don’t know what is going to happen to the light’. There was talk about under lighting it. And I realised that this work was really a lot to do with the honesty of the material and the space, so I didn’t want to deny the reality. I wanted to allow it to be what it is, and not intervene.
Which is an interesting contrast to Kit’s work as well. Because his work is so super-saturated with neon. Kit’s screen is so fragile and we walk up to this perspective and you feel if you had too much of a heavy breathing session that you might even bowl it over. And then with my work, it’s so clunky and huge, and there is still a threatening element, but…
RM: What would happen if this whole room though (the enclosure), went outside? Like really really, really outside. Like you encountered it in a park or something, or the edge of a freeway or…
CH. Absolutely. That’s what I’m thinking about. The aperture would be all the way around it then. I’m really interested in that dialogue.
RM: Could you still maintain that sort of fetishistic, psychological reverberation if you have it outside?
CH: I think the dialogue becomes a lot more about, like we were saying before, about the socialist imperative within the work. It would be referencing Conical then. And wherever it goes, I’m so excited by that. I love that reference.
RM: But I think there is sort of a dreadful possibility that your inside space is outside and Kit’s outside space is inside. And that’s also quite psychological. Where does our subjectivity reside? There is this sort of dilemma here. We identify with this sort of megatropolis as this zone of neon desire, where every need is going to be fulfilled, but then there is this lurking sense of what we have of private life and private subjectivity and duality we which we try to maintain exquisitely and hygienically. There is this impasse between these two spaces, which we are sitting in as a panel. It is actually a real impasse between these two zones.
AA: Kit’s work completely erases the substrate. We are left with the residue of the screen only and a failed Utopia and perhaps memories of Le Cobusier and Albert Spier. But what is this thing here, called dystopia? Is Kit suggesting it’s in generic screen culture.
KW: I was interested in the idea of architecture not just being a vehicle upon which one plays, Paris as a city of light. I was interested in going beyond that. And I was interested in a condition where architecture of the city actually is light. A lot of the buildings in Tokyo only exist really 3 or 4 years. They are close to being graphic signifiers if you like, to being absolutely ephemeral that seems like an incredibly accelerated condition. Using Borges and the hyper real, the sort of replacing of one reality with an overlaying fiction.
It seems even further down the track than that, and for me I think there is a really interesting connection in terms of the pressure it places on the surface of architecture. They both seem to be about a particular surface. Here it is about a sort of endless surface of desire, but there it is sort of insubstantial. Here it is incredibly pressurized, it’s like a diamond it is an incredibly weighty and anxious surface, and I really like that intensity.
AA: Kit’s talking about the surface of architecture, to me I get a lot more sense of the ideological… of promise of the city gate that is never really opened. We are left with the screen image. We are left with the desire. People have walked in here and said, ‘Tokyo is not like this’. But Rome’s there too. Is Paris like this? You know, we are still left with the ideological in a sense, or the unfulfilled promise.
KW: I was trying to propose a sort of promise that is absolutely undercut at the same time. The jerky animation, the almost clichéd kitsch references. It’s almost a minimal degree of desire.
AA: I’m not saying that you’re buying into that ideology. I think this work is actually quite illustrative of a dystopic history. Is that how you see it?
KW: I mean I think it is perilously close to being an illustration of this position. And I feel that these animated works go a little further into the discourse than I’m interested in. I suppose I’m trying to think of the city as just a combination of… The city represents society in the wider sense, or the city represents objects in the wider sense. Your idea of the world rather than being about the city per se, I was curious about the state of the world, which is extremely virtual…it’s the world of the Internet, but being able to shift between references, fantasy and the everyday…
RM: Which ties in with Virilio’s of the territorialisation of space, because everything is available at the speed of light.
AA: The third front…
RM: Yeah, so all our desires are going to be met in that medium interface, so we lose that kind of geographical placement. In this kind of cinematic, plasmic kind of orgasm of visualality which we have here, I find myself trying to detect locatable signs by which I can then re-mythologise myself as having a place. I notice the references to star wars, and various kind of iconic, futuristic cinema culture, which builds into the design as sort of a report. Did you do that consciously as a sort of a device, seeding the landscape with a referential memory?
KW: Yes, but it wasn’t an ideal, it was kind of a desire, almost a mundane fantasy. They are cliché’s, they are such dumb references, a bit like Tom and Jerry, some conditions of pop culture are not great art, they are just limited experiences of desire.
CH: They have mass appeal.
DS: It’s the cast that I really find the most interesting. The cast onto the back panels, it provides the alley way, to what’s behind this. And the first thing is that I want to go straight behind the back, and start reading what’s going on. It’s a lovely fatigue. It’s grime. It’s pure grime. We couldn’t animate these walls any better. It’s unintentional, really. 'Cos you’ll be thinking of the walls as always being flat, planar but there’s all these patches in them.
RM: There’s also the way in which the screen becomes the veil for the cultural imaginary because we can’t help but think of Japanese screens and the role that silver screen painting has played in Japanese culture, and that sort of flimsy transient nature of Japanese architecture – of course to cope with earthquakes and so forth – so it’s always been based on that ephemerality, as opposed to your work (Cat), which is sort of locked in.
CH: Yeah, the fragility of Kit’s screen is to me one of the most exciting things, especially when you walk through those gaps in the side and you almost think you could knock it over really easily. Like David was saying, the nuts and bolts of the work, being able to see what’s feeding this, whereas over here, I mean these lights, I don’t actually know how these work, how the city can sustain this, environmentally. You know, looking at Kit’s screen, it’s all there, that’s how is this happening?
KW: You know, it’s interesting because one thing I was trying to do was to avoid it being about Japan, and too Japanese, but really I was just using Japan as an excuse for talking about wider notions of the city. But if we did accept a particular aesthetic, I find it really interesting to think about the work in terms of Japanese architecture, which is so (inaudible) and formal, and has this sort of rigorous minimalist sensibility to it. And then that architecture which is sort of dismantled to be reconfigured, at certain places and certain times. So I would be really curious to sort of dismantle, and rebuild this…
RM: So do we have hidden a sort of asceticism and hedonism here as polar opposites of urban existence?
AA: Well I must say Kit’s work is spatially acute. We had this discussion in the selection meeting about previous shows of yours (Kit) and your awareness of space, and how you would work in this particular gallery. There was some discussion about the fact that maybe it wouldn’t translate so well. But the truncation of the space and the sense of compression, the pushing of that light box down into the space, gives you a feeling of condensing which marries quite well with the imagery I think. Cat’s work also has that sense of compression.
Jason Maling: Has anyone from Japan come over and seen the show?
AA: Yes.
JM: I get a sense of fucked up tourism or something. A kind of neo-techno orientalism or something like that. It really reminds me of looking at late 19th century works and seeing a postcard on the back of the painting. I’m curious about this sort of recontextualising your impression as a tourist and what that means.
KW: As a sort of colonial importer of the exotic, that was my biggest fear of the show. But I’ve tried to use it as a springboard to talking about a wider notion of a particular future condition. William Gibson talks about Japan being the future’s future, which is a beautiful way of putting it. What the future dreams of. Obviously, it’s a kind of excuse, but I agree. I guess this did partly come out of an Australia Council studio residency, so in a sense they have given you money to do that.
JM: But there’s an honesty there as well, that there’s a splendour and a spectacle, that is present.
RM: This idea of neo-orientalism is fascinating isn’t it? But there’s kind of a neo-sublime here as well, there’s a new invention of awe. And in that awe, Kit has to declare himself an outsider to Japanese culture, which is probably an honest statement in it’s own right. Because outsiders aren’t immediately accommodated there, and why should they expect to be? So in a way he’s left with this panorama of neon sites as his only available cultural material with which to play. So there is something about the traveller, and the future traveller, that is travelling at the speed of air travel.
MT: And in a sense if it is the futures’ future, then everyone is an outsider. That no one belongs.
JM: The gentleness of the sound, the bird chirping really struck me.
DS: You wake up in Tokyo and the first thing you hear is the radios going eeeeee. And you go down to the milk bar, and down to the park and you are in a really quiet park.
CH: Also it gives me the sense that it’s all very well – this mega technology, but how does nature fit into this? That mountain becomes a sort of landfill site, and where does nature fit in?
AA: Some viewers to the show seem to have had a desire for the specific, you know a specific representation of Tokyo. I mentioned before about the removal of the substrate, I guess the historical substrate of Tokyo would be firstly post-war depression, then emerging into economic superiority. The whole post-war history of Japan is an immediate reference that many people look for, yet you have cleanly removed that history. If people look for the specific it’s not there, the soundtrack, the cut and pasting, the depthless quality that is here tends to remove you from the specific and take you back to a more generic notion of fantasy.
KL: Except for the screen. You were saying you were really cautious about introducing things you perceived as too Japanese, but a lot of the other imagery is other, ‘any place’ in a way, except for the decision that you’ve made with the screen. What was that about for you?
KW: I originally thought if somebody saw the screen in another context they might not actually think it was Tokyo, and some of the reference to say, 2001 and (inaudible)… references I hope push it over another edge. Interestingly when I’ve shown the light boxes elsewhere people have said they thought it was an inverted image of Melbourne, of people in Sydney that it’s an inverted image of Sydney, which is kind of nice. But I did make a decision quite late in the day, when it got accepted into the Australia Japan year of exchange program to reduce the sources I was using, and focus on what I got from the residency, still trying to leave it with that sort of openness that I was talking about. My excuse being that perhaps Tokyo is just a particularly accelerated condition that we all share.
DS: Is that why you went for the biblical rolling text?
KW: Yeah, that’s Gideon’s bible, not that I’m a religious man at all, but I kind of like the way that Gideon’s bible is something that you encounter when you are travelling that kind of describes the perfect city of a Western notion of a perfect city. Quite a nightmarish scenario really.
DS: What I keep thinking about is seeing a French movie, with Icelandic subtitles. The third language, trying to get hold of us. And I’ve been wishing for that to be bigger and maybe playing off this, I’m just talking about the inevitability of the English language for subtitle for this image.
RM: It plays across the surface of film noir, it’s the dark shadow of the other work, but it might not be fully realised in the sense that it’s not really dark, but that’s because it’s also similacral. We are constantly watching dark shadows on television, we watch hundreds of murders a night and so forth, so everything is already mediated by media, even the dark side. So in a way the possibility of expressing a psychological space in media is traumatised by it’s expansive reach, which relates to your work Cat, because you are locating it as an immediate space, as a phenomenological space…
CH: A real space.
RM: … as an unavoidable space, so I’m really interested in that polarity between the two, for me that polarity expresses the crisis of a contemporary condition. You can’t go with one or the other, we’re actually dealing with both at once. In some ways putting them both in the gallery together exhibits that in an excruciating and fascinating manner.
AA: Kit, you’ve got separate works here making something fragmented yet cohesively whole. Kit in this case, the hierarchies that you set up between different components in your show are sort of levelled out. There are some differences to be sure, but they’re not the same differences that you’ve set up in the past, and in some ways, with Cat’s work present it negates the need to do that because we already have the polarities of a certain condition, existing. Had Cats’ work not been there for example, perhaps the show is a little uniform?
RM: There is a minimalism in both works that I really admire, both artists have pared back.
MT: Absolutely. And know where that point is to stop making, and think that that’s enough. That self censorship in a way. That’s the hardest thing an artist has to do, is know where to end, and that’s what’s’ so successful about these works, there’s nothing there additional, or extra that’s clouding these works, it’s succinct.
KL: There has been some really great behind the scenes moments where Kit was getting out the Windex, and Cat was hammering and sawing. And that idea of the diagram, you know the exploding car manual the idea that’s actually a containment of something, unwieldy. Having been around during the install period, it was great to watch the literal explosion of sawdust and the work as an expansion of itself, and Kit tiptoeing around the sides… with his masking tape. At the end of the day, the work compounded itself and became that diagram again. And in the end what was created by Kit’s work was an interface for the body and Cat’s work created a cavity for it.
RM: The body is kind of squeezed out of both spaces. To reintroduce our bodies when we come into this space ourselves. When I walked into this space I felt encumbered on my skeletal frames, flesh, because I didn’t quite know where to put it. Because I fell off the screen, you know you spit something onto a glass surface and you just run off. And then I didn’t want to go in there, (Cat’s work) because it was far too oppressive. And so I was left in an intermediate zone, which was deeply problematic.
CH: That’s one of the things that I wanted about the work to do – a purely personal, psychological repulsion…a shuddering and shuddering. But what you could not predict at any stage, and in dialogue with Katie Lee early on, what I was saying was that I want people to get literally into the work. And I need to work out a particular height, (for the opening) and all these things, and then in the end, I just sort of thought, well I need to forget about what people are going to do, because I don’t know.
JM: Did many people go in there?
CH: Heaps of people, and under it.
AA: From the galleries perspective, it’s a really authoritarian usage of the space, in that it hasn’t let the physical space – particularly the dichotomy of the two spaces – actually determine the content of the work.
RM: You’re scaring me now because they are both equally equal. They are both full of parental demands to be satisfied as a social citizen. You know if I’m living there, I have to absorb all those desires, this smorgasbord, phantasmagoric cinematic evocations, and then if I’m promised if I go there, I’ll be actualised there as an individual.
JM: Have you been in the work since you’ve finished it Cat?
CH: Yeah I have. Actually on Saturday when I was minding the gallery, I thought to myself… wow, this is my first time with that BIG thing I made. I was looking at it thinking, holy shit, what have I done! I’ve created a monster! So I got in it, and the interesting thing with the psychology of that at the time, was that I was waiting for people to come up at any moment, and I didn’t want it to become a performance work, about me. It was a private moment, and I had the anxiety of being busted.
JM: When you were in it, did you feel that you’d transformed that claustrophobic space into something quite intimate? That was actually yours?
CH: The claustrophobia wasn’t part of the initial concept. You know the original concept was that I wanted to have a something that gave me a physical relationship with the earth that is parallel. And for it to be nestled. I knew that it would be supported from above, but supported from below.
The substructure was me trying to go, ‘that is the gallery’. As an artist I am independent of the gallery but I’m being supported by all these networks. There is a lot of metaphor in this work for me and it does go very broad and big, and parallel. I feel personally when I get in the work, that it takes me to the country, to a field, lying back and looking up at the stars.
MT: And there is that very fine point where both happen. You feel claustrophobic, but you also feel safe. The experience of actually putting yourself into a closet, or being put into a closet. Actually taking yourself into a small confined space because you need to get in there, to do whatever it is, or being forced into it.
JM: I’m in the world of 2 year olds at the moment and they always want to get into these spaces, or boxes. And you find yourself playing games in these kinds of spaces. Maybe it’s like a womb. I don’t know. I mean I haven’t actually experienced places as claustrophobic, and they don’t either. They experience them as intimate, and comforting. And even in the dark…
MT: I think the difference with this work is that you are horizontal. You are lying down, so you can’t help feeling uncomfortable. Because you are not erect. You are not in control.
RM: You’re not even crawling.
KL: It offers you a number of tiers of experience though. You know crawling around underneath is cosy. It’s a nice space. Then the centre of it shifts, it’s darker, more self-conscious space.
RM: If I slid a door over that exit, and said you weren’t to be given any human rights or freedom, like (David) Hicks, you would kinda freak, wouldn’t you.
CH: Well I’d freak at anyone taking my freedom away.
RM: Yes, well so what happens here is our freedom is distributed across the entire surface of this kind of kaleidoscopic neon landscape that we are equally traumatised because we don’t know where it fits. So it seems to be the crisis of the soul is replayed equally on both installations.
AA: One more thing about the lighting in Cat’s piece I think it’s a really important point because for me, where the lighting stops, that is where the notion of the display cabinet stops. Display can only say so much, or do so much.
RM: You see I see this as an analogical description of the kind of western humanist body. We have the rationality on the top, which is illuminated. We have the kind or heart, which is the centre of the emotions, and we have the base which is the erotic and the sexual, which is of course dark and forbidden, so it becomes a sort of analogue for the body. That intense light is actually the light of torture. As we know in Abu Graib, that Hick’s torture is that he is constantly illuminated 24 hours a day. If you can’t go into that refuge of darkness, then you don’t have that cosiness, you’ve created this incredible dialogue. It’s very fraught. It’s a lot more kind of dynamic that it attempts to be?
KH: It’s interesting to hear you talk about coming in here and talking about this kind of monster. I mean it’s interesting to me to think of both works as having a kind of monstrous quality of excess.
CH: I think I made a joke once when I was making it and thinking, ‘god this is so labour intensive I think I might have to decide that this work is about excess’. You know because I was churning through material, and I was taking so much time to acquire the form ply, and it was very exhausting for 2 and a half months, just… you know, there is a lot of money that’s gone into this. But at the same time, there’s consideration of the modular, so it pull-apartable and re-translatable.
HT: What plans do you have for it, then really? Like outdoors or…
CH: Outdoors definitely.
RM: If you can create that space outdoors it will have another reverberance.
KL: Even just the natural light will effect its psychology a lot. Harriet and I were playing around with it the other day, and we turned out the lights and raised the blinds to get natural light into the space, just to see what would happen and the interior was very, very dark.
CH: And also you get that splicing of the landscape, which for me is exciting to think of looking at the landscape through the middle of it, back to outdoors.
MT: But it really won’t be as dark if it is outdoors standing alone. And that space will change enormously.
RM: I’m kind of fascinated. Maybe it will be light, but it will be dark at the same time. That’s kind of even more uncanny. That’s why I really want to see that space outside, to see if it really does work.
CH: It’s in motion. I will definitely do it.*
AA: This is where that notion of site specifity and modularity is really interesting. This is a bit of a soapbox of mine I suppose. The enclosure space has been designed as a type of insert into this gallery space, a prop, even a contraption. The enclosure does these things… it opens, it has light and sound spillage, it sits in the building container in a detached way, it doesn’t touch anything, it is just a prop. And then there is Cat’s reading of that reading, where a framework is inserted into a framework that already exists. I’d worry about it going outside in the sense it would simply sit in the landscape – not as powerful as the fringes of house frames built in Caroline Springs before the cladding goes up. But that is the horror, the frames are unstoppable.
RM: Would you need the enclosure walls?
AA: Well, no. But I’m talking about a certain history, of this place, and then an insert into that history and then and insert into that insert. It’s a sleeving process if you like.
RM: I’m kind of interested in it from the other side, from the point of view that if you turn the electricity off in Kit’s work, the whole work dies. Which is exactly the oil crisis. This whole similacral fantasy of sort of hyper modern society is based on this extraordinary environmental exhaustion, which is entropic in its very nature. And I am intrigued by the way you have created an entropic landscape. Because it’s stimulating, it’s happening, it’s moving, but it’s ultimately dead, because nothing is really changing.
DS: And then Cat’s work will be the back projection for these pieces. And so we are actually in the slot. We are in that compression.
RM: So there is a hidden debt here, to technology and resources. And there is a hidden debt here to psychological energy and personal strength. And both are becoming exhausted in our contemporary position.
KL: And human resources as well because I kept thinking whilst Cat was making her work… imagine making Tokyo. Imagine all the individual movements and labour that has gone on to make that city.
AA: To go back to the notion of the diagram, they are diagramming entropic fatigue. They are not trying to mimic art historical models, they both have this sense of representation.
There were a couple of things with Kit’s show that don’t sit so well with me, and they may be immaterial… The level of production in the images is so high, however I find the level of production in the installation far less refined. I wonder if that is a roughing up of the work… an example is the light spillage at the edges of the light boxes, the mesh in the perspex gap there, the overlap here on the screen and the visible sticky tape. This is something that has been noted by other artists too, where the attention to finish detail is probably more than your non-artist viewer. Having seen other shows of yours I’ve noticed the level of refinement is more consistent. I just wondered if you’ve got something to add to that?
KW: To be very frank, there were a few logistical considerations. The video didn’t get back to me in some cases until two hours before the exhibition opened, for example the piece with the light spillage didn’t get back to me until 2 hours before the exhibition, and the light levels in that piece aren’t quite how I would like them. The mesh on that piece as well, that arrived at 10 pm the night before the show opened, so for me I hadn’t really worked with projections at this level before, so I’ve learned a great deal from the exhibition.
AA: It’s a shame that you can’t clearly read the text (on the video work). It’s so pixilated and so small.
KW: It is frustrating. I was working with lighting technicians and…
AA: So they are obviously things that you are very aware of…
KW: Yeah. On the other side of the boat there was a point at which I particularly – with the signage, whether it be in Fitzroy or – there’s a certain cheapness and a tackiness, the light overflow on that one didn’t really bother me.
MT: It’s interesting that you didn’t talk about your addition of the little dinosaurs. The fact that they are so object.
KW: To be honest I think of this as a very sculptural show. I think of these as signage, as objects. I was very sensitive to the fact that I would be showing so near to Fitzroy. You know down that strip there is such beautiful lighting design, there is such beautiful lighting design in strange neon things, and I didn’t see them as pictures, more as contraptions for a certain practice.
RM: To step back a little bit, isn’t that the role of an artist run space? That you can perhaps trial some things, and the fact that it’s not totally realised is part of its charm, and its power? Because if you made this totally slick, it would mean engaging with a whole lot of other discourses. And if your work was kind of placed in another environment, I wouldn’t be faced with the sort of psychological…
AA: I think the point is that the work is pretty slick here. And there is a level of finish-fetish in the work, that to me some of these spills and slippages are not actually disappointing, they are just not contributing much.
The role of the artist run initiative is something that should be determined by the artist run initiative. And I would always try in these discussions to be frank about something that may be completely rejected by the artist, and it might be something that they disagree with or it might be something that they think about, or say ‘I knew that, so I’m glad that someone actually said it’.
RM: I must say I haven’t had this conversation with Kit, so don’t get me wrong here, but I kind of like the folkloric reinvention of a haptic personal space here, to do with pasting things together with sticky tape and making it work. Because it’s kind of hapless, ineffectual and terribly real.
AA: I’d prefer to see the actual imagery that way, instead of the dichotomy between the imagery and the installation, because to me it doesn’t ring true.
MT: I don’t know if that is necessary, it’s still questioning things and making me think.
RM: Yeah, I agree. Because it's is also kind of built into the design of the imagery, because there are weird breaks and some weird joins there that you really can’t account for.
DS: Just as a side conversation we were talking about how the zeppelin disappears up into the room. And then the composite video is not just the panel, but has the continuity, and it’s more difficult to do, to get that coming back into the second panel.
RM: Well I just love that discontinuing panel, the space up there, kind of 3D.
AA: I guess I’m not looking to be lost in the fantasy of the images, I’m just looking for a more refined way of actually dealing with not letting you off the hook, and bringing them back to the surface, that maybe there is a more sophisticated way of dealing with that over time. Is it a stretching or an accident? I would like that to be more obvious.
RM: I must say I’m supportive of Kit’s slight shabbiness here, because it takes very little to create an illusion through cinematic cyberspace. And that is what this is all about. Because we are all bought off very easily, very cheaply by sort of neo technology blah blah blah, and Kit’s kind of manifested that seat in a kind of installation exhibition art work. And it works. And it’s terrible that it works. There is nothing behind those screens, there’s a few bits of you know, projectors, a power point and the devices are very simple, but profoundly simple.
CH: I wouldn’t know how to make them, do you know how to make a projector?
RM: And I like the haptic amateuristic component of Kit’s work because in a way it’s an artist coming to terms with this huge expanse of technology, and hasn’t quite got it right. And hasn’t quite perfected it. And I like that slightly nostalgic dimension here too. It’s not just utopia, it’s also melancholic.
DS: Those masks for the projectors are amazingly skeletal structures.
KL: I don’t mind the masking and the provisional aspect, but there still has to be a certain logic behind those decisions, that those devices still have to comply with. You are interested in the light boxes being like street light boxes, and using that logic, but there are a few incongruous elements to that. If you tap into that (logic) and continue it all the way through (the show) you can believe in it, and I’m happy to believe it with your work, Kit. With the masking devices, that was fine, but for me what was an issue was the gaffer tape, because there was a break in that logic for me. It came down to that being a street sign, but there was a concealment going on rather than an honesty in that device so there is a difference between an honest device and a cover up, and a slight blending is going on here in terms of your vocabulary.
AA: But this is coming from the context of Kit’s last three shows, and to me this is sort of a tentative foray into the installation technique becoming part of the content. And I am suggesting that it is tentative, and ambivalent … all I’m suggesting is that it either needs to proceed, or push through a little bit more and I haven’t seen this situation happening in the last few shows. It’s not a success or a failure.
RM: I like the dire risk in this, because I am still seduced by this charade on flimsy pasted together screens. Because I am seduced very easily, I am promiscuous, I am know to go for media desire objects, so I’m constantly playing against these surfaces whilst critiquing their environment the way they are set up. And I kind of like the degree of difficulty there, so I like the risk.
AA: I totally agree, but I think the risk is quantified if this discussion takes place, where these things have been noted, not as successes or failures, but as forays into a development of a practice, they are neither good nor bad.
MT: As Katie Lee said, it’s the vocabulary that Kit is using, that we are questioning.
* See Helen Lempriere 2007 where Catherine Hart’s work was exhibited.
