Exposing the entrenched "morality" of the past

Australia's leader frank about a lamentably recent social ill

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Proper Studies (1927)

ON March 8th, Australian PM Julia Gillard delivered a remarkable address as part of International Women's Day. Earlier this week, Australian women - and women everywhere - were again her audience. Her theme was forced adoption, and the "moral" conservatism that mandated, with quite breathtaking hypocrisy, the removal of babies from their natural mothers, on the grounds of their being too young, or unmarried, and other "shameful" pretexts. Speaking to over eight hundred people, gathered in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Canberra, she set the record straight, pulling the facts from beneath the veil of outright double standards practised between the Fifties and the Seventies. With rhetoric as impassioned as it was objective, her address eloquently but uncompromisingly exposed this social atrocity, and outlined the emerging policies that will prevent such tragic history being repeated.

This, surely, is one of the things that social justice is all about - not insisting that each person play by a given set of rules or risk stigmatisation, but be recognised and valued as a human being regardless of their lifestyle and whether it tallies with prescribed "norms". It is not when we are cajoled into being the same that progress is made, but when our lifestyle choices are acknowledged and respected in individual rather than collective terms. Indeed, it is precisely the freedom to be true to ourselves, rather than abiding by given opinion or social "ideals", that enables the expression of human dignity at all. Liberty is indivisible, and diversity must always prevail, each voice listened to, not merely heard.

As little as forty years ago, the women in that room were told they were "bad", "unfit for motherhood", bemoaned by an outlook that appointed social conservatism the official disguise of bigotry, "tradition" the aesthetic term for a formal policy of oppression. History will record their victimisation by a "system" that stressed "propriety" over love, as if intolerance were preferable to compassion, but also their unswerving thoughts of the children they left behind, their innate decency and sense of duty to those absent sons and daughters wholly unshaken by the passage of time.

Amalia Pica in Oxford: Or, a Satire on Vanity

Mollifying Inherited Pretensions

Amalia Pica’s striking For Shower Singers exhibits a number of works in the UK for the first time. Amid the seductively disparate themes and images that abound in the Argentinian-born artist’s latest offering, mockery of institutions and the otherwise earnest ambitions of the individual might be identified as her principal concerns here. Spanning various genres, from wall displays to installations, London-based Pica satirises our cautious preservation of traditional and proverbial status, implying that we construe anachronisms for legitimate emblems, historicism as a worthy arbitrator of would-be social and creative enterprises.

Red Carpet (2010), duct tape on cardboard, traverses a wooden floor in straight and curved forms. How much Pica echoes the incorrigible celebrity culture in which we are saturated, a breathless and peculiarly Western desire for fame mirrored, here, in a suitably contorted rather than logical presentation. Soberingly, Pica leaves us wondering whether hierarchic structures, aside from their Hollywood superficiality, possess any more virtue as social constructs or as instinctive moral and artistic categories. 

If contemporary art is sometimes accused of intellectualising the everyday, of imposing nuance on the manifest, then Sorry for the Metaphor #5 (2010) offers an “apology” for this, only to objectively mimic the ground for that criticism. A figure stands by a reservoir, holding a notice. A signifier has been uprooted, an instruction ignored, prescribed clarity “burdened” with ambiguity. The scene is composed of 128 A3 photocopies. Pica, purportedly sympathetic to decried meditations on the implicit, wills that our appreciation of the world is as natural and imperfect as that realm itself, not defined or governed on our behalf. She prompts those cynical about aesthetic complexity to contemplate whether they would ordinarily tolerate a primitive, ordained configuration of their own experiences, or whether we would sooner intuit, cultivate and interpret those fragmented impressions for ourselves.

Number 1 (2012), a plinth daubed in turquoise paint, attests to a disparaged classicism, the archaic, however affectionate our popular view of it, here portrayed in the most embarrassed light. A foundation has been defaced, material and principle alike defamed. Here, as elsewhere in For Shower Singers, Pica simulates a deft collision of the precious and the anarchic, questioning whether the axiomatic significance accorded to rank and to established values carries a rational or supposed wisdom.  

For Shower Singers
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street
December 14th, 2012 – February 10th, 2013.

Practicing Urban Meditation

Klein and Moriyama tell an evocative tale of two cities

ANY retrospective promising images of New York or Tokyo immediately and effortlessly excites the cultural imagination of the would-be spectator. A title featuring both cities, then, might be seen more as an event than an exhibit, offering singular aesthetic enlightenment and the inevitability both of new questions and unforeseen paradoxes. Yet even William Klein + Daido Moriyama: New York Tokyo Film Photography betrays that full metropolitan nuance, presenting as it also does shots of Paris, Moscow and Madrid.

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."

Loyalty and forbidden love over a Victorian summer

IT might be said that, for his portrayal of Michael Fitzhubert in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), little could have better prepared Dominic Guard than his title characterisation of The Go-Between. Just as Michael feels implacable duty to a blonde, ethereal muse, Miranda, Leo Colston is captivated by Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie), as he dispatches her correspondence to her lover, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Leo, like Michael, fluctuates between reticence and obsession, prescribed inhibitions enticed by false and implausible unions.  If, then, certain of the figures in Picnic and The Go-Between are curiously parallel, then so, too, are their broader narratives - both are set in 1900, examining themes of temptation, ambivalence and forbidden desire, amid stifling conservatism and incorrigible social pride.

The seminal opening line, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there", is as much a throwaway reminiscence as an aphoristic foreground to the story of reluctance, action and regret that ensues. The film conveys both the recollections of the older Leo and the experiences of the younger, these first words variously a lyrical hypothesis and a would-be evaluation.

'Site' - The Aesthetics of Order and Chance

Mark Wallinger offers a Deleuzian meditation on form and paradox

"The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay."

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980)

ON show at the BALTIC, Gateshead, until mid-October, Site is Mark Wallinger’s first major solo exhibition in the UK for more than a decade, with four installations themed around order and chance. The Other Wall, 10000000000000000, Construction Site and MARK focus on identity, precision and randomness, echoing Nature’s capacity to spellbind with images both of aesthetic approximation and of structure.

As the centrepiece, 10000000000000000 is a scene composed of 65,536 stones on individual black and white squares. The title is the binary form of 65,536 in decimal, that figure itself the number of charts in Western geomancy, the magic art of divination – that exactitude, though, is one branch of the visual antithesis this exhibit illuminates, that of the apparent and the obscure. On the one hand, the chessboard effect denotes precision and accords definition to the stones, to their individual uniqueness and contrasts of shape, colour and texture. Amid that continuity and linearity, though, we are aware, also, of their seamlessness, their vast array making the stones indistinguishable, chance and randomness within Nature denying any one a stand-alone attraction or quality.

In The Other Wall, Wallinger follows thinkers and artists as varied as Lowry, Sartre and Pink Floyd in making a celebrity of an everyday structure. A wall of red, grey and brown bricks, each is labelled with a set of numbers in white chalk. Mirrored here, perhaps, is our tendency to imbue even the inanimate with salience, the seemingly unremarkable noted, rationalised, adapted. The Other Wall tacitly recalls Duchamp’s Fountain, with the Frenchman’s inscription ‘1917’ citing the year of its production, and, here, Wallinger’s ‘1559’, ‘1914’ and ‘1974’, as three of countless examples, moving beyond such chronology but still exciting speculation as to their purported significance – Years? Codes personal to the artist? Application of utterly arbitrary digits? The succession of numbers follows no apparent logic – ‘1415’, ‘4775’, ‘7023’, ‘6421’, and so on – but the curious specificity with which Wallinger endows each brick stresses what could just as easily be a speculation about Nature as, here, a numerical oddity – amid the apparent chance yet individuality within Nature, does there exist a method, an order, an element of determination to even the most disparate social and spatial mechanisms?

An eighty-three minute beach scene, Construction Site shows workmen erecting and dismantling scaffolding at the water's edge. The sea and the construction, as markers of the natural and the created, conjoin Nature and labour, and yet we also see them functioning independently. The men putting up the scaffolding do not stop to observe the water, an aesthetic that is curiously incidental to their work, and of which, as an audience, we are at most implicitly aware. We are not "here" to observe the lap of the wave, but the efforts of the workmen. The natural scene is not, as might stereotypically be supposed, more compelling by virtue of its beauty or tangibility, since Wallinger offers a curious juxtaposition. The ripple of the glistening water is as much a romantic cliché as it is an aesthetic taken for granted, and thus only unconsciously acknowledged by the viewer. Meanwhile, though, it is not the construction per se that is striking, but the setting for that action, a shoreline.

Therein lies orthodoxy and idiosyncrasy - we are used to seeing scaffolding, and understand its purpose, but not in so arbitrary an environment, one we associate with hedonism rather than work, passivity rather than endeavour. Despite their being fused in one continuous shot, then, order and chance are rigidly dissociated - the power of the water could impede the men's work just as its lull is purely a backdrop; at the same time, the workers are curiously oblivious to either its wonder or its threat, Wallinger having them execute their responsibilities as if they have been commissioned or that this is the traditional arena for such industry. Wallinger makes an idol of logical rigour rather than innate beauty, definition and precision emphasised over magnitude, temperament and chance.

Finally, MARK is a video presentation showing that name on a succession of walls - those of hospitals, prisons, homes, railway bridges, underpasses - different wall designs, sizes, periods, but each carrying that same inscription. "MARK" is, of course, the artist's signature, but, as a term rather than name, conjures the broader social role bound up in such domestic or public spaces - unity, compassion, punishment, servitude, destitution, and challenge. Each makes a mark on society, be it in our perception of those settings, or in their reality.

The sequence tells us much about personhood and personality. Firstly, personhood. Across the places in which "MARK" appears, those who inhabit them may experience variable levels of agency or autonomy, but are bounded by "personhood" - the status, if we are to use a standard definition, of being a person - a condition that defies social, moral or professional differences between individuals, and, in being classified as which, questions of our goodness, opinions or freedom are seemingly immaterial. If, as a term, "human being" is more concerned with the existence of the individual, rather than with any criteria or conditions that must be satisfied to "meet" that definition, then ethical and other judgements about, for instance, our conduct or cognitive well-being, may be subservient to a fundamental and all-encompassing "I".

Secondly, personality. "MARK" is etched into different points on the walls - central, to the left, right, higher and lower. Such variations reflect the differences within an essential truth, that each person has character of different moods, shades and extremities - the personalities that engage the attention, those content or seeking to be more individualistic and leftfield, those who aspire, those with a more subdued demeanour, willing to "follow the crowd". Wallinger attests to those contrasts, giving us a "MARK" who cannot help but catch the eye, one that is offset to one side of the screen, one that is more obscure, beneath our line of vision, or one who is more elevated, driven, focused but not at the heart of the action. Within the psychology of Wallinger's showcase graffiti, we detect assertiveness, modesty, and the enigmatic.

In MARK, Wallinger locates equality within wholly dissimilar worlds and circumstances, be they products of the most benign or appalling instances of chance. Families, patients, prisoners, among others - his unseen subjects might never meet, and yet each desires, acts, speaks, expresses. Pronouncements on the merits and flaws of those we connect with such communities are touchingly answerable to Wallinger's neutral yet creative eye - the "MARK" that does not make statements and suppositions, but instead removes the veil of the most confident, proud, ambivalent or anonymous social categories, to hear the voices and denote the value of those within.

A stark, inspiring and fiercely original perspective on identity, organised chaos, and the reliably erratic schemes and forms within Nature.

Eisenstein and Odessa

Power Descending

IF the Odessa Steps Massacre in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the most oft-cited, recreated and pastiched scenes in cinema, then the peerless inspiration it has provided stems as much from its raw, devastating content as from the brute timelessness of what it depicts - the struggle of people and power.

Thomas Tallis: An Experimental View

Fourteen Minutes of Fame

The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, hosts Canadian Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet, June 16^th - October 14^th 2012.

Janet Cardiff, in her exhibition The Forty-Part Motet, understands intuitively a cardinal aesthetic principle – that less is more. With a show the only material features of which are loudspeakers, positioned in a circle as they convey a pivotal Elizabethan musical work, Cardiff notes the virtues of a spartan layout that emphasises the nuances of the score over what might otherwise seem invasive ephemera. Taking as the title of her presentation the technical make-up of Thomas Tallis’ exquisite Spem in Alium (‘Hope in any Other’), Cardiff reworks a piece for eight choirs of five voices each. In doing so, she is careful to distinguish her accomplishment, as one who purely experiments with music, from one she well knows to lie compositionally with a celebrated late Tudor prodigy. He creates, she adapts, and Cardiff admirably resists the temptation to impose embellishments that would vainly seek joint attribution. Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1573) was supposedly written to mark Elizabeth I’s fortieth birthday, and Cardiff’s strikingly original perspective is as meditative as it is engaging.

Resonant in The Forty-Part Motet is the sense in which the lyrics, heard through the individual loudspeakers, create an overall continuity – each choir is separate, to be sure, and yet as we move around the circle of speakers, harmony is maintained amid otherwise distinct sets of performers. The choirs are unique, and yet from the narrative of vocals we detect something singular that is as ingeniously engineered as it is evocatively realised.

Additional to the arresting beauty of the performances, we hear, at the beginning of the recording, almost muttered conversations between members of the choirs. Far, then, from willing some "polished" rendition, Cardiff, to her credit, gives us a warts-and-all take on the action. We are privy to their chatter, afforded a glimpse of their inhibitions, nervous laughter mingling with focused preparation. Such a feature lends a curious integrity to the recording. For Cardiff, not all art must be aesthetic - it can be combined with the sounds of the everyday, the most rudimentary exchanges, with those snippets of dialogue seen to merit inclusion, rather than be cautiously deleted lest they seem crude or erroneous.

Although Cardiff's source work is a seminal and much-heard choral piece, her mode of communicating that track nonetheless makes possible a fresh interpretation and, for us, an unusual form of appreciation. In enabling observers of the exhibition to walk round, placing themselves close to the speakers and register in detail the richness and depth of the sounds, we digest the music from that much more intimate a vantage point. We are able to "interact" with the performance, freely and gradually taking in tonal structure and subtlety. That relationship with the music may not be so easily formed in an auditorium, wherein our impressions of what we hear are to some extent dictated by where we sit or stand, so Cardiff, through permitting us to "select" our viewpoint, invites us to focus on our terms as well as on her own. Such a liberty – being able to walk around, discerning a subject from different angles - when scrutinizing  a sculpture or a painting, is welcome but somehow natural and expected. With a piece of music, however, opportunity to move from one place to another, in tandem with the flow and variety of a recording, opens up more novel possibilities for study and participation.

Cardiff has Spem in Alium, a fourteen-minute piece, play in a continuous loop. As such, those entering the exhibition room coincide either with its resumption, when it is in full session, or drawing to a close. Such a format recalls the spontaneity rather than bid for precision described earlier. While an inanimate work of art might be a stationary, unchanging entity, our coming into the room either at the start or midway through the performance captures each visitor’s attention through its different temporal and stylistic moods – amid the conversations that precede the recital, when in full flow, or as the performance is drawing to a close. To that end, Cardiff offers us the sounds of the incidental, of an arresting highpoint, or the diminishing but tantalizing moments of a powerful, haunting rendition.

Here, The Forty-Part Motet returns to Newcastle for the first time since 2001, having then premiered at the Castle Keep. Its appearance at the BALTIC is especially welcome – it is a singularly compelling installation that appropriates intelligently but unselfconsciously both performance and spectatorial space, drawing us into the creative world of a Renaissance genius. An implicit awareness of Tallis’ authorial intention maintains artistic salience and authenticity without muting Cardiff’s own, deftly revisionist annotations.