Richard Grayson

RICHARD GRAYSON

CURATORIAL

Director of Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia
1992-1998
Programs and Projects curated

original eaf web menu 1998

1998

Ideal Work - Publication

Ideal Work (publication project: writers and artists )

Artists from Australia and overseas were asked to describe the artwork that they would make were they operating in an ideal situation without physical and material constraints. These artworks have been published as a document with a written commentary on each work by a writer familiar with the artist's practice.

Artists: Linda Sproul, Jan Nelson, Susan Hiller Stephen Bush, Rosslyn Piggott, Mike Parr, Simryn Gill, Rebecca Cummins, Steve Wigg, Simone Mangos, Joyce Hinterding.

Writers: Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, David Cross,Richard Grayson, Kevin Murray, Louise Haselton, David Bromfield, Sharmani Pereira, Ellen Zweig, Mark Jackson, Harald Fricke, Anne Finegan.

Title: Ideal Work
Author: (curator) Richard Grayson
EAF Publication date 1999
Number of pages 112 pages
Images 44pp (colour & b&w)
Binding soft
Size 210mm x 297mm
ISBN 0 949836 37 0

Susan Hiller
From the Freud Museum
1998

Susan Hiller
Wild Talents
1998

In a project initiated and curated by the Experimental Art Foundation, Susan Hiller will be exhibiting and in residence at the E.A.F. , Adelaide during the Telstra Adelaide Festival.

SUSAN HILLER is an American born artist currently based in the U.K. and over the last twenty five years has developed a complex and multi-media practice that has established her as one of today's most significant artists. In 1986 the ICA London mounted a major survey, and in 1996 the Tate Galley Liverpool mounted a mid-career retrospective of her work, in the same year she was in residence at the Dia Art Foundation New York. Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller was published in 1995 by Manchester University Press.

Susan Hiller will be showing two major works at the Experimental Art Foundation from February the 26th to March the 29th 1998:

Wild Talents - a video and sound installation that works specifically with childhood themes: the unpredictablilty and threat of spontaneous unfocussed special abilities such as telekinesis or precognition, wild talents that, in a different context could be understood as traditional aspects of mystical religious experience. The work consists of two dramatic wall size projections using separate but paired images as well as a separate video component which combine to generate a work and space that startlingly questions the meanings of deviant experiences and knowleges as well as interrogating the nature of faith, the ways we understand belief and exploring our need for myth and fable.

From The Freud Museum an installation drawn from her residency at the Freud Museum London. The work consists of a large number of objects in boxes that are presented in a series of museum vitrines each box represents a combination of objects that are 'rubbish, discards fragments and repreoductions which seemed to carry an aura of memory and hint at meaning something' the installation invites us to tease out links and meanings, sequences and gaps, in generating the meaning and strong poetry of the work.

Experimental Art Foundation publication, Adelaide Festival catalogue, Australia
• read essay
Museum of Contemporary Art catalogue, Oslo, Norway, 1998
• read essay

Whilst in Australia Susan Hiller will be in coversation about her work in Adelaide and interstate venues.

Adelaide: ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Tuesday 17 February 1.15pm with Richard Grayson
EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION
Monday 2 March 6.00pm with Richard Grayson

Melbourne: AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Wednesday 4 March 6.00pm with Anne Marsh

Sydney: ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Friday 6 March 6.30pm

to be announced 'From a Cave Home'
5 March to 4 April 1998
Susan Hiller at the CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

Deej Fabyk
White Room/Strawberry Girl
1998

Leith Elder
I'm afraid read essay
1998

Lynne Sanderson
Mutant
1998

Franz Ehmann
The Blue Room of Humanity
1998

Rick Martin
Maria Ghost
4.12.97 - 18.1.98

This exhibition is based on a mystery story. In 1840, in the seas south of the Coorong in SA, the brig Maria foundered. The twenty-six survivors were slaughtered after being rescued by local Aboriginals (the Milmenrura). Only one child returned. No one knows why the Milmenrura turned on the Maria passengers. They had previously safely escorted survivors of the brig Fanny two years before. A punitive expedition was sent from Adelaide. Two Aboriginal men, Mongarawata and Pilgarie, were hung. In the colony, a debate erupted. Were they entitled to a trial? What had happened? Robbery? Interference with Aboriginal women again? A reciprocity dispute? This exhibition does not attempt to present any answers. It is an exploration of the place, shipwreck, shock, puzzlement and lunacy, with photographic and sculptural evidence. Trace elements of the obelisk in Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, may be discovered in the gilt trunk (see invitation).

Mark Chapman, lecturer in Architectural Theory at Adelaide University contributes as writer.

This exhibition can be seen as the third in a series looking at memory, history and place (Breathtaking: A Passage on the Titanic, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Sept/Oct 1995 and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, November 1993).

Jan Nelson
Studio Practice
6.11.97 - 30.11.97

Studio Practice

Jan Nelson knows a lot about the slippery yet intensely valuable properties of transcendence. Her recent work has explored the processes and power structures by which art somehow exceeds its material properties to become charismatic. Carefully dissecting the machinations of 1960s avantgardism, Nelson has developed a practice that both extends and diverts the logic of the modernist ideal. Where artists like the French provocateur Yves Klein sought to create pockets of mystery in large momentous gestures, Nelson searches for complexity in the prosaic. She focuses on the constitutive pieces that make up the artistic process building these parts into a journey. Invoking the logic of the road movie, Nelson navigates the crucial narratives of making art from conception to experimentation. The purpose of this is not to highlight the triumph of the finished art work but to show that the anticipation of arriving is every bit as powerful.

In Studio Practice the artist dismisses the heroic in order to find something real in the everyday. The video and photographic images of walking, leaping, crawling and lying down illustrate activities that are at once menial yet also full of creative potential. They exist as a series of experimental propositions that explore the interplay between chance and rational decision making. The deliberately inconclusive nature of each act eschews a sense of completion while leaving open the possibility of an instant of symbiosis where banality may become profound. Nelson is not afraid to risk making mistakes and spoiling the perfect work of art for within error exists new layers of meaning. Blunders do not necessarily point to failure but offer an insight into the human condition. The act of falling off a chair twice for instance suggests a fool stupidly making successive mistakes. Yet a more interesting analysis points to individual volition and our obsessive nature in getting things right.

Nelson's acts of experimental drifting have another specific purpose aside from renegotiating the parameters of the chutzpah. This is to explore the issue of identity in relation to the actual site of artistic production. Framing and reframing her body in still and moving formats, the artist is also questioning her whole relationship to the studio. She alludes to the uncertain and constantly tenuous nature of this space that serves to secretly fabricate her art while at the same time hide her body from the finished product. Stripping the creative process to its bare bones, the artist offers her body as an instrument of markmaking in place of the actual marks. By revealing this process and herself, Nelson is demanding a level of proof: evidence that the artist is physically and emotionally imbricated in the work and that art is not a static, de-personalised activity.

Nelson's willingness to explore fragility is a direct challenge to the masculine conventions of the avantgarde. With no spectacular tricks up her sleeve she appears to be a phoney or at best second rate alchemist. Yet in her willingness to reveal other elements for consideration, important, if more subtle, points of transcendence are made possible. Her brazen leaping and stomping on the streets of Paris are a case in point. Judging by the bemused looks on the faces of the passersby, Nelson successfully transcended her status as artist and became instead a slightly obsessive French philosopher.

Catalogue essay by David Cross

Alan Cruickshank
Museum of the Colonial Post Colonial
9.10.97 - 2.11.97

MUSEUM OF THE COLONIAL POST COLONIAL

Alan Cruickshank's manipulations both add to and subtract from an already resonating archive - J.W. Lindt's Album of Australian Aboriginals, originally created during the early 1870s in his Grafton studio. The layers of meaning and allusion in Lindt's studio portraits ripple beneath Cruickshank's additions to them. We are faced with a double set of entanglements. On the surface at least, Cruickshank's transposed heads remind us of the extent to which Lindt's original compositions evoked the 'almost totalising encounter' [Mydin: 249] of colonialism, through which indigenous peoples were reduced firstly to passive witnesses and finally to objects of curiosity. But instead of the black faces and sombre, unreadable expressions of Aboriginal subjects confronting the photographer's lens, Cruickshank has substituted the faces of Europeans, and suddenly our confidence in reading these photographs as texts of the colonial encounter disappears. This is Cruickshank's third foray into the Arcanum subject. His earlier attempts were more playful, more ambiguous in their confrontation. In those studies, exhibited as ARCANUM and THE ARCANUM MUSEUM in 1992 and 1995-96, his transpositions strategically modified existing historical photographs through the addition of a black face here, a black face there. Like a rogue historian, Cruickshank has cut and pasted identities and facts, suggesting a different Australian history in which Aboriginal people had exerted authority and power equally with Europeans during the 'nation building' phase. Some of the appeal of those exhibitions lay in the apparent randomness of Cruickshank's selections, a reduced didactism which suggested merely that Australian history might have been different if ....

Catalogue essay, Philip Jones (excerpt)

Craige Andrae
Album Various artists
11 September-5 October 1997

Travel is obviously of some import to Craige Andrae. His excellent solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of SA a few years back was full of images and allusions to change, translation and movement. In Album various artists we have works that have been part informed by a recent trip to Europe during which the artist checked out some of the productions usually considered 'great'. In a way the exhibition can be seen as echoing the eighteenth century liberal education tradition of the Grand Tour where, as a rite of passage to full maturity, gentlemen and gentlewomen would propel themselves around Europe and Italy absorbing the landmarks of Classical and Renaissance civilisation. And then get home to Yorkshire or wherever the family estate may be and build their own Roman or Greek grotto in the back garden. The resultant architectural productions usually considerably improved (be it in terms of utility, hygiene or picturesqueness) on the original. Andrae has used a number of works by European and American artists as a starting point for some of the pieces in this exhibition, some not too difficult to identify, others more or less obscured. But this is not some act of homage or simple translation (or thank the Lord about any tyranny of distance), the original works are just the jumping off point for new productions, and have started trails of thought. We can see Calder, trace Duchamp, and be pretty certain of Mondrian as references, but the works have their own autonomies and concerns:

sometimes about our attitudes to the 'other', the 'trademarked' and otherwise authorised (Mobile) where all the clothes hanging there are luxuriating in the name of their maker - Hugo Boss socks Yves SaintLaurent underwear etcetera: epitomies my dear of la sophistication European n'est ce pas? Not to mention how much money it takes to actually own a name ("the most expensive shirt that I have ever bought" the artist says). In Garden a pretty invisible reference to Monet and his fascination with his garden serves to generate a work that considers the artist's relationship to their immediate environment and everyday life and what serves as engines and material for production. Other pieces in the exhibition are not directly linked to specific works of art - Guernsey, Untitled etc - but are to do with events and the artist's perceptions of what is going on around him. Always, a questioning and thinking about art, its politics, its functions and purposes, how its made and how we see it, are central to Andrae's quizzing gaze and intelligence. And because of our awareness of this, it becomes as if the artist has become complicit in our viewing, is at our elbow tugging and nudging us as we walk around the show. After all, this is the work of an artist as viewer (as traveller) - as well as maker - and an album of images of, and thoughts about, what he has seen.

*Lawyers Guns and Money* (artists and the law) Exhibition and publication: Richard Grayson with Linda Marie Walker Aleks Danko, John Reid, Andrew Petrusevics, Harry Wedge 19 June-13 July 1997 Sally Mannall, Destiny Deacon, Scott Redford 17 July-10 August 1997 Rebecca Cummins, Mike Stevenson, Laurens Tan, Patricia Piccinini 14 August-7 September 1997 • catalogue essay		Artists, through their representation of Kings, Queens, martyrs and other figures of State and religious significance, have always been central in the iconography and understanding of the power structures of the society around us. At the same time artists have often been represented, or represented themselves, as somehow being outside of the law or as 'invisible legislators'. The romantic rhetoric of the 'outlaw ' has been given currency with present day ideas of the 'transgressive''. However these positionings don't fully express the complex dialogues and difficult complicities which we, as individuals, have with expressions of law, power, control and morality. For the duration of Lawyers, Guns and Money, the Art Gallery of South Australia is highlighting related works from its permanent collection, including works by S.T. Gill, Ivor Hele, Lidia Groblicka, Robert Boynes, Richard Dunn, Ian North and Juan Davila.
	John Reid Untitled 1982 - 19 June-13 July 1997 Since 1982, John Reid has been making a work made up entirely of Australian banknotes. The project, designed to draw attention to the economic underpinnings of political repression - and in particular political disappearances - resulted in a three year legal battle contesting the fifty two charges laid against him by the police. This case resulted in permission under a new act of parliament to enable the cutting up of banknotes by the artist - an act otherwise illegal in Australia. The money used is that earned by the artist rather than donations or spoiled notes from the mint		Andrew Petrusevics Liberals Descending The Staircase 19 June-13 July 1997 Andrew Petrusevics' work has evinced an ongoing fascination with the structures and expressions of power. From the e-party events - agit prop performances, videos and tapes proselytising the virtues of 'e' (before the letter became drug related) - to his current activities using digital media, the images and mechanics of the representations of power have been central. His recent work uses current political events and personalities as source material.
	Harry J. Wedge Works 19 June-13 July 1997 "HJ Wedge of the Wiradjuri nation, was born on Erambie Mission, Cowra in NSW. An interest in photography and a chance meeting with a cousin who was studying photography at TAFE Eora Centre, Redfern, led HJ to Sydney and his subsequent enrolment at the Eora Centre in 1989. The course led HJ from photography to painting, and he discovered a medium conducive to his communicative needs... Aboriginal issues and HJ's forceful messages are released through dream images and stories from deep within his Aboriginal spirituality," (extracts from a Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative biography of HJ Wedge). The works and texts powerfully articulate the various forces and influences brought to bear on the individuals and peoples of Aboriginal Australia.		Aleks Danko Songs of Australia, Volume Two, Death of the Spirit of Freedom 19 June-13 July 1997 A central focus in the work of Aleks Danko has been the experiences, narratives and hidden currents of Australian suburbia. Iconic images used in the exploration of these have varied from the garden shed to Australian Rules football and Vegemite. His gaze is both revealing and critical, positioning these debates and arenas as one of the central dynamics of the construction of the 'Australian' sense of identity; and asking quite what these narratives may reveal of attitudes and inclinations at work within society.
	Sally Mannal For Lack of Evidence 17 July - 10 August 1997 The work uses the 'witness request boards' to be found on the streets of London - where she was recently resident. These offer brief descriptions of crimes or accidents that have occurred at that site, serving to reveal violent or criminal events or narratives linked to a seemingly anodyne location, events that would otherwise be occluded from view. These texts also form the raw material for her wall works some of which are rubbings from the boards. These were made with the help of the Metropolitan Police Force who gave the artist access to many of their resources.		Destiny Deacon Not Another T-Shirt 17 July - 10 August 1997 The multi-faceted practice of Destiny Deacon explores positionings and representations within contemporary Australia from a Koori perspective. She uses objects and photographs in ways that are both playful and deeply critical of the representations and (ab)uses of indigenous cultures within history and current media. The use of T-Shirts in "Not Another T-Shirt" implies the positioning of the wearer (and they are all from the artist's collection) as a point which the vectors of these concerns and agendas have at one time or another affected (vectors upon which, in turn, the individual has hoped to have effect).
	Scott Redford Hamlet Machine (Not) 17 July - 10 August 1997 The artist's work references many different codings and languages: from those of advertising, fine art practice, popular culture and gay iconography in works that help blur the boundaries between these seemingly discrete areas. "Hamlet Machine (not)" interrogates ideas of the transgressive within the romantic constructions of the art-world, be it the doomed romantic beautiful boy (Kurt Cobain) or the murderer (Martin Bryant) - representative of the figures that have been fetishised as 'outsiders' by artists and art movements.		Rebecca Cummins Descending Metaphors and Liquid Scrutiny 14 August - 7 September 1997 The artist's focus is on technology, and the way that technologies can be used to change, and control understandings. The video tower displays phrases and texts used during the Gulf War where a terrifying poetry of euphemism was generated to obscure a realisation of the outcomes of metal or explosives meeting flesh and bone. The goblets re-articulate a centuries-old design for a surveillance technology, one initially perhaps intended as a conversation point, but which in contemporary form now has a role in our everyday lives.
	Laurens Tan Super Poke 1 14 August - 7 September 1997 Tan's work recently has focused on the approaches and hardwares of gambling (an increasing obsession in Australia) as a central metaphor, where the individual is positioned in a web of various demands and laws: the wish to gain money for 'free', the inevitable fact that it is the casino/pokie owner that the odds favour, and the pitching of the individual against the laws of chance and luck. The randomness, quixoticness and hopelessness of the task is reinforced in his specially constructed poker machines.		Michael Stevenson Let Those who Ride Decide 14 August - 7 September 1997 Mike Stevenson addresses the webs of connection and control that lie within and behind the manifestations and expressions of modernism. By making links through history, art, international capitalism, terrorism and shady political cadres he renders clear their symbiotic relationships, drawing attention to the necessary Gestalt of the present day. "Let Those Who Ride Decide" uses as a starting point those trolleys that street preachers and conspiracists use to present and carry their texts and messages.
	Patricia Picinni Protein Lattice 14 August - 7 September 1997 Piccinini's work has centred on digitisation, the human genome project and on ideas of societal construction. This recent body of work looks at the implications of artificial tissue growth and the 'ownerships' of biology. Flesh and tissue are now something that can be grown, grafted and copyrighted, and become another commodity that is sold and traded. The project brings to view, and explores, the ethical problems associated with these developments.

Warren Vance
Thru Fairest Sunlight
22 May-15 June 1997

Thru Fairest Sunlight

Living proof I am the past,
or genetico-chemical
boiled up for now
as person.

Or, I am some socio-
ethnographic detail or
another like, I am Richard
the born in Geelong,
the poet,
say,
from exotic Western District
stock,
to affable bull-necked
bastards,
and a diamond backed, flame
bellied,
succubus.
Like that.

I am the night-shift cabbie,
Kick Down Dickie.
I'm a sleaze (Stretching,
lush with dreaming,
rubbing my brushed velvet
eyes),
and a cranky bugger,
but a pro- no question.*
I'm a liar I think
(I mean, I could promise you,
I am, but you'd doubt it.)
In the shade, I am that
insinuating leopard.
He thinks he's invisible
With his eyes shut.**
I think therefore I am, as
well.
I'm living bloody proof of
that,
but still, if you think about it,
its not quite enough
evidence.***
I am, I am... the Red Back
Mystic!
Surely I'm this little corker of
a rubric!
But sorry dear, no,
just like Artaud,
I am 'every name in history'.
So, yes, I declare,
I am Artaud,
too.
I'm the face in the mirror
when I like what I see,
(I'm the schmoozy boozy
crooner.
Am I Dean Martin?)
I'm the mind on the road,
I'm the lamp post that hails
me.

I am 'dad' to my kids
and, as he, for sure,
I am Someone Else.
Once, eye to eye,
we stared each other faceless
I am, in truth, the snake you
saw,
just a split second ago, but,
no,
its a hose.
Potentially, though, I know
I'm a real possibility.

I'm perving in the back
for the rear view eye
for its tear, or a sign of
breathless sight,
for she who'll drink down into
me
with a lust for blood and
omniscience
absolute and all-consuming
but
still.
I'm the moth, alive, on the
screen
the pity
the one insistent dead still
moment
of unmediate, bloody pity,
full, the moment, incessant,
voiceless,
a chorale ascends, roaring
cascading light within
everywhere
that being used to be.
I am the Manjushri.
I am the golden world
gleaming at dawn.

I'm the living dead,
the blood and bone,
I'm a load off my mind
plant food, posthumous.
And already I'm a compost
of gratuitous sacrifices.

I am the head on the wheel,
in tears,
and the ear that hears the
snuffling sobs
but then, somehow, sort of
eavesdropping,
they
I just stop crying.
(on a bike, a glimpse,
then gone,
before I could think to want
her)

* The night driver's street is made of folded yellow cellophane and you crack through it like a sharpened stick. And you learn that sight is a question of clues about which we make certain assumptions. At night you operate by a whole other set, encountering the same (I think) phenomena, you reify just the same, but slower, conferring new identities to plane trees and pillar boxes till, in the daylight, things seem awesome, but senselessly overstated.

** He thinks I'm invisible too. Well, of course, to him, with his eyes shut, I am. More than he, to him, anyway, and he's just a metaphor for, I dunno, something.

*** "The notion of identifiability via characterization is inconsistent and without any sanction in logical thought because the reciprocal dependence of terms on their logical opposites means that the two terms that make up any oppositional structure must both be present in order for either one to be present. This... means that one cannot have single terms, in isolation with respect to their opposites: either both or neither are present. The paradox of characterization, then, is that in the instance where something is characterized there must be a simultaneous ascription of logically contradictory characteristics to the one entity. Hence, in the very act of gaining their identity entities lose it as the presence of any attribute entails its absence. And in the very act of losing it they gain it since the negation of a characteristic affirms it. The affirmation of any characteristic logically entails the affirmation of its negation and vice versa. Wittgenstein...speaks of a feeling "as if the negation of a proposition had to make it true in a certain sense in order to negate it." ... Thus, contrary to its aims, entity identification is lost at the expense of characterization, rather than gained." (Peter Fenner, Reasoning into Reality Wisdom Publications 1995.)

Richard Garward Melbourne, April, 1997

Julie Henderson (in collaboration with Anne Walton and Caroline Farmer)
duende
8 May-18 May 1997

duende

Discharge1 of duende with a touch of semi(er)otic hysteria to say nothing (of) a preoccupation with (avoiding an absence of) definition. This is hard. And then again, soft. "Ssss"ounds. Like soft sounds. Or sounds like "soft". But can "soft" be a sound? And anyway, if we're to be completely honest here, the sound we're working with is dark. "Dark sound". There! It's out in the open now. One possible translation for you2. From the Spanish in this case. But why Spanish, you may ask. What's wrong with English? What's wrong with it in"deed... Thing done intentionally or responsibly; brave, skilful, or conspicuous act; actual fact, performance...". Ahhhh, meanings. Where would we be without them? Lost, probably. In the dark. Missing. Like "longing for"? understanding. Or (a) more! (a) more! Like standing under. This "conspicuous act", this "performance" of ... Translation: it's a vexed business, all right. And then again, all wrong. Which is to say it's in "a state of commotion". Like the sea, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

But now we're in danger of 'being'["sss"]wept away with the ["sss"]well, when a quick word count warns: 190 words already. Almost halfway there. And still so unresolved. So empty. But at the same time, full. Of potential. Time! The sudden alarm of it: (w)ringing, pressing, pushing, squeezing something out. Or in....wards3. Now where did that reference to a hospital come from? This is not about sickness is it? Depends. On your point of view of ...(a) form, a loose form of tack4ing. Things. Or no things. Together! Trying to speak. Together! In navigational terms. Like trying and then again not trying to pin or even write it down. Like (a) birth, (a) berth ((a) bored5?) this vessel. Drifting through. A short passage of words. Leading words (in?) other words. Away. A way. To constantly write (or "right" as in "correct" or "balance") itself. To ess6ay7 . Rather than: to be written. By. Upon. Or about. face8. Like a going about9. Again and again.

It's hard work. This! To try. This! To say. This! To speak. This! ... And this ... and ... this might (finally) be the point. Or one of many. And all of them looking (as in "searching"? "probing"?) a bit blunt or broken and (un)even(ly) stuffed. muff10(l)ed. Opened. And closed. Over muted voices. "Ssss"ounds. Coming and going ["Inside"!] the other wise smooth ["Inside"!] surfaces of the white cube. Ever so "ssss"lightly interfered with. "Touched" (up?) as in: "moved". Into, in two - an abra(i)ded kind of formation. An odd sort of gift11. Wra["psss"]. Over. Wra["psss"]. Under wraps12. And then again unwraps. Itself. R.I.P.'s itself. Open .... sesame13. There! To find....its own (un?)kind of organ14. Grind, grind, grind(er?). Ground. Down. Write! Down to the ground. (Ahhhh!....at last! Blood!) letting. Gravity. Do the work! The work! Oh please let "it" do the work! This! .... ah! .... time!

But "it's" getting out of hand, now. "It" could be anything, now. Real(ly). Or unreal(ly). "It's" the container that mat, matt, matte15, matters most, now. Not what's in it. See? It's so ... bleeding. Obvious. It's a (suit) case of ... now. You see? "It". Now you don't. It's (a) full (and empty) stop (over) now. It's a period (piece) now ...itsssssa ... itsssssa ... by-bye now.

Notes
1 "discharge ... fire (gun); release electric charge from; put forth, get rid of, send out, emit, (missile, liquid, purulent matter, abuse); acquit oneself of, pay, perform, (duty, debt, vow); undergo discharge of contents; (of river) flow into sea..."
2 Another one could read something like this: "'The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet'. That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style - of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act...the duende...must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood...kindles the blood like an irritant,...exhausts...repulses, all the bland, geometrical assurances, smashes the styles...": Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca (translation by Ben Belitt), Grove Press, Inc., New York at p 154-156
3 "wards ... notches and projections in key and lock designed to prevent opening of lock by wrong key..."
4 "tack ... long stitch as slight or temporary fastening in needlework; temporary change of direction in sailing to take advantage of side wind..."
5 Let's hope not or we're done for girls.
6 "-ess ... suffix forming nouns denoting females (actress, adulteress, countess, goddess , lioness...)
7 "say ... utter, make (specified remark), recite, rehearse, in ordinary speaking voice ...
8 "face ... supply ... with facings; cover (surface) with layer of other material; dress surface of..."
9 "going about ... (nautical) on or to the opposite tack..."
10 "muff ... woman's fur or other covering (usually cylindrical) into which both hands are thrust from opposite ends to keep them warm...; bungle, miss...; blunder in (theatrical part, etc.)..."
11 "gift ... thing given, present, donation..; faculty miraculously bestowed, virtue looked upon as emanation from heaven etc., (gift of TONGUES); natural endowment (gift of the GAB), talent,..."
12 "wrap ... enfold, enclose or pack or conceal in folded or soft encircling material, (wrap it in paper, cotton wool; wrap up a parcel; mountain, affair, is wrapped in mist, mystery; wraps up his (or her) meaning in tortuous sentences, in allegory); "under wraps in concealment or secrecy ..."
13 "open sesame ... magical or mysterious means of commanding access to what is usually inaccessible..."
14 "organ ... musical instrument of pipes supplied with wind by bellows, sounded by keys, and distributed into sets or stops having special tone, which in turn form groups or partial organs...; (archaic) person's voice with reference to its quality or power..."
15 a nod, here, towards Roland Barthes via Trinh T. Minh-ha, either of whom help give a group of girls like us, dutch courage, so to speak, at times like this. "The term 'matte' (mat, mate in French) is used by Barthes to describe texture, colours, sounds, the surface of a text. It may mean such things as lusterless, without resonance or echo, flat, 'literal'". It's a term which comes up in Barthes reading of Japan in his L'Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970). He refers to the "void" around "the Japanese thing" as "an empty space making it matte". But in relation to the Japanese box, he says that it "... does not function as a temporary accessory to the object it contains; as envelope it is itself an object. Although its value is related to what it conceals, "that very thing which it encloses and signifies is postponed for a very long time" (Barthes p 61). "Like a rigorously arranged bouquet which invites the perceiver to follow what the creative hand has traced, thus frustrating the simple decoding of a symbolic message, "the package is a thought"": When The Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender & Cultural Politics by Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1991, Routledge, NY, at p 210

Anne Walton, April 1997

Dean Whitehorn
Synapse
24.4.97 4.5.97

This story begins in the year 2016 at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality, in London.

At the time our scientists were working with virtual miniaturisation techniques for humans and objects, the aim being to recreate the entire planet earth in miniature so that it could be carried inside the body of an astronaut into outer space.

Phase one of the experiment was to be the releasing of this digital earth, as a virus, into the atmosphere of a distant planet.

I had been working as a researcher at the Institute for some years when I was approached concerning a mission to investigate the making of the film, Fantastic Voyage, in the year 1966.

The principal researcher on this project, John Paul Bichard, reached a frustrating impasse in April and temporarily handed over the reins to the cinereach lab who had a great track record in unearthing vital research clues, through infiltrating the sci-fi film sets of the past.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman from the lab contacted me early one morning, while I was working on a special costume for a visit to the set of Land of the Giants the following week, and explained the situation.

We agreed that if I could finish the costume that night then it could double up for a visit to Fantastic Voyage.

On the 24th of April 2016 I entered the VRTimetransport lab at the Institute, got into my costume and was wired up for the journey.

Looking back on it, Dean Whitehorn, the VRTT operator, seemed a little hungover at the time, but he'd had a lot of experience and I trusted him implicitly.

When I came to, several minutes later, I found myself in a large white space which I took to be one of the studios at 20th Century Fox. There were some free standing white walls with gaps between them, forming an enclosure in the centre of the studio. Several people were walking in and out of the enclosure on what appeared to be some kind of stepping stones surrounded by water. Every so often there was a bright flash of light.

It didn't seem like how I remembered the movie but most of the people looked like 60s film stars so I wasn't too worried. I approached two of the actors and caught snippets of their conversation "...supposed to be an interneuron, the things that carry messages around your body... you know what Stephen Hawking... no, that's motor neuron..."

A tall man accompanied by a woman with shoulder length black hair approached the two actors, "Carolyn, may I introduce you to Dean Whitehorn. This is...."

Strange coincidence I thought. Also, I couldn't remember a Dean Whitehorn having had a part in the film. Must have been an extra, I figured.

Feeling slightly disconcerted, I took a better look inside the enclosure. The flash kept going off but there were no cameras around. It seemed to me that this must be some sort of pre-filming test room, with all these people acting as human messages inside an enormous interneuron, or maybe it was a scene that had been edited out of the final cut.

A rather pale woman with short black hair, standing with a couple of other women, was becoming very animated a couple of paces away "...on longing... yes Susan Stewart....yes.....this show..... we are both the container and the contained,... the transmitter and the transmitted.... within a gigantic representation of.... a part of our own body....insignificant within our own insignificance, oh I meant significance....yeh, I guess it's a kind of have your cake and eat it too kind of a show....no, not really....yes,....but what about relationships to the architectural?....Bachelard... you mean in a politicised kind of a way?....no, more like the body as architecture or interior design.... and we can become messages on the wallpaper of our minds, man....sublime..... you seen Fantastic Voyage?....no....yes....."

I made a mental diagram of the set and relayed it back to the Institute for further investigation. Seconds later a message appeared on my receiver "....mission accomplished ....prepare to return to the future....."

Catalogue essay, Suzanne Treister/Rosalind Brodsky, 3/4/97

Anne Ooms
The Ladies of Nairn
27.3.97 20.4.97

The Explanation

I want to write plainly about how I work. The process of being with the work, attempting to sustain connection with it, involves an ongoing cultivation of openness. This for me is the fundamental joy and difficulty. It is the job of setting aside judgement and anxieties, the narratives of what has been and should be, of a place in history, in order to pay attention to what I can only think to call a 'real' desire. It is a tricky and elusive business which must allow for distractions with an infinitely gentle rigour. It involves the paradox that while I remain committed to the production of a successful work of art, its success is predicated on a faith in letting go; most importantly, the letting go of a preconceived notion of success. Relinquishing the wilful push for resolution is a moment by moment activity. The process of choosing creates the philosophy of my practice: when and how do I allow diversions to have their way without undermining the project and myself as an artist. The continual renegotiation of my relation to these questions is the task at hand. The ability to use change creatively, to accommodate ongoing dissolution, is commensurate with the strength of my faith in it and in my practice as a whole. Sense of self and loss of self are inseparable.

My amorphous complex of desires in the face of a job to be completed (an art work, a lecture, a catalogue essay), continually threatens to fix into a dichotomy. Attentively resisting this polarity by accepting both and refusing to force either issue allows connections within myself, the work and between us to arise. This sense of connection is always an energising surprise. It's a break in causal logic, a temporary abeyance of habit, a satori. It's a blessed relief.

While working on a series of embroideries for this exhibition, I became more interested in my collections of postcards and certain fragments of texts and deciding to put the latter two together, began the narratives which became the current work. (I often find that beginning a work enables me to imagine the work I really want to do.) A recurring image through these texts and in various forms in others I've written, is of a man in a clearing in a jungle or wood. One of the memories which forms the compost for the image is undoubtedly Mellors and his cottage in Lady Chatterley's Lover. To feed the last of the seven texts written for The Ladies of Nairn I had on my desk a post card of a painting of the Virgin and Child with a walnut and another of a green Hans Arp sculpture. Their choice at that moment had no apparent reason. Blocked for a bit, I absent mindedly turned over the Arp card and noticed the title, Waldhut and having no German dictionary, rang a friend who looked it up. It means keeper of the forest or you could say game keeper, he told me.

There is no order for the seven texts to be read. In one you'll find a slender line of connection to this, the eighth text.

Catalogue essay, Anne Ooms, 1997

THE STRETCHER CASE
31 October 1996 - 27 February 1997

The Stretcher Case was a series of exhibitions representing the work of several artists whose work comes out of, is informed by, or is extending a painting practice.

'You need only to wander around a Perspecta, a Biennale or even an EAF, to see that painting is no longer the belle of the ball. It is a little ignored and lurking in the shadows like a wallflower: burdened with the history of a canonic centrality and all the dull duties of being adult - a form which avant gardistes worth their salt should perhaps ignore or reject in their search for new solutions, new forms. Some people have even pronounced it dead. Others claim it to be impossible. So given histories, positionings and attitudes, how do you work with it? Or from it? How does a contemporary practitioner use, or ignore, the expectations and positionings that painting - in the widest definition of the term - finds itself in the late 1990s?'

The season represented some diverse responses by artists to the practices and problems of painting and consisted of exhibitions by Anton Hart, Yuko Shiraishi, Lyell Bary, Eugene Carchesio and Susan Norrie.

THE STRETCHER CASE
Susan Norrie
Guila (work from painting)

THE STRETCHER CASE
Eugene Carchesio
Sleeper

THE STRETCHER CASE
Lyell Bary
Every Little Detail

THE STRETCHER CASE
Yuko Shiraishi
Focus
5 December 1996 - 6 January 1997

FOCUS by Yuko Shiraishi focused on small particular shifts, between colours, finishes, degrees of three dimensionality, and temperatures of colours in an exhibition both austere and immensely sensual. The works demanded their own autonomous identities whilst simultaneously functioning as components of an installation that commanded the gallery space. Although using languages of minimalism that may be familiar to us, it denied easy extrapolations from such references, and refused both ironic quotation or straight rearticulation. This refusal made the use of such references very different to much current Australian work that is predicated on historical precedent (either to legitimise or ironicise the approach). In the refusal of Focus to be easily placed there was an echo of the complex cultural shifts and influences that have informed the artist, and the generation of a work which rewardingly denied essentialisms in our reading of it. The project provided another focus, another point, from which we might consider the abstract.

This show would have been impossible without the support of Annely Juda Fine Art, London and the British Council.

THE STRETCHER CASE
Anton Hart
North Star
31 October-1 December 1996

The 1996 component of the season kicked off with an exhibition by Anton Hart which referenced ideas of minimalism and colour field practice, however confusing and problematising these through the combination of these with other references to historical practices, and those autonomous to the work and project itself. The exhibition presented monochromes, found objects, computer scanned images, text on glass and figurative images in a body of work that investigated the construction and status of the significant, for want of a better word, 'meme' (unit of information) within our readings of an artwork or exhibition. Where, or what is our point of reference, particularly if we are attempting to identify these in formally polysemic discourse? None of the elements were hierarchised: each occupied the same plateau of event and of loading producing an uncanny shift when attention was shifted from one component to the other, as if sudden changes in scale were taking place, a certain shudder of opticality and understanding: initially denying - and therefore foregrounding - the fixed point implied in the title.

Gail Hastings
To Make a Timeless Work of Art
3 27 October 1996

More poetries, this time those of space and mapping. Initially looking like an installation firmly grounded in the histories of minimalism, upon closer inspection the work seems to flicker between the now and enlightenment and pre-enlightenment uses and articulations of space and memory. A polite Dante making plans with Alexander Pope informed by the systems of Giordano Bruno. The satisfaction of the work lies not only in its subtle articulations of colour and space in the elements and their positioning and the use of the gallery space, but in its claim to the articulation of other models of art and experience: thus achieving the immaculately contemporary and the resolutely old fashioned simultaneously, and constructing a work that is both reticent and ambitious. The front part of the gallery contained objects that referenced both sculpture and furniture, as well as water colour images/plans and texts that referenced the physicality of the exhibition and at the same time placed them within a metaphorical context and the narratives of poetic space. The second half utilised a trompe l'oeil to lead the viewer back via what initially appeared to be a seamless blue line at eye level into a maze like recess at the further end of the gallery.

Joanne Harris
Gas
529 September 1996

GAS presented works of hesitated meanings, elided links, where implication and the nearly voiced were generated by and between the component elements. A recurrent image was one of covering where a form is both echoed and obscured by its 'cover' in this case clothing and cloth (the cover being a form in itself). This was also suggested through the generation of a wall of brown paper describing geometric shapes but at the same time suggesting patterns from which something else would be generated. Surfaces both attracted then resisted, a function echoed through the use of language where it attracted with the possibility of naming or titling, but then remained resolutely itself as a combination of vowel and consonant, not as a direct signifier of immediate meaning. This was subtle non-immediate work with a strong poetry.

Helen Fuller
Caravan
529 September 1996

CARAVAN possessed an auto-biographical/biographical element, with Helen Fuller continuing her series of works based on her late father's collections. In this work the lists, strategies and objects used and listed by her father as pertinent to a caravanning holiday, supplies, maps etc, were assembled and articulated into works by the artist. The genesis of the objects encouraged an 'in-betweeness' in our reading of the work - and perhaps in the work itself- where we had to consider the claims of the work as autonomous/formalist events, and as narrative events (as well as being determined by an existing generative structure). Ideas of memorialisation and the mechanics of mourning were invoked: the way that the raw material (inherited, or of memory) has to be re-shaped and reworked and recontexturalised before sense in the present tense can be made form the past.

Linda Sproul
Difficult to Light: The White Woman Variation #2
25 July-25 August 1996

Linda Sproul premiered a new work which consisted of a series of large photographs of the artist, sometimes echoing an academic anthropological photography (in profile, holding a measure) and others where she was echoing iconic western images: Madonna, Monroe, Keeler, Grable. These were displayed in a corridor formation in conjunction with large mirrored grids based on anthropological measuring systems in which we could view ourselves. See how we measured up. The work used/implied various gazes and ways of looking and the images occasioned by and through such gazes - to set up a meditation on construction and placement. This work was a component part of the artist's ongoing project where she investigates the "symbolic and actual condition of the white woman sited in Australia".

Sue Pedley
Under The Pier
27 June-21 July 1996

Sue Pedley's work addressed fundamental ideas of making, of change, and of process. Activity and labour were bought to bear on materials, and the space that they occupied, over the ten days that the artist spent in the gallery constructing the work. This produced an installation that carried the signs and traces of its own development and the histories of a working and re-working.

The changes and shifts that were effected on the material objects through direct engagement and recombination also changed the placing of the elements of the installation in formal and conceptual categories. They resisted their positioning within the discrete arenas of drawing or sculpture, crafted object and found object, natural or manufactured. Rather the evidence of past transformation and labour caused them to become fluid and mercurial, playfully imposing their tentative autonomy, momentarily, as themselves, rather than as representative of a category.

UNDER THE PIER used grasses, plastic, thread, cloth, sand, paper, cardboard, to build itself. It contained work made elsewhere which was represented, reconfigured, and recycled in the new matrix. During installation, the form of the work grew and shifted; reacting to the space, to accidents, to the generation of new elements. The work continued to change at the micro level, as well as the macro the humidifiers scattered around the gallery encouraged the plaster to 'breathe', as it absorbed and discharged water, causing the pigments put into the plaster to expand and contract.

Out of Adelaide
Simon Cardwell, Lynne Barwick, Aldo Iacobelli, Sarah Lindner,
Shane Carn, David O'Hallorhan, Thom Corcoran, Bronwyn Platten,
Joy Hardman, Sonja Pocaro, Louise Haselton (image), Josie Starrs,
Larissa Hjorth, John Tonkin, Shaun Kirby, Victoria Straub, Trinh Vu.
23 May-10 June 1996

A Zeitgeist number. The premise of the exhibition was quite a simple one: to represent work by artists who have left or about to leave Adelaide. Therefore it was a curatorial structure that was about as sophisticated as the 'Adam' show curated by Hany Armonius a few years back at Kunst, where all the participants had to be called Adam Adam Boyd, Adam Cullen you get the picture (with the exception of the one called Hany). OUT OF ADELAIDE was an idea generated through different conversations around coffee tables and bars, about the feeling of shift, change, and departure in Adelaide. People moving on. The show wanted to represent and celebrate the work of a certain number of people over a certain period of time (hey Guy Debord!): all of whom had contributed a lot, through their work, and through their other activities. Artists were approached, and those who wished to participate then selected the work to represent themselves. The exhibition was energetic and zappy, and with a rather surprising amount of sex to the fore - at least surprising when you think of preconceptions of recent 'South Australian' practice: a sex focus is not necessarily the thing that immediately sticks out.

As one of the critics in town wrote, it was all pretty up-beat, and, as another pointed out, considerably more interesting than the Moet and Chandon showing at the same time up the road. What OUT OF ADELAIDE did say was that Adelaide has produced/hosted some impressive activity artwise and artistwise: that had its own identity and autonomy even within disparate forms of expression. As a concept, or even a show, it touched a nerve in some, who felt that OUT OF ADELAIDE was somehow critical, or at least over valitudinal. However, as it co-incided with the release of the State Government sponsored Adelaide 21 Report and its projections and ideas of Adelaide as a cultural generator and site, in view of the dynamics of its size, gravitational pull etc, OUT OF ADELAIDE was percipient, as well as celebratory.

Shaun Kirby
International Headache Congress
18 April-19 May 1996

Anyone familiar with Shaun Kirby's work or who saw the talk he presented at the EAF at the end of 1995, would, to an extent, have been expecting the insidious way in which meaning emerged and then suddenly ducked out of sight; how layerings suggested themselves - the sensation of strata that are structural but not necessarily seen all adding up to what could be called (to maybe coin a cliché) the iceberg syndrome, where much remains unseen below the water-line but you absolutely know it's there in terms of substance and weight. What you would not necessarily have been expecting, would have been the degree that playfulness came across when compared to the artist's previous exhibitions, where it had been present, but somehow more tied down, out of sight (playfulness degree zero?). Here it was definitely a little more unleashed and bouncing, without the work losing its weight or its gnomic complexities.

At the far end of the gallery stood a vast wooden volumetric structure, nail-gunned together out of lengths of timber like a geodesic dome built on acid, which was covered in cloth with stick figures and the legend "Jockey or Nothing" printed all over it. Further up the space, electrical ducting mazed angularly across the floor from a power point on one wall to a bed near the opposite one, where it ended in a large illuminated globe resting on a bobbly foam surface near an unattached false rubber nose. Elsewhere there was a small photo of a building with removed windows each framing the different coloured walls behind, in front of which were two cubes of scented Calvin Klein soaps stacked mini-architecturally. A floor sweeper on a table, pierced by inscribed pens, a large framed photo of a potato sprouting leggy roots, and other things. All of which added to a puzzling and satisfying complexity and amalgam of reference, counter-reference and physicality.

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup
Cross Winds + Search
(installation, surveillance and broadcast project)
17 February31 March 1996

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup are based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. They were resident at the Experimental Art Foundation over February and March 1996 to develop two projects that were the EAF's participation in the Visual Arts program of the Telstra Adelaide Festival of Arts. These projects were called respectively SEARCH and CROSS-WINDS, and both investigated different relations between the individual and the ideas of the polis and the city.

SEARCH was a project for video and broadcast TV. The artists made a synchronised walk in the city, both starting at the same time from a central point, then walking in opposite directions until they gained the further extremities of their route. This walk was followed and recorded by means of the recently installed police surveillance cameras. From this footage an edited tape was made, linking the footage of the two walkers, taken at the same time but in different places, and segmenting this into ten second sections. These sections were then broadcast on Saturday afternoon over a four week period on Channel 7 as part of the Festival TV program, interrupting the broadcast with the silent and grainy footage of the artists, and thus turning the viewers TV set into a security monitor, and allowing the viewer to see others as they themselves have been seen, should they have recently been shopping in the centre of town.

This was a project that required considerable liaison and organisation, the more so, as owing to a confusion in scheduling, the first broadcast was a lot sooner than we had anticipated. In fact it gave the artists, and the EAF, a week to get the work made rather than the four weeks originally timetabled. Even this rather truncated development time wouldn't have eventuated without the Festival going into bat for this project at one point in its genesis, as two days before Pat and Wendy arrived, we still had no guaranteed access to air-time. That resolved, it would then have been impossible to get the project successfully made without the quick support of the South Australian Police, in particular the people in the surveillance room, with the help of Kevin Tischer and the support of Superintendent Ron Jackson, who moved faster than anyone had previously warned them as necessary. The Media Resource Centre were also supportive through supplying access and help at short notice. The finished work was also on show at the EAF during the exhibition, twinned with an earlier version of SEARCH made in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in association with UK-based Locus+.

The CROSS-WINDS gallery work projected the EAF further into the confusing ether of broadcasting, necessitating a learning curve that was so steep that oxygen starvation was a possibility. At least with SEARCH, the artists had already effected a version, so they could foresee some of the pit-falls and anticipate the technologies required. However, CROSS-WINDS was a new project and required a month long radio broadcast, a subject on which we were all amazingly ignorant. The ignorance was not much dispersed after a first couple of days on the telephone to people such as Motorola, other than to find that walkie-talkies could not be used as the signal was a constant one.

Through the murk of surplus capacities and moving wave lengths it became clear that the only option was to set up our own EAF radio station. Fortunately at this point, the clouds parted a degree and a beam of light appeared bringing illumination in the form of Jeff Langdon from Radio 5UV, described by someone at the Australian Broadcasting Authority as the Renaissance man of Australian radio. Through Jeff, we were able to locate a thirty watt Exciter, transport it from Sydney, and then navigate the complexities of getting a special event's licence from the ABA. Jeff also provided a site, found an antenna, and rigged up Exciter and antenna into an operational whole, and then jiggled it when it was found that the telephones in the Alumni Department of the University of Adelaide were picking up the signal too.

All this activity was so that three extracts of opera could be travelling through the airwaves across Adelaide to be picked up by sixteen radio receivers in the EAF Gallery. The space also contained eight loud speakers that were carrying the sound of sung chords, which were abstracted and recombined from the broadcast arias. Both the arias and the broadcast music were sung by women, and the opera excerpts referred to women's narratives and stories. The orientation of the elements was determined by the idea of the 'wind-rose', a concept of Vitruvian city planning (which in turn was an influence on the vision and plan of Adelaide) in which a city should be orientated so that it blocked out the eight major and sixteen lesser winds, thus cutting out their baleful influences upon health and well-being through their effects on the humours. The Gallery was plotted out with the vectors and directions of these winds, relating them to points in Adelaide. The work conflated the physical orientation of cities with an ideological construction, substituting the voices of women for the (blocked) winds, and relating the site and position of the Gallery to the city, in a work that was both beautiful and political.

An unexpected spin off from this was the discovery of quite how many people are out there scanning the airwaves in search of something new. From the day after commencing transmission of the three bits of music, the EAF was receiving at least two or three call a day, sometimes considerably more, from people with enquiries as to what was happening. Presumably these people had tracked us down via the Australian Broadcasting Authority as there was nothing on the broadcast to identify the EAF as the broadcaster. Most wanted to know the identity of the works, and who was singing, some wanted to congratulate us on setting up a station without any talking, and one caller was concerned about the health of the operator, as they had been playing the same three songs now for at least two days and were they OK?

George Popperwell
Region
25 January-18 February 1996

This was a major work by South Australian based artist George Popperwell. One half of the gallery - the one that the visitor initially walked into - was empty, its boundary marked by a dividing wall. Passing that, one entered a space that was filled with shapes and forms constructed out of marine plywood. These referenced various scales and expressions of architecture: from flat sheets at the far end of the space that suggested both decorative ogees in walls as well as funerary slabs, to simple cubes, to buildings with eves and roofs, some entire, some sectioned. Model scale, architectural scale, and space was used: the shifts between the units re-inforcing the reading of some of the units as being representational of (another thing elsewhere) as well as (just) being there.

As usual in Popperwell's work the piece was both seductive and resistant to immediate reading, however it did not take long for the references to the idea of the necropolis to come through: in particular the way that some crypts found in graveyards are models themselves of larger architectural forms. In turn, this lead to a reading of some of the architectures modelled as camps, with all that such resonances imply as regards the holocaust and final solution. Impressively these ghosts were conjured without melodrama, but with quietness and weight.

Clear?
Mehmet Adil, Kerry Williams, Craige Andrae, Peter Tysoe
26.1.95-12.2.95

"Clear?" was as an exhibition, presented in association with Ausglass (Australian Association of Glass Artists), in which four artists made works that investigated ideas or concepts of transparency. Within this shared brief, there was obviously a diversity of approach, attitude and intention - differences that also served to articulate issues in the current debate between an exploratory materials-based 'craft' practice and a sculptural/conceptual 'art' practice. With shared materials the audience were able to see whether there were different terms of reference, or indeed commonalities expressed in the works of Peter Tysoe and Kerry Williams, from a studio-based glass background, and Craige Andrae and Mehmet Adil, both of whom have worked widely, but not exclusively with glass in their individual practices. Tysoe exhibited abstracted forms referring to waters and grasses in the natural world, Williams cast apples on lightboxes looking at the iconography of the Fall story from a feminist perspective; Andrae a series of multi-shaped glass boxes placed on the floor referencing both modernist town planning, minimalism, and suprematism; and Adil effected a large drawing on sheets of glass through the ignition of lines of gunpowder.

25 Years of Performance Art in Australia
16.2.95-12.3.95

This exhibition was curated and toured by the Ivan Dougherty Gallery and represented a (partial) history of performance practice in Australia, a practice that the EAF in the seventies had an important role in, as was articulated by Noel Sheridan in his catalogue essay. The works were represented through various forms of documentation - slides, photographs, sound recordings and videos, as well as through props from the performances, and covered a wide range of the artists involved. As part of the exhibition season, performances were presented. On the opening night Michele Luke performed "Awkward Glories or the Penny Dreadful of an Arcanum Hagiography" in collaboration with Steve Matters and the Burning Giraffes, and later, a work by Joy Hardman and "Which Side Do You Dress?" by Linda Sproul were performed by the artists.

John Conomos
Night Sky
17.3.95-9.4.95

"Night Sky" was a three monitor video work that ran the length of the gallery. Each monitor was framed by neon signs that spelt out words in the mis-spellings of the artist's Greek Australian childhood - chocols for chocolate, minosaur for minotaur and liberary for library. Each screen carried a series of words and images that combined with each other variously as they went in and out of sync, generating various combinations and readings across the work, whilst different phrases and bits of dialogue emerged momentarily from the soundtrack. The images investigated various histories: a strong autobiographical element, footage of Duchamp in New York, the artist on the island of Kythera, footage from fifties Australian film representing immigrants, Marx Brothers skits, tableaux vivants of people facing each other separated by a swinging light-bulb, a person addressing another through a megaphone, someone peering through a telescope (these constructing the component parts of film, sight, sound, light and movement). All of these combined into a poetic meditation on the history of languages, of film, of art and stories of the artist and his family. The readings were manifold and slipped from one arena to another. For instance, Duchamp could be read as a founder of language based work, an artist who worked with movement, but also the artist as exile. "Night Sky" triggered lines of thought and reflection and engendered a multiplicity of readings allowing the viewer to tease out new connections, echoes and similarities.

Alex Rizkalla
Flight - Flight
27.4.95-28.5.95

"flight - Flight" took as its starting point a reflection by Wittgenstein on how words might be placed or generated, whether they are held in place through images: "Suppose I wanted to replace all the words of my language at once by new ones: how would I tell the place where one of the new words belongs?" Is it images that keep the places of the words? Rizkalla constructed two images relating to the notion of 'flight': one of a bird moving through the air, the other of women running naked through the street. This generated a meditation on memory, history and our understandings of the world (the scientific, the historical) and how those understandings are generated and sustained through memory. The photographic image can be read as analogous to the remembered image; from another time, another place, another context. By animating these images onto movement through passing them through a series of old slide projectors, the artist makes a parallel to the 'memory trigger' where one image occasions an ongoing narrative. One static image allows the flight to begin. The images of the bird in flight recalled the works of Muybridge, as did the images of the running women. On second sight it became clear that the women were not frozen in motion by the scientific gaze, but were running under the implacable stare of their Nazi guards, rendered politically and personally powerless by historical shifts that the rhetorics of the scientific were used to justify. Their flight was one of fear.

Lisa E Young
Towards Graceland (Installations from the home of Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie)
1.6.95-25.6.95

"Toward Graceland" consisted of furniture and domestic interiors constructed by the artist referencing ideas of sixties and seventies opulence best exemplified in the interiors of Graceland. Such interiors, with the mirrored cocktail cabinets and white silk sheeted beds, with their radios embedded in the bed head, speak about kitsch, but also spoke about the sublime. Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie are a royalty - and royal family - without nationality, and the values that they represent are those of a transcendence available to all. Elvis and Priscilla are of the people, rather than being above aspiration, as previous nobilities were. They represent the outer limits of aspiration: dreams and desires stretched and made hallucinatory, but never floating away entirely, as they are tethered to the realms of possibility. The works in the exhibition - the gingham cloth table bearing two loaves of bread positioned under a massive picture of the Matterhorn, with yodelling emanating from hidden speakers; the shiny satin of the King-sized bed, its valance animated and moving in generated drafts, took the objects from the ideal home (seventies version) and represented them in such a way that the ghosts of desire were seen and heard, if only from the corner of our eye or at the edge of hearing.

John Barbour
Stills from the Liquid Plane
29.6.95-23.7.95

This work existed somewhere between the conventional categories of painting, sculpture and photography, having elements of all three, but shifting towards each area depending on how the viewer looks at them: whether one focused on colour relationships, spatial distances, conjunctions, etcetera. The materials and the simplicity of their construction encouraged such slippages: in another context, or arrangement, the painted sheets of hardboard propped by means of sticks across the gallery floor would be stripped of their functions and readings, and shift into another inert state, another mode of being. By their fast-footed refusal to generate a unitary meaning, the work became an engine for the generation of fluxing meanings as our gaze travelled across the space and elements. In this, ghosts trailed each reading/meaning. Were you looking at them as paintings for instance, the ghost of sculpture followed, or if they were regarded as installation, that of a site specific practice was engendered. Given this, the primary locations of sculpture and painting were also rendered fugitive, made more insubstantial by the traces of the other states of being. The ghosting was a constant throughout the work, down to the angle cut at the base of the forms, so that the elements read as emerging from the concrete floor, implying the part that made the oblong whole was lodged underground, even though our inspection told us that these shapes were indeed irregular. In "stills from the liquid plain" we were presented with a system of events that addressed the very fundamentals of how we may find structure and create meaning, in narrative and language, in a work full of meaning, although allusive, glimpsed and spectral.

Litteraria
South Australian Museum
1995

Litteraria was a project where two artists, Robert MacPherson and Simryn Gill, were invited to make work for the South Australian Museum and were given access to the collections of the Museum. Robert MacPherson's project at the Museum focused on the Toas in the collection. Simryn Gill used objects from the collections drawn from the area between the north-western coast of Australia to the south-western tip of Peninsular Malaysia, and the islands in between.

Short Sharp Shock 1, 2 and 3
Joy Hardman, Teri Hoskin, Sonja Porcaro, Michael Grimm, Dean K. Farrow, Lisa Beilby, Geoffrey Parslow, Kelly Milton, Katie Moore, Anne Robertson, Joanne Harris, Sarah Haselton, Chris Harris, Larissa Hjorth, Sunday (Phillip) Hopkins.
27.7.95-10.9.95

When an organisation gets the white modernist block in conjunction with a rather restricted cash flow with which to make things happen, there can be a certain bias towards the 'known' to set in. By this I mean having at least a vague idea of what may squatting, whirling, slouching or slipping within the boundaries of the gallery space. There is nothing wrong with this, it's called programming, and, at its best, it's about effective use. However this approach is not the whole story. Relationships between spaces and artists can be otherwise articulated. "Short Sharp Shock" was conceived to interfere with the determinism that lurks within the above model.

SSS is where time, space and resources can be provided for the organisation to show works in progress, punts, and new productions by new producers; thus facilitating a diversity of representation and shifting relations between the space and the work. This time the distancing from the directives of the 'organisation' was further extended. A discrete and large part of the articulation and the artists chosen was made by two artists themselves, who represented their own work in SSS 1 & 2, along with the others. This blurred the traditional (and bureaucratically encouraged) distance between the...

Di Barrett
Mail Order (For Women)
14.9.95-8.10.95

"Mail Order" was a series of works, made via computer technology and colour photocopying, using images drawn from adverts offering fetishistic clothing and accessories, and images of the unadorned un-retouched middle aged female body. The work looked at the operations of societal demand as regards appearance, behaviour and dress, and bought to bear on these the approaches of feminism and post-feminism. Corsets and shackles, nipple rings, all contain and remodel the body, and can be seen, at one level, as metaphorical for societal constraint and modelling. However, in this work they were never allowed such a simple positioning, as in current dialogues, fetishism occupies a particular and disputed position.

On one hand it may be seen as a purely oppressive construction, implicit in the most primal forms of misogyny. On the other, it is asserted that the oscillations of fetishism are a paradigm of a deconstructive strategy for women, and that this reinforces sexual difference and plurality, and that, as such, it can be used in a framework to re-articulate all areas of sexuality. The fact that "Mail Order" never settled for any one position or reading allowed complex and different readings, where it celebrated libido and sexuality as something particular, as various and individual and complex, and operated both as critique and celebration.

Anne Graham
Sterilizer
12.10.95-5.11.95

The installation "Sterilizer" had as its central concerns those of the institution, work, and women, and considered the complex relationships and expressions of power and politics in their relations and operations. The making of work that directly addresses the social and political has been central to the artists work. "Sterilizer" specifically referred to the institution of the woman's prison and the role that work has within the prison as part of the regime of 'correction', the work, in this case sewing having a role that is both economic and social. One wall of the gallery was hung with gowns made to the same pattern as the medical garments made by inmates at Mulawa Women's Prison. The artist however changed the original colour from that of a medical green to white. The activity and site of the sewing is placed in a web of association and linkage.

Other institutions were suggested: those of the hospital and the asylum. In a statement the artist said: "The Mulawa and Norma Parker gaols in New South Wales also provide the equivalent of sweated labour, where women earn the sum of twelve dollars a week churning out surgical gowns for the NSW hospital system. It is paradoxical that women in the most powerless situation, deprived of their liberty, should be employed making garments for the most powerful controllers of bodies, surgeons. The wearers of these habits are permitted extraordinary license under the protection of their profession. Medical prescriptions (sedatives) are utilized as the main means of containment for women in custody. Women in gaol are often presumed to be 'bad or mad'. It is only in fiction that they become heroes like their male counterparts"

John Tonkin, Elective Phisiognomies
Cecelia Cmielewski, Imprimateur
Bronia Iwanczak, Path of the Accident
9.11.95-3.12.95

These three linked shows - in a grouping proposed by the artists themselves - centred on questions of identity and construction. Iwanczak and Cmielewski focusing on questions of memory and culture in the development of an Australian/Polish identity, whilst John Tonkin re-modelled his appearance through a series of morphs, in a work that not only explored computer technologies but ideas of desire and sexuality. All used or referenced technologies in the production and presentation of the work. Cecelia Cmielewski presented a video footage of St Petersburg and Tallin on two monitors, as well as film footage of the artist dressing herself in Polish national costume and dancing, viewed by means of a hand-cranked film editing bench, locating the technology as a metaphor of memory and literally engaging the viewer.

Iwanczak erected columns of earth, wheat and blue air (sky) through which the spectator had to walk to view footage on small monitors dotted on the walls, carrying hard to see images of Warsaw, and other cities. John Tonkin linked his use of the computer to developments in a critique of genetic science and engineering and by extension to 'discovery' of the genes 'responsible' for gay and criminal people. A critique of such deterministic modellings was engendered through an interactive computer installation and the images of his changed face on the wall linking to the discredited 'science' of physiognomy.

Andrew Osbourne, Anti-net
Michael Graf, I say a Flower!
7.12.95-21.1.96

This was another partnership curated by the artists rather than the space: Osborne feeling that his work would generate synchronicities with that of Graf. Andrew Osborne comes from what could be loosely called a 'craft' practice, whilst Graf from a 'fine' arts practice. Osborne's objects in the exhibition were large cases made out of wood supporting an integral glass case. These contained bicycle wheels. A magnifying viewing screen was mounted in the casing in front of a series of photographs on the rim of the wheel. By pulling out a drawer in the lower half of the casing, a pully system creaked into action, causing the wheel to turn and animating the images as they passed by the screen, inventing a technology for the presentation of narrative in time, as if the cinema had never been invented. The works of Michael Graf also played with ideas of narrative, with long arrangements of panels forming friezes of sequential images. The component images themselves were drawn from diverse and various sources: David, Freidrich, Redon, Matisse, Fairweather for example. The meanings and reasons for conjunction were left opaque by the artist, forcing the viewer to generate stratagems for meaning in the work.

Michele Luke
Performance
1995

Shelley Lasica
Here Behaviour
1995

1994

Andrea Sunders Plassman
Walk About Airborne
1994

Filomena Renzi
Songs of Neptune
1994

Weird Science (Adelaide and Manila)
Josie Starrs, Leon Cmielewski, Lynne Sanderson, Marion Marrison, Suzanne Treister (Manila only)
1994

Kevin Todd
Anatomies
1994

Nola Farnham
Carsick
1994

Patrick Pound
Post-Code
1994

David O Hallorhan
The Sound of the Box
1994

Trinh Vu
Voyage of Discovery
1994

Pam Harris
Retrospective
1994

This exhibition was part of a dual project – the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Artspace exhibited a retrospective of the prints of Pam Harris, whilst the component at the Experimental Art Foundation celebrated her performance and video work through photographic documentation, videos, and the display of the props and constructions she use in performances. Pam Harris was a significant artist and had considerable influence in South Australia as an artist, teacher and exemplar, and this exhibition paid tribute to her practice.

Source: Solo Survey Exhibition Linkage Project, Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS EAF annual report

600,000 Hours (mortality)
1994

Publication cover

600,000 Hours Exhibition

(co-curated with LM Walker)
Adam Cullen, Nikki Savvas, The Campfire Group, Dominico De Clario, Hiram To, Bronia Iwanczak, Lindy Lee, Colin Duncan.

600,000 Hours Conference

(co-curated with LM Walker and Dr. Peter Bishop)
Prof Dr Elisabeth Bronfen,Thomas Sokowlowski Dr Griselda Pollock, William Yang, Dr Colin Pardoe, Dr Gary Krug, Jyanni Steffensen, Dr Jane Goodall, Campfire Group, Felicity Fenner and Anne Loxley, Leon Marvell, Dr Anna Gibbs.

600,000 Hours Publications

Title 600,000 Hours (mortality) Author (ed) Linda Marie Walker Edition & publication date 1994 Number of pages 52 pages Binding soft Size 210mm x 297mm ISBN 0 949836 31 1 Main subject Considers various views and aspects of mortality in the late twentieth century
Title 1,799 of 600,000 Hours (mortality) Subtitle Papers and Documentation Author (ed) Linda Marie Walker Edition & publication date 1995 Number of pages 118 pages Binding soft Size 210mm x 297mm ISBN 0 949836 32 X Main subject Papers from conference and images from season of exhibitions re mortality

Chris Ulbrik
Assay

Charles Watkins
Dreams of Linnaeus

Karen Finlay
A Certain Level of Denial

John Rose
Violin Music in the age of Shopping

Mike Parr
100 Breaths 100 Songs

1993

Various Small Fires
Thom Corcoran, Jenni Robertson, Steve Wigg, Louise Haselton, Hossein Valanamesh, Lisa E Young

Bronwyn Platten and Cecelia Clarke
Possible Clouds

Susan Fereday
Object A

Geoff Weary
Faraway

Alan Cruickshank
Mien

Adam Boyd
Polysections

Joyce Hinterding
Untitled

Ceallaigh Norman
RushWaltz

Adam Geczy and Greg Healy
Love(ly) Things

Shane Carn
Wrapped in Plastic

Mehmet Adil
Untitled

Tony Kastanos
Work in Progress

Lynne Barwick
Fresh Blood

Simone Hockley
Ooze

Andrew Petrusevics
MFP

Jonny Dady
Hiring

VNS Matrix
All New Gen
1993

Derek Kreckler
The High Cost of Living

1992

Interrupted Dialogue Revisions
1992

Contemporary Hungarian Art (co-curated with Suzy Meszoly/ Soros Foundation Budapest)
Zoltan Adam, Rosa El-Hassan, Peter Kiss, Istvan Regos, Janos Sugar, Janos Szirtes, Attila Szuchs, Zsolt Veress, Laszlo Laszlo Revesz, Zoltan Bonta, Gabor Farkas, Marta Feher, Aron Gerbor, Agnes Hegedus,Erika Pasztor.

Hiram To
Karaoke
1992

Jyanni Steffensen
ca speaks...ca sucks
1992

Aldo Iacobelli
Souvenirs
1992

Simryn Gill
Loot/Poona
1992

Found objects in books

Bill Seaman
Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers
1992

Henri Chopin
Performance
1992

Wigg and Watt
Where was I?
1992

The Cantrills
Projected Light
1992

All texts on this page are from the original eaf website and unless otherwise specified are written by Richard Grayson

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