Not beyond recognition, but beyond redemption
Jen Budney
Jen Budney: There’s a scene in the opening pages of Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney that really hit me. Carey describes being repulsed by a voice over the intercom in the airport when he arrives back in Australia after many years in New York. The voice says, “Customer O’Brien, Customer Figgis, please present yourselves at the podium inside the terminal.” Carey writes: “God damn! Why did we talk to people like this? Customer? What sort of dreary meeting in what windowless conference room had produced this honorific for international travellers? (…) You cannot expect a curious tourist to understand that this language contains the secrets of our history, but this was the discourse of a nation which began its life without a bourgeoisie, whose first citizens learned the polite mode of conversation from police reports: eg, At this stage I apprehended the suspect, I informed him of his rights and he come quietly with me to the podium where he assisted me with my enquiries.”
Does the work of ACW consciously seek to rebel against this Australian inheritance of officiousness, false primness, petty bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it? Some of your work seems to blow a lot of big fat raspberries to the establishment. In this sense, how can we situate your work in a national – Australian – context?
Geoff: It’s true our country operates as a technocracy and there is an avoidance of other complexities. The racism of my country generally has made me feel ashamed at times to declare where I come from. But there is also a long tradition of laconic, ironic, anti-establishment behaviour. My brother always barracks for the Pakistanis against Australia in the cricket when they tour. To avoid conformity, our best-known hero committed suicide in a billabong.
Jacqui: Yes, looking back over our work, it appears we have rebelled against the establishment, but actually I think institutions were remote to us. The fact we began working collaboratively, after having separate practices, was difficult for some people to comprehend. Now that I think about it, suggesting that anyone-could-be-an-artist and wanting to bring that work into the institution may have been threatening. But things change quickly when they change.
JB: A nation’s art history tends to get written by experts who tell you what the works mean. What do you think of this?
ACW: Well, history can be exasperating in that every moment we live is contested or conflicted. It’s hard to get two people to agree on something that happened, like family members all having different versions of the same event, at the time and years later. In the present we realise how difficult it is to be certain about anything, yet history tends to present an oracular version of what happened. Maybe history is there to repress that feeling of uncertainty. Most major events I have lived through feel misreported to me in that I don’t often feel or remember the same as what is tabled. At the time of Artfan magazine we realised that what we heard people saying about art just wasn’t being written down at all. The magazine was an attempt to find a place for what many people were saying about artists and exhibitions but that simply couldn’t be found in newspapers or magazines. Also, books about the art periods I have lived through tend to be very rhetorical. It’s easy to exchange the experience you have had for what has been written down, even if you don’t agree with what you read. Ann Stephen, a Sydney-based curator and writer, has worked determinedly to bring attention to the work of Ian Burn and his involvement with Art and Language. Without her tireless efforts and latest book, he would have just dropped off the map in Australia
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JB: The American satirist Art Buchwald once said, “If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.” Would you disagree with this, then?
G: There is a fantastic transcript of Lacan addressing the radical students of 1968 at Vincennes. The students challenge him rowdily that his work is obscure and remote, and when he asks them what they want, the hecklers say they want to go outside and take ‘the people’ with them into the streets. Lacan says something like, “When you leave the University you become aphasiac, and when you leave and continue to speak you are still inside.” Rebellion was a specialty of the baby-boomer generation, whose members have now ended up exploiting others to a degree never seen in history before.
New York artist Andrea Fraser has made a living being hired by museums to make a critique of them. I read something recently where she said there was no longer an outside and that everything was now in the capitalist exchange system. It’s true in one way, but it’s also very misleading. I know many artists who simply can’t say or do what they want because the institution and other people forbid it.
J: I have never seen our project being ‘outside’ of the establishment. I see our project as a valuable contribution to what the establishment offers its audiences and its public. I was quite surprised at a comment made a while ago by an Australian museum director who referred to our work as being ‘radical’ – which I interpreted as too radical to show or buy. The Serpentine is not a radical organisation, nor is the Guggenheim.
JB: Do you consider your work to be participating in ‘relational aesthetics’?
J: I don’t know, really. Our work and the intentions are quite different from Cattelan’s and Beecroft’s, for example. I think that when the term became more known in Australia, only a few years ago, there was a desire to slot artists into this description in an Australian context. Maybe it’s useful for some people to think in these terms. I think that it was difficult to categorize our work – it wasn’t seen as either painting or sculpture or performance or video art, and relational aesthetics introduced a platform in which to understand it. Certainly, aspects of our work have been concerned with relations to audience, and more recently on a one-on-one basis.
G: I guess so, just as we are in psycho-geography, spatio-temporality. We have been working in this way for many years. I’ve been working with these ideas in Australia since the early ‘80s.
JB: How did living and working in Italy affect you?
G: A lot. People touch and hug you all the time and that makes you feel good. And they eat well as a right, rather than a privilege. The art scene from the mid-‘90s looked at conceptual practices in a more libidinous and funny way. Many Italian social practices remain kind of arcane and most people still call us gli australiani, after ten years of working there.
J: The collectors there are well informed. They know who the artists are, they follow the art scene and they know what’s going on, not only in Italy. I felt that in Australia everything was more remote and that we hadn’t experienced the possibility to be together in that way.
JB: One could argue that this simply points to the continued existence of an aristocracy in Italy. Not to say that Australia, in its ‘remoteness’, is more democratic – rather, the rich people in Australia haven’t been rich long enough, they haven’t been educated long enough. In order to embrace ‘difficult’ contemporary art, doesn’t one have to be prepared? Doesn’t one need an education?
J: One needs a context in which to understand and place contemporary art into their lives. I was speaking recently with an Italian collector about two Italian artists, mutual friends. He was saying how much he liked them and that he bought their work because he wanted to help them. G: We recently made a show in an apartment of people in Milan who said they “didn’t know anything about contemporary art.” One young woman, after looking at some paintings of Cousin Itt, pulled her hair over her face to impersonate the painting. Like, what more do you have to know?
JB: But I’ve been looking at your older videos lately (History 3, Animal 3, and others). They make more and more sense to me as the years go by and as I see other videos or paintings by ACW that use recurrent images and themes: Uncle Fester, nudity, bears, Mary, etc. There’s so much going on in these older works, so many layers or subdivisions, so many ideas, that it can take years to process, I guess! So, someone who just walks in off the street and watches one of these videos… do you really think she or he can ‘get it’? Is there an optimal way of viewing your work? Like, does it all have to be put in context?
ACW: The whole question of the archive is of course vexed. We make works to address what eludes us. You can, in a sense, archive a life but if that makes the immediate or unmediated response of the viewer irrelevant then something important is lost. Saving too much creates a loss, or restricts the audience, because it suggests there will eventually be a singular ‘knowing’ reading. I guess we are waiting to see what our work means. Often when we first make a work people tell us there is nothing there. It’s embarrassing at times. We hope that the audience will continue its work.
JB: Does the idea of a survey show feel like a turning point?
ACW: Yes. It was never our plan to be unacknowledged.
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JB: As artists, do you have ‘respect for the medium’?
G: I think content and subject move from medium to medium, and you can follow it if you want. Recently I saw a video work by Tacita Dean, Presentation Sisters, which seemed to be more about and in the tradition of portraiture than any recent painting. Painting now seems to go on and on referring to its own recent history. I like paintings that are open to the world rather than sealed off from it. I was working on a nude in Photoshop earlier this year and when it was greatly enlarged I couldn’t help but think it looked similar to a leg in a painting that I had studied like Titian or Piero di Cosimo. At the bottom of Photoshop is painting. Also I think I’ve never seen much evidence that being very educated in any craft allows you to say more. For that reason I like to explore all mediums to see what turns up.
J: Moving across media has in fact become the norm in contemporary art.
JB: But isn’t ‘mastery’ a means of seduction: a way to draw the viewer in to the larger meaning? Do you consciously reject this?
G: My life long inclination has been that the viewer already knows, so why try and convince her or him that you know and they don’t? I guess that’s why we are interested in errors deceits and mistakes (the name of our current magazine). I dunno. I mean, this reminds me of global warming: WE ALREADY KNOW. I guess polishing a work over and over to make it seductive is like the death drive.
J: I think we express what we know spatio-temporally rather than in the material of the works.
JB: What about narrative? Is that becoming more or less important to you as you move on in the ACW project?
ACW: It seems more productive to represent listening than to tell a story. The world is so full of things.
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JB: Is working together (the two of you) different than working in a group?
J: Working in a group is much more of a process and it takes longer to arrive at and agree on ideas. With the two of us, we can work on things separately and bring them together already half done; then we just work out how to finish them.G: We still interface with others and situations in an unstable way. We don’t agree very much. Events can still proceed without people becoming the same. We’re never sure what either of us will do. Often we can’t remember who did or thought of what. On the other hand, being in a couple makes you less paranoid. As Claire Fontaine recently said to us, “At least you have an audience of one.”
JB: When you work collaboratively with folks doing things in public or in private that later end up in a video (such as the hot-tub parties), what is the artwork? The happening or the edited video? Does it matter to you? If it doesn’t matter to you, should it matter to audiences?
ACW: One of the clearest definitions of an artwork is something that shows that it is not the thing itself. Once you realise or agree that it’s not a hot tub party, it has become art in some way. How it is not a party will eventually be described and that is the work of the audience. It’s important to know that Big Brother is not reality. Last year we made a work where we burnt the Australian flag. It was an event with singing and fellowship, and the resulting video work is silent and formal. What remained of the event was different to the experience. In the end you can do what you want with our works. Burn them if you want.
And in fact it was not a hot tub party. We invited groups of people to come and participate in the making of a video work, which also became a magazine.
JB: Does the nature of your ambition change when you work as a collective?
ACW: You need to listen more, because someone else is always there. You become aware that projecting your view onto another person is only one way of feeling liveliness. It can be thrilling to find a way of thinking or working you hadn’t thought of before. Listening and letting things in is what we do. Perhaps it is the opposite of a struggle between will and materials.
JB: Many collaborative projects in the last few decades (at least those that have been written into art history) have had explicit political and/or social goals – think of Group Material, K.O.S., Collab, 16 Beavergroup, etc. I guess much of this comes out of (or supports) the notion of ‘Post-Autonomous’ art, where the aim is not so much to create objects or document the ‘creative process’ but to instigate opportunities/platforms/media for the generation of political/social change. How is your work the same or different?
J: Geoffrey started working with groups in the early ‘80s. Most of these people were not usually involved in contemporary art and many of them hadn’t made art since they were in school. These projects went through a few machinations and by the time we began facilitating workshops together in the early ‘90s, people from different backgrounds had became involved: non-artists, people who said they knew nothing about contemporary art, amateur artists, young artists, professional artists, and occasionally writers and curators. Our aim was to bring people into contemporary art, to provide a platform for people to have some experience of working in a group, collaborating with other people and, if desired, a space to show these projects. Overall, these projects have been about creating an exchange between all the people participating. We never teach people to draw or paint or use a video camera. We assume (and rightly so) that each person will have something to offer, and it is the knowledge of the group that provides all the material we need to work together. These projects, obviously enough, were also about breaking with ideas about authorship, signature, and spectatorship. I don’t think our project is really that much different to Group Material or 16 Beavergroup or other groups working in this way today. Just recently, a young artist made a comment to us that I found quite interesting. She said something like, “But you just get the people in the groups to make your work for you.” This person has not long completed four years of study at one of the most prestigious art schools in Australia. It was really a surprising comment.
G: I think we are incrementally working towards a more ‘open system’. I don’t believe at all that if it’s not ‘totally open’ we have failed. We have never used utopia as a platform. I guess it’s more about conflicted space. It’s about how much indecision you can bear. To totally conform to a group and to be completely free are both pretty impossible. I’m interested that it’s pleasurable to be together and how might we negotiate that.
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JB: Do you have an ideal audience?
J: On our SPEECH web site there is a project titled Who is the audience for contemporary art? We ask artists, mainly artist collectives, “Who is the audience for contemporary art?” One person says something like, imaginary friends are important because they may actually come to life someday and become your audience. My ideal audience: viewers who are able to look at the work, to watch a video work all the way through. People still don’t really spend very long with a work.
G: Not really, but we are looking for a way out of cultural loneliness. Meeting people one at a time seems more satisfying than attempting to interact with a mass public. I have been thinking that, within the system of capitalism, Tupperware is an interesting model. The product itself is what you project onto it. You can put screws and nails or cooked pasta in the containers. People meet for parties in their own homes and distribute these utilitarian objects. The product’s sociability spreads in a horizontal way.
We are interested in what people say, rather than in working in a rhetorical model. We are interested in thinking about what we want rather than what we are meant to want.
JB: Is ACW’s work autobiographical?
ACW: Yes, inadvertently; it’s all about the figure/ground changing. Us, as individuals, in institutions, in groups, in the world.
JB: Some of your paintings and some of your videos are dream-like – different elements come together where the associations are not obvious (no linear narrative, or not one that makes sense – here I think of the bear and hot tub paintings) or things happen as if in a dream – like real-life but uncannily different like the video where Geoff falls in the water. Is this intentional? Are you interested in dreams?
J: I just woke up from a dream where someone was old and dying and we all kept saying how young he looked. I’ve heard many people describe events in their lives like being in a dream, or being surreal. Weird things happen all around us that don’t make sense and I think that our work reflects an aspect of that (perhaps unconsciously on our part as we make it). The Baptism video doesn’t refer to a dream; the event actually happened and we re-enacted it. The reason why we wanted to do that is related to how Geoffrey wanted to be baptized some years back. He talked about it on and off and I would say if he didn’t believe in God why did he need to be baptized. Was it the old insurance idea: just in case he is up there? Anyway, I managed to talk him out of it and then, a little while later, he fell in a pond, just like it happens in the video. We saw this event as his baptism.
G: Akiro Kurasawa said, “Everyone is a genius when they dream.” We have a work where people buy our dreams that are written down, then they own them and their copyright. I guess in this way the artist offers what they don’t understand about themselves. Many art works are like dreams in that they feel very familiar but you don’t understand them at all. JB: How important is religion?
G: My parents were both atheists. My father had a very material view; for him there was no God because he had been in aeroplanes and seen for himself; the heart is just a pump, etc. So, in contradiction, for years I looked for the spirit or incarnate, the world inside this one. In the 1600s, Hobbes called gas a spirit. In 2000, I saw Jean Clavreul, an old guy who had been part of Lacan’s original group, speaking to a small group in New York. He said religion is on the side of the answer and that atheism is on the side of the question. I now firmly think that atheism is the more ethical pursuit. Atheism is like not-knowing without end.J: There are references to religion in our work but for me they are only stories that describe the world as we know it.
JB: That’s funny, because I see your work as having a very Catholic aesthetic – it’s full of saints and sinners, suffering and redemption, and kitsch. Is this just a coincidence?
G: That is funny. I have always been drawn to these themes. Have you noticed that junkies are often drawn to these themes? Suffering, redemption, the Mother, God. I guess it’s like Nietzsche’s notion that you can’t be outside of Western civilization because everything you think is built with it. Every time I go to a particular cafe-bookstore in Turin I look at this new, gold covered book about saints (it’s quite worn now). I look at the faces of those who have suffered. I have now developed the impression that there is an incredible, intractable, single-minded mania in these people, who are stubborn, obsessed and blind to all that’s offered to them. A lot of them have grave, driven faces, kind of in-denial – they look like they would simply listen to no one. The trees in these pictures are very beautiful, but I don’t see much beauty in this obdurate mania.
J: I had a Catholic, violently Catholic, education. When I met Geoffrey he knew a lot of stories about the saints and the Holy Spirit, but he’d taken them all from Italian Quattrocento painting. During the time he was looking at those works, I was trying to cleanse myself of the need for religion.
JB: Is making art a search for redemption, then, Geoff? Jacqui, is it a denial of your religion? Where does the impulse come from, and is it the same or different impulses for the two of you?
G: Redemption and sexuality seem pretty closely linked – the desire for both. Maybe in art it’s like looking for something that’s not going to be useful. As for being different, we are never the same; we don’t think like a brand; our work is a love story.
J: The impulse is perhaps unconscious a lot of the time. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s like just having to do something even if it’s destructive. I’m not aware of my desire to be redeemed.