Heartland
November 2013
Looking back on 2013’s watershed survey of contemporary South Australian art.
On a recent visit to the magnificently anachronistic Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, I found myself transfixed by a shrivelled specimen of a bush pear or bush banana. What transformed this sad little representative of the genus Marsdenia or Native Pear, as it is often called, into a disturbing poisonous token of the heartlessness of the colonial scientific enterprise was a visit I had just made to the exhibition HEARTLAND: Contemporary Art from South Australia, in the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), a short walk away, down North Terrace.
On display was Yhonnie Scarce’s work titled The Cultivation of Whiteness (after Warwick Anderson’s 2002 book that exposed the experimentation in the 1920s and 30s on Central Desert Aboriginal people). For this work, Scarce had hybridised, in iridescent blue glass, her own exquisite variant of the bush pear, a fruit that was once a food source and still holds totemic significance for the Kokatha and Nukunu people, who are the artist’s ancestors. Like all the artists in HEARTLAND, Scarce was given ample space to create her own mini-museum, and she displayed a collection of sixty specimens in large science beakers that she placed on a shelf running around two walls of the gallery. From a distance, the dazzling effect of coloured glass in the Pyrex containers created the impression of beautiful variations of type. Closer inspection revealed that each object was not just a variant of this glass-blower’s art but also a product of her destructive intervention with cutting and grinding wheels. On many, Scarce had slashed the flawless surface with parallel grinding scars, evocative of the cicatrices on Aboriginal bodies that are so familiar through old anthropological photographs. Some of the glass forms were neatly or crudely dissected, while others were simply smashed to form a collection of gorgeous shards. The impact of this work explains not only why I might have been riveted by a bush pear in the Museum of Economic Botany but also why this exhibition displayed important, if not exemplary, curatorial strategies.
It is thirteen years since the AGSA has presented a survey exhibition of specifically South Australian contemporary art. That exhibition, CHEMISTRY: Art in South Australia 1990–2000: The Faulding Exhibition, curated by Sarah Thomas, was a very different exhibition to HEARTLAND in its curatorial ambitions and scope. The curators of HEARTLAND, Lisa Slade and Nici Cumpston, did not duplicate the previous show’s attempt to present a synopsis of the ‘big hits’ or ‘big names’ in recent art from South Australia—an inherently retrospective exercise. Instead, they asked a much more interesting question: who are the contemporary artists who might best tell us about South Australia’s geographic, cultural and historical essence without recourse to the visual conventions of colonial landscape? They also adopted the potentially high return, but very high risk, curatorial strategy of asking many of those artists to produce new work in response to the theme ‘Heartland’. This was also an expensive option, only made possible by a government grant through Arts SA.
Suffice to say, the gamble paid off handsomely. Perhaps this was because the curators rigorously narrowed their selection to artists who use or have used their experience of living in South Australia as a wellspring for their art. There was, however, another agenda that did most to shape the rich heterogeneity of the content and display in the exhibition. Slade and Cumpston articulated this clearly in the catalogue, noting their exclusive focus on artists who translate the corporeal and spiritual connections with place through “hand and heart”. Before any visitor was half-way through the exhibition, this intention became refreshingly obvious in the almost singular focus on artists who individually or collectively make things—specifically through direct material intervention to produce physically crafted objects and images. Even what appeared to be powerful photographic landscapes by Kate Breakey were digital prints, hand embellished with pencil and coloured pastels to exploit and critically undercut the romantic tradition found in early-twentieth-century pictorial photography. And the portfolio of photographs by Ian North, Felicia: South Australia 1973–1978, consisted of recent, hand-made prints following the best craft traditions of the printed photograph. North’s thirty-eight, modest-sized gelatin silver prints were hung Salon style in the exhibition, scattered up and across the three walls of a dedicated gallery room. Hanging opposite in this darkened space was what appeared on first and all subsequent examinations to be a multiple-panel digital or photographic print. Kim Buck’s charcoal drawing Lithology resists any non-photographic reading regardless of how closely it is scrutinised. The dialogue about materiality that the juxtaposed works in this room set up was a wry curatorial conceit that undermined the tediously ubiquitous first option of the digital print in much contemporary art practice and display, as well as the sole option in image-making outside the boundaries of art.
The one video inclusion in the exhibition, What Remains by Angela and Hossein Valamanesh, revealed the hidden muscular pulsations that facilitate the movement of a snail. Filmed from below on smooth glass, the snail’s propulsion mechanism takes on the vibrating rapidity of electricity, a revelation that only increases the mystery of the snail’s stately pace. Unlike many artists dipping into video, Angela and Hossein Valamanesh sought technical support in making the work, in this case, from their son Nassiem. As a result, What Remains is a superb example of the video art form in terms of the synergy of technical and conceptual means, and it was given added context by two supporting wall works that reproduced a snail’s opalescent meanderings using glass powder and gloss medium on felt.
Interestingly, Hossein was represented in the CHEMISTRY exhibition in 2000 as was James Darling, who in HEARTLAND also presents work made in collaboration with his partner, Lesley Forwood. River to Ocean by Darling and Forwood is a massive installation that maps the complex landscape that facilitates the great Murray–Darling river system’s exit to the sea. In building the contours of the land in River to Ocean, the artists have used their signature material of interlocked mallee roots. However, I found that in this work, these entanglements lost something of their usual formal power, largely discounted to the demand to follow the topography of the large map below that ordered their arrangement. Unfortunately, the volume of the work’s sound component, by Philip Samartzis, was set too low, a common problem in galleries attended by large, diverse groups. An easy way to combat this is to have sound checks with a small group of school children in the next room of any gallery space, since this is the median sound environment for visitors.
Most major exhibition catalogues are sent to print long before the related exhibition is mounted, which eliminates the possibility of installation shots, and results in an alphabetical sequence of artists with illustrations of earlier work or work in progress. It is unfortunate that we only tend to notice these limitations of a printed catalogue when the product is as sumptuous as that produced for HEARTLAND and when curators produce such exceptional experiential dynamics as they did for this exhibition.
Much thought was given to the configuration of the temporary exhibition space on the lower floor of the AGSA to accommodate HEARTLAND. The large atrium space made necessary by the long staircase leading down to the entry and exit points was particularly well activated with surprising sightlines to, and encounters with, works by Annalise Rees, Chris De Rosa and Wendy Fairclough. The exhibition space proper was divided into eight rooms, and the large fourth room structured as both the physical and symbolic centre of the exhibition. This room featured the works by artists from the Tjala art centre in Amata, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands, in South Australia’s northwest. Like the other artists who made work for HEARTLAND, the Tjala artists made their individual and collaborative work mindful of the exhibition space. A video supporting the exhibition showed images of the artists in the Tjala art centre trying out models of their work in a scaled down mock-up of the proposed room. The vibrancy of the installation depended on the selection and placement of four large paintings around a central plinth featuring Tjina, a collection of constructed tracks, and other signs, with Paarkakani, a squadron of flying creatures, suspended above. On one wall, Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears), by Hector Burton, Steven Burton, Willy Kaika, Ray Ken, Mick Wikilyiri and Stanley Windy, faced off against two very different works—Ngayuku Ngura (My Country) by Wawiriya Burton and Amata/Apara by Tjungkara Ken, Yaritji Young, Freda Brady and Sandra Ken. This arrangement highlighted the artists’ rich, diverse approaches and variety of symbolic vocabulary. For once, the positive and transformative power of the white cube was on show, as this dynamic installation foregrounded the exuberance and passion of the Pitjantjatjara artists and one could sense the magical essence of the Central Desert country. If this happened to be through the lens of modernist painting and sculpture, so be it. In fact, a major achievement of the HEARTLAND curators was their ability to comfortably position contemporary Aboriginal art at the literal centre of this show—between the long-established polarities of modernist representation and abstraction.
The exhibition layout was sequenced to begin with representation. Wendy Fairclough’s glass objects that opened the exhibition are directly cast from everyday objects, while the giant sea garden by Chris De Rosa, placed at the exhibition’s entrance, acknowledges the almost indexical traces of its sources by incorporating actual sea sponge and old linoleum fragments seamlessly into the installation. Apart from the Amata-Tjala room, the only other room that featured painting was the first, with new painting by Adelaide-born Stewart MacFarlane, who was one of the few Australian artists to gain international exposure during the Neoexpressionist return to painting in the 1980s. This is an inspired selection, because MacFarlane’s Heartland—the title of his large painting of the Flinders Ranges—plays to his formidable strengths. He can’t let go of the blunt psychological drama of Max Beckmann or Edward Hopper filtered through the palette and scenario of Hollywood cinema that frames a familiar if not universal vision.
The exhibition ended with a room of pure abstract delight in the work of Amy Joy Watson, where a dozen, large helium-filled balloons supported complex polyhedrons, hand-made from balsa wood and painted in colours that echo bleached Australian landscape or faded 50s architecture, as much as the palette of Georgio Morandi. This was complemented by the collection of abstract architectonic forms by Annalise Rees at the exit that led into an interactive environment where visitors (of all ages, it turned out) could develop their own inventive constructions from supplied shapes.
Significantly, HEARTLAND signals a distinct return to the curatorial privileging of aesthetic judgement. Across the exhibition, materiality was the primary driver of metaphoric transfer; works such as Hossein Valamanesh’s When the Rain Stops Falling, with its upside-down, denuded tree rotating above a leaf circle on the ground, and Commonality by Wendy Fairclough, where the commonest domestic items are cast in fragile crystal, needed no back story or extended wall text to trigger meaningful interpretation. Clearly, political or environmental concerns underpinned a number of the works in HEARTLAND but in these too, the medium dominated the message.
HEARTLAND: Contemporary Art from South Australia showed at the Art Gallery of South Australia from June 21 to September 8, 2013.
artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Exhibitions/Past_Exhibitions/2013/Heartland/HEARTLAND1.html
Images:
1. Kim Buck
2. Hossein & Angela Valamanesh
3. Ian North
4. Tjanpi Artists