'South Pacific' is the prescribed regionalism of the Pacific Islands; a colonial fantasy; place constructed by trade routes, European and US voyagers, and the events of World War 2, which connected the Islands interminably. Framed by grainy, opening and closing footage of the ocean, and overlayed with subtitles which flow across the screen in the rhythm of a net chat, Stella Brennan’s South Pacific explores narratives about place that have impacted upon the region from the outside, and flowed in.
The images in the work actually come from three sources and continue with Brennan’s ongoing interest in antiquated technologies: their revelation and precise dating of utopian thought; the ways in which their re-presentation can refigure and warp persistently operative modernist frameworks for seeing and reading places and events, histories and artifacts. The grainy intro and outro is filmed off the nose camera of a passenger jet, as videoed off the jet’s inflight entertainment system. The radar images were filmed from an antiquated harbour radar machine at the Auckland maritime museum. The ultrasound images were made by immersing a model plane - a bockscar, the plane that bombed Nagasaki, which came to Brennan packaged with a model atomic bomb - in water. The water creates images like sonar pictures; the explosions are handfuls of sand being dropped in front of the probe. This was the clever suggestion of Brennan’s husband and collaborator Dr David Perry, who is a radiologist.
I love how illusory and poetic the narrative voice of this work is, switching from one kind of omniscient position to another (plane passenger, Islander, the non-human landscape) in different ways sympathetic and sensitive to a diverse set of actors, observers, and ecologies involved in the periods and events invoked. Brennan dedicated South Pacific to her neighbour, who was an aerial photographer with Australian forces in Rabaul during WW2 and who showed her the photos he took of the Japanese surrender there. While seemingly short in length, South Pacific took 18 months to create: Brennan struggled with the challenge of transporting fascinating factual information in to artistic form, while swerving the domain and impact of a social studies project. The text that remains is a gathering of fragments: from stories people have told her about the war, including the aerial photographer, but also Bill Sevisi, a very famous Samoan/ NZ Hawaiian Steel guitarist who imparted the story about learning tunes off the shortwave radio; image and document research such as the U-boat log, which was found in the New Plymouth Library collection; research on personally puzzling artifacts from the period, such as the mine at Mokau and the radio station at Musick point; as well as narratives and language play that have been extended or interpolated for poetic effect. The simple, fairly obvious device of a dream sequence successfully ties these many voices, histories, ponderings together; the plane passenger traverses South Pacific space in a disparate, and episodic, fitful temporality of dreaming and waking.
Thanks to Stella for speaking about the work in more detail with me. There are two great essays on Stella Brennan's practice by Robert Leonard and Sean Cubbitt in the monograph O----------10. Robert's essay, 'History Curator' is available online here.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
How to make another work about colonization
John Gillies'Divide 2006 quickly orients the viewer in to a sensory rendering of the Australian bush: the dry airborne scuffle and scaled peeling tones of eucalyptus branches and hard grasses, and these images and sounds in ghostly dialogue with a diverse set of landscape narratives from Australian fiction film and literature. In time, the work's specific enactment of the story of the call of Abraham and his chosen “ flock” to the promised land becomes more clear.
The passage of Genesis 12 that provides the work's voiceover is the originary possession doctrine in the Judeo-Christian worldview: the promised land as the call to hardship; the summons requiring the sacrifice of identity (from home, from family) for a land unknown; such personal costs as the means of accessing the sublime mode of the evangelist campaign; the call to colonise as the call to individual wisdom; the call to emigrate as a call to responsibility, and a priviledged growth of faith from isolation and transplantation; the call to wisdom as for the world’s sake, disinfection from idolatory; the call as the fresh religious start of the human race on new soil, under new conditions.
The title of this post points to Gillies' aesthetic choices that the artist acknowledges are made in the wake of a decade of debates over Australian historiography, and within local contexts of exhibition that have become tired , shy and suspicious of local traditions of politically inflected aesthetics. The authority of the biblical voiceover and the narrative it delivers is differently rendered ambivalent, malevolent, arrogant, through the men's performed gestures, and through interventions from the landscape of their new world. The men disturb the fragile structures of an ant's nest at the very beginning of the scene; a set of additional hands and an associated laugh appear as a possible knowing indigenous presence interior to the land; the fixation upon stock numbers equivalencing anxious, opportunistic modes of occupation; the tearing and scattering of pages from the bible, which cover, but are further decomposed within, an inhospitable landscape, resistant to possession. To step in to allegorical time, in to singular reduced formal renditions of the colonizers' actions and intentions, constructs an alternative means of re-experiencing and re-exploring historicized trauma and discomfort with renewed sensory awareness.
A more local reception of Divide, and the work that it does, recognises Gillies' long term engagement with the Sydney performance scene, the cultural influences and performance traditions that are local to that, and that communities' motivations in participating in this work, making strange and ambiguous certain signs of national identity through signature detourning gestures and techniques. The four actors are all renowned figures; the appearance of Sydney-based Chinese opera singer Xu-Fengshan who performs a Kunqu, a rare Chinese drama tradition, further upsets the male journey narrative with temporal and sexual ambiguity. Sydney audiences decipher a work with these additional markers that speaks to and from a renowned performance community with deep concerns about narrative, representation, and national identity at the time of the work's production. In the work's final scene, the men and their journey falls away in to blurred images of sheep, whirring and circling (as colonizing sheep requiring constant guidance tend to do), within a seemingly more present, statement-moment of famished and deforested land.
The passage of Genesis 12 that provides the work's voiceover is the originary possession doctrine in the Judeo-Christian worldview: the promised land as the call to hardship; the summons requiring the sacrifice of identity (from home, from family) for a land unknown; such personal costs as the means of accessing the sublime mode of the evangelist campaign; the call to colonise as the call to individual wisdom; the call to emigrate as a call to responsibility, and a priviledged growth of faith from isolation and transplantation; the call to wisdom as for the world’s sake, disinfection from idolatory; the call as the fresh religious start of the human race on new soil, under new conditions.
The title of this post points to Gillies' aesthetic choices that the artist acknowledges are made in the wake of a decade of debates over Australian historiography, and within local contexts of exhibition that have become tired , shy and suspicious of local traditions of politically inflected aesthetics. The authority of the biblical voiceover and the narrative it delivers is differently rendered ambivalent, malevolent, arrogant, through the men's performed gestures, and through interventions from the landscape of their new world. The men disturb the fragile structures of an ant's nest at the very beginning of the scene; a set of additional hands and an associated laugh appear as a possible knowing indigenous presence interior to the land; the fixation upon stock numbers equivalencing anxious, opportunistic modes of occupation; the tearing and scattering of pages from the bible, which cover, but are further decomposed within, an inhospitable landscape, resistant to possession. To step in to allegorical time, in to singular reduced formal renditions of the colonizers' actions and intentions, constructs an alternative means of re-experiencing and re-exploring historicized trauma and discomfort with renewed sensory awareness.
A more local reception of Divide, and the work that it does, recognises Gillies' long term engagement with the Sydney performance scene, the cultural influences and performance traditions that are local to that, and that communities' motivations in participating in this work, making strange and ambiguous certain signs of national identity through signature detourning gestures and techniques. The four actors are all renowned figures; the appearance of Sydney-based Chinese opera singer Xu-Fengshan who performs a Kunqu, a rare Chinese drama tradition, further upsets the male journey narrative with temporal and sexual ambiguity. Sydney audiences decipher a work with these additional markers that speaks to and from a renowned performance community with deep concerns about narrative, representation, and national identity at the time of the work's production. In the work's final scene, the men and their journey falls away in to blurred images of sheep, whirring and circling (as colonizing sheep requiring constant guidance tend to do), within a seemingly more present, statement-moment of famished and deforested land.
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