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.