Exhibition Review

Magic Object: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

Magic Object: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is a 21st century wunderkammer; a place where artworks act with agency, pushing up against each other, drawing threads, casting spells and connecting multiple sites for spatio-temporal-material investigations. Curated by Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the exhibition sees a movement towards curiosity, ritual, shamanism and besoulement within contemporary art. The biennial exhibition features 25 artists and is this year presented across multiple sites, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at UniSA, JamFactory, Carrick Hill and the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Slade’s large inclusion of Aboriginal Australians within the exhibition is of particular note, showing the formative contribution that Indigenous artists make to the discourse of Australian contemporary art.

The wunderkammer as a concept has formed part of Curator Lisa Slade’s curatorial concern for a number of years, extending from curatorial projects including Curious Colony: A Twenty First Century Wunderkammer (2010) and Strange cargo: contemporary art as a state of encounter, (2006), both presented at the Art Gallery of Newcastle. Seeing the wunderkammer as a curatorial methodology, Magic Object acts as a cabinet of curiosity for a group of artworks that are defined both by their enchanting connection, and their curious difference. Slade draws from the historical understanding of the concept, steeped in anthropocentric, colonial thinking, which privileges the curiosity of the collector (read powerful, white, colonising man). Through this exhibition she seeks to re-situate the meaning of the word within the contemporary, as space for aesthetic and philosophical contemplation, ‘a means of colliding the historical and the contemporary, art and non-art -- and for investigating our antipodean position in the world.’^[1] This is after all, the foremost survey of Australian art, and Slade uses the kammer as a place within which to present difference through non-western, cross cultural and boundary practices that are key to the landscape of contemporary Australian art.

The wunderkammer can be easily seen within the dispersed aspects of the exhibition scattered around the city; at the museum of Economic Botany, JamFactory Gallery 2 and at Samstag Museum. A perfect vitrine space, JamFactory’s Gallery 2 provides a cabinet within which Slade has displayed a collection of rarefied objects. Featuring works from Abdullah, Bond, Gill, Haselton, McMonagle, Moore, Nell and Swann the esoteric collection of objects is museological in presentation, and designed to inspire wonder. The works presented here push and pull between real/imagined, material/spirit is unsettling in its quietude. Similarly, the presentation of Bluey Roberts’ work, complete with glass vitrine cabinet, at The Samstag Museum reads as museological. Likewise, Tom Moore’s installation at the Museum of Economic Botany, Watching Glass Grow, situates itself as a meta-wunderkammer; a cabinet of curiosities within a museum collection within the botanic gardens, a space of living and growing specimens. Referencing nature, yet inherently unnatural in their mutations, Moore’s work comprises a group of eccentric glass objects; fronds of murrine glass grasses sprouting from unassuming mounds, anthropomorphised glass carrots that stare back at the viewer.

LEFT: Fig 1. Glenn Barkley, Iznik Ignatz Potz, 2015, RIGHT: Fig 2.  Nell, The Wake (detail), 2014–16,       

A cheeky nod to his former career as a curator, Glenn Barkley has chosen to display his work as a room within a room (a kammer within a kammer, if you will). The partition of space is an architectural act of blocking off and making separate, creating a distinct inside/outside. On the exterior the dingy plywood construction references unfinished exhibition furniture, complete with spack-filled fixings. Inside the pod there is a sense of intensity, purpose and energy. The doorway is a portal to a highly organised and animated world. The works are grouped closely, saturating the plinth with a miasma of art historical references, paying homage to the studio ceramics movement, the decorative arts, and thousands of years of material culture as told through the history of vessels.

Animism is key to Slade’s Magic Object. Many of the works are transformed from simple and uncomplex objects into anthropomorphised beings through the addition of legs, eyes, appendages and voices. Faces and body parts appear in a majority of the works, some connected and others abjectly displaced or trans-fused. It may be possible to consider these objects as being besouled, a concept where objects in a gallery act on the level of bodily empathy.^[2] The role of the artist in the act of besoulement displayed within in Magic Object is not stable. While there is an understanding that the artists have, at the very least, colluded with the materials of their artwork in order to create spiritual agency, there is no ownership declared over these souls, either by Slade or by the artists. Viewing the artist as a colluder instead of a creator is a concept that can be seen in Roy Wiggin’s room at the Art Gallery. The darkly painted space is hung ‘salon-style’ with ilma, or dancing rods. These are hand-held spiritual objects that have been informed by the spirits of the unborn and the deceased and are conjured as songs as well as objects which are also used within dance.

Heather B Swann’s Banksia Men present simultaneously as costumes for ritual, and objects inhabited by souls. Their physicality and material presence, though unanimated in the gallery space, is occupied by the uncanny, hovering spirit of the Banksia Men. Nell’s body of work fits easily within this animistic tendency, with her ceramic objects using facial features and body-like-parts as a way to empathetically communicate with the audience. Slade has brought these concerns to the forefront of the exhibition, including an essay from Gemma Weston in the catalogue that develops theory around Magic Object’s many animistic tendencies. Weston writes about understanding animism ‘as a system of exchanges and relationships between human and non-human subjects with their own agency, where natural, cultural and spiritual worlds reciprocally bring each other into being’^[3] The works and bodies of works have a reliance on the affective realm of art, and their relationships amongst each other (pushing, pulling, rubbing against each other in virtual/affective space).

Despite this theorisation of relationality on the most part, especially at the Art Gallery of South Australia, there is a clear separation of bodies of works into distinct rooms or spaces. This is a curatorial decision that appears to value the distinction between bodies of work over relation. However at Samstag Museum, the groupings of works flow into each other, creating a richer audience experience and allowing for works to be read against each other. Here the works speak together to present an other-worldly experience. Juz Kitson’s hanging sculptural works, which combine pristine Jingdezhen porcelain with materials including hide, horns, wax and plant material, reference living bodies, specifically alien-like egg clusters (Fig 4.). The perfect and smooth surfaces of Kitson’s porcelain contrast with the sprawling, uneasy, gothically-over-decorated, ceramic works by Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Upstairs at Samstag works act as portals into other spaces/dimensions/magical planes. Tarryn Gill’s deities form a ritual circle of magic beings, inviting the viewer to step into the circle and become the object while the beings stand around and meditate over you. Garry Stewart’s interactive media installation goes further to transport the viewer into another space/world/temporal dimension. The work places the viewer in the position of the subject and performs the body with algorithms of visual reverberation, splicing and delay. Danie Mellor’s round prints provide a glimpse into a hyper-callibrated, highly saturated, natural world; some kind of Australia that you’ve never seen before. Slade writes “Mellor draws on Western traditions and indigenous cultural perspectives to create imagery that suggests multiple ways of approaching the conceptual space of our environment.”^[4]

IMAGE: Fig 3. Danie Mellor, On a noncorreolationist thought I–XIV, 2016,

Materiality and material deception also come into play within Slade’s rationale for Magic Object. Many of the artists selected have a deep connection to their material of choice. Louise Haselton’s body of work honours the innate and somewhat alchemic qualities of domestic materials, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s sculptural works show a deep connection to materials honed through hours spent making. In Michael Zavros’ and Jacqui Stockdale’s work however, there is an element of material deception. Zavros’ hyperrealism presents as photographic image, where it is in all actuality a painstakingly produced oil painting. In the adjoining room, Stockdales series of images, The Boho, create the opposite illusion; hand painted landscape serve as backdrops for photographic portraits. Robyn Stacey’s camera obscura prints also twist the logic of visual perception, taking the familiar and flipping it on its head. Through this Slade suggests that artists play a role in questioning our perception of the world, and do this through magical reorganisations of the way in which we look.

Generous in content and presentation, Magic Object provides many entry points for the viewer. Through simple gestures such as anthropomorphic memisis, and objects that operate with body-like empathy, Slade has curated an exhibition that is easily accessible. The exhibitions engagement with the concept of the cabinet of curiosities, conjures idea of works of art that can be read against each other within the same space. This is perhaps where the exhibition becomes weaker, as on the most part the objects and bodies of work are kept in distinct rooms. Through wall text and the accompanying catalogue publication focus is kept on the agency of the objects, their ability to act, to be be-souled, and in this aspect the exhibition succeeds in creating a space where works can be read for what they do rather than the viewer searching for a misplaced and antiquated ‘meaning’. As a survey of Australian art, Magic Object offers a refreshing view into contemporary practices, and contextualises current tendencies in Australian art for a diverse audience.

               

                                                                                                                       

Fig 4. Juz Kitson, Outside the symbolic order of things (creation and the mortal), 2014 

Fig 5. Jacqui Stockdale, The Offering, 2015

IMAGE LIST

Fig 1.   Glenn Barkley, Iznik Ignatz Potz, 2015, earthenware, 7 pieces, various sizes, installation dimensions variable; Private collection, Sydney. Courtesy the artist and Utopia Art Sydney Sydney

 Fig 2.  Nell, The Wake (detail), 2014–16, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, and STATION, Melbourne

Fig 3.   Danie Mellor, On a noncorreolationist thought I–XIV (detail), 2016, type C print on metallic photographic paper, 14 images, dimensions variable, edition of 3. Courtesy the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne

Fig 4.   Juz Kitson, Outside the symbolic order of things (creation and the mortal) (detail), 2014, Taiwanese porcelain, Jingdezhen porcelain, Southern Ice porcelain, angora and cashmere goat hide, goat hooves, antlers, 230 x 55 x 65cm. Courtesy the artist, GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane

Fig 5.   Jacqui Stockdale, The Offering, 2015, from the series The Boho, type C print, 139 x 105.5cm. Courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne

All images via ‘Magic Object: the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’ website, last modified 2016, accessed march 2016 http://adelaidebiennial.com.au/media/media-gallery/

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^[1] Lisa Slade, ‘Every Artist is a Conjuror’ in Magic Object: the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, ed. Lisa Slade, (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2016)  p18

^[2] Jan Verwoert, ‘Animalisms’, in  Art and Research, volume 4 no1, (2011), accessed April 2012, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v4n1/verwoert.php  p2

^[3] Gemma Weston, Twenty-First Century Animism, in Magic Object: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art ed. Lisa Slade (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2016)  p102

^[4] Slade p52