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/
[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
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