Late in 2008, at the invitation of curator Georges Petitjean, Melbourne-based Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew turned the entire exhibition space of the AAMU, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht into an installation he called Theme Park. In what he described as the opposite of a solo exhibition in a museum, Andrew turned the museum itself into a multi-leveled exhibition object. If there were ever an attempt by an Indigenous artist to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, Theme Park may well be it. It included original works by Andrew, including his large-scale series of mixed-media canvases, The Island, based on 19th-century drawings of Australian exotica, gigantic inflatable clowns inscribed with Andrew’s characteristic op-art designs derived from Aboriginal dendroglyphs, “found video” of the removal of such inscribed trees by officials of the South Australian Museum, Aussiebilly (“14 rockin’ tracks from Down Under”) and Olivia Newton-John, video interviews with victims of contemporary political “disappearances,” ethnographic artifacts from international museum collections, and Andrews’ own collection of kitsch Aboriginalia.

Hard to imagine? Indeed. And that it why the superb exhibition catalog produced by Petitjean and the AAMU is such a welcome addition to my bookshelves. Theme Park (the book) features extensive photographic documentation of the installation and reproductions of many of the works that occupied the space in Utrecht. There are excellent essays by Petitjean, Marcia Langton, Nicholas Thomas, and Andrew Gardner that address not only the installation itself, but other aspects of Andrew’s long career that shed light on his goals in mounting this extravaganza. There is a photo essay, “Corridors and Boxes,” by Andrew that looks into the incarceration of Aboriginal history in museums, and an interview with the artist by Maria Hlavajova. The handsome hardcover edition even includes a set of three slightly kitschy ribbon bookmarks in the Aboriginal colors of red, yellow, and black.

Andrew’s most famous work to date is probably Sexy and Dangerous (1996), a two-meter tall transformation of a 19th-century photograph of a young Aboriginal man, painted and decorated with headband and nosebone, and further overlaid with three Chinese characters and the English words of the work’s title. Like much of Andrew’s work, it features a collision of ancient and modern, an man whose ritual status is defined by his ornament and denied by his anonymity. Andrew’s work is a portrait of an outsider’s view of the Indigenous; the original photograph was as much a transformation of its subject as Andrew’s late 20th-century manipulation of the image is a transformation of that earlier artifact. The Chinese characters place Australia in an Asian context, removing it from the Antipodean place in nature implied by the original. It asks what sort of reality inheres in the individual and what inheres in the apprehending gaze.

The apprehending gaze, be it of explorer, colonist, or museum curator is Andrew’s perennial subject. And nowhere does it receive a more thorough exposure than in the corridors and display cases of Theme Park. The supposedly scientific documentation of Aboriginal ceremony that forms the core of The Island‘s imagery jostles up against souvenir postcard books of modern Indigenous people. A pair of china plates depicting the characters of Marbuck and Jedda from the famous 1955 motion picture by Charles Chauvel is a tumble down a rabbit hole of images of images of stereotypes of Australian blacks. There are mission-era bark paintings and recordings by Aboriginal country singer Jimmy Little: culture or more kitsch? As with a real life theme park full of roller coasters and sideshows, shock and laughter are the sought-after, simultaneous responses Andrew elicits from his audiences.

Much of the laughter derives from Andrew’s inherent appreciation of the follies of kitsch; a serious man, he has a generous sense of humor, and can spot the ludicrous in the shameful. He makes us smile at the tasteless of ceramic ashtrays, or injudicious contest advertisement that asks the reader to supply a caption for a picture of a young black girl in polka-dot bows and bare breasts offering Violet Crumble to a pack of helmeted soldiers.

When I looked up Violet Crumble (a chocolate honeycomb candy, if you’re not Australian) in Wikipedia, I learned that its slogan is “It’s the way it shatters that matters.” Andrew must have had this doggerel in mind when he selected the advertisement for his Theme Park, as with it comes the darker side of laughter, the shock at the shattering subjugation of Indigenous experience to colonialism, the outrage at the reduction of Indigenous people to stereotypes and, worse, the denial of individuality and humanity, the fracture of culture and lives.

Andrew has done extensive research in the archives of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where he has uncovered hundreds of photographs of Aboriginal people, like those that feature in his 2007 series Gun-metal Grey, people who have vanished without a trace other than these neglected portraits. This sense of loss and disappearance has led Andrew to an engagement with other forms of disappearance, most notably the victims of political repression and violence at the hands of juntas in modern South America. Relatives of those desaparecidosare among the people who feature in Andrew’s 2006 video piece Interviews, which was included in Theme Park.

In addition to his researches in Australian archives and jumble-sale stalls, Andrew has raided the collections of a dozen museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and France for material to include in his exhibition. This international assemblage of the fruits of colonialism is one of the things that distinguishes Theme Park (and the catalog’s essays) from more conventional examinations of the impact of European expansionism on the Indigenous people of Australia. The theme of colonialism in Indigenous art is often looked at from the perspective of the presence of the English in Australia or the South Seas, perhaps best exemplified recently in the works of Daniel Boyd. What Andrew has achieved in Theme Park is a broadening of scope: he looks for the evidence of appropriation and exoticism (with its attendant dehumanization) worldwide, and folds it all into his own nightmarish Luna Park. The gaping maw that swallows visitors on Sydney’s North Shore has been recast into a voracious global consumer of peoples and cultures. While the Indigenous experience in Australia is still the focal point and the primary means of expression for Andrew, he has managed to cast the local experience as but a single instance of an intercontinental phenomenon whose power extends through centuries.

In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Andrew has positioned himself amongst an international cadre of artists working to define dislocation and disaster, as Andrew Gardner notes, including the American dissector of slavery Kara Walker and apartheid’s inspector William Kentridge. Like many of his fellow art-school trained Indigenous artists, Andrew mines Aboriginal identity for his work; like very few, he succeeds on an international stage where the implications of his Aboriginal identity resonate in new and stronger ways.

January 17, 2010

http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1403073609/E20100116131054/index.html

TELL ME TELL ME: AUSTRALIAN AND KOREAN ART 1976-2011

National Art School Gallery, Sydney. 17 June-24 August, 2011.

NMOCA, Seoul. 8 November 2011 to 19 February 2012.

Image: ‘Loop: A model of how the world operates’ 2008. Dimensions variable. Installation view MCA, Australia.

The exhibition is a first-time collaboration between the MCA in Sydney and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (NMOCA). See the MCA website for more details.

Jointly curated by MCA Curator Glenn Barkley and NMOCA Curator Inhye Kim

The contemporary Australian and Korean artists featured are:

Brook Andrew | Bahc Yiso | Chang-Sup Chung | Chung Seoyoung | Brown Council | John Davis | Bonita Ely | Lalara Gaiyabidja | Rosalie Gascoigne | Marr Grounds | Don Gundinga | Newell Harry | Lou Hubbard | Bob Jenyns | Tim Johnson | Stephen Jones | Chosil Kil Kim Beom | Kim Eull | Hong Joo Kim | Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Kang-So Lee | Seung-Teak Lee | U-Fan Lee | Choong-Sup Lim Robert Macpherson | Tv Moore | Nyapanyapa Yunupingu | Nam June Paik | Byoung-Choon Park | Park Chan-Kyong | Hyun-Ki Park Jooyeon Park | Insik Quac | Terry Reid | Stuart Ringholt | Noel Sheridan | Moon-Seup Shi M | Charlie Sofo | Stelarc | Christian Thompson | Ken Unsworth | Louise Weaver | Haegue Yang Yeesook Yung | Yirawala | Dongchun Yoon |

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Artspace, Sydney.  20 July – 21 August 2011

This installation incorporates 300 boxes. There are three types of boxes of 100 each.

This solo exhibition is programmed alongside artists Praneet Soi and  Deborah Kelly

From the Artspace website:

“18 lives in Paradise takes form as a makeshift wall, representative of a barrier or border to demarcate the poles of inclusion and exclusion, functioning to protect or prohibit. In a reconfigured form, these blocks may also be read as a totem, a beacon to guide or an epitaph to commemorate; a way to look to the future, or to the past.

Comprising a series of eighteen images screen-printed on cardboard boxes, the various compositions create an alluring metaphor of what it is to construct a picture of exoticism. Sourced from found postcards, the images range from the early to mid twentieth century, representing a curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, distant landscapes, missionaries and military servicemen. The images come together as an assemblage of oddities representing the collisional paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented for curiosity and those of a dominant culture who have colonised, either briefly or permanently, both land and people for wealth, resources, labour and pleasure.

The boxes emulate the form and materiality of the commonplace courier box, utilized for transitting of cargoes and resources from one location to another, these are  vessels within which many anonymous contents shift between hands, between custodians, between owners. These blocks operate as signifiers of the gaze, referencing what has been discovered and captured, while their content remains vacuous. “

The basic unit used in 18 Lives in Paradise is a cardboard printed box 50 x 50 x 50 cm. The boxes are the building blocks for a sculpture, wall or any other structure.

The box is also a parody of the courier box – those containers daily transported around the globe in the vast movement of lives and identities today. What was thought of as fixed may not be so.

The images are sourced from postcards. The postcards range from the early to mid-twentieth century and form part of a worldwide curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, environment and resources …The images come together as an assemblage of ‘freaks’ and represent the collision paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented out of curiosity and those belonging to dominant cultures who have used the land and its people for entertainment and wealth.

18 Lives in Paradise can form a column or wall.  It can be a barrier, a beacon or epitaph. En masse, the boxes are a symbol of many lives whose identities are sometimes twisted for the gaze of the curious world.

Brook Andrew 2011

From Blank Pages  Art Space Pool, Seoul

21 October to 30 November 2011

Brook Andrew, Alicia Frankovich, Jung Yoon Suk, Deborah Kelly, Donghee Koo, Minouk Lim, Bona Park, Rho Jae Oon

Curators Reuben Keehan and Blair French

From Artspace, Sydney, website:

Curated by: Heejin Kim in collaboration with Reuben Keehan

How does art confront uncertainty and the fear of the unknown, be it the shock of catastrophic change or the depression and anxiety of everyday life? Are there alternatives to simulating terror hyper-expressionistically or represent feelings metaphorically? Does art have access to the apparatuses that might produce such tensions? Can its co-optation of the real and the virtual engender counter-strategies, like art therapy’s internalisation of the other within the self by releasing what the mind represses? However considered, art maintains a certain silence, a relative impotence in the face of the awesome power of the paranoia and hysteria of the public sphere, the stresses and dysfunctions of work and family, to say nothing of the ever-present existential threats of terror attacks and disasters, natural and manmade. Should this apparent muteness, this blankness toward what are essentially complicated abstractions necessarily be conceived as helplessness?

From Blank Pages: Eight Artistic Propositions in the Time of Catastrophe questions the role and capacities of art in dealing with such abstract social and mental spaces as panic, uncertainty and paralysis, through the reconsideration of these states as ‘blank pages’ by the poet Su-Young Kim (1921-68). Here, art is proposed as a conceptual reconfiguration of blankness, rather than as something to be subsumed and recuperated by it. Just as each artist interprets this blankness differently, the means of dealing with it are diverse, at times adventurous, even anarchic and ridiculous. The project is a speculative one, conceiving the art space as a laboratory – a necessarily messy, excessive and anti-laboratorial laboratory – in which propositional scenarios are juxtaposed, interspersed and thrown into giddy relief for the consideration of viewers developing their own strategies for blankness.

Founded in February 1999 as a non-profit organisation, art space pool works at the cutting edge of the Korean contemporary art world, developing dynamic solo and group exhibitions, academies, workshops, panel discussions and education programs. As one of Korea’s leading galleries, art space pool has made significant contributions to Seoul’s vibrant cultural scene. It is positioned as a stronghold for alternative art, a place of mutual education in which art specialists—artists, critics and curators—can engage in an exchange of ideas from which an alternative discourse of art can be produced. Through symposia, curatorial experiment, in-depth educational programs and the publication of a journal, art space pool aspires to be a starting point for the collective exploration of the possibilities of an art based on the intersection of ethics, aesthetics and the present state of the world.

From Blank Pages is supported by Arts Council Korea and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. Participation of Australian artists Brook Andrew, Alicia Frankovich and Deborah Kelly are supported by the Keir Foundation and organized by Artspace under the broader framework of the Burn what you cannot steal project, supported in turn by the Australia Council for the Arts. This overall project emerges from a strategy of international collaboration with like-minded institutions in which Artspace is actively engaged on an ongoing basis. It is premised on a recognition that the sophisticated work of Australian artists demands critical contextualisation within the broader international framework in which it operates, with the inclusion of the artists made on the basis of the relationship between elements of their practice with those of other artists.

21 October 2011 – 30 November 2011
art space pool, Seoul, Korea

Burn What You Cannot Steal  

GALERIJA NOVA, Zagreb

5 December 2011 – 28 January 2012

Brook Andrew, Alicia Frankovich, Deborah Kelly, Minouk Lim,
Daniel Malone, Hiroharu Mori

Curated by: Reuben Keehan

From Artspace, Sydney, website:

Burn What You Cannot Steal proposes the readymade as an unsurpassable horizon of the art of our time, but also as a sign functioning within a distinctly Euro-American canon, that system of legitimations under which the supposedly global art world continues to operate. Through a range of radical aesthetic strategies from assemblage to performance to public intervention, it seeks to tease out the problems and possibilities of this contradiction and other tensions embodied within it to question the ownership of time, ideas and things, to ask how and why a given practice enters the orbit of the global art world, and to propose the body and the city as objects ripe for reframing, reinterpretation and reuse.

The exhibition and related programs emerge from a strategy of international collaboration with like-minded institutions in which Artspace is actively engaged on an ongoing basis. It was conceived in response to an invitation from the dynamic Croatian curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (WHW) to develop an exhibition for Gallery Nova, Zagreb in which Australian practitioners would be included among a selection of international artists. It is therefore premised on a recognition that the sophisticated work of Australian artists demands critical contextualisation within the broader international framework in which it operates, with the inclusion of the artists made on the basis of the relationship between elements of their practice with those of other artists. As part of this broader activity Brook Andrew, Alicia Frankovich and Deborah Kelly are also exhibiting within the broader From Blank Pages group exhibition at art space pool in Seoul, Korea in October – November 2011. The Burn what you cannot steal book, published in 2012 by Artspace in association with Gallery Nova, will include feature essays by Anthony Gardner, Lily Hibberd, Reuben Keehan, Heejin Kim and Sean Lowry as well as texts on each of the participating artists.

Gallery Nova is a non-profit, city-owned gallery in the centre of Zagreb. With a history of developing experimental art practices that extends back to the 1970s, the gallery is currently under the directorship of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (WHW). Since 2003, WHW have been established as one of the most active sites for production and presentation of contemporary art and a platform for progressive modes of cultural production based on partnerships with cultural workers from different fields, with programs that aim to reopen and question topics suppressed within public discourse and to establish trans-generational and international links and contexts. Through the program of Gallery Nova, WHW develop innovative models of collaborations with different organisations from the field of non-institutional culture and activism, and work on the strong international contextualisation of Croatian art production.

Supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, the Arts Council Korea and the Keir Foundation.

Paradise  Tolarno Galleries

18 June – 30 July 2011

Paradise combines ethnographic and other curio postcards collected over the past 15 years by the artist. The postcards are incorporated into sculptural elements from neon and rare wood species as well as lacquered monument objects.

MCA, Sydney, curator Glenn Barkley is writing an accompanying essay that will be available soon.

The following images are a selection of the exhibition. Please go to ‘Installation and Sculpture’ in the drop down menu of the website and then ‘Paradise’.

Review in Broadsheet, Melbourne. By Dan Rule, 29th June 2011