Powerful absurdity, Michael Cook's Invasion series: Viewed 27 August 2023

Cook, Michael. 2017. Invasion (UFO Possums). Ink jet print on paper. Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, Australia.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Michael Cook's work Invasion (UFO Possums), 2023.

This work was shown with others from Michael Cook’s Invasion series 2017, in the foyer area of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. I visited the gallery on 27 August 2023 to see another exhibition and had not encountered Cook’s work before. However the six large-scale, filmic works captured my imagination, especially this work with its iconic allusion to science fiction movies. Attesting to the theory of Susanne Langer that work can present as a symbol in its entirety (Adrienne Dengerink 2005, 194), I was distracted by the incongruity of possums as alien attackers before realizing the work’s symbolic references to post colonialism. Many days later I realised a link between this series and the work of the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, who uses absurd situations to highlight the plight of Palestinian people. The trigger was her Space Exodus series 2009, in which Sansour featured as a Palestinian astronaut (Gabsi 2010).

From both Cook and Sansour’s work I reflect on the use of humour and absurdity as a way of dismantling the viewer’s indifference or blindness to potentially unpalatable messages, a useful lesson as I seek to address climate change in my work.

Bibliography:

• Adrienne Dengerink, Chaplin. 2005. Art and Embodiment: Biological and Phenomenological Contributions to Understanding Beauty and the Aesthetic. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library.

• Gabsi, Wafa. 2010. "‘Fiction and Art practice’Interview with Larissa Sansour ‘A Space Exodus.’." Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East 10.

Women as robotic drones? Intriguing sculpture by Anne Ross: Viewed 26 August 2023.

Ross, Anne. 2001. Muybridge, Hills and me. Patinated cast bronze sculpture. Bayside Gallery, Bayside City Council Melbourne, Australia.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Anne Ross's bronze sculpture Muybridge, Hills and me, 2023.

I saw this work on 26 August 2023, at the Whichway exhibition of Anne Ross’s work. It exemplifies a work with multiple layers of cultural meaning (Ross and Bosse 2023, 60-61). While appearing initially to be a playful work based on the self-described iconic Australian clothes line (the Hills Hoist) , it raises questions for me on closer consideration. For example, does the suspension of multiple figures, the lower half of a presumably female body, reference women tied to repetitive domestic labour, and hence the lower value placed on women by society (Ortner 1972, 71). If so, is this a feminist work? Through referencing herself in the title, is the artist suggesting this is her experience, or is she expanding more generally on the fair weather life of a creative?

Does the reference to Muybridge in the title refer to Eadweard Muybridge, the early English photographer known for photographs of animals in motion (SFMOMA), and familiar to me through the work of Francis Bacon? If so, are women being likened to plough-horses? Drawing on the work of Rene Decartes and his mind-body split (MacLachlan 2004, 3-4), do the legged forms function as robots, absent a controlling brain? Are women being compared to mindless robots?

Am I hermeneutically reading too much into this work? Would someone who had never hung out washing raise these questions? Would I, if I had not experienced the backyard Hills Hoist or knew nothing of Muybridge?

All these questions remind me of the role of symbolism and its cultural (and gendered) context in the viewer’s interpretation of art.

Bibliography:

• MacLachlan, Malcolm. 2004. "Embodiment: Clinical, Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Illness." Maidenhead, UK: McGraw-Hill Education.

• Ortner, Sherry B. 1972. "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Feminist studies 1 (2): 5-31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177638.

• Ross, Anne, and Joanna Bosse. 2023. Whichway / Anne Ross ; curator, Joanna Bosse. Brighton, Vic: Bayside City Council.

• SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Eadweard Muybridge." Accessed 27 August 2023. https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/eadweard_muybridge/.

Transformative climate change installation by Nicholas Mangan: Viewed 20 July to 4 August 2023

Mangan, Nicholas. 2023. Core coralations and Death assemblage. Film and sculpture. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Nicholas Mangan's installation Core coralations and Death assemblage, 2023.

I viewed this installation on three occasions between 20 July and 4 August, each time spending longer sitting with the work as I became more comfortable with the subject matter of global warming and its impact on the Great Barrier Reef. While I have already included a review of this installation in my annotated bibliography (Cole 2023a), I have also included the works in this dossier, due to their role in showing me the aesthetic potential of conveying sensation (Grosz 2005, 1-3).

As context, my annotated bibliography is shown in full (indented):

Commissioned for Melbourne Now, this work uses film and sculpture to highlight the damage wrought to the Great Barrier Reef, from the arrival of Captain Cook to recent mass bleaching events.

Set in a large, ominously dark room, the twenty minute film loops continuously on a wall-mounted monitor. Opening with the arrival of Cook’s ship The Endeavor and referencing the irony that a plug of coral saved the ship from sinking (Mangan 2023), the mostly black and white film intersperses aerial shots of the reef with the artist’s attempts to commune with dead coral, and scientific work to develop new heat-resistant strains. The watery, pumping soundscape is often unbearably loud.

The monitor’s size is echoed in the nearby sculptural panel. Made from coral fragments as a form of ossuary, and infused with a bioluminescent pigment, the panel is activated every few minutes by ultra violet light, bathing the room in blue.

This work’s haunting beauty and sparse composition suggests aesthetic possibilities for my work on concealment and protection, and memorialising the impermanent. It also resonates with me conceptually, as I find myself drawn inexorably from an inner to an external focus by the existential threat of climate change (Cole 2023a).

The reference to the arrival of The Endeavor in 1770 provides a temporal and colonial context. The use of text in the film is a succinct means of communicating the key concepts, and providing relief from the visual images, while the multi-dimensional addition of the pulsing blue light and soundscape amplify the immersive nature of the installation. These are all points for me to consider as I develop my practice in this thematic area.

Informed by recent learnings in the Critical Frameworks A course, I note that the works have both a denotative meaning, through showing the remains of dead coral reefs and laboratory based recovery efforts, as well as a connotative meaning, through the suggestion of an ossuary. The ossuary is a symbol of death which must be culturally learned. Together the installation exemplifies the view of Giles Deleuze that art addresses problems through generating an affective response (Grosz 2008, 3), which in turn highlight priorities for attention (Dukes et al. 2021, 816).

Bibliography:

• Cole, Elizabeth. 25 August 2023 2023a. Critical Frameworks A - Annotated bibliography. RMIT University.

• Dukes, Daniel, Kathryn Abrams, Ralph Adolphs, Mohammed E. Ahmed, Andrew Beatty, Kent C. Berridge, Susan Broomhall, Tobias Brosch, Joseph J. Campos, Zanna Clay, Fabrice Clément, William A. Cunningham, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Justin D’Arms, Jane W. Davidson, Beatrice de Gelder, Julien Deonna, Ronnie de Sousa, Paul Ekman, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Ernst Fehr, Agneta Fischer, Ad Foolen, Ute Frevert, Didier Grandjean, Jonathan Gratch, Leslie Greenberg, Patricia Greenspan, James J. Gross, Eran Halperin, Arvid Kappas, Dacher Keltner, Brian Knutson, David Konstan, Mariska E. Kret, Joseph E. LeDoux, Jennifer S. Lerner, Robert W. Levenson, George Loewenstein, Antony S. R. Manstead, Terry A. Maroney, Agnes Moors, Paula Niedenthal, Brian Parkinson, Ioannis Pavlidis, Catherine Pelachaud, Seth D. Pollak, Gilles Pourtois, Birgitt Roettger-Roessler, James A. Russell, Disa Sauter, Andrea Scarantino, Klaus R. Scherer, Peter Stearns, Jan E. Stets, Christine Tappolet, Fabrice Teroni, Jeanne Tsai, Jonathan Turner, Carien Van Reekum, Patrik Vuilleumier, Tim Wharton, and David Sander. 2021. "The rise of affectivism." Nature human behaviour 5 (7): 816-820. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01130-8.

• Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels : feminism, nature, power.Next wave. Durham: Duke University Press.

• ---. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.Wellek Library lectures. New York: Columbia University Press.