Zoom discussion of Nola Farman's SPACE/PLACE & THE RED DOT

Please join our Zoom discussion of Nola Farman's reflection on her 2019 work, Le Point Rouge, on Friday September 18 at 6pm, with guest facilitator, Alex Wisser.

This is the fourth reflection in Articulate's ongoing project born in the Covid-lockdown, What Do I Say About this Work Now? and which you can read here.

Topic: Articulate project space's Zoom Meeting

Time: Sep 18, 2020 6.00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney

Join this Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84176627652?pwd=NXN1Mjh3enozQmZ1dkJtcFFONDk5UT09

Meeting ID: 841 7662 7652

Passcode: 944566

Those needing to dial in please contact Articulate in advance on etalucitra@gmail.com.

See all reflections and discussions in this project here.

See the recording here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/4pdHZVPf7nVqN8ReHsgdPn9N5vRioJSi7d8E5Yn5AEYZ82-AlketQTkkIkoI7QXS.Su9pyOJs9TbWXGGU 

Passcode: G*B086HW

Send your own reflections on a past artwork for a future zoom discussion - details here

What do I say 4 : SPACE/PLACE & THE RED DOT

WHAT DO I SAY ABOUT THIS WORK NOW? is an online project begun for the COVID-19 shut-down period. As new spatial artwork can not easily be shown during this period, this project instead encourages discussion of artworks that already exist. Artists are invited to reflect on one of their own works, including how and why its location is part of the work, for posting on this blog. Responses will also be posted here, and can be self-posted on Facebook and elsewhere. Here is the fourth reflection:

Noel Farina Le Point Rouge (The Red Dot) 2019

SPACE/PLACE & THE RED DOT

I invited my artists to comment on the nature of the Articulate project space before an exhibition is hung: Marco Smudge says, “it’s a space waiting for my personal expression”. Flavia de Jour says, “it’s there for the communication of my difference.” Desirée de Kikk  says, “it’s a place asking for trouble.” Tra Tekram (TM)[1] says, “it’s a place made for my purposes!” Noel Farina says, “it’s a space for my free flowing thought.”

Subsequently, I asked Noel Farina to review Nola Farman’s artwork titled

Le Point Rouge (The Red Dot), which was in a group exhibition at Articulate project space and it was shown at Artspace as a part of Nora Fleming’s Misguided Tour.

Here, for the pleasure of debate, are Noel’s comments,

Dr Permangelo E. Regularis

Thank you for this opportunity Permangelo. Firstly, a gallery is a space haunted by human imaginings. It is where artists collectively create a sense of place. Here, in Articulate Project Space, framing a Red Dot and placing more of the same amongst other artworks is an intrusion, it suggests contagion. Today this would inevitably gesture towards the current pandemic. The red dot is infectious. It cannot be contained. It spreads easily in a crowd. It goes viral. A collective noun would be a rash of red dots,

The Red Dot is an indicator of value, both aesthetic and monetary. It is highly selective, pleasing few and dis-pleasing many, placing and dis-placing. It is the logo of an insatiable cannibal, consuming some and spewing out others, selectively – the mis en place for the main meal. The driving force, the driving farce, slipping between the lines – under the lines of defence – into the line of fire – the spot to aim for. Well spotted. A spotty rash, a spatter of blood and an insatiable itch – irresistible – contagious.

Not every viewer has symptoms. But after a fever, a raised heart rate, feelings of pending doom, a tendency to faint[2], followed by an inclination to reach for a credit card, Red Dot Fever (RDF) is confirmed. There is no known cure and it’s doubtful that a vaccine will ever be developed. 

TM wishes RDF could invade and infect all the spaces of the art world. Oh to be airborne!  So easy.  A red dot can be stuck on with a digit – digitise – no need to lick  – no lechery here. Just a seductive dance in space – see it from across the room. Try to refuse. It is hypnotic. If you go away, you will come back. Dance attendance.

Noel Farina, Sydney, August 2020

---

[1] Tra Tekram (TM) is an artist, whether we like it or not, in the sense that he is the arbiter of aesthetic value. From the outset his saucy little dots have been and still are a significant part of the repertoire composing his body of work. In a noble gesture, he decided to gift his oeuvre to the art world and it has since become familiar to artists, viewers, collectors and dealers alike. Hence, the red dot has taken on a life of its own.

[2] Stendhal Syndrome: the first example of something resembling RDF was recorded in 1817 and considered to be unique to Florence. This is disputable, given recent evidence of the behaviour of art collectors all over the world.

Tonight's Zoom - WHAT DO I SAY ABOUT THIS WORK NOW?

We had very interesting conversations tonight about the form of theatre that Voices of Women used in the Leichhardt Town Hall last year, and the challenges that variously restructured live spaces create for performers, actors and audiences.  Also about the theatre Nola Farman is enacting on #nolamayfarnam. We also talked about how our current use of Zoom is effecting our relationship to physical space, and how it sometimes effects relationships with people in surprising ways, perhaps because its shared live time might explain why it seems not as artificial or virtual as we might expect. 

Listen to tonight's Zoom discussion here.

Screen shot of tonight's Zoom discussion

Please send your own reflection on a past work, either as text or as video or aural recording, or mixture, for posting on the Articulate blog, so that, once it is posted, the next zoom discussion can be arranged. Details of what to send are found here.

What Do I Say About this Work Now 3 - Zoom discussion

Please join discussion of the third reflection of What Do I Say About this Work Now? on Friday June 19 At 6pm

Topic: What Do I Say About this Work Now 3

Time: Jun 19, 2020 06:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87233271980

Meeting ID: 872 3327 1980

from: Voices of Women,Leichhardt Town Hall 2020. Noni Carroll Photography.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PES30S7XvJQ&feature=youtu.be

To prepare for the discussion of reflections on Voices of Women 2019 please :

• watch Voices of Women, The Monologue Adventure 2019 and 

• read The staging of multiple voices in a shifting space by Clare Grant

Thinking about the performance of Voices of Women in 2019 at Leichhardt Town Hall: activating the space means rethinking about how we listen - where we gather - and why we come together to share story. What is a public space? What is an intimate one? Thinking about active listening of an audience, the craft of storytelling, and the spaces that can change and be transformed to accomodate that.

Understanding that an audience is never JUST listening, while accommodating the voices of multiple writers from diverse backgrounds. In the most obvious of setups, the reader would probably stand out in front of the audience, delivering the text in what is known as ‘front-on’ mode, like a lecture, or a sermon; a situation laden with associations of being ‘talked to’, or formally addressed.

Discussion with Lliane Clarke, Producer/Director, Clare Grant, Dramaturg and UNSW Performance Lecturer, Sage Godrei, actor/writer, hosted by Cassi Plate, broadcaster, curator. Includes QandA. 

What do I say 3

WHAT DO I SAY ABOUT THIS WORK NOW? is an online project begun for the COVID-19 shut-down period. As new spatial artwork can not easily be shown during this period, this project instead encourages discussion of artworks that already exist. Artists are invited to reflect on one of their own works, including how and why its location is part of the work, for posting on this blog. Responses will also be posted here, and can be self-posted on Facebook and elsewhere. Here is the third reflection:

Lliane Clarke's reflection on her Voices of Women project at Leichhardt Town Hall in 2019 is available via the link below  and is supported by the following text by Clare Grant.

VOICES of WOMEN - THE MONOLOGUE ADVENTURE 2019           https://youtu.be/PES30S7XvJQ

The staging of multiple voices in a shifting space

By Clare Grant

Thinking about the staging of the Voices of Women readings means thinking about maximising the staging possibilities for active listening for the audience, understanding that they are never JUST listening, while accommodating the voices of multiple writers. In the most obvious of setups, the reader would probably stand out in front of the audience, delivering the text in what is known as ‘front-on’ mode, like a lecture, or a sermon; a situation laden with associations of being ‘talked to’, or formally addressed.

From The Theatre of the Bauhaus; (ed) Walter Gropius and Arthur S Wensinger;
 Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London; 1961; p23.

This Bauhaus image clearly shows how the tiniest movement of a finger on a stage space can trigger exponential shifts in viewpoint for an audience; each line in the diagram impacts on each of the others. What happens, then, if you place the audience into this mix, ‘on the stage itself’, and ‘just’ read to them? The construction of the listening space becomes critical, so that the work and the listener are able to meet each other with as little distraction as possible – while never trying to persuade the listener that they are anywhere but in the actual building. They are on the real chairs, in real time. This ‘reading’ space becomes a kind of neutral space, open to the various ‘worlds’ being evoked by many writers’ imaginations and experience; a listening space that offers multiple ways to become immersed.

It’s a point of transition and exchange, with an extra layer if the writer is in the room too, in physical form, rather than just implied by the structure of the event itself. The reader/actor is also unquestionably present as themselves, while carrying into the space some of the characteristics of the figures of the story. It’s not strictly acting, because the writing is overtly being presented as itself, and the performer (usually) holds the script in her hands.

A rendition of an immersive performance space, designed by C20 theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, re-imagined by Justin Cash, “Non-naturalistic Performance Spaces” (2016) 2020; at: https://thedramateacher.com/non-naturalistic-performance-spaces/

An early proponent of a staging plan that shaped a disrupted viewing, C20 Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski engaged in one of the earliest experiments in spatial relationships with the audience, freeing up the theatre space to be reimagined, and to activate the most resonant relationships between a writer and a space. Bringing multiple voices into play in the same space needs this break from more traditional arrangements of bodies in space, to absorb the range of voices without illustrating any of them.

Staging the ‘Voices’ readings to date: the first, in a long thin studio space, where, to be in a front-on arrangement would have left most of the audience with poor eyelines and a lack of physical proximity to the readers, the use of the ‘traverse’ setup allowed for a constantly shifting point of focus and a broad scope for actions by the performers. For the second, the ‘in the round’ setup in the vast space of the Leichhardt Town Hall also allowed for the audience to connect immediately with the performers, and, with only two rows of seats, the sense of ‘accountability’ of the audience members is slightly ramped up. The use of a floor rug and several standard lamps created a sense of intimacy, the domestic, thus a cosiness that the otherwise expansive space could have killed. The rug and the lamps were simply signals to the audience to relax and allow themselves to engage in the writing, while the lamps, not intending to create any kind of fictional ‘setting’, were simply a functional means of being able to see, while also achieving a ‘mood’ to help contain the audience’s focus.

The new challenge in of this project in Articulate project space ….. the ‘space’ for the third event, might have been inspired by the following set-up proposed, and designed, by Jerzy Grotowski.

Figure 4.1 Jerzy Gurawski’s “scenic architecture” for Akropolis, 1962. 
Published in Paavolainen T. (2012) ‘Grotowski and the “Objectivity” 
of Performance’. In: Theatre/Ecology/Cognition. Cognitive Studies in 
Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. P.133.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137277923_5)

 

All parts and angles of the multi-levelled space, with its multiple and variously-delineated areas will be drawn on, to amplify and, possibly, challenge the written voices and their stories. Grotowski enables a way of thinking about staging that releases the audience from the traditional proscenium arch, pointing to the multiple potential stagings for the Articulate readings program, albeit this time, challenged to ‘pivot’ still further into the filmic, the virtual; a possibility that would have been anathema to Grotowski, the most rigorous of believers in the power and importance of the body of the live performer.

Zoom Launch of What do I say about this work now?

Last night 22 people joined the Zoom Launch of What do I say about this work now? Artists, writers, publishers and others were encouraged to participate in this project by writing or talking about one of their spatial works for inclusion in a future post and zoom discussion. 

Screen shot of zoom launch recording

The zoom launch was arranged and conducted by Virginia Hilyard, and the project begun by Margaret Roberts and Sue Callanan speaking about their own earlier works in support of posts already on the blog, and the audience responding in a lively discussion afterwards. This included discussion of space and place, documentation of spatial artwork, how visible information tells you about what you can't see, and the coincidental similarities between the works discussed despite their independent selection. 

Please send your text or other form of reflection on one of your past works ASAP. Those we receive in the next few weeks will form the basis of the next Zoom Discussion. More information about the project is found here.

Next posts will be uploaded soon 

WHAT DO I SAY 2

WHAT DO I SAY ABOUT THIS WORK NOW? is an online project for the COVID-19 shut-down period. As new spatial artwork can not easily be shown during this period, this project instead encourages discussion of artworks that already exist. Artists are invited to reflect on one of their own works, including how and why its location is part of the work, for posting on this blog. Responses will also be posted here, and can be self-posted on Facebook and elsewhere. Here is the second reflection:

RECALL 2015

Sue Callanan

RECALL was part of an exhibition whose title The Motor Show was borrowed from the Sydney Motor Show, a longstanding annual event on the Sydney calendar which had ceased to exist.

An exhibition coordinated by Emma Wise, Linden Braye and myself in October 2015, was held at Articulate project space, the site of a former panel beating workshop on Parramatta Road, Leichhardt. As a panel beating workshop it was conveniently located amidst the long strip of car sales yards spreading out along Parramatta Road, and with which Parramatta Road has been closely identified. For avid car hunters, it was the ‘go to’ for the weekend excursion.

Foreground: Mad Mick The Rolling Sculpture 2015. Photo: Peter Murphy

We invited other artists to participate on the theme and they responded with a variety of works- installations, videos and, in one instance, a baby blue vintage Cord (The Rolling Sculpture) whose owner, Mad Mick, towed it from his garage and parked it in the front section of the space, in true showroom style. See image above and the link here for other works in the show.

For my own work, titled RECALL, I drove my yellow Honda Jazz into the far end of the space onto a wooden platform, and into an area that was relatively contained, allowing a narrow space around it.

I decided to box in the space with large sheets of cardboard. My initial intention was to construct one big box out of large boxes for spare car parts, which the nearby car yard had plenty of. However, it soon became clear that what I needed was a large single box. I noted the collection of boxes all had the same texts printed on them: ‘THIS WAY UP’,  ‘FRAGILE,’ and PACKAGING MUST BE RETURNED WITH ANY CLAIM. I hand stencilled these texts onto my one large box.

Sue Callanan RECALL 2015. photo: Peter Murphy

At the time of the show, I coincidentally, received a letter from Honda, requesting a recall of my car because of a model-wide issue with air bags. RECALL, then appeared on the box and became the title of the work. It was timely because it reinforced the idea that the car needed to be returned in the box- an improbable proposition.

The only evidence of the car inside the box was a slight protrusion of its rear end through a hole cut to size, in the manner that packaging sometimes allows a glimpse of the contents.

By bringing the car into the space, I’d anchored it in the context of the original panel  beating workshop (it was also slightly dinged in the rear), recalling its history and the relationship of the workshop to the surrounding car industry.

The construction of the box to fit snugly into the space it occupied, including inserting itself between cut outs in the architecture had another function, which was to manipulate the architecture of the space and to somehow invert the notion of its scale, by making a box fit it. It became a box (the cardboard box containing the car) within a box (the building), with the cardboard box neatly fitting its contours, in the way you might expect a product to be packed securely with sections to prevent movement.

Whilst the installation recalled and responded to the past and current activity of the car industry along the strip, it also set the ground for raising my awareness of the social relations developed as part of business exchanges. The mechanic at the nearby workshop had clear recollections of doing business with the panel beating workshop which sprang up in the ‘70s.

The art space is part of the social economy and by taking a fully functioning object (ie the car) from one sphere and placing it in the other (art space) the intention was to create a link, with which we are more able to reflect on our relationships and our participation in the everyday world in which we exist.

The physicality of the space, and the particular space that the viewer occupies is integral to the work. The body is housed by the car, the viewer by the space, and the car by a box at one end of this vast space.

Much of my work is designed to set up a conversation with the surrounding architecture and to create portals for bringing viewers, with all their multiple relations with the world, into it.

Sue Callanan

April 2020

WHAT DO I SAY 1

WHAT DO I SAY ABOUT THIS WORK NOW? is an online project for the COVID-19 shut-down period. As new spatial artwork cannot easily be shown during this period, this project instead encourages discussion of artworks that already exist.  Artists are invited to reflect on one of their own works, including how and why its location is part of the work, for posting on this blog. Responses will also be posted here, and can be self-posted on Facebook and elsewhere. Here is the first reflection:

Untitled (First Draft WEST) 1991

Margaret Roberts

Untitled (First Draft WEST) was one of my first installations, which at the time I called room drawings. It was made as a room drawing because embedding it in the building asked for more eye-foot coordination than normal, and asked us to understand our imagination and physicality as one. It did this by enabling only half of the ‘drawing/sculpture’ to be seen at a time, requiring the mind and body to collaborate as we move up and down the stairs, putting the work together in our minds from memory. Making a room drawing meant I could make a large sculptural form without constructing anything, lightly embedding the form in the ready-made building using drawing to borrow part of its physical structure. More broadly, it was a way of trying to understand why as artists we are taught to value the space generated within artworks more highly than the physical space they occupy.

Margaret Roberts Untitled (First Draft WEST) 1991 (detail - ground floor) 

photo: Chris Fortescue

The idea was prompted by making a half-circle of the wall of my Newtown studio using a nail at floor level and a piece of string, and seeing that it implied the other half-circle coming down from the ceiling on the wall of the inaccessible floor below (because a circle seems to be an irreducible whole shape). I used the iron-oxide I had available in the studio from colouring wax in the past. I brushed-in the half-circle on my studio wall with a thick mix of this iron oxide and water, and rubbed it back the next day to expose its rich surface. It was prompted towards room drawing by a need to reduce object-making because I was running out of storage space, and was thinking that slides use less of it (not realising at the time that I might be creating a different problem).

I remembered that by happy coincidence First Draft West (then at 39 Parramatta Road Annandale) had two identical back rooms, one on top of the other and joined by a staircase, which would be an ideal place to make this work, and they kindly accepted a proposal for a joint show later on with Wendy Howard, opening Wednesday 11 September 1991.

I used unbound iron oxide again in First Draft WEST to mark out the two half-circles on opposite walls of the two rooms, joined by the upper surface of the floor/ceiling in between. Because I think of these temporal works as also being permanent, just not always installed, I will jump tenses now from talking about what I did in 1991, to how the work would be experienced at any time. While in the ground floor we see the single half-circle on the Western wall against the ceiling.  When we leave that room and walk upstairs, we enter the first floor room by walking onto the iron-oxide on the floor and see the other half-circle on the opposite (Eastern) wall rising from floor-level. We get oxide under our shoes, and walk it around the building with us, unless (unlike most visitors in 1991) we wipe our feet on the doormat provided at the top of the stairs.

 Margaret Roberts Untitled (First Draft WEST) 1991 (detail - first floor) 

photo: Chris Fortescue

Through this and other works, I came to realise the problem of photographic documentation, and small steps that could be taken to address it.  These two photographs were taken by Chris Fortescue, who also photographed many of my later room drawings. Each time the photographs have been intriguing, both in themselves and also because they show a different work from the one I had actually made. This applies less to photographs of this 1991 work, perhaps because viewer-movement was between rooms, rather than just within them, and each image of this work did not seem to alter its subject any more than photography normally does. Also, I realised later that because documentation of this particular work requires two photographs rather than just one, and perhaps also text or a floor plan to explain their relationship, it may already have some built-in self-awareness.

I kept the documentation puzzle at a distance for a long time because I assumed I had to solve it completely, which seemed impossible. However, after I met up again with Stephen Sullivan, a fellow student from the 1980s, I began to realise the problem could be approached differently. After many months of discussion that turned into years, and a few shows together, Stephen used Chris’ ground floor documentation photo to make a print he called Harmonic Yoyo. He also made prints from the photographic documentation of several of my other room drawings from the 1990s.  Each print repeats a single photo twelve times, six upside down and six right-way-up. This arrangement means the image, while still recognisable, is lost in the pattern as a whole. Stephen and I regard these images as collaborations to which I bring the images, and Stephen arranges them into works and titles them. We exhibited seven of these arrangements as framed inkjet prints DNA Converter and Other Machines at Multiple Box Sydney in 2006.

Margaret Roberts & Stephen Sullivan Harmonic Yoyo inkjet print 2006

Stephen had his own way of engaging with this collaboration, but for me it addressed the puzzle that at the time I had not found a way to approach: why I am motivated to make artworks that incorporate the physical location, knowing that the documentation images, which may be interesting in themselves, will also delete the scale and actual space that is essential to the work? I later realised that even though I make all my installations in part to challenge the photographic virtualisation of the world, conventional documentation procedures mean I get them back as photographic corpses after they are de-installed. The collaboration with Stephen did not restore the value of place that I saw the room drawings asserting and the photographs denying, but it produced images with an in-built self-awareness of their own abstracting nature. I liked Stephen’s solution because the photograph’s own self-occlusion—within the pattern made by their own crazed duplication—is a type of payback for their own role in the denial of actual space in the record of the room drawings. In this way, some of the limitations of the photographic record are built into the record itself, and this saves some space for the work.

Margaret Roberts

April 2020

http://margaretroberts.org/archive.html

Edited by Emma Wise

https://emmawisewords.wordpress.com/

https://emmawise.com.au/