living thingsmatt dabrowski christopher lg hill

Lismore Regional Gallery March 2014

Curated by Wes Hill

5Introduction

10Matt Dabrowski: Metaphysical DetectiveWes Hill

28Christopher LG Hill’s throwaway, fantasy thingsOliver Watts

Introduction

Wes Hill

Living Things was originally conceived as a reflection on discrete forms of community

engagement, with an emphasis on how artworks could be thought of as being ‘alive’,

or as possessing some form of agency of their own. Instead of producing didactic

and reductive notions of ‘community engagement’ and ‘the living artwork’, I was

more interested in art’s capacity (following Jacques Rancière) to instigate debate

and socio-political action through aesthetic engagement itself. Like all theories,

these ideas evolved once I began to apply them, and I soon realised that the selected

artists, Brisbane-based Matt Dabrowski and Melbourne-based Christopher LG Hill,

needed to speak on their own terms about art’s relation to socio-political mobility.

As it progressed I became more interested in the relation between consumer objects

imbued with economic value and contemporary art objects imbued with the value

of community participation, framing the exhibition in terms of the transformation of

materials into active social commentaries.

In his 1867 work Capital, Karl Marx developed his theory of commodity fetishism

from Enlightenment texts on mythology, which held that primitive people worshipped 5

Opposite: Freedom of Association (2014), installation detail, Christopher LG Hill.

Exhibition view (left to right): The Handmaid of the Lord (2009/2014), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. tingly FXs throwie 2 (2014), Chistopher LG Hill.

their cultural objects not as symbols of gods but as

actual ‘living’ gods. Marx thought that commodity

fetishism similarly entails the worshipping

of objects, transforming useful materials into

enchanted forms. Because the readymade materials

of Hill and Dabrowski often evoke the pursuit of

capital and the production of commodities, both

artists can be associated with this seminal Marxist

theory of consumerism. For Living Things, Hill

mined the many second-hand stores of Lismore as

source material for his scattered installation pieces,

while Dabrowski’s work, The Handmaid of the Lord (2009/2014), which involved

growing mushrooms in a temperature-controlled space in the gallery, saw him consult

with local Northern Rivers producers about the sustainability of his living sculpture.

Such discrete local interactions drew out the relation between community engagement

and everyday capitalist exchange.

While investing their practices with a great deal of personal significance, Hill and

Dabrowski typically dissuade viewers from arriving at finite conclusions about

their work. In this sense, both artists create contexts in which they ‘let go’ of their

intentions, encouraging a myriad of associations, none of which could be considered

incorrect. Whereas Dabrowski follows the fatalistic interpretive ideals of astrology,

where nothing happens by chance, Hill staunchly adheres to the open-ended poetic

principles of art, in which authorial intentionality is overshadowed by a belief in art’s

resistance to hermeneutic closure. In both practices, art objects are seen as actively

triggering the imagination in ways that go beyond the governance of both makers and

viewers.

Above all, Living Things serves to showcase Dabrowski’s and Hill’s practices, as idio-

syncratic animations of everyday forms. The exhibition frames the lively, open-ended,

social and associative qualities of

both artists’ work as constitutive

of what is ‘contemporary’ about

‘contemporary art’; centring on

the staging of materials in order

to generate debate while resisting

resolution.

8 9

Opposite and above: Chistopher LG Hill and Matt Dabrowski installing their works at Lismore Regional Gallery, March 2014.

Wes Hill

Based in Brisbane for over two decades, Matt Dabrowski has, over the last few years,

upped the scale and scope of his work to become one of the Australia’s most interesting

and idiosyncratic contemporary artists. His work, which traverses all media, has a

visual sensibility which is as bright as the Queensland light, and a conceptual approach

driven as much by political concerns as it is by his interest in astrology.

In his formative years, Dabrowski was immersed in the lively Brisbane subculture

of the 1980s; an era in which Queensland, thanks to then-premier Sir Joh Bjelke-

Petersen, was widely regarded as somewhat of a police state. Reflecting on this phase,

Dabrowski has said: “Even though I was at the tail end of it, I was always getting

patted down, pants down, socks searched, hassled by the cops. It was the culture at

that time. I really didn’t know any better because I hadn’t traveled anywhere else.”1

Exploring Brisbane hangouts like the Goth-friendly Vortex d’Junk, and embracing

the “gender dysphoric clubby fogland fusion of ‘80s aerobic fashion and trannies lip-

syncing Shirley Bassey” that Fortitude Valley provided, Dabrowski’s work became

Matt Dabrowski: MetaphysicalDetective

10

Opposite: ATOMIC (2006), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Image courtesy the artist.

influenced as much by these local social experiences as anything else. He became

associated with Brisbane fanzines such as Maggot Death, the artist-run-initiate (ARI)

Gallerie Brutal (which later changed to Isnt Gallery) and, in the 1990s, pursued a range

of collaborative projects and performance art pieces that have made him a significant

point of interest in the rejuvenation of the Brisbane ARI scene over the last five years.

While ARIs facilitate important alternative expressions, they can also cultivate a

fashionability which is as rigid as the mainstream art world they try to counteract. In

contrast, Dabrowski not only appears indifferent to the fashions of art, he seems on

another plane altogether, driven less by a World View than by a Cosmic View. His

exhibition titles such as Neptunian Washing Machine (1997), The Explosive Tongues

of Luxury (1990), Sonikinetic (1990), ATOMIC (2006), SPARK (2006) and Lake

Lycanthropy and Your Albedo Ratio (2010) exemplify his interest in the intergalactic

and explosive forces that lie beyond everyday reality and the conventions of daily life.

Like the Surrealists, Dabrowski tries to fuse life and art, dream and reality, conscious

and unconscious experience. For Salvador Dali, the most famous Surrealist artist, his

conception of the paranoiac-critical method resulted in the production of complex,

hallucinogenic images. He defined this process as a form of “irrational understanding

based on the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.”2 Dali was

inspired by the systemic quality of certain kinds of neuroses, in which complex illogical

associations can be made on the basis of a single obsessive belief. Paranoiacs tend to

build their world on an original delusion, with this unstable foundation supporting a

structure on which loosely knit associations can be organised so that their conclusions

are rigid, defensible and, most importantly, rational. While Dali employed objective-

looking representations to mask a delusional premise, Dabrowski uses documentary

evidence and upfront critique to similarly disguise the incongruous connections

underpinning much of his work.

In Dabrowski’s ambitious installation An Abridged History of Western Cinema

(2010), an edited video of a black and white Hollywood cowboy film is projected

on an outdoor billboard with a hole cut in the middle of it, surrounded by hay bales

and an actual horse – a French Percheron stallion, to be precise. A customised smoke 1312

An Abridged History of Western Cinema (2010), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Image courtesy the artist.

machine blows smoke through the hole, illuminated by the light of the projection, in

reference to the famous smoking Camel cigarette billboard located in New York’s

Times Square until the 1970s. On first encounter, the work seems to embody a form

of critique, conjuring associations between the promulgation of cowboy imagery in

cigarette advertisements and the sublime image of colonisation represented by the

Western film genre. This is reiterated by Dabrowski’s stated intention to “combine

the devices and iconic elements of advertising and cinema utilising the Situationist

strategy of détournement.” In this sense, the incorporation of a real horse serves as

objective evidence, as if intending to convince the viewer of the real politics behind

such mass media ideologies. However, the more one engages with his work, the more

Dabrowski’s critiques seem like Trojan horses (excuse the pun); what looks initially

like didacticism soon morphs into abstraction.

This process is comparable to Dali’s famous painting Face of Mae West Which May Be

Used as an Apartment (1935), in which the image of Mae West initially encountered is

subsequently reduced to individual formal elements which are both reliant on the primary

image and serve to make the idea behind the primary image seem strange or abstract.

The instabilities that lurk underneath many of Dabrowski’s critical presentations are not

generated through basic negation or contradiction but by something far more subtle. This

is the case in the photographic work Key Self Portrait (2010) in which an image of a key – 14

Key Self Portrait (2010), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour.

Photoshopped to resemble the artist’s own profile – is presented on a stark white

background, as if having been scanned directly into a computer. The work produces,

for me at least, neither ironic nor poetic distance. Instead, its factual presentation sits

in tension with its conceptual associations, offering a bunch of failed self-portrait

metaphors that defer to mere documentation.

Documentary evidence and literal critique are for Dabrowski what hyper-realism is to

Dali; a means to convince the viewer of specific lines of inquiry, and to camouflage

paranoid premises. This is not meant in the pejorative sense but to suggest the 16

Left: ATOMIC (2006). Opposite page: Vortex Book (2014), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour (both works).

often celestial linkages in Dabrowski’s work, which interrupt the conveyance of a

straightforward socio-political message.

While the Dadaists nihilistically subverted creativity, Surrealism was chiefly

conceived as the fusing of conventional, logical views of reality with unconscious

experience, in order to achieve a ‘super-reality’. Similarly, Dabrowski’s practice

presents a refreshing idealism; he genuinely strives to make the world a better place.

Following such earnestness, he has stated that his ATOMIC (2006-2011) series of

photographs, which documents oil stains found in public car parks, is an attempt to

reveal “the unconscious complicity with the ideological justification of conflict for

resources, exemplifying our avid consumption for convenience.” However, as with

Dali’s critical-paranoiac method, the formal aspects of the works themselves appear

to undermine such intentions.

Beginning as an attempt to make art without control, Dabrowski has stated “Before I

started photographing the oil spots, I was experimenting with letting paint drip without

thinking, focusing on incidental activities such as the blob patterns left behind when I

rested a glue-gun.” Such activities are paradoxical attempts to break the codifications

of visual language through visual language. In Surrealism this is associated with

automatism, centering on automatic or involuntary processes. Although related to 19

Won’t YOU take me to Funkytown? (2014), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Video still courtesy the artist.

Freud’s idea of free-association, Surrealist automatism required only one person and

was not spoken but written down and drawn. It served as their technique for tapping

what they believed to be the unconscious, with hypnotic trances and dream narration

providing additional routes to the unknown. Dabrowski’s use of automatist techniques

hints at a desire to seek out what lies beyond the surface of everyday reality. Though he

failed to achieve the desired lack of control he was after, the very effort communicates

his interest in discovering realities beyond perception, like a paranoid person who

collects evidence to prove that the world is not what it appears to be. When looking

past its ecological critique of our reliance on energy sources such as oil, ATOMIC

begins to resemble a series of Rorschach tests, suggesting the transformation of linear

meaning into abstraction or multiplicity.

Dabrowski often aligns visual symbols to energies or forces in his work. In Lux (2006),

which comprises a piece of computer routered coal sourced from the last coal-burning

tug on the Brisbane River, he highlights the circular process of energy, which he

describes as “when sunlight hits Earth, trees grow, they become coal, we dig it up

and burn it to make electricity to make light.” Flawlessly engraved with the word

‘lux’ (Latin for ‘light’) the sculpture acts as a presentation of evidence to clarify this

circular process and to spark ecological awareness. However, despite being concerned

with the transformation of matter into energy, the didactic presentation and tactility 20

of the object conjures a contradictory sense of factuality, materiality and permanence.

Since 1994 Dabrowski has been studiously researching astrology, teaching himself

how to assemble astrological charts and give readings, even appearing on a community

television show called Fortuna which aired on Bris-31 in 2007. He thinks of astrology as

“the study of our existential embrace. It’s polygamous, mundane and metaphysical. It’s

a bit Frankenstein at first, starting to

learn the art by dissecting fragments

of time, like a post-mortem

examination of a moment.” Here

Dabrowski’s ‘aesthetics of evidence’

can be understood as the work of

a metaphysical detective, using art

as a forum to convey an astrological

concern for the intrinsic concurrency of

events.

In installations such as The

Handmaid of the Lord (2009),

which was restaged for Living 21

Opposite: Lake Lycanthropy and Your Albedo Ratio (2009), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Image courtesy the artist.

Opposite page and right: The Handmaid of the Lord (2009/2014), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour.

Things, Dabrowski’s interest in astrology is a central feature. The work consists of

a table stacked with growing mushrooms accompanied by synchronised bird sounds

and a video projection of a full moon that rises every eight minutes, in reference

to cosmological cycles. For Dabrowski, it suggests “basic astrological theory about

how the moon has rulership over cool, plump and watery things like mushrooms

and cucumbers.” Such concerns are echoed in Lake Lycanthropy and Your Albedo

Ratio (2009) in which a video projector mounted on the ceiling of a gallery creates an

image of a full moon crossing a large water-filled cement crater. Vortex Book (2014)

again sees him couple intergalactic and factual sensibilities, comprising NSW street

directories that have been cut and stacked together to resemble a vortex on the floor

of Lismore Regional Gallery.

When the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was interviewed about her

installation TH.2058 (2008), exhibited in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern,

she commented that science fiction is a surprisingly rare genre in contemporary

art. Dabrowski’s work, like Gonzalez-Foerster’s, can be seen as an attempt to fill

this apparent blind spot, utilising the diminished lack of curatorial control offered

by ARIs to pursue a genuine fascination for alternative sciences, religions and

politics. In this sense, perhaps his work should be located within the history of art

as ‘lebensphilosophie’, following thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Rudolf 2524

The Handmaid of the Lord (2009/2014), installation detail, Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour.

Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, for whom art was predominantly an

organic and spiritual pursuit which could expose the limitations of rationality.

Importantly, Dabrowski insists on attributing all of his work as ‘Matt Dabrowski and

the Many Hands of Glamour’, as a way to oppose the notion of artistic genius and the

singular authorship of art. The word ‘glamour’ is derived from the Scots language in

the Middle Ages as a corrupt form of the Old French word ‘gramaire’, which referred

to the knowledge of the learned classes. As this knowledge included things such as

magic and astrology, the Scottish transformation of ‘grammar’ into ‘glamour’ retained

this association with the occult sciences, eventually becoming used to describe a

sense of magical enchantment. In his usage, ‘Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands

of Glamour’ associates the social basis of all cultural production with the labour that

supports the enchanting spell of aesthetic value, in which ordinary objects become

magically transformed into highly regarded ones. Such a transformation is apparent

in his most recent video work, Won’t YOU take me to Funkytown? (2014), in which

the artist invites gallery-goers to plug-in their IPods or iPhones to a monitor showing

footage of contemporary dancers warming-up, thereby elevating the documentary

material into a mysteriously multifarious music video.

Dabrowski highlights the phenomenon of aestheticisation as a kind of evidence, in

a way that is itself enchanting. His work suggests that, after coming to grips with

the absolute socio-political contingency of art, maybe the next logical step is to look

beyond our known world, to the imperceptible forces of the vast solar system that

affect our planet in mysterious ways.

Endnotes 1. All artist quotes are from an unpublished interview with Dabrowski conducted in February and March, 2011.2. Salvador Dali, “The Conquest of the Irrational,” in Salvador Dali: A Panorama of His Art (Cleveland: Salvador Dali Museum, 1936/1974), 49.

26 27

Opposite: Fortuna (2007), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Video still courtesy the artist.

Oliver Watts

In Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), the narrator and Holly

Golightly have one of those perfect days together, celebrating the narrator’s publishing

deal. It is wistfully described by the narrator as “A beautiful day with the buoyancy of

a bird.” The whole city came alive for them as they moved from cocktail to cocktail,

from a park to a lake to the zoo via a marching parade. With autumn leaves burning in

bonfires, the narrator suggests, “Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem

that season of beginning, spring.” The whole novella has this autumnal and nostalgic

quality. What I think the narrator means about autumn is that it is characterised by a

process of change, a ‘becoming’ rather than a joyful end point. There is something of

the past in it too, and of letting stuff go.

Christopher LG Hill has conjured such a scenario within the spaces of Lismore Regional

Gallery. Spread across three rooms, Hill’s installation Freedom of Association (2014)

presents the viewer with seemingly random objects. At the centre of the work is an

old satellite dish on which sits an orange soft toy, beaming messages out, or beaming

them in. Hill is a kind of visual poet and the title of his installation resonates with

Christopher LG Hill’s Throwaway, Fantasy Things

28

Opposite: Freedom of Association (2014), installation detail, Christopher LG Hill.

ideas of freedom and a transitory sense of place, as well as concepts of assembly

and community-making. He deals in common materials and common mediatic forms,

making creative use of throwaway things through a poetics of choosing and gesture.

The dried autumn leaves on the floor of the gallery weave the various components

of Hill’s installation together in an overall effect, as if oscillating between the real

and the ideal. Living Things was staged in Lismore during autumn, and in that way

the work helps bring the outside in – breaking the wall between everyday life and the

intense reframing of the white cube. On the other hand, the poetic and the metaphoric

are at the forefront of the work, communicating a distanced and elusive quality.

Freedom of Association never settles easily into an ‘artwork’ or an ‘installation’ but

seems more like an impressionistic staging. While there is no doubt the installation

references the world ‘now’ – its hyper-mediation, its dynamism, its commodities, its

stuff – everything is slowed here into a sublime type of placelessness.

If our ‘everyday life’ now also comprises the immaterial and the digital, a similar

transformation happens in Hill’s video work tink thank (2014), located in the screening

room of the gallery. The digital video enables us to see differently the glut of texts

that we are presented with every day on the Internet, or on platforms such as Twitter.

Words slowly scroll up, showing seemingly random sentences that form a sort of

contemporary Symbolist poem; words and sentences are isolated and recombined to

create new resonances. This atmosphere is heightened by Lethargic coil (2014); Hill’s

sound piece of ambient, scratchy and junky noise. Like the declassed satellite dish in

Freedom of Association, tink thank suggests that we are all walking nodal points, as

streams of information buzz in, around and through us.

There is undoubtedly a form of critique and resistance against our late-capitalist world

in Hill’s contributions to Living Things. His wall paintings, borrowing from graffiti,

also quietly sign dissent. But what sort of dissent is it? The use of found material

brings attention to Marxist-inspired movements such as Arte Povera, which expressed

the disintegration of culture in the modern world. In this reading Hill’s detritus could

be understood as the detritus after the party of capitalism. Cheap plastic champagne

flutes, strange hats, stuffed toys, and shredded trash magazines turned into papier-

mâché bowls appear to fit that reading. They are not objects of high pop, or explorations

of the post-industrial world, but are something more contemporary. The objects seem

less material and light. Like the Arte Povera artists, Hill is interested in the levelling

of art, and in wrestling it away from the global markets that seem to define art today

(even more than they did in the 1960s). However, his work lacks the revolutionary

zeal of that late-modernist movement. If this is Arte Povera, it is Arte Povera for the

Occupy generation. What seems to define contemporary modes of resistance is their 30 31

Exhibition view (left to right): Freedom of Association (2014), tingly FXs throwie 1 (2014), Christopher LG Hill.

quiet refusal and almost critical resignation; neither transgression nor conformity.

Hill’s critical approach then has two points. One is an insurrection of the personal

refusal. The other is some faith in art and poetry to still create a sense of community

and kinship; it is the faith in aesthetics to provide some hope. This shift is already

evident in the detritus he chooses. The gloves, the hats and even the cheap cups really

signify absent persons. What haunts his work is not the totalising power of capital

but a persistent type of humanism. The process of looking and engaging – that is,

the aesthetic apperception of the audience – is what joins us all together, forced as

individuals to ‘complete’ a very open-ended work.

It is not uncommon to have this strange hybridity of realism and idealism – an

emphasis on the poetic and the physical – within the one work. Indeed this pluralism

characterises much contemporary art practice. Art stars such as Dan Colen and Sterling

Ruby are recognised for their conflation of the material real and some sort of poetic,

post-minimalist abstraction. Sterling Ruby has also flirted with large post-graffiti

spray paintings which in the end look like Rothko paintings. But Hill’s work resists

the finished objects of this brand of contemporary art (which of course now sells in the

half-millions). The skill of Hill’s practice is his connection to the resistant avant-garde

of the material (Marxism) in a way that makes Sterling Ruby look like punk styling. 35

Above: Freedom of Association (2014), installation detail.Below: tingly FXs throwie 1 (2014), Christopher LG Hill (both works).

Hill somehow maintains the authenticity of the street in his objects; a soft intervention

with a fine sensibility. He privileges the process of viewing, a shared response as we

are forced to make the connections ourselves, turning viewers into poet-flâneurs. It is

no surprise that when Roland Barthes was trying to sell his idea of the ‘death of the

author’ to the literati of France he brought up the relevance of the nineteenth-century

poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The disjointed and open poetry of Mallarmé seems to square

perfectly with the empowerment of the reader.

Hill’s focus on the materiality of the ‘everyday’ is not simply an Adorno-like attack on

commodity fetishism as some have seen. Thierry de Duve’s Kantianism is another way

of understanding the beauty of Hill’s object choices. In his essay “Resisting Adorno,

Revamping Kant,” de Duve writes “when all is said and done I must confess that

Adorno doesn’t do much for me; he rarely helps me think”.1 De Duve articulates the

idea that “the sentence ‘This is art’ is the paradigmatic formula of a modern aesthetic

judgment in the truest Kantian sense”.2 This Duchampian ‘choosing’ is central to Hill’s

work. For de Duve (and Kant) it is not art’s role to be directly political. Through little,

irrational ruptures, art can be used for insurrection and to destabilise our normative

positions.

36

Opposite and following page: tink thank (2014), with sound work Lethargic coil (2014), Christopher LG Hill. Video still courtesy the artist.

Hill’s graffiti works, tingly FXs throwie 1, tingly FXs throwie 2, and tingly FXs

throwie 3 (all works 2014) exemplify this shift from ‘material street’ to ‘beauty’ that

takes place in his work. The wall paintings are based on two colour ‘throw-ups’ (a

term for quickly executed graffiti) which are located somewhere between a tag and

a more finished piece. Hill already declasses the genre by mixing styles – a bubble

writing mark here, shadow lines and a wild style mark there. More importantly, the

works are clearly abstract field paintings, not done in spray but in thin acrylic paint.

They are, however, directly painted on the wall, which not only recalls the radicality

of street interventions but also the insistence and immediacy of conceptual practice,

within the confines of the white cube space. What interests me in these works are

their many levels of de-authoring, and hence opening up to meaning. The tag is the

ultimate signature but here the shapes really do not spell out a name. If the work

remains a throw-up, then Hill – as author – effaces himself by merely creating a kind

of theatrical rendering of street art. The soft plurality of these paintings – somewhere

between art and graffiti, between signature and abstraction, between the real and the

ideal – is astoundingly complex and evocative.

Hill’s work in the end seems to really have faith in beauty and poetry. Like the

Occupy movement, the final point in relation to Hill’s work is; how do we radically

try and form new senses of community? The power of art is its irrational but uncanny

ability to affect many people in common; what Kant called the sensus communis.

Stanley Cavell also made a similar point about the weird magic of aesthetic judgement.

In Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy (1965) he wrote:

“It is essential to making an aesthetic judgment that at some point we

be prepared to say in its support: don’t you see, don’t you hear, don’t

you dig? Because if you do not see something, without explanation,

then there is nothing further to discuss ... Reasons – at definite points,

for definite reasons, in different circumstances – come to an end.”3 40 41

Exhibtion view (clockwise from left): tink thank (2014), tingly FXs throwie 2 (2014), Freedom of Association (2014), Christopher LG Hill.

The crucial question here is the friendly banter “don’t you dig?” In discussing the

difference between rational knowledge and aesthetic knowledge, Cavell gives an

example that I paraphrase. On a first date, imagine if you ask a person, “Do you know

that Tony Abbott is our prime minister?”, and the other person says, “yes, I know”.

That rational information would get you nowhere. But if you say, “I really like Pulp

Fiction, do you?”, and they say “I love Pulp Fiction”, it is a sort of miracle that we

can share such an ineffable, seemingly subjective, random thing in common. It is a

‘something’ that is not a fact and that at some level cannot be explained. So this is

what Hill seems really to be doing by framing his practice in the revolutionary modes

of the materialist avant-garde, effectively asking: what role does idealism and poetry

play in political practice? Surely a lot?

The key, I think, to Hill’s work is less about the radicalism of Arte Povera and more about

the anarchic spirit of the Dadaists and their connection to the anarcho-individualists of

the mid-nineteenth-century (including those connected to Symbolism). The ideas of

Max Stirner and his anarchic book Ego and his Own (1844), seem particularly relevant

to Hill’s approach to poetry and language, having provided the guiding light for Tristan

Tzara and Marcel Duchamp before him. Stirner saw the revolutionary philosophy of

Left Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx as merely a ‘change of masters,’

forming a modern type of ‘religion’. Stirner clarifies his position and calls for what he 43

Above: Freedom of Association (2014).tingly FXs throwie 3, Christopher LG Hill (both works)Below: Freedom of Association (2014), installation detail, Christopher LG Hill.

labels as (merely) ‘insurrection’. This mode of disavowal seems appropriate to Hill’s

artistic stance. Stirner writes:

“Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as

synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions,

of the established condition or status, the state or society, and is

accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its

unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet

does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is

not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without

regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The revolution aimed

at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves

be arranged but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes

on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the established, since if it

prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth

of me out of the established.”4

It is this formulation of a ‘union of egoists’ that finds expression in the loose group

of Parisian Dadaists, and, quite possibly, in the reception of Hill’s work. Stirner’s

discussion of the ‘un-man’ mirrors Duchamp’s idea of the ‘anartist’ – Duchamp’s retort 45

to being labeled an ‘anti-artist’. The term correlates both to the anarchist and to the

anomic, referring to a refusal of standards, values and order. Stirner’s writings added

to the sensibilities of other nineteenth-century philosophers such as Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche, who influenced Dada in their own ways.5

In Hill’s works we are asked to rearrange and re-sort the real in an aesthetic mode that

is a little absurd and unhinged. He asks us to individually apprehend but to do this

collectively. The exhibition starts us off by reframing and isolating fragments which

we then piece back together. Most radically of all though, Hill’s work suggests a mode

of seeing the world beyond that of finished objects. It is a master class in seeing the

poetry in our own lives, suggesting how it is quite easy to project our own loves and

desires, our vehement hatred and indifference onto the material stuff of the world and

to build our fantasies from that. Perhaps its greatest challenge to the art world is that

he does not require us, as Hal Foster did, to return to the real, and to find the authentic

in the material reality of history, memory and the street. On the contrary, for Hill the

real might be the fantastical structures – of capitalism, love and ideology – that truly

structure our lives.

44

Endnotes1. Thierry de Duve, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant,” Art and Aesthetics After Adorno, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 261.2. Ibid., 65.3. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 93.4. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 279-280.5. Stirner’s writings could be coupled with Schopenhauer’s attacks on reason in favour of the ‘will’ or unconscious processes, such as personal desire and love. In Zurich and Berlin, the Dada-ists were additionally influenced by the socially and aesthetically antipathetic work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

47

Opposite: tingly FXs throwie 3 (2014), Christopher LG Hill.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Hill, Wes J., 1978- author, editor.Living things / Wes Hill.

ISBN: 9780957931268 (paperback)

Dabrowski, Matt--Exhibitions.Hill, Christopher L. G.,--Exhibitions.Installations (Art)--New South Wales--Lismore--Exhibitions.Art, Modern--21st century--Exhibitions.

Hill, Christopher L. G., artist.Dabrowski, Matt, artist.Watts, Oliver, author.Lismore Regional Gallery.

709.2

Above: Living Things (2014), exhibition view.

Front cover image: tingly FXs throwie 1 (2014), Christopher LG Hill.

Back cover image: ATOMIC (2006), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Courtesy the artist.

Contents page image: Key Self Portrait (2010), Matt Dabrowski and the Many Hands of Glamour. Courtesy the artist.

Book design by Wendy WilkinsExhibition photography by Wendy Wilkins.

© 2014, Lismore Regional Gallery and Wes Hill

Copyright for all images held by the individual artists. Copyright for all texts held by the individual authors.

Wes Hill and the artists would like to thank James Bowles-Leeson for his assistance with the exhibition.

Lismore Regional Gallery is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.