Heritage and Hauntology:The Installation Art of Michael Goldberg

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‘...things both new and old surround

us, and we constantly draw on them

to help secure a particular

construction of our personal history.’

with clinical precision the diverse exorcismsperformed in, for example, those oddedifices called ‘historical homes’.

Brecht’s famous quip to the effect that thepyramids stand only as a monument to thethousands of anonymous slaves who diedbuilding them can serve as a kind ofconceptual point of entry for anyoneencountering Goldberg’s work for the firsttime. Goldberg’s ambition is to invite backthe ghosts that sanitised history hasbanished, while at the same time turningits own solid matter into ectoplasm. To takean example, his installation titled RealEstate, 1996, involved a subtle andinsidious occupation of one of Sydney’sgrandest colonial villas. The John Vergedesigned Tusculum was built for thewealthy merchant Alexander Spark. Verge’spromiscuous desire to imprint classicalorder on his new environment ran thegamut from giant columns to tinymouldings. For Spark and his wealthycompatriots a classical make-over was theonly way in which the new land couldproperly be civilised. Goldberg recognisesthat this is not just (or even) a disinterestedaesthetic exercise but is rather a symptomof the desire to heroicise and legitimate theexpansion of the British Empire byassociating it with that of ancient Rome.For, as Marx wrote of a different momentin the history of the bourgeoisie, ‘…theyanxiously conjure up the spirit of the past

During the Festival of Britain in 1954, itwas decided to open a kind of museum ofeveryday life in the form of a purpose builthouse fitted and stocked with furniture,appliances and decoration ‘typical’ of thatyear. I have not seen the place, but Iimagine it must seem peculiarly divorcedfrom the historical moment that gave riseto it. None of us live in this kind of purepresent. Rather, things both new and oldsurround us, and we constantly draw onthem to help secure a particularconstruction of our personal history. Ahouse devoid of such mnemonic richnessmust have all the evocative warmth of adisplay home!

Of course, the kind of cryogenic history towhich this house is dedicated is not, in anymeaningful sense, history at all. Instead, itis an expression of the desire for a kind offorgetting; for a tabula rasa on which thenew history of post-war Britain would bewritten. Michael Goldberg, I suspect, wouldenjoy this house, as he has a highlydeveloped radar for the various ways inwhich official historical sites invariablyorchestrate the effacement of that whichthey claim to capture. He has documented

DAVID McNEILL

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In the year prior to his Tusculum projectGoldberg created an installation in themost widely known historic house inSydney, Alexander Macleay’s Elizabeth BayHouse. Goldberg’s work, A Humble Life,was again sited in an unrestored and hencerather abject room of this extravagant late-Georgian mansion. This room contained,among other things, an elderly display casestanding in one corner of the roomsupported by a rough wooden pallet. Thecabinet contained half a dozen RoyalDoulton figurines of the kind that haveproven so enduringly popular inAnglophile settler cultures. They wereordered in such a way as to draw attentionto the fact that these china sets do play outreal social relations at the level of theimaginary. China sets like Sweet andTwenty, Milkmaid, The Royal Governor’sCook and the rest miniaturise, infantiliseand legitimise a world of abused servants,convict ‘slave’ labour and racism. Thispoint is driven home with the inclusionnearby of a facsimile of Macleay’s originalconvict register. The cabinet with the

after which it was named. In cellar roomsbelow, the artist set up a series of complexdisplays that serve to summon up thehistory of dispossession, privilege,pomposity and avariciousness that marksthe history of our settler culture. Thesedisplays included light boxes proclaimingVitruvian maxims (Firmitas, Utilitas, andVenustas), plaster classical columns, orderlypiles of left-over material from a campaignof restoration, an ornate gilded mirror anda multimedia display of the subsequentsubdivision and ownership of Spark’soriginal land grant. Thus Goldberg’sTusculum intervention underlined the kindof self-aggrandising delusion that allowedour early settlers to present to themselves asheroic what was in reality a rather grubbyhistory of theft and exploitation. Further,his work suggests rather inescapably thatthe process of transforming this historyinto ‘heritage’ cannot do other thanreproduce these delusions uncritically. Thegreater the dedication to the authenticrenovation of a bygone site, the lesspanoramic the historical gaze.

to their service and borrow from themnames, battle cries and costumes in orderto present the new scene of world historyin this time-honoured disguise and thisborrowed language’.1

Marx writes as informatively about thisprocess of historical ‘coat tailing’ in theEighteenth Brumaire as anyone has before orsince. History as a séance, a conjuration, isas accurate a metaphor for the activities ofNational Heritage organisations as we arelikely to find. Selected ‘friendly’ ghosts aretrapped and condemned to a perpetualpurgatory inside upholstered chaiselounges, bell jars, commodes, dados andstucco frames. Others are sent packing, andit is these that Goldberg seeks out andrecalls.

In the foyer of Tusculum Goldberginstalled documents pertaining to theoriginal land grant and also architecturalrenderings connecting the Spark house, viathe mediation of Palladio, back to itsVitruvian origins in the Roman suburb

Michael Goldberg, A Humble Life, installation, 1995

figurines had a small adhesive label at thebottom which read, ‘Museum Exhibits canConceal Complex Personal Histories’. Onleaving the room the visitor could read aninscription on the back of the door whichquoted the golden rules of domestic serviceas prescribed in 1837 by the wife ofGovernor Darling: ‘Do everything in itsproper time. Keep everything to its properuse. Put everything in its proper place’.These are, coincidently, also the guidingprinciples of a certain kind of heritagemanagement for which propriety is thehandmaiden of restitution, not revision.The obedient servant of official history willleave no corner unplastered in the desire toproduce a particular version of ‘figurinecabinet’ history. However, history is surelynot something that sets or congeals on aparticular site any more than it is the storyof discrete individuals. Instead it is locatedalong and is coincident with, the myriad ofligatures (political, economic and so on)that articulate and disarticulate such sites.

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apotheosis of the entrepreneur as a kind ofmedia endorsed role model for a late-capitalist society. Shallow and despicablethough this construct is, Goldbergrecognises the ways in which this world ofcurrency speculation, propertydevelopment, power lunches, celebrity ballsand BMWs was presented as romantic andeven heroic. In a real sense the yuppieentrepreneur of the period before globalrecession was the heir to NineteenthCentury bureaucrats and settler-merchantssuch as Macleay and Spark.

Unlike their predecessors, these newpredators draped themselves not in thedebased trappings of a mythological pastbut rather in Memphis design andpostmodern art. Although Philippe Starckchairs replace Chippendale ones, the effectis the same; a masking from theperpetrators themselves of theconsequences of the actions of their class.In 1999 Goldberg installed The Well Built

The discrete site is by itself something quitedifferent. It is a vessel for mourning or fornostalgic reverie, that is to say, a memorial.

In any case Goldberg is not an obedientservant. His interventions invariablychallenge the possibility of the kinds oflocalised historical containment thatheritage maintenance and restorationpresupposes. He cites with approvalFoucault’s call for a history of space andpower ‘from the great strategies ofgeopolitics to the little tactics of thehabitat..’2 It is precisely this mutualexchange and dependency betweendifferent levels or intensities of activity thatattracts his attention.

Goldberg moved here from South Africa inthe late 1980s, and it may be that he wasable to recognise parallels in the strategiesof selective memorialising shared by thesetwo settler cultures. His arrivalcorresponded more or less with the

Michael Goldberg, Real Estate, installation, 1996

Australian in a room in the Art Gallery ofNew South Wales overlooking the site of alarge scale speculative development inwhich a large derelict wharf atWoolloomooloo was being transformedinto expensive and very fashionableapartments. The Gallery and the buildingsite were connected by a rather spectacularstretch of parkland that in turn coveredover a new freeway. The title appropriatesthe slogan of the property developer. TheGallery space was somewhat claustrophobicas it was quite densely packed with woodenformwork, steel scaffolding, mesh fencingand assorted bits and pieces associated withbuilding sites the world over. Severalpaintings from the permanent collectionhung on the gallery wall and the sight ofvaluable art in such close proximity to amise en scene associated with corrosive limedust and so on was disconcerting. We haveall seen renovations taking place in an artgallery and are more or less conditioned torecoil from the conjunction of art andconstruction.

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grandly, ‘life-style’.

The vista which The Well Built Australiancontrives brings home the oftenunacknowledged complicity betweenaffirmative or ‘cosmetic’ culture and theinterests of business. The buildingparaphernalia in the gallery space culturesitself to the construction site in thedistance and the sanctified space of thegallery becomes, for a moment, profane.The piece offers a salutary warning to thoseof us who may on occasion applaud theapparent implosion of high and ‘mass’culture. Such implosions are not always asinnocent as the avatars of an art of the‘everyday’ might wish.3

In Specters of Marx , Jaques Derrida’seccentric reprise of communism, the highpriest of deconstruction examines some ofthe points in his writings at which Marxchooses to deploy metaphors to do withconjuring, ghosts and possession.4 Thepassage from Das Capital explaining

Goldberg’s intervention acts as a catalystfor re-appraising this association on anumber of planes. In fact urban and innerurban property development has frequentlyexchanged coy glances with the art world.The process of ‘urban renewal’ has so oftenbeen little more than a euphemism forprofiting from the displacement of workingclass and ethnic communities. This is noless true of, say, Sydney’s Redfern in the1990s than it was of the innerarrondissement of Haussmann’s Paris overa century ago. Whether it be the East Endof London in the late 1980s, New York’sEast Village a decade before or Paddingtonin the 1960s artists and the infrastructurethat cocoons them have been unwittinglyconscripted into a kind of mercantile avant-garde. The process of making over a suburbhas not infrequently followed a precisetrajectory that starts with artists searchingout cheap studio space and ends withboutiques, apartments and all the trappingsof what the industry has come to call rather

Michael Goldberg, The Well Built Australian, installation, 1999

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commodity fetishism, and the section fromthe Eighteenth Brumaire referred to above,are the best known of these. But there are asurprising number of others given Marx’smilitant materialism. More interestingly,Derrida suggests that our own relationshipwith Marxism might be like that of theliving with a ghost that just will not goaway. He even proposes a new mode ofstudy for the investigation of this reluctanceof the dead to finally take leave. He calls it‘hauntology’. This idea, I will venture, ispretty much what Michael Goldberg hasbeen practicing for the last decade.

David McNeill is a lecturer in art history at theCollege of Fine Arts, University of New SouthWales.

N O T E S1 Marx, K., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, London, 1976, pp.10-11.2 Foucault, M., ‘The Eye of Power’ quoted inVidler, A., The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely, London,

1992, p.167.3 The curator of the 11th Biennale of

Sydney, Jonathan Watkins was quoted assaying that the exhibition would have fulfilled its task if the visitorsrecognised during their travels between

venues that the Sydney skyline wasas beautiful as anything they might see

in an art gallery. Given the ratherchaotic history of urban planning in this city

this might be seen as a fairly unambitious aim!

4 Derrida, J., Specters of Marx, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994.

Michael Goldberg, The Well Built Australian, installation, 1999