The World We Found

Michael Waite

Master of Fine Arts

University of New South Wales

College of Fine Arts

March 2010

PLEASE TYPETHE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Waite

First name: Michael Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MFA

School: School of Media Art Faculty: College of Fine Arts

Title: "The World We Found"

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This paper documents three visual art projects that explore the area of everyday life. One concern was to find ways of attending to the everyday that were appropriate to express its elusive and ambiguous nature. The two main approaches determined were, firstly, a direct engagement with the world rather than a detached way of operating, and secondly, working within the framework of the project, a method that is more concerned with the process of engagement rather than producing a polished artwork as the final result.

The basic concepts of phenomenology are also considered in regard to their relevance to the everyday. Phenomenology is a philosophy that stresses the importance of studying our subjective experience of the world as embodied beings. Important thinkers in this area such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of both the relevance of everyday life to this philosophy and also of the potential for artists to play a role.

Consideration is also given to the sorts of organising structures used in traditional museum displays where things are brought together in ways that seem to produce meaning. This is an area of interest to some contemporary artists who question the principles of these systems, which are often collectively referred to as the archive. Two of my projects are presented in the form of an ordered system of visual records, while the third is documentation of an official ordering system found in a Mexico City park.

Essentially, I was exploring the potential for visual art projects to present aspects of everyday life in ways that draw attention to the subjectivity inherent in the encounter between self and the world.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

Signature

.. Witness

..... Date

The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY

Date of completion of requirements for Award:

THIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF THE THESIS

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Man Who Collected 4

Chapter Two: The World 7

Chapter Three: Landmarks from Home 19

Chapter Four: The Collection of a Gentleman 29

Chapter Five: D.F. Nature Walk 39

Summary 43

Appendix A: Stills from Landmarks from Home

Appendix B: Index of VHS titles onto which

Landmarks from Home footage was inserted

Appendix C: Catalogue of street portraits

Bibliography

DVD Insert Landmarks from Home (inside back cover)

1

Introduction

... the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying

to master an object or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an

ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an

enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly)

but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in

which every object displays the human face it acquires in a human gaze. 1

In this paper I explore ideas around three projects completed as part of my MFA

research from 2007 to 2010. The MFA research paper and exhibition are both titled

The World We Found, which points to the key concepts being explored. In broad

terms, the three projects use ordering structures to examine aspects of everyday life as a

way of exploring the subjectivity inherent in our quest for knowledge. As expressed by

one of the fundamental philosophical questions Is the world knowable?2

In my research the area of the world that is under consideration is everyday life

our immediate surroundings and mundane activities that are often taken for granted,

might be a source of philosophical insight when presented in different ways. The

question as to whether it is possible to have objective knowledge of the external world

was considered by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and is still a question of interest

to contemporary philosophers and scientists. We would like to have objective, unbiased

knowledge of the world around us, however our approach always proceeds from our

own subjectivity. Across my MFA projects the main knowledge structures being

explored are the kinds of gathering and sorting practices found in traditional archive and

museum displays that bring together disparate items in ways which seem to produce

1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (69-70).

2 Throughout the paper the term the world is used in its philosophical context, not to describe

planet Earth but rather to represent the ultimate setting for our existence and all the things we

experience.

2

meaning. However it is possible that there is no inherent meaning in the world and it is

we who create these narratives out of our desire for meaning. This view ties in with one

of the basic tenets of phenomenology, which states that because our experience of the

world is always filtered through our senses and consciousness we cannot have objective

knowledge and that all we can really study is ourselves studying the world.3 We never

see the world clearly because we are always in the way.

I begin the paper with a general discussion of everyday life, ordering systems,

and phenomenology, outlining the key concepts of relevance to my research, and also

mentioning various writers and artists who have explored these areas. I then describe

the three projects, which were all undertaken as part of the MFA research. The first

project discussed is Landmarks from Home which comprises a video archive of

mundane buildings and locations around Sydney that hold some personal resonance for

me. In relation to this I also discuss sense of place with particular reference to the

Situationist International concept of psychogeography. The second project covered is

The Collection of A Gentleman which consists of 44 portrait drawings of myself that

were made by street portrait artists around the world. In this work I was interested in

creating an archive of a particular form of popular art as a way to point to the

subjectivity of perception, as well as a presentation of the ubiquity of a certain style of

mimetic representation. The final project discussed is D.F. Nature Walk a selection of

photographs I took in a Mexico City park where more than 1,000 trees had large

identifying numbers painted on them. This project documents an institutional ordering

3 Edmund Husserl outlined the basic approach of phenomenology early in the twentieth century

as an alternative to the detached objectivity that had come to dominate the sciences post-

Enlightenment. Husserl proposed that as our fundamental experience of the world is via our

embodied interaction with it, this should be the starting point of science and philosophy. The

world is a world of phenomena and the things in it are studied as they appear to a conscious

being.

3

system, which I saw as a vivid example of our attempts to understand the world by

applying our own meanings to it.

4

Chapter One:

The Man Who Collected

In a short story titled The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973, Tor ge

Bringsvrd4 writes about a Norwegian man named Ptk who had begun to feel

increasingly disconnected from everyday reality. Unsettled by this he devises a plan that

he hopes will lead him back to his previous state of being at ease in the world. He will

accomplish this by an intensive study of the complete contents of his local daily

newspapers, believing that if he can grasp the totality of the concrete events happening

in his part of the world it will help to ground him. He soon finds this approach to be

impractical as it takes several days to read the contents of one days newspapers, Ptk

realised that the sum of information was too weighty for any single man to balance on

his head. News fell in heaps around his feet, clung like ivy to his legs and tightened like

a belt round his stomach.5

After rethinking his methodology he decides to select one particular day and

study it in-depth. He chooses the 1st of September 1973 and begins by purchasing all of

the Norwegian newspapers published on that date. He clips items from the papers and

sorts them into various categories such as the weather, business and sport. Once he has

worked through the local publications he buys newspapers that were published on

September 1st from neighbouring countries and then from around the world. He studies

foreign languages and twice moves to larger apartments in order to be able to

accommodate his growing archive:

4 Bringsvrd, Tor ge. The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973, (1973) in

Borges, Jorge Luis, Silvina Ocampo, and A. Bioy Casares (eds.), The Book of Fantasy, Viking

Penguin, New York, 1988 (77-80). 5 Ibid. (78).

5

But all the time there were more things to learn. The subject turned out to be

just about inexhaustible. Who would have guessed that so much had happened

on exactly the 1st of September 1973?

6

He becomes progressively more hermit-like, avoiding contact with friends and anything

that distracts him from his project. His apartment is essentially a research library

dedicated to the worldly events of one day. The more material he gathers, the more

connections and patterns he finds that seem to hint at some grand unified understanding

that might be attainable. One day there is a fire in his building and Ptk is severely

burned while trying to save his archive. He dies in hospital, oblivious to his immediate

surroundings as his mind is still assembling the final pieces of the giant puzzle.

This story touches on some key concepts in regard to everyday life and the

archive that are present in my research as well as the work of some contemporary artists

and writers to whom I refer. First is the notion of a person as a lone researcher, who

while working on a project uses a methodology that is structurally rational, (gathering,

ordering and classifying in the case of Ptk). However, unlike a conventional academic

research project which would require some initial peer assessment of its rationale and

likelihood of success, the individual can devise his or her own rules by taking a leap of

faith based on intuition. In the case of Ptk, he never rationalises the way in which he

expects his project to make sense; his is an act of magical thought that is given the

appearance of rationality by his use of archival methodology. Another element of

interest in the story is that Ptk does not discriminate between the various pieces of

information that he collects. For example, he doesnt give particular importance to

global politics over local sports results; there is a levelling where all categories of

information are capable of providing value. He gathers and sorts everything - classified

6 Ibid. (79).

6

ads, the stock market and business news, the TV guide, sporting results, cinema listings,

crime, politics and war. In The Delirious Museum, Calum Storrie writes how this

profusion of data overwhelms Ptks project ... but the enterprise can never be

completed because even when time and space have been contained there is an infinite

number of narratives.7

7 Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B. Tauris,

London, 2006 (152).

7

Chapter Two:

The World

I shall suggest ... that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy

... has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are

always prone to forget.8

THE EVERYDAY

Ptk felt this news article gathering was a project that could be carried out by himself, in

his own apartment, using material that was readily available to any person, implying

that philosophical understanding is attainable within the realm of everyday life. Tor ge

Bringsvrds story was first published in 1973 at a time when interest grew in everyday

life as a field of study. In the same year Georges Perec published an article titled

Approaches to What in the journal Cause Commune in which he coined the term

infra-ordinary" to describe that which exists below the extraordinary9. He argued that

while much attention is paid to the big events of life, the ordinary and common

elements are overlooked as being unimportant, when close study of them with a fresh

approach might lead to valuable insights about human existence. He wrote:

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our

utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that

which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.10

Something that several writers have noted is the ambiguous and elusive quality of the

everyday. Helena Tatay writes:

8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (39).

9 Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, London, 1999 (209-11).

10 Ibid. (210).

8

The everyday is associated with the small side of life, with the grey, humble and

imprecise element. It is the other side of the coin of the capitalist social scene,

whose image, constructed by the media, is colourful, optimistic and logical.11

In a 1969 article titled Everyday Speech, Maurice Blanchot notes the importance of

this elusive quality:

Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold.

It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth,

without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible

signification.12

In his essay Recent Art and the Everyday, Stephen Johnstone identifies two common

elements in the approaches of contemporary artists to this area. Firstly, in line with

Perecs notion of the infra-ordinary, the everyday ... exists below the threshold of the

noticed and is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.13

In the second place, artists

whose work explores the everyday, generally do so by some direct engagement with the

world rather than operating as detached observers. The everyday is seen as ... both

authentic and democratic; it is the place where ordinary people creatively use and

transform the world they encounter from one day to another.14

This leads to a

consideration of how such an elusive concept can be dealt with artistically in regard to

approach, materials and presentation. In Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Ben

Highmore asks, What then would constitute a suitable aesthetic form for registering

11

Tatay, Helena. Hans-Peter Feldmann, 272 Pages, Centre national de la photographie, Paris &

Fundacio Antoni Tpies, Barcelona & Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 2002 (35). 12

Blanchot, Maurice. Everyday Speech (1969), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday,

Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (36). 13

Johnstone, Stephen. Recent Art and the Everyday (2008), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The

Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2008 (13). 14

Ibid. (13)

9

daily life in all its newness, uncertainty and lack of tradition?15

Georges Perec also

asked:

How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down rather,

flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to

give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we

are.16

Michael Sheringham writes of the risk of the everyday dissolving into statistics and data

if the approach is too didactic or rational.17

He proposes the framework of the project

as a suitable approach, defining a project as an endeavour, that, although it points

toward some end, is more concerned with the steps that are taken along the way,

shifting attention from outcomes (for instance, a finished artwork) to processes,

practices, constraints, and durations18

. Writing that the project:

allows for everydayness by suspending abstract definition and creating a

breathing space, a gap or hiatus that enables the quotidien to be apprehended as a

medium in which we are immersed rather than as a category to be analysed.19

As an example he refers to the 1981 work by Sophie Calle La Filature (The Shadow) in

which she had her mother hire a private detective to follow her.20

She knew that she was

being followed and therefore, to an extent performed for the watcher, without being sure

who he was; meanwhile the detective was unaware that she knew of his surveillance.

The results of this project have been presented in both gallery and book form as a

combination of texts (his report and her writings) and photographs (those taken by the

15

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, London: Routledge,

2002 (23). 16

Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books, 1999 (210). 17 Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006 (360). 18

Ibid. (388). 19

Ibid. (390). 20

Ibid. (342).

10

detective and others by a friend who Sophie Calle involved in the project). The work is

presented as documentation of a process rather than as a polished work that had been

created later.

THE ARCHIVE

In a 2002 interview with Helena Tatay, the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann said, I

am not interested in the high points of life. Only five minutes of every day are

interesting. I want to show the rest, normal life.21

His 1977 project All the Clothes of

a Woman is an example of how in his work he considers both the everyday and the

archive. Most of his titles are plain descriptions of what is in the work and in this case

he simply photographed all the clothes of an unidentified woman. It was first presented

as a book of 71 photos, simple black and white shots with the clothing on a clothes

hanger on a wall and the shoes on the floor. It is reminiscent of a museum display and if

it was photographs of all the clothes of a seventeenth-century woman we might easily

apprehend it as such. However there is a sense of displacement caused by the

contemporary look of the garments how do we read our own era and culture as a

museum display? Further, a museum would have explanatory texts but Feldmanns

works never do, as if they are meant to be self-explanatory. This absence draws

attention to the underlying ambiguity of museum collections and the texts that

contextualise them. They often present one narrative in favour of other possible ones.

As Helena Tatay writes:

Rather than search for a coherent discourse, Feldmann seems to explore the

meaninglessness of existence. Another aspect he finds interesting is leaving the

21

Tatay, Helena. Hans-Peter Feldmann, 272 Pages, Centre national de la photographie, Paris

& Fundacio Antoni Tpies, Barcelona & Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 2002 (35).

11

work open, so that it not only allows but demands that the spectator recreate the

works, projecting his or her own experience.22

In January 2008 the International Center of Photography in New York staged an

exhibition titled Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art that

included artists such as Christian Boltanski, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Tacita Dean. In

his catalogue essay the curator, Okwui Enwezor, discussed the ways in which

contemporary artists have explored the idea of the archive. First he clarifies what is

meant by the use of the word archive in contemporary art, not, a dim, musty place

full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert

repository of historical artefacts 23

but rather as, an active, regulatory discursive

system.24

And further, that the archive is, a representation of the taxonomy,

classification, and annotation of knowledge and information25

and thus also refers to

the kinds of ordering systems traditionally used in libraries and museums. One key

aspect explored by contemporary artists is the air of authority attached to these systems:

Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against

the grain. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional

principles underlying the use of the archival document, or it may result in the

creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archaeological

relationship to history, evidence, information, and data that will give rise to its

own interpretive categories.26

22

Ibid (35) 23

Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, New York,

N.Y.: International Center of Photography, Steidl, Gttingen, 2008 (11). 24

Ibid (11). 25

Ibid (16). 26

Ibid (18).

12

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EVERYDAY

In her book The Ecstatic Quotidian27

, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei analyses examples of

modern literature that explore the everyday in ways that relate to phenomenology, the

philosophy primarily developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.28

One

central idea proposed by Husserl is that we can never have objective knowledge of the

physical world as our experience of it is internally produced in ways that are so

automatic we are rarely aware of them. As Husserl wrote:

Daily practical living is naive. It is immersion in the already given world, whether

it be experiencing, or thinking, or valuing, or acting. Meanwhile all those

productive intentional functions of experiencing, because of which physical things

are simply there, go on anonymously. The experiencer knows nothing about them,

and likewise nothing about his creative thinking.29

Phenomenologists use the term natural attitude to refer to this unquestioning common

sense acceptance of our experience of the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that we

have to consciously find alternative ways of looking at the world to break out of the

natural attitude and become aware of the processes of perception. He wrote that this

type of philosophical reflection, ... slackens the intentional threads which attach us to

the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world

because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.30

This position makes everyday life ideal material for phenomenological study,

once we realise that the mundane world of things that we use and take for granted (e.g.

27

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007 28

The primary text on phenomenology was Edmund Husserls Logical Investigations (1901).

His student, Martin Heidegger developed the ideas in Being and Time (1927). Maurice Merleau-

Ponty studied the processes of perception in Phenomenolgy of Perception (1945). Although

having different approaches, all three stressed the primacy of the embodied individuals

encounter with the world. 29

Ibid. (14). 30

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (13).

13

bricks, utensils and table manners as listed by Perec)31

can also be a source of insight

into the condition of being and our experience of it. However, if these objects are

potentially so interesting, why do we tend not to notice this most of the time? One

possibility given by Georges Perec is that we are creatures of habit, performing the

same routine day after day, and as long as things go as we expect them to there is no

need for deeper reflection on those activities or the objects involved in them. He wrote,

we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if

it werent the bearer of any information.32

In an essay from 1931 Samuel Beckett wrote

that, Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, and

as a result of this, the creation of the world ... takes place every day".33

That is, we are

creating the world as we understand it based on all of our experiences, even those on

which we place little importance.

This leads to a consideration of what might be required to prompt us to move

from this habitual not noticing to a more aware and insightful approach to considering

the world and our perception of it. Husserl suggested that due to the centrality of

subjective apprehension of the world, the ideas being considered by phenomenology

could just as well be explored by art and literature.34

Victor Shklovsky, a Russian

Formalist35

wrote that one purpose of art was to defamiliarise the world by making

strange. He wrote in 1925, The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to

make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the

31

Op. cit. (210). 32

Ibid. (210). 33

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in

Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007 (16). 34

Ibid. (87-88). Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei writes that Husserl grants fiction ... a special

relevance for the philosopher. And further that Husserl was aware that the poetic-literary

writer not only competes with but may exceed the phenomenologist in regard to facilities of

description and imaginative variation, and so provides a resource for phenomenology. 35

Russian Formalism refers to a loose grouping of literary theorists active from around 1910 to

1930. Their writings were influential in the areas of semiotics and structuralism.

14

process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.36

So artists

and writers, as well as philosophers, can play an important role by presenting the world

in such a way that the viewer or reader has their perception altered and moves to more

awareness.

One element that is of interest to me in this field of study is the perception of

ordinary objects such as buildings and trees. Martin Heidegger referred to objects as

being either obtrusive or unobtrusive and used the term average everydayness37

to

describe how we experience the world in the state of unquestioning acceptance. Most of

the time we might sit at a table or write with a pen and consider them as no more than

an object with some use value, in that sense unobtrusive. However in the state of

obtrusiveness, the naked presence of the object as being, separate from its use value,

stimulates our awareness. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei gives an example from the novel

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke. The character

Malte is both fascinated and disturbed by some partly demolished houses that he

encounters in Paris. He is particularly drawn to explore the interiors by the way they

evoke the past lives of the people who once lived there. As Gosetti-Ferencei writes,

The houses in ruins, naturally, have lost their equipmental signification; their

existence, torn out of average everydayness, protrudes.38

36 Childs, Peter and Roger Fowler The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms Routledge, Oxon, 2006 (93). 37

Heidegger, Martin Being And Time, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008 (69). 38

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in

Modern Art and Literature Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2007 (30).

15

DRIVE & PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

All cities are geological: you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts

bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose

landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.39

In mid 1950s Paris the members of the Situationist International group began using two

words, psychogeography and drive, in relation to their practice of creative exploration

of the city. The leader and main theorist, Guy Debord, described psychogeography as,

the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,

whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.40

Drive (French for drift) was the name given to their technique for exploring certain

parts of the city on foot, either alone or in groups. Writing in 1958, Debord explained:

In a drive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations,

their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement

and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the

encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity

than one might think: from a drive point of view cities have

psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes

that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.41

39

Chtcheglov, Ivan. Formulary for a New Urbanism, (1953) in Ken Knabb (ed & trans),

Situationist International Anthology, Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public

Secrets, 2006 (1). 40

Debord, Guy. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, (1955) in Ken Knabb (ed &

trans), Situationist International Anthology, Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of

Public Secrets, 2006 (8). 41

Debord, Guy, Theory of the Drive, (1958) in Ken Knabb (ed & trans), Situationist

International Anthology Rev. and expanded edn., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006

(62).

16

Its worth noting that at this time Paris was undergoing urban modernisation that saw

some old districts being demolished and replaced by metro stations, freeways

constructed alongside the Seine, and public housing blocks that were often built in the

hard edged International Style42

favoured by the government of the day. The

Situationists disliked this architectural look, regarding it as the house style of modern

capitalism and state control; their preference was for the more chaotic and unplanned

older areas of the city that had evolved over centuries and that is where most drives

were undertaken. As Vincent Kaufmann writes, one reason for this practice was, the

desire to introduce poetry into a lived experience of the street, of the city.43

There are apparent similarities between a drive and how someone might

wander through a museum or gallery, leading to the notion that during a drive the

participants explore an area of the city as if it were a museum. Architect and exhibition

designer Calum Storrie considers this idea in his book The Delirious Museum44

, his

argument being that when approached in this manner cities have the potential to be

more interesting than museums. He writes, Most cities have evolved over a long period

of time and they have often done so with very little control. The museum, however, is

traditionally associated with order and classification.45

His view is that the logical

structure of most museums limits the range of possible interpretations of the contents,

whereas the city has a greater richness of possible meanings. For example, in a city such

as Sydney it is possible to view in close proximity to each other, elements of the urban

landscape that range from the 21st century back to the 18

th, rather like walking into an

art gallery and finding an abstract expressionist painting next to a Vermeer with no

42

The International Style was a modernist architectural style practiced by architects such as Le

Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with slogans such as form follows function. 43

Kaufmann, Vincent. The Poetics of the Drive, (2001) in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (95). 44

Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum : A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B.

Tauris, London, 2006. 45

Ibid. (2).

17

explanation. As Storrie writes, In some ways any city is a Delirious Museum: a place

overlaid with levels of history, a multiplicity of situations, events and objects open to

countless interpretations.46

Although the drive was described as a transitory experience, some of the

Situationists did produce visual art works as a result of their walks. Naked City

(1957), a collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, was produced by cutting

up a map of central Paris, eliminating certain areas, moving others about, and adding

arrows that represented subjective connections between these zones. Psychogeographic

Map of Venice (1957) by English artist and sole member of the Psychogeographic

Committee of London, Ralph Rumney, was a two page document of black and white

photographs and captions documenting a drive in Venice. As Calum Storrie describes

it, he treated it as a found place, a museum of spaces and accidental encounters. By

selecting sites and routes with particular resonances, Rumney became a nomadic curator

of the city.47

In his writings Debord stressed that the drive was a new technique, distinct

from earlier artistic walking practices such as the chance-determined walks of the

Surrealists or Baudelaires concept of the flneur. However in his book

Psychogeography, Mervin Coverley48

takes issue with this stance, writing that although

the drive has its distinctive elements it should be considered as part of a loose tradition

of creative urban exploration that both precedes and follows it:

But psychogeography has resisted its containment within a particular time and

place. In escaping the stifling orthodoxy of Debords situationist dogma, it has

46

Ibid. (2). 47

Storrie, Calum. The Delirious Museum : A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, I. B.

Tauris, London, 2006 (40). 48

Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography Pocket Essentials, Harpenden, Herts, 2006

18

found both a revival of interest today and retrospective validation in traditions that

predate Debords official conception by several centuries.49

He gives as examples the eighteenth century London novel Journal of the Plague Year

(1722) by Daniel Defoe; the urban wanderings documented in Thomas De Quinceys

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) and in the contemporary era, books and

films by Iain Sinclair such as London Orbital50

(2002). The latter is about a year spent

walking the edge of the M25 motorway that encircles London. Taking this broader view

of psychogeography, Coverley lists two key characteristics; first, the importance of the

act of walking, in which we move at human pace and have direct engagement with the

street, as opposed to the view through the window of a moving car; and second, in the

search for new ways of apprehending our urban environment.51

In a statement that ties

in with ideas about everyday life, phenomenology, and their potential for revealing

meaning, he writes, Psychogeography seeks to overcome the processes of

banalisation by which the everyday experience of our surroundings becomes one of

drab monotony,52

and further, that the various artists and writers involved in this

practice, all share a perception of the city as a site of mystery and seek to reveal the

true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.53

49

Ibid. (10). 50

London Orbital was released in hardcover in 2002. Iain Sinclair also collaborated with filmmaker Chris Petit to rework the material as a poetic essay style video work, also titled

London Orbital and released in 2002. 51

Ibid. (13). 52

Ibid. (13). 53

Ibid. (13).

19

Chapter Three:

Landmarks from Home

... no other medium of expression has cinemas original and innate capacity for

showing things that we believe worth showing, as they happen day by day in

what we might call their dailiness, their longest and truest duration.54

In late 2007 I began work on a project titled Landmarks from Home as part of my

MFA research. In this project I use Super 8 and Single 8 motion picture film to

document particular buildings and structures around Sydney that have a particular

resonance for me. Various clips from this documentation are linked together and then

inserted onto the blank section at the end of VHS tapes that I rent from video libraries.

The tapes are returned to the library to be available for future rental. This work is best

discussed in two parts; firstly, the rationale behind the selection of the sites and how I

document them, and secondly the manner in which Ive chosen to disseminate the work.

Ive lived in Sydney since the mid 1960s and have always felt a strong sense of

place. By this I mean that quite often I will encounter a building that has an unexpected

impact on me in terms of making me think about how the city works and how people

live. Sometimes these buildings will be in a district that also holds interest for me and I

will spend time exploring the area on foot, returning over the years. Occasionally when

I revisit an area I will find that one of the buildings has been demolished or altered and

no longer has the same resonance. In thinking about ways to preserve an image of these

buildings and also try and make sense of my response to them, I had the idea to make a

54

Zavattini, Cesare. Some Ideas on the Cinema quoted in Ivone Marguiles, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akermans Hyperrealist Everyday Duke University Press, Durham and

London, 1996 (37).

20

motion picture archive of them. An early working title for the project was Places I

would miss if they were to disappear.

Im not sure if I can define one specific quality that draws my attention to these

buildings, however there seem to be some common factors shared by the majority.

There is a sense of transience due to many of them no longer serving their original

purpose and not yet having been adapted for a new function. Others stand out due to

being rather ugly, strange looking, or somehow not in harmony with their surroundings.

I think most of them are obtrusive as described by Heidegger; there is something

about their appearance that makes them distinctive. In part, I see my video

documentation and re-presentation of these places as an alternative to the type of coffee

table books (on Sydney architecture, for example) that present spectacular images of

impressive buildings; these publications are designed to show Sydney at its best, as a

wealthy, cultured city where the citizens care about good design.55

Realistically, these

publications only represent the lives of a small proportion of people, while the plain,

utilitarian and even shabby structures are more representative of the lives of most of us.

Jeremy Millar wrote, ... architecture is societys values made concrete.56

I believe that

the city reveals much of itself in the places that were designed with no priority given to

their appearance but rather were constrained by tight budgets and construction

timetables.

I will attempt to describe one of the key buildings out of the more than twenty

places I have documented thus far in order to give some understanding of my selection

process.57

One of the first places I documented, in late 2007, was the wall of an old

55

For examples, see Robert Irving; John Kinstler; Max Dupain Fine Houses of Sydney Methuen,

Sydney, 1982 and Paul McGillick & Patrick Bingham-Hall, Sydney Architecture Pesaro

Publishing, Sydney, 2005 56

Millar, Jeremy and Dean, Tacita Place Thames & Hudson, London, 2005 (120). 57

Appendix A has still images of all the clips along with brief text descriptions. The DVD included with this thesis plays all of the clips as they will be shown during the MFA exhibition.

21

brewery building on Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, which had marked on it, the

shape of a two-storey terrace house that must have been attached to it at some time in

the past. I saw it as an accidental piece of public art, like an enormous photograph, a

physical impression that had lasted long after the event of its making, providing

evidence of what had been. I realised that what fascinated me about this shape was its

phenomenological obtrusiveness, representing the structure that had since lost its use

value. When looking at it, this inspired my reflective state, with thoughts of the

transience of things and human projects. I would think about the amount of human

energy that must have gone into that structure - initially someone had designed it,

council approval must have been sought and achieved, others built it and people bought

furniture and lived there. I made my recording of the site in late 2007 when the brewery

had ceased operation and the site was marked for high-density housing construction. By

mid 2008 the building had been demolished and all trace of the house was gone.

Although I generally work with still photography I decided to use motion picture

film clips for this project because the clips have a duration, giving a sense of witnessing

time passing that seems particularly relevant for recording the city. Paul Virilio wrote

that, the city is a film, one in a state of continuous metamorphosis, one in which not

only is everything animated but everything is also incessantly accelerated. Everything

passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling.58

I frame and shoot

somewhat akin to a still photo by having the camera fixed on a tripod and letting it run

for 60 seconds. My hope is that the viewers experience of watching the clip will be

similar to when I stand on the street and contemplate these buildings. The fixed-frame

moving image is a concept that has been explored by contemporary artists such as

Chantal Akerman and Tacita Dean. In her study of the films of Chantal Akerman, Ivone

58

Virilio, Paul. On Georges Perec (2001), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday,

Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008 (110).

22

Margulies writes that such extended takes of everyday subject matter, prioritise what is

often regarded as minor and banal, which in turn leads to a hyperreal vision of the

everyday.59

Similarly, the short films of Tacita Dean have been described as forming an

archive of an extended meditation60

on places that are stranded, outmoded, or

otherwise sidelined.61

VHS

VHS video interests me as a technology that I have seen rise and fall during my adult

lifetime. I remember when the first video library opened in my suburb in the early

1980s and the effect this had on our viewing habits. VHS was the start of the general

population programming their own entertainment, a trend that continues today with

DVD rentals and Internet footage. The VHS industry must have turned over billions of

dollars in its era. As of 2009 however it is a niche technology seemingly on its way to

extinction. Most rental libraries have gotten rid of the last of their tapes and as of mid

2009 I only know of three businesses that still rent VHS tapes in Sydney, although they

do seem to be committed to keeping them for as long as possible.62

The act of placing my footage where it is essentially hidden is an attempt to

explore suitable ways of presenting ideas related to the everyday, as suggested by Ben

Highmore:

But if what is deemed to be the appropriate form for attending to the everyday

(mainstream sociology, say, or novelistic description) has resulted in a lack of

59

Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996 (p. 4) 60

Foster, Hal. An Archival Impulse OCTOBER, 110, Fall 2004, (12) 61

Ibid. (14) 62

One of them, Videos Galore on George Street, next to Wynyard railway station went out of business late in 2009.

23

attention to certain aspects of the everyday, then the everyday might benefit from

the attention of purposefully inappropriate forms of representation.63

I have also thought that to insert the material into such an obscure place might be

representative of my anonymity - as just one person in the city of four million. These

are records of my private interests that might not be of any interest to others who have

their own memories and interests, just as our diaries and photo albums are possibly only

of interest to ourselves. This idea was explored by Tactita Dean in her photo book

Floh64

, (floh being the German for flea, in reference to the flea market) in which she

presented her collection of anonymous snapshots bought at German flea markets, which

she described as being a selection from an ocean of private memories65

It could also

be argued that my method is pointless because given its VHS form, it is unlikely to

ever be seen by anyone. However for myself, part of the interest is in not knowing what

has become of the material. I also relate to the thoughts expressed by John Baldessari

after his cremation of most of his early work in 1971. He said that he was asking the

question, where does art reside?66

and his conclusion was that the memory trace being

the key thing, art could exist perfectly well in a residual form in his mind, or as

photographic documentation.

Occasionally I will see an article in the media about a 19th

or early 20th century

shop that has been discovered, abandoned for decades and preserved as it had been left.

These discoveries are always of interest because they provide us with an image of how

people used to live. I think that in 2010 it would already be fascinating if we were to

discover a late 1980s video rental library frozen in time. It would function as an archive

63

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory : An Introduction, Routledge, London, 2002 (21). 64

Dean, Tacita. Floh Steidl, Gottingen, 2001. 65

Royoux, Jean-Christophe. Cosmograms of the Present Tense in Jean-Christophe Royoux et

al., Tacita Dean, Phaidon, London; New York, 2006 (95). 66

Kirby, Peter .John Baldessari: Some Stories, (video recording) Media Art Services, 1990.

24

of popular culture as well as evidence of how quickly things can change in capitalist and

industrialised societies. In some of Walter Benjamins writing, he considered this area,

in particular his notion of the role of a cultural researcher as being akin to a ragpicker.67

Ragpickers are those who scrape a living by searching through the discarded production

of society, looking for items of value. As Ben Highmore writes, Benjamin, will look to

the meagre materials of everyday life in his attempt to apprehend actuality68

The

concept is that there is hidden value in the discarded or overlooked, whether it be

merchandise or ideas, and that we can learn much about a society through examining

what it has discarded. The throw outs of the immediate past are predictions of the

future, soon DVDs and CDs will join VHS on the scrap heap, and in a few years it will

be iPhones or some other desired consumer product of today.

One structural element that fascinates me about VHS technology (and which in

fact makes this part of the project possible) is that the tapes are quite easy to copy onto.

This seems strange and almost naively old-fashioned in the digital era of passwords and

copy protection. The tape shells have a plastic tab that allows the video recorder to write

information onto them. On all commercial tapes this tab is broken off to prevent

accidental erasure, however it is easy to put a piece of masking tape where the tab was

and the tape can then be recorded onto again. Another factor that engages me about

these tapes is their containment of internal space that represents time. The blank VHS

tapes that were used for movie rentals came in lengths of 15-minute increments, for

example, 90 minutes, 105 minutes, 120 minutes. This meant that when movies were

dubbed there was invariably some unused tape at the end. It also interests me that this

space is essentially private property, part of the asset, but of no particular worth and not

67

Highmore, Ben Everyday Life and Cultural Theory : An Introduction, Routledge, London, 2002 (21). 68

Ibid. (63).

25

something with which the owners would ever intend to do anything, it simply sits there

unused. Furthermore, when I add my material to it, it doesnt damage it in any way or

have any effect on the original footage, and if some owner did find my material and

object to it, it would be quite easy to tape over and return that part of the tape to its

prior state.69

DTOURNEMENT

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Situationists devised a practice called

dtournement, a word that does not translate directly into English but has several

meanings along the lines of hijack and detour. Guy Debord described it as a sort of

cross media collage, The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing

together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces

a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.70

The principle was

to combine separate works to make a new work with new meanings. This was not as a

direct, rational response to the original as this would just continue the dialogue, but in a

way that transformed the original. The best known examples are works by the Dutch

Situationist member Asger Jorn that he called modifications. Between 1959 and 1962

he would purchase paintings from flea markets - mostly kitsch works by anonymous

artists. He would then paint on top of them, leaving some of the original still showing

and exhibit the work under his own name.

69

Appendix B is an index of the titles of all the VHS rental tapes onto which footage was

inserted. I would generally rent a couple of tapes per week, watch them and then add my

footage. There was usually room for around five minutes of film to be appended. 70

Debord, Guy. A Users Guide to Dtournement, (1956) in Ken Knabb (ed), Situationist International Anthology Rev. and expanded edn., Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, CA, 2006

(15).

26

In a work titled T3-AEON (2000), Israeli born USA based artist Omer Fast rented

VHS tapes of The Terminator (1984) from New York video libraries. He then over-

dubbed his own audio onto four sections of the soundtrack. The sections onto which he

added his material were the most violent scenes, replacing the original dialogue, music

and sound effects with his own recordings of people describing childhood exposure to

violence. In one instance, when Arnold Schwarzenneger as the Terminator was shooting

someone, a mans voice recounts being hit by his father, He slapped me. And then he

slapped me again and again. As Jennifer Allen writes he was ...transforming the

blockbuster film into a public archive for private memories...71

The viewers enjoyment

of manufactured Hollywood violence would be disrupted by an intrusive reminder of

the reality of everyday violence.

Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell met in 1951 when they were students at the

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and became lovers then collaborators on

theatre writing projects. In the mid 1960s Orton was a successful playwright with works

such as Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot that were savage attacks on what he saw as the

priggishness and hypocrisy of English authority and genteel middle class morality.

Before this success, between 1959 and 1961 they were living in the London suburb of

Islington and were disgusted by what they saw as the poor choice of books at the local

library. In 1967 Orton wrote Libraries might as well not exist; theyve got endless

shelves for rubbish and hardly any space for good books.72

They expressed their

disgust by altering book covers with the addition of offensive collages. They would

smuggle the books out of the library, alter them at home with images removed from

library art books and then covertly return the books to the shelf to be discovered by

unsuspecting readers. Eventually they were arrested and both sentenced to six months

71

Allen, Jennifer. Openings : Omer Fast Artforum 42.1, 2003, (216-217). 72

Lahr, John. Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton Allen Lane, London 1979 (97).

27

prison in 1962 for theft and malicious damage to more than 70 books. Ironically, as a

result of Ortons later fame, the altered books are now valuable and kept in a special

archive by the Islington Local History Centre where they are viewable by appointment.

There are similarities and differences between these projects and mine. All entail

some element of adding new material to work produced by others. However the works

by Jorn, Fast, and Halliwell and Orton are destructive to some extent, where the

additional material functions as an attack on the ideas represented by the original works.

I dont regard my insertion of VHS footage as destructive and it is not motivated by

anger. I see it partly as a neutral act that attempts to explore a form of presentation in

regard to particular media characteristics. There is also a message in a bottle aspect to

this; I dont know if anyone will ever see my added material and it would have to be

somewhat unlikely when the low amount of VHS rentals is considered as well as the

position of the material on each tape. However if someone did rent one of the tapes and

watched it past the end credits (perhaps dozing off in their armchair) it would be a

strange experience when footage of buildings around Sydney appeared with no

explanation.

Dubbing my footage onto VHS tapes is one of the ways Ive explored in order to

disperse the images, outside the context of a gallery. The original footage exists as a

distinct work and for the MFA exhibition will be shown in the gallery as a DVD loop

playing on a TV screen. It will be displayed on an older style analogue television to suit

the personal and domestic nature of my project. Large scale video projection did not

seem appropriate. By the selection of particular building structures and the creation of a

moving-image archive of them, I have made a record of my psychogeographic response

to Sydney. When I watch it I see a city of obscure buildings and structures that have a

feeling of transience and lack of care. I felt that my intentions were summed up in a

28

quote by the artist Allan McCollum referring to the text Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art

of the Everyday by Allen Ruppersberg, ... a love letter to the ephemeral and to

memory, a valourisation of the things that are destined to disappear.73

73

Johnstone, Stephen. Recent Art and the Everyday (2008), in Stephen Johnstone (ed.) The Everyday, Whitechapel Ventures, London & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2008 (18).

29

Chapter Four:

The Collection Of A Gentleman

The Collection of a Gentleman is comprised of 44 drawn portraits of myself that I paid

to have done by street portrait artists across six countries. I started work on this project

in July 2007 as part of my MFA research and the drawings had all been made by August

2008. My primary intention was to explore the process of perception whereby our

senses continuously and seamlessly present the world as image. I didnt expect to learn

about perception in a scientific sense, rather I wanted to place myself in the state that

Maurice Merleau-Ponty called philosophical reflection that, ... slackens the intentional

threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.74

During the

course of a sitting the artist would closely observe me for around 40 minutes. They

would perceive me as a mental image which they would depict on a sheet of paper. By

gathering dozens of examples and presenting them together I hope to draw the attention

of others to this generally overlooked but quite extraordinary process whereby our

senses continuously present the world to us. As a secondary element I was also

interested to discover how the generic style of realistic portraiture is globally dispersed.

Perhaps a key reason for our fascination with realistic portraiture is the way in

which such a portrait can be seen as both a work of art and as a stand-in for the person

depicted. Unlike other genres of art such as landscape or still life, when we look at a

portrait our mind readily flips between the apprehension of it as art and our emotional

response as if we were facing a living person. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:

I say: This is a portrait of Peter, or more briefly: This is Peter. There the

picture is no longer an object but operates as material for an image ... Everything I

74

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2004 (13).

30

perceive enters into a projective synthesis which aims at the true Peter, a living

being who is not present.75

Richard Brilliant suggests that there is something in the mimetic quality of a portrait

that stimulates our perceptual cognition in the same way as does a living face.76

Also,

although we might tend to think of the living face as being real and the drawing as a

clever illusion, it is worth considering just how contingent is our direct apprehension of

a living face when on a phenomenological level we are already experiencing each other

as internally produced images. In 3rd

century Greece, Porphry related the refusal of the

philosopher Plotinus to have his portrait made:

He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter or sculptor, and

when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked

him, Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?

Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desirable spectacle to

posterity, an image of an image?77

In 1990 Jacques Derrida curated an exhibition at the Louvre titled Memoirs of the

Blind in which he explored his theory of the blindness of the artist. The opening

image in the show was a painting by Joseph-Benoit Suve titled Butades, or the Origin

of Drawing (1791). It depicted Pliny the Elders classical Roman tale which told of the

birth of drawing. A young woman, the daughter of the potter Butades, when faced with

separation from her lover who was going abroad, drew his outline on the wall by tracing

his shadow cast by an oil lamp. As Derrida explains, In this tradition, the origin of

drawing and the origin of painting give rise to multiple representations that substitute

75

Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture, Reaktion Books, London, 2008 (24). 76

Ibid. (24). 77

Ibid. (16).

31

memory for perception.78

Butades cannot draw her lovers outline and see him at the

same time. The same applies to all life drawing, the artist looks at the model but must

then move their eye to the paper to draw; due to this even slight delay the mark depends

on memory, From the outset, perception belongs to recollection.79

John Baldessaris

1971 work Police Drawing explored this role of memory in drawing. At the beginning

of a community college art class taught by a friend, when only the students were

present, Baldessari entered the room and stood for a while so the students had a good

look at him, then left. The teacher then came to the room with a police identity sketch

artist who made a drawing of Baldessari based on the descriptions of the students.

Baldessari described this work as being about the gap between seeing and making the

mark, in this case due to the translation of verbal information into visual information.80

My intention when I gathered the multiple portraits of the same subject was (as I

hoped) to prompt viewers to think in broad terms about portraiture as representative of

perception, rather than to just see it as a portrait exhibition. Richard Brilliant wrote of

the potential for multiple portraits to be about more than just appearance:

...an experience comparable, in its way, to reading several biographies of a

famous person. However, such an abundant repertoire of images may also present

the viewer with a confusing range of options, destabilising the characterisation of

the person portrayed and obscuring the mental image of the subject ...81

Contemporary artist Francis Als has explored the potential of multiple images in his

project Fabiola. Since 1995 he has been collecting paintings of the Catholic saint

Fabiola (currently he owns more than 270). They are mostly sourced from flea markets

78

Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and other Ruins University of

Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993 (49). 79

Ibid. (51). 80

Bashkoff, Tracey. Not Just People Falling Off Horses in Baldessari, John, et al. John

Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange) Guggenheim

Museum Publications, New York, 2004 (22). 81 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, Reaktion Books, London, 2008 (132).

32

around the world and are generally not expensive as they are not of great artistic merit.

The interesting thing about them is that they all appear to be copies of each other, in fact

derivations from one source image by the French artist Jean-Jacques Henner that was

originally exhibited in 1885; although it is doubtful that many of the artists know that,

as they work from the copy most available to them. As David Morgan writes, Yet one

senses that there is a referent, albeit elusive, never fully present in any single image, but

there nonetheless.82

That is, the multiplicity of variations draws our attention to the

image of the absent original. We see the same face through the veil of each images

peculiarities. What we see is a juxtaposition of a consistently observed pictorial

formula, virtually an eidetic schema, a mnemonic device branded on the surface of the

neocortex.83

At one stage while working on this research and thinking about everyday life

and archives, I wondered what a Museum of the Everyday might look like, and in

particular the section devoted to art. I could envisage there being examples of black

velvet paintings, some big-eyed Keane kids from the 1970s, amateur paintings gathered

from thrift stores, and works by street portraitists. All of which have in common the

element of being somewhat informed by fine art, both traditional and contemporary,

although rarely receiving any critical attention, being produced for immediate

appreciation by the everyday person and/or consumption away from fine art galleries. It

is a genre of creative output that is widespread and globally popular. However, it exists

below the level of regular critical attention. Of course the fact that this type of

production is ubiquitous and popular does not necessarily make it good, but I think it

can make it interesting.

82

Morgan, David. Finding Fabiola in Francis Als, Fabiola: An Investigation Dia Art

Foundation, New York, 2008 (19). 83

Ibid. (19).

33

Occasionally popular art does cross over into the fine art world, exhibitions of outsider

art and graffiti art being perhaps the most common. One example is the exhibition

Thrift Store Paintings first exhibited at Metro Pictures gallery, New York in 1991. The

paintings, hundreds of amateur works by anonymous, untrained artists, belong to

contemporary artist Jim Shaw who has, for more than a decade bought them cheaply

from USA thrift stores. When seen in a junk store most people would probably consider

them to be worthless rubbish, however gathering them together in the context of a

contemporary art gallery caused them to be seen differently. When the collection was

presented at the ICA in London in late 2000, reviewers did note the lack of skill and

talent evident in most works, but also saw significance in the evidence of the dispersal

of high culture into the everyday. Julian Stallabrass noted attempts to emulate

expressionist, abstract and surrealist works84

, while Neal Brown referred to the

particular energy of amateur practice85

and Ralph Rugoff wrote that the mind-

boggling range of formal solutions and unusual content in the work provoked many

visitors to drastically reassess their evaluation of fine art, much of which by comparison

seemed constrained and dull.86

Part of my interest in street portraiture is due to its stylistic origin in traditional

fine art portraiture, which Shearer West has identified as being initially a genre specific

to Western Europe.87

Defining portraiture as a recognisable depiction of an individual,

she locates its origins in Renaissance Italy in the form of large-scale, full-length

portraits of prominent persons such as aristocrats and religious leaders.88

Through the

84

Stallabrass, Julian. Collector's Pieces [Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Paintings, ICA], New

Statesman, 16 October 2000, (42-3). 85

Brown, Neal. 'A Noble Art / Jim Shaw', Frieze 57 March, 2001, (104-05). 86

Rugoff, Ralph. 'Rules of the Game', Frieze, 44, Jan-Feb 1999, (46-9). 87

West, Shearer. Portraiture, Oxford History of Art; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004 88

Ibid. (39).

34

17th

and 18th

centuries portraiture continued to develop in countries such as England,

France and the Netherlands while being influenced by social changes such as the rise of

the middle class, and the spread of printed books. The popularity of biographies and

memoirs helped to develop more complex notions of personal identity. The growing

middle class provided a market for portrait artists, although their budgets and sense of

social place required a more modest depiction than the portraits of rulers. The portraits

were smaller and the pose was typically head and shoulders rather than full length - very

much the look that is still popular today.

One element that interests me is how this originally Western style has attained

worldwide popularity and acceptance as evidenced in the availability of street portraits.

During my project I have had portraits drawn in Sydney, Los Angeles, Mexico City,

Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. As part of my research I also have

specific information as to where I could find similar portrait artists in Manila, Jakarta,

Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Bogota, not to

mention the well-known sites in London, Paris and other major cities of Western

Europe. Although Im content that my 44 portraits are enough to represent this

phenomenon, if I had the budget and the time I would like to continue this pursuit in as

many parts of the world as possible. I would present the collected results in a book that

would act as an archive that presented the global dispersal of this style. Because they

would all be representations of the one person, they would also act as a means of

comparison between stylistic similarities and differences.

The drawings I have collected range in size from A4 (210x297 mm) to A2

(420x600 mm) with about sixty percent in black and white and the rest in colour, with

the media varying between pencil, charcoal and crayon. The lowest price paid was two

dollars in Hanoi and the highest was one hundred dollars in Mexico City, the average

35

being around fifteen dollars. The time taken to draw a portrait is pretty standard,

varying between 30 to 40 minutes. Based on conversation, I would estimate that half the

artists had received formal art school training while the rest were self-taught. In Sydney

most of the artists work in Paddys Markets on weekends. There are generally two or

three artists in different parts of the building at any time. The ones I spoke to were from

mainland China and all of them said they were graduates of the Chinese art school

system. One man told me that for every 400 applicants only one is accepted to art

school where the students attend class six days a week for four years, mostly being

tutored in a style of straight realism. On graduation they can expect to take a job as an

artist in some semi-official capacity, making portraits of local dignitaries to be

displayed in town halls and the like, for which they would earn about one hundred

dollars Australian per month. I found other graduates of Chinese art schools drawing

portraits in Kuala Lumpur and have also been told they are present in New York City.

Out of all the artists I observed, I found their work to be the most technically competent.

In Los Angeles my portrait was drawn by a man who had trained as an illustrator

and had worked for Warner Brothers before being laid off. In Mexico City about half of

the artists were art school graduates. The rest were either self-taught, or I wasnt able to

talk to them due to language difficulties. I would estimate that about one third of the

portraits were made with the artist and myself communicating with basic sign language

and perhaps writing a number for the price. In Kuala Lumpur, at a busy night street

market called Bintang Walk, there were a couple of tables set up with three Chinese

portrait artists working each night. Two of them only did black and white and the other

specialised in colour. They spoke no English and were being managed by a Malay

woman. When I asked her how she communicated with them, she laughed and said that

36

she couldnt speak Mandarin and they spoke no Malay, but somehow they got things

done. Its the duck talking to the chicken she told me.

Wherever I went the portrait artists were typically to be found in parks, markets

and other locations where tourists and families congregate, mostly on weekends and

evenings. Generally it is not only artists who are found there but also a range of vendors

of food, drinks and novelties. In Los Angeles, around Santa Monica and Venice Beach

there are buskers and Chinese artists carving portraits in grains of rice. In Kuala Lumpur

at Bintang Walk there are vendors displaying battery-operated toys on the footpath,

while in Hanoi the street artists were in the night market area among stalls displaying

clothes, food and mobile phone covers. Most of these places are family friendly and a

way for parents and kids to have a day or evening out with free entertainment in the

theatre of the street. The portrait artists and their subjects play a role in this, as generally

any instance of a portrait being drawn will attract a crowd of spectators. The audience

are fascinated to observe the skill of the artist as they build up the image of the person

in front of them. Its quite common for people to stand and watch for most of the

process, their eyes constantly moving between the sheet of paper and the subject. The

one person who cant see the image forming is the person who is being drawn. I also

found it quite common for members of the audience to give me approving nods and

smiles to confirm that it was going well. I recall in Paddys Markets in late 2007 a

woman met my eye, smiled while giving the thumbs up and said Its you.

In her work Layers Korean artist Nikki S. Lee used drawings made by street

portrait artists to explore ideas of identity. Beginning in 2007 she had her portrait drawn

in Bangkok, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Prague and Istanbul. In each location she had three

artists draw her portrait on the translucent paper she provided. Back in her New York

studio she layered the three portraits from each city on a light box and took a

37

photograph of them with elements of each either showing through or being obscured by

the others. The work was first exhibited in 2008 as a series of large photographic prints

of each of these layerings. She said that the work was concerned with notions of identity

and how she found herself behaving differently depending on what country she was in

or with whom she was mixing:

I am interested in identity as it is affected or changed through social contexts,

cultural categories or personal relationships. This interest began through personal

experience. I realized that I changed between my surroundings in New York and

Seoul, depending on whether I was with my family or friends. So before I was

thinking about 'who I am' I first started thinking about 'where I am'.89

When I look at my collection of portraits I can see there is potential to interpret it as

being about identity, and I think that is an interesting interpretation, although it was

never my main interest. I never even thought it was essential that the portraits be of me.

I would see it as being the same if, for example, I was able to collaborate with a person

who travelled a lot and was prepared to sit for portraits wherever they went. In terms of

identity I could see the collection as referring to a diffused and anonymous identity: the

difference between the idea of a concrete, clearly defined and separate identity versus a

more fluid and diffuse notion of being - hard to grasp or categorise.

Although my project has obvious similarities with Nikki S. Lees Layers, I

believe there is an important difference. She controlled how the drawings were made

and then significantly transformed them into a finished work. My method is what

Michael Sheringham referred to as a project90

more concerned with the ideas being

explored rather than a polished outcome. The artists drew me just as they depict every

89

Jenkins ,Sikkema, & Co., Nikki S. Lee Press Release, retrieved 3 June 2009,

90

As discussed in The Everyday section of Chapter Two in this thesis.

38

other sitter and the drawings will be presented unaltered, together on the gallery wall. I

would expect many viewers to be confused by this and to wonder just what my artistic

contribution was. Displaying them in a collective order just as a museum display might

be presented is intended to suggest that there is a narrative to be discovered, although

unexplained.

In May 2009 I showed the collection of portraits in a gallery space inside the

Sydney Antique Centre, which is a large two level building shared by dozens of antique

dealers. Walking through the centre a visitor sees multiple collections of furniture, art,

jewellery, sports memorabilia; a grouping of diverse objects brought together because

they are all for sale. I chose to exhibit the work here because I wanted to emphasise the

collective nature of the portraits and thought this might come though in an environment

that had something of the ambience of a museum. The gallery space consisted of two

long rooms and I arranged the 44 drawings in one row along four of the walls, in the

order in which they were made. For the MFA exhibition I will show the drawings

grouped together on one wall with dimensions 4 by 3 meters. My intention is that it be

seen as one work, comprised of multiple elements.

39

Chapter Five:

D.F. Nature Walk

When I stayed in Mexico City91

for five weeks in early 2008 working on the street

portrait project, I spent most of my spare time in the Hipodromo Condesa area. This

district was first developed for housing in the 1930s. Previously it had been vacant land,

part was the estate of a Countess, (Condesa) and part was a defunct horseracing track,

(Hipodromo). The developers incorporated the shape of the racetrack into the street plan

by turning it into a main loop road named Avenida Amsterdam. The architectural style

is predominantly art deco and it was once a popular area in which wealthy families lived

until the earthquake of 1985 when they started to move to the newer suburbs outside the

city. A lack of demand lead to cheaper housing and artists and other creative types

started to move in; today its a quiet district comprising parks, cafes and bookshops.

Running along the centre of Avenida Amsterdam is a tree-lined pedestrian

pathway. The first time I walked along this path I noticed that each tree had a prominent

identifying number painted on it. The numbers were mostly executed in white, some in

red. They were approximately eight inches in height and generally quite sloppily

applied, as if with a house painting brush. The only reason I could think of for

numbering each tree in this way was some official attempt to catalogue and keep track

of them. Although this might be understandable from a bureaucratic point of view the

visual impact of the numbers was enough to spoil the illusion of a walk in nature that

was presumably the original intention. In fact, it was more like walking through a giant

inventory and this interested me as an example of an institutional ordering system that

was on public display. It made me aware that the trees belonged to the city and were

91

The citys official name is Distrito Federal, commonly shortened to D.F.

40

regarded as accountable assets. No doubt this is the same in most parts of the world but

I had never really thought about it. By putting the numbers on the trees it was as if the

city was, in terms of this area, making strange and jolting me from my natural

attitude.

I was also struck by the fact that trees that were being ordered, seeing a

connection to Eugenio Donatos claim that modern institutional ordering systems

originally developed from the structures of eighteenth-century botanical taxonomy:

the Enlightenment could then originate the idea of giving an ordered

representation of Nature in various botanical gardens. It is in this idea of an

ordered spectacle of Nature, supplemented by an ordered language that would

describe the spectacle, that the idea of the Museum was born.92

It could also be seen as an example of what has been called the mathematisation of

nature, a way of thinking about the natural world that originated with Enlightenment

thinkers such as Ren Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton. Nature was divided into primary

and secondary characteristics, with the primary being anything that could be objectively

measured and the secondary being those qualities such as colour and texture that could

not be easily quantified. In terms of modern science the secondary qualities were

ignored or overlooked in favour of the primary, giving the sense that nature was

something that could be measured and understood.

The next day I walked the length of the avenue, which being an oval has its start

and finish at the same place. I discovered that the main numbering system in white paint

started at 1 and ended at 1,058; however there was also a different numbering order in

red paint that was sometimes applied to trees that were also numbered white, with no

92

Donato, Eugenio. The Museums Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pcuchet in Josu V. Harai (ed.) Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist

Criticism Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1979 (227).

41

obvious relation between them. My assumption was that the red numbers were part of

an older system that had been superseded by the white, although I had no way of

confirming this and was content for it to remain a mystery. (In fact I never attempted to

find out who was responsible for the numbers, believing it safe to assume it was the

work of the local parks department.) Rather than photographing the trees and using the

photograph as a document, someone had merged the original object with its

documentation. This struck me as an extreme example of the structures we use to

organise our knowledge of the world - it was an attempt to impose order on chaos, with

the logic of numbers being applied directly onto unruly nature. It is common in museum

collecting practices to remove the object from its original location, however in this case

it was as if the ordering system had been brought to the site of the objects and made part

of them. I felt that it represented what Matthias Winzen calls, the paradox of protective

destruction inherent in collecting, the damaging or diminishing of the object intended to

be collected comes from its being torn out of its previous context, its everyday use.93

I

decided to photographically document each of the numbered trees, thinking that perhaps

they could be presented in some way to illustrate the detached, objective approach to

understanding the world. Most urban d