Spiros Panigirakis

Gertrude Contemporary Art Space’s walled-up front window feels like a rebuff to my bad habit. When the traffic is quiet I sometimes idle my engine, forget the road and superficially consume the front space like a teenager cruising down Chapel Street on a Saturday night. I admit my drive-by window-shopping is not qualitatively dissimilar to browsing on Contemporary Art Daily or flicking through the ads of some art magazine. For me these experiences sit somewhere between a wall, an absence of an actual engagement with spatial practices and an image. The wall both intervenes in our experience of space and also offers a graphic ground to modes of photographic documentation that today dominate our consumption of art. When encountering photographic documentation of art that exposes seductive expanses of wall and little else, it is easy to treat this remediation as a mere reduction of experience, discounting the potential complexity that can be elucidated from the remapping of space. On the other hand some spatial experiences of the gallery are too often reminiscent to that of a furniture show room, with or without the coloured feature walls. In light of historical precedence that resist an easy frontal relation to a gallery’s wall such as Marcel Duchamp’s First Papers of Surrealism (1942) or exhibition design that carries with it an ideological experiment such as one instigated by Jean-François Lyotard in Les Immatériaux (1985) at the Pompidou––I have begun to think about a number of discrete Melbourne practices (Fiona Macdonald, Bianca Hester, Pat Foster & Jen Berean and Fiona Abicare) that self-consciously utilise the wall as a boundary for experience and the production of meaning.

The walls of a gallery do more than sustain the architectural forces of the building. Walls also create a more complicated relational system than one framed by an oppositional power dynamic. It would be simplistic to explore a dynamic that pits the so-called ‘institutional’ against the so-called ‘independent’. This dynamic might figure the artist resisting the reduction of the authoritative wall that is driven by a curatorial rationale––perhaps newly painted and coloured, this wall offers a novel configuration of rooms but also corrals an artist’s freedom. The artist on the other hand builds their own support structure, controlling and facilitating the movement of the audience through the exhibition, they offer an alternative framing device to the white wall paradigm.

An analysis that resists a binary logic is in order; one such an analysis would locate a gallery’s wall within a complex field of power and representation. We might imagine a wall as an agent within a dynamic. First a wall is a material and spatial force that demarcates, blocks, organises, encloses and supports relations that encompass the social, the experiential, the ideological and so forth. The wall also offers a graphic ground to modes of documentation that facilitate our consumption of art practice. The wall in this instance becomes a frame for representation and further mediation, creating the potential for ocular-driven reduction as well as further production that is generative of new meaning. And finally, a wall within an art context is understood (like any wall) from prior experience, history or knowledge. A wall is a space for projection not via its intersection with an artwork but also due to its very own identity. A wall connotes other walls and even the idea of ‘wall-ness’ itself.[1]

In New12 the curator, Jeff Khan, made an interesting decision regarding ACCA’s main exhibition hall. He left the space unencumbered by any additional walls and partitions and in doing so made his own practice more refreshingly explicit, especially from the dominant vantage point of the foyer. He resisted a recent historical precedent to reconfigure the design of the space anew with every exhibition. One consequence of this decision was that it allowed the four artists’ projects to relate to one another within the singular phrasing of the hall. The artworks’ austere and polite proportions did not dictate any particular passage for an audience through the hall. However their respective artworks could not help but intermingle. This curatorial strategy probably means that the artists will be unable to photograph their projects as singular works––a trope that is essential to perpetuating the image of artistic autonomy. However, it allowed a more differentiated conversation to emerge outside of the individual social context explored by each work.

In Still Gratuitous (2011) at Light Projects, Fiona Macdonald built on existing ideological structures that constitute her practice and field within an exhibition that took on a curatorial framework. In this work, Macdonald built partitions to demarcate the different activities curated within the exhibition program. These provisional and somewhat roughly hewn structures appropriated modes of exhibition design as a type of production that was made manifest during the show. This construction process could partly be seen as a critique of overcrowded corrals built for group exhibitions. More importantly, the walls reflect the divisions that split, separate and conceal social practices within an autonomous art field. This dynamic was complicated further by Macdonald’s decision to allow the audience entry, not through the usual front door, but through the side door belonging to the adjoining psychoanalyst’s consultation-room.  A platform that performatively addressing the street front of the gallery was built for invited writers to work on. During the exhibition walls were built around the writers, awkwardly separating them from displayed outcomes in other parts of this small gallery. The writers thus became engaged with the political space of the subject and its difference. This walled separation questioned the relationship between the space of the street and the social practices within the gallery. It created a complicated community framework that required the audience to engage with the density and difference explored in the writer’s work and not through politically expedient images illustrating difference. In one of the final stages of the exhibition an all-male feedback session was convened in a backroom, whilst a sassy drag queen prepared cool summer cocktails out on a platformed front space. This scenario was marked off from another floor space scattered with the texts by post-colonial, feminist and psychoanalytic theory of Gayatari Spivak, Juliet Mitchell and Luce Irigaray. The separation between these discursive forces challenged the audience to synthesise the complex work––as fraught or aspirational as that might seem.

While Macdonald uses the wall within a logic established by existing museological contexts, other artists are building walls within sculptural practices that have a critical relation to the field of design. Both Bianca Hester and Jen Berean & Pat Foster have used the besser brick to stage a jail-yard production, only played in and out in two distinct performative registers. By making the brick a central actor, Hester and Berean & Foster appropriate embedded conventions of power that connote an everyday context. Perhaps these works replace one institutional code for another­­––a space of modernist display displaces designed spaces of regulation––municipal sports yards and disciplinary and education precincts.

In A Monument to Progress (2010) Berean & Foster create a series of blockages that speak of the difficulty of relating to another human subject. At times it seems impossible to engage with both the spatial experience of their sculpture and public space. The precariously placed panes of glass, the drop sheets, municipal crowd control barriers and the buckets of Jim Bean consumed last night suggest that communal interaction will be fraught to say the least. In The Doing and the Undoing of it All  (2009) windows cease being vantage points to fairer worlds, becoming walls of transparency but also bureaucratic mechanisms for surveillance. A graphic line of masking tape on each windowpane flattens the spatial intervention and any affirmative bodily participation. This flattening is echoed in Double Negatives (2011) at the CCP as images of inebriated figures are made into patterns, utilitarian surfaces are disrupted and blankness is austerely framed­––resisting community at the same time as it incisively adopts its architectural conventions.

Hester, on the other hand, regulates community engagement within the actual spaces of her projects. In Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning (2010) at ACCA, Hester produced a highly orchestrated presentation of sociability and materiality, perpetually in states of animation and at the same time reflexive of its translation into the stasis of the photographic image. The technology used to document the work becomes another actor amongst the staged flux of bodies, castings and construction. The wall sits somewhere across this scene. It is like a constraint that enables the expansion of vernacular actions. The limit of the image is continually challenged. An image made for one project will invariably find its way into another more spatial framework: as part of a pixelated blur of the video still; a tangle of decisions that are made into a diagram; and the rampant sequence of images across the ACCA catalogue. The intersection of the wall and an image is no more important than in a current series of performances where Hester holds a cast meteorite aloft against a series of walls across Melbourne and Glasgow. The span of geological and astronomical time between meteorite and the processed rock-turned-brick is almost unfathomable, but here Hester butts up against the wall like a sculpted relief and gets a snap taken. The wall is a boundary that makes (and grounds) almost everything, transforming a sit-in, collecting sticks, kicking a ball, riding a bike and growing weeds into a something.

While the exhibition design in ACCA’s New12 used a barely there approach, New 11 was busy with intersecting passageways and narratives driven on the most part, by the spatial conditions instigated by the artists. Fiona Abicare’s screen for Act None (2011) asserted itself against the scale of the building but also as type of conceptual intersection for a number of neighbouring works. Her bespoke tiled screen (a collaboration with Minifie van Schaik Architects) reminded us of how omnipresent the veil of fashion can be. Abicare’s walls act out a force even when composed of a fine georgette curtain as evidenced in COVERS (2008), an installation hosted by Heide Musuem of Art. Abicare’s practice, while impeccably styled is not a diffusion of high fashion for an art context. Nor is it an illustration of how that cerulean in a couture gown can somehow trickle down to the lumpy sweater found in a clearance bin and then onto the palette used for a painting.[2] Abicare’s method is however analogous to how fashion creates a bodily-awareness of the temporal and at the same time re-mediates the condition of time in an ideal image. The object of clothing is constantly translated across different material conditions. The most basic of these is possibly the sensorial experience of wearing a piece of clothing––of trying it on, taking it off and moving. The market mediates this most basic human function by proliferating an ideal via the image, sending out dictums declaring that last season’s product is now in some ways obsolete due only to the passage of time. However, this is not some formal and material reduction of fashion’s concerns as it too encompasses a critical perspective on the social. An audience’s passage around Abicare’s screens, walls and movable partitions implicates us in our parallel passage of a world that does not escape this image culture. Like the backdrops in a photo studio, a catwalk, a showroom or even a dressing room, our physical and psychological experience of the mise-en-scène is bound up in a projection of ourselves as ideal or as compared to an ideal.

The critique of the white cube is well-trodden territory.[3] The walled spatial conditions enacted by Abicare, Hester et al. are not concerned with a futile struggle with art’s authority. Their walls create relations with bodies and discursive fields, embedding an understanding of power that consists of multiple and intersecting institutional bodies. Walls that are a constituent element of any built structure do not need to be white, rectilinear or even materially existent to assert the ideological framework of the institution at-large.[4] However regardless of the varied post-1960’s artistic and theoretical precedents that sought to evade the ‘white cube’ and rendered it a figure of speech––the white cube remains a pervasive architectural default of gallery design. This is no more evident than in Denton Corker Marshall’s impending creation of a very literal white cube for Australia’s pavilion in Venice. In some ways, this is perpetuation of a tired status-quo that is slavish to its devotion of what contemporary art is meant to look like in a magazine reproduction, rather than what might be an engaging spatial context. I guess that leaves the more interesting spatial relations to the artists and curators to build, on or off a wall.

Spiros Panigirakis is an artist and lecturer in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. He has worked closely with four of the six practitioners mentioned in this text.