drawings
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Review: Handbags by Beth Maslen, at Conners Conners Gallery, Jan-Feb 2025.
Precarity and gravity are the first words that come to mind looking at Beth Maslen’s new work Handbags at Conner Conners in Fitzroy. Behind two long, curved sculptures constructed in foam, plaster, cardboard and wood veneer, appear four photographs showing an image copied four times and installed along the wall. The far-left photograph is hung in full view and the others are partly or entirely concealed behind two sheets of paper pinned at their top corners and today, flapping feverishly back and forward in the wind. Propelled by a reimagining of mundanity and object-hood, Maslen draws from Gertrude Stein’s 1914 Tender Buttons to consider form and tenderness in the banal.
The passage accompanying the show comes from Stein’s first chapter on Objects, discussing “A Substance in a Cushion”. Experimenting with language and nonsensicalness, the writing engages with precision, specificity and abstraction to reinvigorate the possibilities of ornamentation, utility and colour. Maslen’s process follows a similar logic and indeed, this is not the first instance of the artist reconfiguring everyday objects. It becomes apparent that part of Maslen’s process involves degeneration to facilitate the possibility of regeneration, through experiments with scale, obscurity and language.
Seeing the exhibition on a particularly blustery day plays out in favour of the works as their endurance is tested. The sculptures appear light, unsteady and likely to topple over at any moment. However, they prove to be entirely resolute. If not for the wind, I might have tested them myself, acting on an impulse to flap my arms around, maybe jump through the archway of the far sculpture. This is not as an act of sabotage, rather, the works and their occupation of space tease playfulness out of you. The forms are highly choreographed and dynamic. The contours of the plastered foam evoke something ergonomic like an ornately carved bench or a launch ramp at a skate park and they beckon you to engage as such. This urge is not so far-fetched considering Maslen makes reference to French designer and architect Charlotte Perriand in the title, Ornaments of significance and romance (after Charlotte Perriand). The allure of the objects is almost an act of hostile architecture, look but do not touch.
This playful dynamism also comes from the presence of the drawn line which is seen most prominently on Ornaments of significance and romance (after Charlotte Perriand), where Maslen has curved and manipulated a strip of brown cardboard into what my mind understands as an archway or a model roller-coaster. This line is not actually drawn but instead forged, and it entertains another bodily impulse, to be traced with my own arms in a big swinging motion. The line gives the impression of a trace of motion left behind, perhaps by the artist, in the way that a sparkler leaves behind a momentary drawing in space. This form references and materialises the line ‘A circle of fine cardboard’, found in Tender Buttons and its colouration echoes Stein’s final remark, ‘Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change.’ The transparent tape used in the construction of this line is applied prudently and with such a consistent tension that it evokes tenderness despite seeming a minute detail – but that is the appeal of Maslen’s work.
Despite initial associations, this line does reveal itself to be an enlarged handbag strap. Moreover, both sculptures appear to be reconfigurations of handbags, Ornaments of significance and romance (after Charlotte Perriand) perched upright (made of cardboard and a thin iridescent strip of purple), and Ornaments of significance and romance (phone, wallet, quays) with its strap (made of oak veneer stained black) lying limp half on the floor as if tossed down at the end of the day. The sculptures’ resemblance to handbags is illuminated not only by the title of the show but also by the photograph, titled Ornaments of significance and romance (sleeping dog). Colour printed and mounted a few millimetres from the wall, the photographs depict a burgundy handbag being drawn open by two hands to reveal a plush toy – a sleeping dog. These photographs, bar one, are concealed to varying degrees by the paper pinned in front, which, when the wind isn’t flapping about, necessitates the viewer to identify that the pictures are indeed replicas of one another by surveying the similarities in light and shade.
Concealment is a central component of the work. It borrows conceptually from the utility, vulnerability and privacy of the handbag as an object and tool. It is then further drawn out in form, particularly where the photographs are obscured and in the cavernous nature of Ornaments of significance and romance (phone, wallet, quays). In the case of the latter, if the viewer is tempted to see inside the hollow structure, they have to get down on all fours and peer in, another instance where bodily gesture is engaged to experience the work. Inside the sculpture, the haphazardly constructed engineering looks at once meticulous and random, planned and improvised, in the vein of Tender Buttons.
The physical interaction required to access these spaces and the effect of concealment is both forensic and generous. Generosity comes through where our curiosity and play is rewarded, and our weird impulses are met by the absurdity of the work, in a tone reflecting Steins’. Forensic, because Maslen invites us to infiltrate and gaze upon something vulnerable, private and internal. The time spent investigating the minutiae of the work’s construction and form takes on its own logic and process of association. The notion of “ornaments of significance and romance” has numerous applications, describing the contents of one’s handbag, to the handbag itself, to the art object, and to what the art object may reference. Ornamentation comes out in those moments where the artist’s hand appears tenderly, like the tape or the trace of iridescent purple. Those intimate elements echo Stein’s negotiation of pleasure and delight. To what effect? in Maslen’s work as in Stein’s, there is romance, ‘a chance to see a tassel’ and perhaps a small dog.
- view Beth Maslen’s works via https://www.instagram.com/connersconners/?hl=en
Cows, 2024.
begins:
it smells like fresh earth.
ploughed by worms, secrets whispered into it by glowing fungi.
That deep-earth, body-buried, treasure coveting, iron-smell,
smells like tastes like metallic chain on tongue,
metallic blood blotted pomegranate bleeding from a pricked finger.
Now that finger is dipped in cows milk
the milk that calcifies my teeth in dark dreams when they fall out into my palms.
puttying, re-fusing to that jelly baby gummy root that cries out: that tooth wasn’t a baby, I need it! the milk is full cream.
the cream licked off by a local cat before the sun rose and the kettle boiled. Perhaps some
kitten whiskers
even fell into the milk, and they’ll prod and poke inside your belly like fish bones.
The milk is silent and breathes very slow breaths.
it contains blobs and curds,
bits of birth fluid, the first kiss your mother placed on your skin, clumps of condensed milk, bandaids from the local shallow end,deep orange mineral from deposits out west, and
so much pink salt that you can float it in.
the glassy surface splits open in time to a deep pelvic contraction.
milk droplets and rays of banana and strawberry coloured sunlight burst through
a calf emerges and is born,
trailing behind it is a liquorice rope
sparkling with the remnants of a burst amniotic bubble. a gas mask lasso that the farmer cracks and swings in steady circles,
gradually opening the steady blue eyes of the calf.
at the willing end of its life, the cow stays close by my side, carrying my bits and bobs in my handbag and walking me across red puddles and cig butts in leather boots.
the cow’s beautiful decay was the colour of
chocolate soil and milk-white bones that hollowed out and turned into a snow
snorted by mushrooms in the dark recesses of the forrest where only pixies live.
The remaining carcass had shiny bows adorned to it and sometimes made a hollow sounding clink like a wind chime on a breath.
some of the ashes got scattered in a distant rose garden,
swallowed by a deep blue vortex
and sent wizzing out in a reincarnation, greeted by a little person crowned with orange cow-licks.the perfume emanating from those blood-tomato paste deepest of deep red roses carried across planes to a distant farm.
The romance of that smell got two cows
horny
and they walked out behind the shed and made a calf
in a bucket of milk.
Excerpt from October 2024 essay: On Giorgio Agamben, Dara Birnbaum and Damiano Bertoli, regarding temporalities and infinity.
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Broadly applying Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism manifesto, Birnbaum’s work can be understood as using ‘non-performance [as] a glitch’ and ‘glitch as a form of refusal’. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto describes the queer body, the ‘body that pushes back at the application of pronouns’, as a ‘glitch’, malfunction and refusal to perform gender and be ‘commodified for capital’. Russell describes Glitch, rooted in the ‘Yiddish gletshn (to slide, glide, slip)’ as an ‘active word’, ‘one that implies movement and change’ and ‘triggers error’. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman might be housed in what Russell describes as the space of ‘non-queer feminist progress, “progress for whom?”’. Despite this distinct possibility, I would posit that the glitch metaphor can be appropriately applied to Birnbaum’s positioning of Wonder Woman in a loop of non-performance to resist hyper-gendering. In the video, glitch is applied aggressively to manufacture disjunction and disturbance. Birnbaum edits as if with visual lacerations, ‘isolating and repeating’ the exposure of a single action. The glitch is reductive and resistant, it eliminates the possibility of escapism and instead the viewer becomes hyper-aware of the medium (video and Woman Women are both the medium), its ‘slipperiness’, potential for malfunction and refusal to traditionally entertain.
In an interview with Karen Kelley and Barbara Schroder for Bomb, Birnbaum expressed what can be read as an analogue application of the glitch. The term ‘mirroring’ is discussed ‘as an attempt to see one’s mirror self and replace it with the real’. In the case ofTechnology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman’s character is imagined by Birnbaum to literally break the fourth wall, force a ‘breakage’ of the video (the glass of the television screen through which women see themselves reflected in the character) and ‘cut through her own image’. Smashing the image of the mirror-self evokes physical malfunction, referencing the slippage of the glitch. ‘Mirroring’ can be further applied as a breakage in the temporality of the glitch. Meaning, its possibilities become an infinite loop in the network of resistances, as a mirror reflecting a mirror projects infinite space. Birnbaum’s work is in some ways therefore endlessly referencing past and current temporalities of “Wonder Woman”. For example, another interpretation of this malfunction comes from the notion of ‘a fostered disorder’ found in the manifesto of the VNS Matrix, an Australian ‘cyberfeminist media art collective’ formed in 1991. The manifesto reasserts glitch as a strategy for ‘corrupting the discourse’ of patriarchy, called the ‘big daddy mainframe’.
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Using ‘time itself as [the] primary material’ and ‘remixing cultural touchstones’, Damiano Bertoli’s Continuous Moment spanned works across video, painting, sculpture, performance, collage and installation. Continuous Moment was ‘predicated on the logic of interconnected and dragging time’ with specific ‘temporal markers’, namely Bertoli’s year of birth in 1969.Continuous Moment bends physical temporalities, referencing the ‘horizontal grid’ as a ‘terrain’ of infinity in the ‘anti-architectural practice of Superstudio’. It also takes themes of ‘translation, reiteration, digression and time travel’ to deal with contemporaneity, linearity, functions of art making, self-reference and histories of occultism, performance and political discourse. Unlike Birnbaum’s use of the glitch and the loop to resist reductive singularities, Bertoli’s Continuous Moment ‘insists that the artist’s work and life are collapsed into a singular point’, a ‘black hole’ that ‘drags together a configuration of cultural debris in a gesture pointing to the year 1969’.
Continuous Moment: Bad Infinity and Continuous Moment: And And And, are both works in video that I will be focusing on in this discussion. Bad Infinity uses a split screen to play scenes from the original 1984-1989 Miami Vice TV series, set against it’s 2006 remake. Both eras of the tv show are distinguishable from one another through their highly stylised ‘temporal fashion’, yet the plot, shot set-ups and dialogue closely parallel each other, at times word-for-word and gesture-for-gesture.
“Bad infinity” is a Hegelian term describing the contradiction in which infinity ‘by wanting to achieve its own determination against the finite’ ceases being infinite, hence the ‘nature of the word: in-finite’. Infinity is never reached yet there is an endless pursuit of self-repetition, perhaps akin to the remaking of an outdated Hollywood tv series or an artist’s practice. Indeed, exhibiting Bad Infinity in March 2009, The Narrows wrote, ‘Bad Infinity explores making from the maker’s perspective; what motivates artists to remake their own work?’ ‘Is it possible to avoid the self?’. I posit that the work answers these questions in its magnification of the series’ inherent self-duplication. In an article from the Monash University Museum of Art this examination is described as a ‘methodology that echoes a number of avant-garde principles that question the backward-looking gaze’. Moreover, the Continuous Moment is characterised by its nature as a loop or vacuum. It can be viewed as something of a “bad infinity” in itself, yet it exemplifies Agamben’s notion of holding one’s ‘gaze on [their] own time’ by accepting the inherent limits of its own singularity, the finite in the in-finite. The split-screen further visualises this contemporaneity. The nature of two simultaneous moving images constrains the functions of a singularity. The ‘disjunction’ and awkwardness of the work is neither ‘nostalgic’ nor memorialising of Miami Vice and it produces a discourse on the function of appropriation, re-telling and self-reference.
Sacred Bird Murmuration, 2024.
bloodclots and bunnies and faces and gummies and car-lots and carnies and kumquats and armies,
and carnage and monies and starcharts and pansies and k-marts and tummies and cow-calves and worries,
and cleaners and bunnies and oysters and curries and bruise-marks and hot-teas and bedsores and Harleys,
and perfumes and bent-knees and heartbeats and sheep-fleece and warm-breeze and toasters and sardines and fungis,
and bedtimes and brandy and clock-hands and parties and fishes and gem-thieves and tickers and flame-trees,
and mustard and aunties and ballads and smarties and carrots and losers and bedsheets and blue-jeans,
and thick-smoke and gum-leaves and crackling and ponies and petrol and tea-leaves and tvs and wetdreams,
and birdies and bodies and blankets and shirt-sleeves
and sunshine and white-teeth and lollies and calm seas.
October 2024 essay: The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty in Works by Richard Bell and Cameron Rowland
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The ‘white possessive logics’ that determine property regimes in Australia and the US (and elsewhere) are discursively, systemically and violently naturalised to perpetuate the dispossession of Indigenous, colonised and historically enslaved peoples. This naturalisation is proliferated in ‘common-sense knowledge, decision making, and socially produced conventions’ which in themselves characterise ‘white possessive logics’. This thesis is drawn from Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. In this essay, I draw upon Moreton-Robinson’s framework for The White Possessive, namely the text’s discussion on Indigenous belonging, Whiteness and Indigenous dispossession, Possessive investments in whiteness, Native title and Being Property, to consider notions of property in its affective and material forms in Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation and Richard Bell’s Embassy.
In this essay I privilege the ‘Trans-Indigenous’ and ‘Indigenous worldwide’ as an approach to discuss ‘diverging and relational histories’ and commonalities in the outcomes of white property regimes on colonised peoples. I further emphasise Moreton-Robinson’s quote from Chris Anderson who outlines that ‘Indigenous studies must counter hegemonic representations of Indigeneity, which marginalize or altogether ignore [Indigenous] density’. With that in mind, this essay is both enriched and limited by my application of The White Possessive to two distinct contexts. Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation work is particular in drawing from Whiteness as Property by Cheryl L. Harris, which examines the ‘subjugation of Black and Native American peoples’. Equally distinct, Richard Bell’s Embassy is informed by his position as a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities and as a member of the ‘Australian Black-Power movement’.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people, is an Indigenous Australian academic and activist. The White Possessive draws considerably from Moreton-Robinson’s lived experience. Notions of property found in The White Possessive derive from extensive interrogations of race and how it is substantiated through colonisation to determine privilege, revealing ‘tension between signifiers of Indigenous sovereignty and white possession in the environment’. The text resists the simplification of property to its structural mechanisms only. Moreton-Robinson introduces property as an affective discourse pertaining to feelings of belonging that are legitimised through rights and are self-perpetuated ‘non-passively’ through the ‘enterprise’ of colonisation. In Australia, ‘white possessive logics’ and ‘patriarchal whiteness’ exploit the strength-through-adversity sentiment of the “the battler” to rationalise white possession. In turn, this dispossesses Native title and values of belonging to land that operate outside of the temporalities and capitalist philosophies of Western property regimes. Moreton-Robinson applies these logics to an American context, stating that ‘white property rights were cemented in law through the appropriation of Native American lands and subsequent enslavement of Africans’. This introduces the first case study, an analysis of Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation, employing Moreton-Robinson’s understanding of belonging and ‘Being Property’.
Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation work from 2018 (see Fig.1.) is a 17-page document containing images and words that record a Restrictive Covenant on one acre of land at 8060 Maxie Road, Edisto Island, South Carolina. The work converses directly with ‘General William Tecumseh Sherman’s [1865] Special Field Orders No.15’ that stipulated the reservation of land for ex-slaves ‘out of concern [to immobilise] a potential uprising’. Following the settlement of ‘40, 000 former slaves’ in the area, the Field Order was reversed and plots of land ‘returned to their previous Confederate owners’. The dispossessed population were directed to either return to ‘work for their former masters… or be evicted’ and subsequently arrested as “vagrants”.
Simon Wu posits that Rowland’s Restrictive Covenant ‘asserts antagonism to the regime of property as a means of reparation’ by preventing the land from development or use of any kind indefinitely and rendering its appraised value at $0. Rowland ‘takes a granular approach’ to antagonise several conceptions of property ‘embedded in the minutiae of exchange’ that entangle with The White Possessive. Namely, the affective and structural markers for “value” that abstractly inform appraisal; including, appraisal of land as real estate (negating value in cultural significance, possibilities for regenerative ecology or in Native title), appraisal of enslaved labour as marketable units or insurable assets (referred to by Rowland as ‘racial capitalism’ and the appraisal of appropriate reparations ‘to compensate for the horrors lived through by former slaves’. Moreton-Robinson’s text can be applied to counter this notion of valueless property. Indeed, Indigenous land relations more generally dispute this $0 appraisal and bring into question the rights of Confederate colonisers and their descendants to dictate ownership and occupation of land that was originally stolen from the Indigenous matriarchally-governed Edisto peoples whose history (oral, ancestral and academically recorded) and current-day representation as property owners is virtually non-existent.
Moreton-Robinson’s conceptualisation of homelessness viewed within the affective discourse of belonging and as an outcome of the ‘original theft’, is represented in Depreciation through what Rowland explicitly draws attention to and what is absent. The experience of homelessness in The White Possessive context is a condition contrived by ‘white possessive logics’ that delineate between public and private space, both of which have white ownership.
In ‘Being Property’, Moreton-Robinson postulates that whiteness functions in itself as ‘a form of property’ in capitalist economies from a furtive position of neutrality, ‘the whitestream’ or “norm” from which non-whiteness is marginalised. This position dictates ‘asset accumulation and ownership’ in the original Field Order and the Restrictive Covenant where institutionalised white power operates. Moreton-Robinson expands on this idea drawing from a quote by Margaret Thornton from Racial Discrimination Act 1975: A Review. She writes, ‘White Anglo heterosexual, abled, and middle-class males are overrepresented in government, legislatures, bureaucracies, the legal profession, and the judiciary, where “they shape legislation, administration and judicial texts in their own image and to their own advantage"’.
Despite this, Depreciation rejects this embodied white possession through its form logistically, representationally and intangibly. From an interview with the artist, Claire Femano discusses Depreciation as ‘valuable mostly in what it represents’ as the framed documents are a physical iteration of a PDF document with infinite reproduction potential. The conditions of ownership placed on the work exist predominantly outside of ‘racial capitalism’ through an engagement with sovereignty that subverts the position of ‘Being Property’ and questions ‘existence’ as ‘constructions of time and property’. This is another way of reinforcing what Moreton-Robinson challenges as the aforementioned ‘whitestream’, and the idea of existence can be viewed as congruent with the shaky status of property as an abstract value network. Moreton-Robinson states, ‘although “property” commonly refers to things owned by persons, or the rights of persons with respect to a thing, it is more than a relationship to the tangible and embraces metaphysical rights such as reputation’. Intangibility is essential to Depreciation and to the approach of viewing property as an affective discourse. It simultaneously creates space to speak about the ways ‘prescribing land’ has had ‘profound material significance on Indigenous people – at times [as] matters of life and death’, according to Mishuana Goeman, as well as arguably the profound cultural insignificance of coloniser’s notions of land as property.
By way of moving into a discussion on Richard Bell’s Embassy, I will return to Moreton-Robinson’s chapter on homelessness and introduce her position on Native title in Australia. The idea of homelessness and home ownership (broadly) play fundamental roles in Bell’s Embassy work, which was first staged in 2013 as a tribute to the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy (see Fig.2.). The 1972 embassy, set up by Michael Anderson, Billy Craigie, Bertie Williams and Tony Coorey, was erected on the lawns opposite Old Parliament House in Canberra to protest the McMahon government’s ‘implementation of a new system that rejected granting independent ownership of traditional land to Indigenous people in favour’ of a land lease system provided Indigenous owners had ‘the intention and ability to make reasonable social and economic use of the land’. Moreover, the Prime Minister ‘rejected the aims of new Australian black-power movement for separate development of [Aboriginal people]’. The original embassy was marked using a beach umbrella, depicted in Bell’s 2021 Umbrella Embassy painting (Fig. 3.), and the tent structure that was introduced in later iterations is used in Bell’s Embassy work, always marked with a sign reading “Aboriginal Embassy”.
Evocative of temporary settlement, improvisational shelter and impermanence, the tent is an ‘assertion of sovereignty’ reflective ‘of the reality of Aboriginal people’s living conditions in New South Wales in 1972’. The tent is also a form that sits non-fixedly and non-noxiously within space and land, reflecting ‘ontological relationships to country derived from the Dreaming’ that privilege belonging and care. Indeed, Michael Anderson is quoted by the National Indigenous Australians Agency saying, ‘The land was taken from us by force ... We shouldn't have to lease it ... Our spiritual beliefs are connected with the land’. Moreton-Robinson extrapolates on this sentiment in regard to homelessness and the ‘doctrine of terra nullius’, stating that ‘the legal regime of the nation-state places Indigenous people in a state of homelessness because our ontological relationship to the land, which is the way we hold title, is incommensurable with its own exclusive claims of sovereignty’.
Sovereignty operates within complex paradoxes in the symbol of the embassy and in Bell’s work in a profound representation of dispossession. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations stipulates that in diplomatic territory ‘the person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest or detention. The receiving state shall treat him with due respect and shall take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on his person, freedom or dignity’. The Aboriginal Embassy is not recognised or protected by these laws, yet as Tony Coorey put it (remembered by Gary Foley), ‘the Prime Minister’s statement has effectively declared us aliens in our own land… We should have an embassy like all the other aliens’. This alienation is explored in The White Possessive where Moreton-Robinson reflects on an Indigenous ‘experience of migrancy’ as a ‘dislocation’ within country unlike that of the ‘postcolonial subject’. Regarding the Mabo decision as a High Court ruling ‘based on politics and economics rather than the rule of law’, Moreton-Robinson discusses alienation in terms of Indigenous people being ‘trespassers’ with the ‘burden of proof for repossession’ in ‘accordance with the white legal structure’. Bell’s Embassy embodies this contingent legal and cultural position, ‘tragically and ironically’ as Moreton-Robinson puts it. It furthermore relates discursively to the contingencies of existence found in Depreciation.
Bell’s response to this condition is articulated plainly in his 2022 documentary and exhibition featuring a version of Embassy. He says to white colonisers, ‘you can go now!’, a sentiment that pulses just as sincerely through Depreciation. Bell and Rowland carve out physical and generative spaces that sit resolutely outside Western temporalities. Depreciation denies the enterprising yearnings of the real estate market and Embassy erects itself within diplomatic conversation where it sees fit. As Daniel Browning points out, Embassy takes on it’s most potent form where its audience is least ‘immune to [its] pointed nature’ and most ‘personally and collectively implicated’, in Australia.
In conclusion, this essay has applied Moreton-Robinson’s framework for The White Possessive with a focus on belonging, Whiteness and Indigenous dispossession, Being Property, Possessive investments in whiteness and Native title in Australia and America, to consider property in its affective and material forms in Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation and Richard Bell’s Embassy. What is revealed is how ‘white possessive logics’, white possession as a ‘basis for property rights’82, the psychology of whiteness as an identifier of safety, reliability, “good” citizenship etc. and white insularity as a ‘protective mechanism’ are reversed to manifest inviolable spaces where Indigenous and non-white possession can exist, be sustained and protected.
Excerpt from April 2024 essay: CATPC, Renzo Martens and Cacao in the Extractive Circuit, in the lead up to the Netherlands at the 60th International Venice Biennale.
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In his article from the Baffler, written in November 2021 titled The Extractive Circuit, Chaudhary describes the mechanisms through which ‘twenty-first century capitalism’ operate, including the ‘global value chains’, ’colonial social relations’ and ‘modern imperialism’ that produce an extreme disparity in the quality of life between people living in the Global South (who are overrepresented in the supply of labour) and those in the Global North where this labour is regularly consumed. Chaudhary cautions us about the ‘pace’ of ‘capital accumulation’, highlighting that higher margins for profitability are often achieved through the devaluation of labour, by whatever means necessary. He further states that the ‘ungovernability of these value chains’ is what ‘propels [the]... speed up’ of ‘capital accumulation’ and this cycle reproduces infinitely.
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Chaudhary’s position on extractivism can be applied to the Chocolate Sculptures produced by the 2014-established collective Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, or CATPC. The works were exhibited at the 2017 Armory Show in New York, curated by Jarrett Gregory under the title What is to be done?. CATPC was founded by Dutch artist Renzo Martens under a research project known as The Institute of Human Activities with a number of members who were previously employed by ‘multinational corporation Unilever’ on Cacao plantations in the Congo. Unilever receives low ratings for Fair Trade and has been accused of several human rights violations. Moreover, the cacao industry in particular is known for ‘human trafficking’, a prevalence of ‘child labour’ and is also a ‘major driver of deforestation’.
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Martens stated that the collective’s aim was to ‘critique economic inequality in a way that can actually override and change it’. This would translate economically to an inverse directionality in the flow of value outlined by Chaudhary. Or in Martens’ words, a ‘reverse gentrification’.
There is real material and cultural value in the Post-Plantation model, where land is purchased with the proceeds from the collective’s sculptural works. This is one of the outcomes of the work where, to its benefit, Martens' presence as a provocateur is decentralised. The benefits of the Post-Plantation extend to rejuvenating other systems burdened by the extractive circuit, as outlined in one of the CATPC’s statements. They write, ‘bringing back biodiversity, restoring food security and mitigating climate change, through the regeneration of forests: these are the keys to decolonizing the plantations’.
The Enlightenment of the Witch, poem in response to art by David Altmejd, 2024.
hernia of LOVE
the crest of the patchwork melon belly is where the baby trampolines itself. purged from within it crowns on the cusp of a breath as if expelled from a great mouth.
the mother conduit body tears and flays itself,
frenched as if to the skeletal play thing of a high-school science lab.
preserved ceremoniously, magically even, is the thinking organ.
A seeing, thinking, feeling, loving brain with a rainbow brain-stem that extends
down within the central crevasse or throat as if connected umbilically to the child.
resigned to fall, smash to pieces and decay the moment the child is born,
the witch mother’s impenetrable muscularity is precarious.
godlike, the body holds a symmetry, outreaching one pair of arms to stirrup her own legs and extending a second pair downward as if to conjure a focused levitation.
she hovers just above the ground with the help of five or six very small
red, blue and yellow fairy people who, with all their might, push her legs upward.
in an effort so immense that her chalky skin
might just ping off, sending candy-necklace cysts all over.
if it weren’t of course, for the
oculist marbles twitching in her hamstrings.
Bacon and Egg, 2023.the crest of the patchwork melon belly is where the baby trampolines itself. purged from within it crowns on the cusp of a breath as if expelled from a great mouth.
the mother conduit body tears and flays itself,
frenched as if to the skeletal play thing of a high-school science lab.
preserved ceremoniously, magically even, is the thinking organ.
A seeing, thinking, feeling, loving brain with a rainbow brain-stem that extends
down within the central crevasse or throat as if connected umbilically to the child.
resigned to fall, smash to pieces and decay the moment the child is born,
the witch mother’s impenetrable muscularity is precarious.
godlike, the body holds a symmetry, outreaching one pair of arms to stirrup her own legs and extending a second pair downward as if to conjure a focused levitation.
she hovers just above the ground with the help of five or six very small
red, blue and yellow fairy people who, with all their might, push her legs upward.
in an effort so immense that her chalky skin
might just ping off, sending candy-necklace cysts all over.
if it weren’t of course, for the
oculist marbles twitching in her hamstrings.
Review of Alex Fredriksson’s Glass Homes, 2022.
It’s easy to imagine a phantom drifting through Alex Fredriksson’s skeletal pine and glass brick structure and occupying a place on or in the entombed photographs of in-flux encounters with the world. However, Glass Homes is not a haunted house. Fredriksson’s ghosts, rather, occupy the intangible mazes of one’s mind where memory, psychogeography and nostalgia convalesce to produce impressions. The aptly titled Glass Homes holds at it’s core, an aesthetic and figurative focus on the elemental. Glass operates in opposition to its material alias, sand, performing a metaphor in which stability, solidity, certainty and structure come up against the slippery and the malleable, comparable to the nature of memory. All the more elemental, is the subtle gesture towards earth, water, air and fire through the photographic works Tomb, Beach Road, 501 and Sunset. Through these works Fredriksson manages to conceal a fully gestated universe within this seemingly straightforward space.
The photographic impressions distil fleeting and ephemeral moments with a sensitive, contemplative and at times, cinematic articulation of light. The viewer experiences images that converge finality, clarity and sentimentality with an uneasiness about the passing of time and the impossibility of preserving a moment. The subjects are grounded in the mundane. A street, an ocean, a sunset and a graveyard could all feel both deeply personal and universal in their ambiguity on the idea of home. Fredriksson’s photographs are void of figures, yet the spaces feel intrinsically human. The shell of a house that we’re invited into inhabits and personifies an emptiness, implied by the timber partition, House Frame. The reductive state of the wall structure nods to two bookends in the narrative of a life. It is representative of the period of time before a house is occupied as well as after it’s habituation, one we might stumble upon in a small town, littered with the detritus of its last owners. Fredriksson moves through memory and linearity, evoking something that is all at once flattened and enhanced, distant and within us. This palimpsest, the blurring and layering of impressions, losing and regaining our orientation in the present, refers back to the central condition of the work, the nature of time.
other writing:
2024: on Property - The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty in works by Richard Bell and Cameron Rowland
2024: The Crone, Emobided Temporalities and Trangressing Memorialisation, on Emma Talbot
2023: Trans-Indigenous practice in Contemporary Art
2022: Non-objective Abstraction: Theosophy and Psychology
2021: White Australia in Anti-Asian Discourse
2021: Mungo Lady
2021: Cosmopolitanism in Early Western Australian and Northern Territory Pearling
2021: The Body as a Cultural Vessel, on He Chengyao
2020: Proaction and Reaction in Ecological Histories
2020: Indigenous Relations to Land in Pre-Colonial Australia
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