BREATHING ROOM —

BREATHING ROOMI met the photographer at the station and we walked out

into the scrappy grasslands where between the train line

and the gully tyre tracks lead away

in among the head-high mounds of shattered concrete,

steel mesh and crooked pylons, brick shards

overgrown with weeds, rust weed and the wild fennel self-

seeding at the level of our eyes, and in two steps we climbed

the mansions of the grass – Away up the cutting’s side mass-

planted tussock as one thing flared yellow in the greyed light

and there, over the motorway, a single immense cloud,

its bright shadow all at once touchable and clear –

And we climbed down into the wreckage where at each step light

broke from the grass tips, so many small exposures, place

falling in an instant from the window of a passing train.

Lisa Gorton, 2013

BREATHING ROOM —

BREATHING ROOMCURATED BY JAIME TSAI1–18TH AUGUST, 2013

EXHIBITORS Lauren Commens Yvette Coppersmith Mike Hewson Eloise Kirk Sara Oscar Clare Thackway Nadia Wagner

WRITERS Donna West Brett Victoria Carruthers Georgina Cole Mark De Vitis Lisa Gorton Michael Hill Sophie Hopmeier Adam Jasper

MOP 2/39 ABERCROMBIE ST CHIPPENDALE Sydney, NSW 2008

BREATHING ROOM —

CONTENTSCURATOR’S INTRODUCTION Jaime Tsai

LAUREN COMMENSMichael Hill

YVETTE COPPERSMITHMark de Vitis

MIKE HEWSONDonna West Brett

ELOISE KIRKVictoria Carruthers

SARA OSCARGeorgina Cole

CLARE THACKWAYAdam Jasper

NADIA WAGNERSophie Hopmeier

BIOS

6

8

12

16

20

24

28

32

35

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of ‘Breathing Room,’ MOP, 2013

COVER: Stephanie Tsai, Untitled (after Tschumi), 2013

Edited by Jaime Tsai Designed by Ella Egidy and Stephanie Tsai First edition

ISBN: 978-0-646-90239-5

Thanks to MOP, NAS and Mikhaela Rodwell

© Jaime Tsai 2013

7BREATHING ROOM —

Despite living at the time in a unadorned, joyless interior fashioned by Adolf Loos, Tristan Tzara believed eighty years ago that modernist architecture was at an end.2

Sadly for the Romanian Dada, the modernist will to rationalise space prevails, and today, uniform, hygienic design continues to negate the “image of dwelling”. It is hostile to our latent desire for pre-natal comfort, or, that inexplicable feeling of lived-in-ness. Although modern interiors intend to evacuate any characteristics resistant to an efficient calculus of organisation, rooms inevitably reflect their inhabitants.

Soft furnishings, cushions, rugs, ornaments and ephemera cloak the geometric spaces of our interiors like moss folded over stone, transforming functional space into a womb-like cocoon. Interiors can be anything from psychologically ambivalent to over-determined, but they are never transparent. Living as we do through an infinite sequence of interiors, it is easy to imagine a taxonomy of these rooms, each with its own unique physiognomy: seedy highway motel, dusty military dugout, gaudy urban penthouse, airless ship cabin, fetid public amenity, forgettable weatherboard, smoky tavern, damp acrylic tent, and so forth. In his Espèce d’espaces, Georges Perec distinguishes the lived-in from a taxonomy of the uninhabitable: “seas used as a dump, coastlines bristling with barbed wire, earth bare of vegetation, mass graves, piles of carcases, boggy rivers, towns that smell bad”.3 Whether inside/outside or domestic/wild, space is given to personification and anthropomorphisation. Rooms become living organisms: whimpering, sweating, ageing, swelling, accumulating and shedding, with walls of veteran bartenders, and atmospheres that range from electric to knife-tense, rooms breathe.

Breathing Room is a visual and textual exploration of our interior unconscious. Taking as its antecedent the Dada irreverence for medium specificity, this project is part exhibition, part symposium and part literature. Each essay in this catalogue is a study of the artist’s response to interiors, tempered by the writer’s spatial imagination and the product of a professional relationship developed over several months. Hill considers Commens’ photography of emptiness; Cole, Oscar’s stills of implied spatial eroticism; Hopmeier, Wagner’s examination of olfactory containment; West Brett, Hewson’s materialisation of the invisible scaffolding of the gallery; Carruthers, Kirk’s sublime exploration of collection and display, and Jasper, Thackway’s fusion of intimacy and expanse in a intrauterine tent. You may have noticed that, contrary to the expectation of a sense vacuum in the white-cube gallery space, your lungs were filled with subtle undertones of a forest floor: damp earth and pine bark. This is courtesy of Nadia Wagner’s immaterial, man-made scent Geosmin, the perfect dérèglement of the senses to trigger an imaginative encounter with familiar spaces taken for granted every day.

Jaime Tsai, 2013

“ THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE WILL BE INTRAUTERINE. A DESIRE TO RETURN TO THE WOMB PRESIDES OVER OUR LOVE FOR ARTWORKS: A FEELING OF EMOTIONAL PLENITUDE, OF TOTAL, ABSOLUTE, IRRATIONAL COMFORT AND OF THE ABSENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND RESPONSIBILITY. “ TRISTAN TZARA, 19331

CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Detail from Untitled 6, 2012 Lauren Commens

1 Tristan Tzara, ‘Concerning a

Certain Automatism of Taste,’

The Surrealists Look at Art, ed.

Pontus Hulten (Lapis Press, 1990)

209, 213

2 Tzara commissioned the house

himself and knew Loos well,

having met him in Zurich. The

house was built in 1925 and

finished in 1926 on Avenue Junot,

Paris. See Krzysztof Fijalkowski,

‘un Salon au Fond d’un Lac, the

Domestic spaces of Surrealism,’

Surrealism and Architecture,

ed. Thomas Mical (New York:

Routledge, 2005)

3 Georges Perec, Species of

Spaces and Other Pieces (London:

Penguin, 1997) 89

9BREATHING ROOM —

A song without a voice is like a work of art without the human figure. This is Brian Eno’s way of describing the challenge of lyric-less composition, of having to space the sound so that the listening experience is properly filled. What is also implied is that the voice and the human figure carry the meaning, a responsibility that must be assumed by other elements when they’re not there.

The interiors are duly exposed by the missing human figure in Lauren Commens’ images of houses in the Blue Mountains. Without some person attracting the attention of the viewer, the rooms themselves are presented for scrutiny. They are disused and worn-out. The people who aren’t in the photographs were not there in the first place. These are rooms within dwellings that have been abandoned, perhaps slated for demolition.

There is a blank descriptiveness about the photographs that demands a forensic reading. Details bear witness to former use. High on an otherwise bare yellow wall sits a single bar heater, its cord optimistically headed for a power point. Another room has a splashback of square tiles underneath a liquid soap canister and the footprints of what may have been a shaving mirror and a paper towel dispenser. In a kitchen twice viewed, a rangehood projects over a disappeared stove, the backing of stainless steel panels scarred by grease. A blue tiled step beside a sheet of aluminium suggests the welcome of a bathroom, while the black grit on the floor indicates the debris that accompanies neglect. A view of a final room has no clues at all and reads accordingly as neutral, lacking in personality.

The subject matter of the photographs is not so much the residual content of the rooms as their emptiness. Empty rooms are filled with space. In German the word, Raum, means both room and space, which is significant because it was the Germans who in the 19th century conceptualized space as a component of art and design. A space is delimited as a room. The things that define these rooms, such as the walls, floors, doors, and ceilings, are also the dimensions of spaces. The purely spatial quality of the photographs is therefore explicit, and not only from a formal perspective. Emptiness is also a mood, reflective and hushed. Inside the buildings is quiet, but outside the noises of mountain towns can be heard - birds especially, and the wind.

A truly figureless composition, one that avoids not only the human figure but also any motif that operates in the human figure’s absence, would be abstract.

LAUREN COMMENS

Detail from Untitled 2, 2012 Lauren Commens

11BREATHING ROOM —

It is hard to imagine what abstraction might look like. There is certainly a type of figure in these rooms. In each photograph, a slice of light enters the room through a window and settles on the wall. Just as a human figure would do, the light becomes the focus of the composition, against which the surrounding shade operates as counterpoint and around which the room is a stage. Light is the dramatic protagonist, articulating the intentions of the artist.

As protagonist, the light has a particular character. It is the fragile winter light of late afternoon. It won’t last long and as the buildings are deserted there will be no electricity to make light bulbs work. So it will be dark soon.

Soon, but not suddenly. The sun will dip below the horizon, the clouds become pink and the rooms burn to orange. The light that remains after its source has gone out is called an after-glow, a transitional phantom that gives form to the event of a light going out. Dylan Thomas’ line about the “dying of the light” hardly needs an explanation, but it is worth pausing to consider just how much metaphor is compressed into these four short words. It is also an inversion, where “dying” speaks for “fading”, and “light” for “life”. The human figure is gone and in its place is light weakened at the end of the day. If brightness is the sign of habitation and vitality, then dimness is the counter-sign of desolation and death.

The photographs grapple with deeply ingrained symbolism. Another layer of meaning arises from the idea that a building is a type of body, both having apertures that link outside and in. A closed room is enlivened by opening the windows and letting in light and fresh air. Likewise we open our mouths to fill our lungs and open our eyes to flood our minds with light. And when death is near, breathing becomes shallow, the light weakened. These rooms will soon be dead.

Michael Hill, 2013Detail from Untitled 2, 2012 Lauren Commens

13BREATHING ROOM —

In his early volume The System of Objects (1968) Jean Baudrillard presents a structuralist phenomenology of commodity culture, an assessment of the lived material reality of commodification.1 His interest is in the landscape of the interior; not so much the meaning of individual objects themselves, but instead the discourses that surround them and particularly the relationships formed between objects in space. He argues that within private space each piece of furniture and in turn each room internalises its own particular function and takes on the symbolic dignity pertaining to it. For, he continues, the primary function of a collection of objects in a defined space is to personify human relationships, to fill the shared space of the interior for habitation, to bind those who occupy it, to specify boundaries and the nature of interactions alike. Baudrillard claims that in the past the emphasis within such systems of space has been on immovability, imposing presence and hierarchical labelling. Each room had a strictly defined role corresponding to one or another of the various functions of the sum of its inhabitants, and each ultimately referred to a view which conceived of the individual as a balanced assemblage of distinct faculties.

Baudrillard makes a distinction between this precedent and what he finds in his present (the late 1960s), which he characterises as a modular world of constructed environments, marked by the dissolution of formal boundaries of inside and outside – a world no longer given, but instead produced, mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled. Walls dissolve, rooms open into one another, space is diffused and at the complete disposal of the occupant. Baudrillard understands this shift as a genuine and fundamental change in the nature of civilization. This new order is for calculation and, above all, functionality. In it Baudrillard sees the end of enigma, of mystery – for everything is clear, and driven by absolute conductivity.

Yvette Coppersmith’s new project Base Work also deals with constructed spaces. Her interiors are formed through walls, arranged to shape rooms – demarcated through their material boundaries. Yet she presents these spaces divested of their substantive qualities. She is interested in their in-between state, their re-invention and re-formation. Their original forms are denuded, divested of ornament, of mass, of surface. In this absence they reveal. Nascent intentions and passing arrays intersect and are simultaneously present, and through this presence Coppersmith finds an occasion to consider the implications of the formation, use and consumption of space as a cultural phenomenon.

YVETTE COPPERSMITH

Top left: Detail from Base work 3, 2013, Yvette Coppersmith Above: Detail from Base work 1, 2013, Yvette Coppersmith:

15BREATHING ROOM —

To do so she induces a moment of occupation. Her works insist on the presence of a spectator. She repeatedly locates and contains a viewer within a fixed structure placed in the foreground. In Base Work III, through the construction of a quasi-pedestal given as a solid, determined block of uniform pigment, Coppersmith frames her viewer rather than the space, locating presence while inverting traditional modes of spectatorship to objectify the intentionality of the viewer’s gaze. The device of the denuded walls – potent in their eloquent nonappearance – reinforces the presence of the spectator, and the capacity of the space to ever adapt in an eternal game of reimagining and reshaping before a series of unseen yet distinctly accommodated occupants. The recognition of the fetishization of space in this viewing relationship, that is, space shaped in responsiveness to the desirous gaze which appraises it, alludes to the status of space as a commodity – wholly available before an expectant spectator. Yet Coppersmith understands space to operate beyond this definition.

Her space is presented to be shaped. Not only in the literal sense of architectural forms given in a process of renovation – exposed only to be rebuilt – but also through its figuration as malleable and limitless. In Base Work I spatial recession and spatial ambiguity cohabit. Flat areas of resolute pigment are simply moments of potential, rather than any kind of opposition to the more clarified spaces - they are the raw material from which more evolved spatial units have also been formed. The emphasis on the materiality of the work in addition to the visceral presence of the act of drawing creates a sensation of just that, creation – of the construction of the spatial realm which exists beyond the viewer’s realm. Importantly, this tension between recession and surface sustains forms rather than consumes them, and as such Coppersmith’s interiors are seen to address space beyond the possibility of commodity. Her insistence on a contained viewing platform then too becomes part of an awareness of space as perpetually ephemeral and ambiguous, despite intrusions which may attempt to establish it otherwise.

1 Jean

Baudrillard, The

System of Objects,

trans. James

Benedict (London

and New York:

Verso, 1996)

Her mark making confirms this, particularly in works such as Base Work II. Each individual mark can be viewed as part of a greater whole, organising the field of the work, as gestures intersect with their compatriots to create forms and visual experiences of the space. While suggesting a referential relationship with the cubic nature of building materials, the spontaneity, variation and vivid nature of the marks convey absorbed cerebral investigations rather than concrete finality, particularly as they generally operate beyond the viewing platform. The plurality of her mark, creating multiple paths of access through the spatial field by a combination of varied hues, directional marks and systems of patterning, focus on process rather than completion, imagination rather than acquisition.

Ultimately Coppersmith’s spatial realms are re-constructions, and are presented as such. They imagine spaces as sites of possible occupation, but as the viewer is openly objectified, space is formed not in an attempt at self-actualisation, but instead as a conduit of awareness. Baudrillard’s observation of the free play of endless conductivity where “things fold and unfold, are concealed, appear only when needed” and of the inhabitant of such a space as a cybernetician – defined as someone obsessed with the perfect circulation of messages – suggests ratified spaces. Coppersmith’s aren’t. They facilitate cognizance – are pensive and exploratory. They recognise temporality, and are conscious of the nature of authorship and usage. They are contradictory in a way which is antithetical to consumer culture, and as such her work resonates with determined consciousness.

Mark deVitis, 2013

Base work 1, 2013, Yvette Coppersmith:

17BREATHING ROOM —

In Walter Benjamin’s denkbild ‘Short shadows’, he contemplates the shadows at noon when they retreat silently and unnoticed to be no more than a sharp black edge compressed and cowering at the feet of things.1 In creating doubles of objects, shadows prove to be treacherous, slippery, ever changing and seemingly take on a life of their own, particularly when the object they emulate is unseen rather than defining the existence of the referent. The presence of strange shadows in Plato’s cave, for example, caused the protagonist to turn and discover the world outside. As an optical device, shadows bestow a sense of mystery, for it is where danger lurks, secrets are hidden and emotions are confined. This sense of deception and illusion that the shadow inevitably creates has been explored in art, literature, crime fiction and psychology as revealing the unconscious.

Unlike Benjamin’s shadow, Mike Hewson’s site-specific work Portal frame 2013, is a shadow that is fixed, elongated, refusing even in its temporal state to retreat or compress. Its illusive qualities however, will not give up their secrets easily, for it is what is not seen that completes the work and formed its genesis. Extending from the feet of the two columns in the Mop gallery, Portal frame travels along the floor as a fixed reminder of the supports that hold up the ceiling and as a memory or echo of the triangulated beams out of sight in the roof space. The optical illusion both reveals and conceals the true form of the structure and instead our view is constantly reset to the interior and to the shadow, which slowly discloses its deception.

A portal frame is both symbol and function. In its simplest symbolic form it signifies the ‘home’ and in its more complex form it is the main structural force for building and for defining inside from outside. The home is where Ernst Bloch’s vagabond goes to conceal himself as no one would suspect him of being there whilst Benjamin’s vagabond possesses the marginal vision that transgresses boundaries and turns them into thresholds in a way of looking that Benjamin described as the “peddling of space”.2 Hewson’s Portal frame evokes both Bloch and Benjamin’s vagabond in that it transgresses boundaries and behaves contrary to our expectations. In doubling both the seen and the unseen, the work confuses the space of the inside and outside, known and unknown, and it is this space that undermines our certainty of what we are looking at and what we are walking on.

MIKEHEWSON

Hewson often uses the optical device of doubling in his work to mediate our encounter with place and create a tension between inside and outside. These interventions reflect his own experience of spatial anxiety when earthquakes largely destroyed his hometown of Christchurch. In wartime Berlin, writer Johannes R Becher referred to the scenery of houses split open to reveal their interiors as slaughtered and eviscerated, and as the ruins of uncanny life.3 Hewson explored the eviscerated spaces of Christchurch by interrogating the loss and the memories of buildings in several works, most notably the series titled Homage To The Lost Spaces (Government Life Building Studios) 2012. In one of these works Hewson rebuilt the external form of destroyed sections of the Cranmer Courts building and installed oversized photographic images of people in interior spaces onto the exterior evoking memories of the former life of the city. In a recent public commission, Hewson developed the art of doubling in the construction of a photographic hoarding for the restoration of the Unwin’s Stores building on George Street, Sydney in 2012. The photographic montage of the stores’ façade both reconstructed the image of the building and distorted it, creating a tension between the familiar and the unfamiliarity of a ruptured fascia.

Hewson develops this tension in Portal frame by investing the space with a familiar, yet unfamiliar simulacrum of an element of the building’s structure. Both image and shadow, Portal frame questions how we interact with the interior as a representation of homeliness. This idea of the homely or das Heimlich is inevitably revealed as an illusion itself. As Hewson’s work reveals, the illusion of das Heimlich is fragile and open to distortion, being held together by the fabric of social mores. As Freud reminds us, das Unheimlich inevitably takes us back to the strangeness of the known and familiar that was hidden away and has now come into the open like a repressed memory of the unconscious.4 Portal frame takes the idea of the homely and the familiar and turns it on its head and in looking for a solution to the optical distress we experience we inevitably create a further visual double that fluctuates between the homely and the unhomely, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Donna West Brett, 2013

1 Short shadows (I), Michael

Jennings et al, eds. Rodney

Livingstone, trans. Walter

Benjamin selected writings.

Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930

(Harvard University Press,

1999) 272

4 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

(1899), trans. David Mclintock

(New York: Penguin Books, 2003)

3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In

a Cold Crater: cultural and

intellectual life in Berlin,

1945–1948, trans. Kelly Barry

(Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998) 19

2 Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans.

Anthony A Nassar (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2006)

82; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space:

art, architecture and anxiety

in modern culture (MIT Press,

Cambridge, MA, 2001) 74

19BREATHING ROOM —

Sketch for Installation, 2013, Mike Hewson

21BREATHING ROOM —

ELOISEKIRKIn 1974, conceptual artist Joseph Beuys performed I like America and America likes me in a room of the René Block Gallery in down town Manhattan. Over the three days of the performance Beuys shared the space with a wild coyote - his props nothing but a blanket of coarse grey felt (the product of thickly matted wool), a shepherd’s staff and plenty of fresh straw. The iconic performance presented Beuys at his most transformative, as shaman extraordinaire. The recontextualisation of the coyote, so inextricably linked with the vast open spaces of the wild American west, into the anodyne enclosure of the white cube, folds the mythic into the everyday. The performance refigured a relationship between man and ‘nature’ that suggests a different approach to the traditional evocation of the sublime: one in which the two are resolved not through the triumph of the Enlightenment reason over the vast tumult of nature but through a shift of consciousness than allows us to reflect on our relationship with the wild through the parameters of a small interior.

A similar kind of thematic approach can be seen in the work of Eloise Kirk and her fascination with the transformative potential of the tensions between culture/nature. Influenced by the imagery of her travels through the Arizona deserts, Kirk used a taxidermied coyote in a recent assemblage to underscore the strange incongruity of this kind of animal in the interior of the gallery. Far from being reduced to the meek, rather glazed-looking trophy that has been the aim of traditional taxidermy, this coyote is fixed in a snarling, defensive pose, back arched, hackles raised, it activates the space in a confrontational way, reminding the viewer of the aura of the wild that lingers around the creature, even in death. On the wall behind the coyote, Kirk mounted a series of picturesque landscapes which are partially covered with smooth-textured expensive Irish painters’ linen. In one case the stiff linen almost covers the chocolate box scene entirely. In doing this she questions the nature of the sublime, the traditions of landscape painting that simultaneously portray the power of nature and our ability to contain and dominate it. Kirk’s use of the coyote is a reminder of the American Romantic landscape tradition and painters like Thomas Moran’s grand depictions of Yellowstone: the very first American ‘wilderness’ to be, rather ironically, cordoned off as a National Park. Moran, himself, expresses his reservations about the containment of nature in the depiction of a small dead stag lying on the ground just above his signature: an ominous memento mori of the vanishing wild.

The contradictions of reason versus sensuality in Romanticism and a desire to explore and subvert them, is evident in the collection of objects Kirk has

Head Mount, 2013, Eloise Kirk

23BREATHING ROOM —

assembled for Breathing Room. Central to the piece is a wall-mounted stag’s head replete with centuries of associations with conquest and hunting. Unlike the coyote described above, this stag’s head has been fashioned to mimic his once majestic stance as king of the forest so typical in the canon of western painting. Yet this taxidermied head also questions the violence inherent in a history of collecting and display based on desire. The stag is a symbol of the way in which we contain and control the objects of our gaze: we transform the object into a fetish and in this case the wild beast has been forever domesticated in the infrastructure of display. To ensure its fate as fetish, as incomplete and impotent, Kirk has removed the antlers from the head and laid them on the floor beneath the animal. As antlers are renewed annually on living animals, budding slowly under sheaths of velvet into boughs of solid bone, this gesture, both ritualistic and eviscerating, strikes at the very heart of the universal mythologies surrounding the stag as a potent symbol of youth and regeneration. This stag’s head is rendered totally abject and even more so in light of the fact that Kirk has placed a black plastic shelf on the opposite wall on which has been placed a number of strange, metamorphic or phallic objects. The assemblage has the slightly magical and macabre feel of a collection of curiosity, a travelling wunderkammer filled with vitrines of mysterious and unrecognisable objects. On the shelf sits a hollowed out horses hoof which has an Duchampian literalness to it, yet its relationship to a once living equine body, renders it fundamentally abject, the leftovers, all that remains. It has the somatic resonance of a certain type of souvenir.

Theorist Susan Stewart investigates the qualities of the souvenir, explaining, that as a concept it is “always incomplete, the object is metonymic to the scene of its original appropriation in the sense that it is a sample. Within this operation of souvenir, the sign functions not so much as object to object, but beyond this relation, metonymically, as object to event/experience… The souvenir is an allusion and not a model; it comes after the fact and remains both partial to and more expansive than the fact. It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins.”1 It is this meeting point of journeying and souvenir that also interests Kirk. Her part-objects are both connected to and dislocated from ‘place.’ When assembled they function as ‘placeless palimpsests’, simultaneously mysterious and commonplace. Neither artefact nor relic, always incomplete and deeply sensual (fur!), they function as fetishes which mark the site of an imagined space, one in which there is potential for convergent and layered realities based on memory and personal experience. Each object in this assemblage has the capacity for multiple readings, together they create a web of partially realised narratives that map out many possible interconnections. It is this very instability that allows Kirk to successfully critique the nineteenth century Romantic traditions of painting and collecting whilst forging a stronger link with the older, medieval traditions of wonder: in so doing, we are challenged by work that is both inexplicable yet deeply familiar, imaginative yet utterly tactile, steeped in ritual and a sense of magic.

Victoria Carruthers, 2013

1 Susan Stewart, On Longing,

Narratives of the Miniature, the

Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collec-

tion (Durham and London: Duke

University Press, 1993) 136

Big Game, 2013, Eloise Kirk

25BREATHING ROOM —

SARAOSCARIn From Here to Eternity, Sara Oscar has created a series of photographs from the classics of Hollywood film. Through a process of selection and excision, each photograph has been cut from the continuity of cinematic narrative, disengaged from the peaks and troughs of dramatic action, to be re-presented as an individual, still and silent image. While atmospheric and artfully composed, the scenes themselves border on the mundane. They picture ordinary objects, domestic spaces, and familiar sights of the modern age—there is a hand holding a cigarette, a radio and a ceramic dog on a bedroom windowsill, a curling iron balustrade, and a rushing train. These frozen shots are characterised by apparent inconsequence, but while they seem at first to be mere aesthetic exercises in light and composition, they relate to their cinematic origins in curious and playful ways.

In fact, Oscar has collected the shots that intercept sex on screen. Each image represents the cut away from the imminent sex scene—the shots of interiors, exteriors and ordinary things that replace the depiction of titillating sensuality, heated intimacy, and sexual violence. The train about to enter the dark tunnel is the final shot in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), to which the camera cuts as Roger Thornhill (Carey Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) – now Mrs Thornhill – fall back into an intimate embrace on the top bunk of a sleeper car. While the shot contextualises the scene and makes sense in relation to the couple’s future together, it also makes an amusingly veiled reference to the lovemaking we assume will follow. With its blunt end speeding towards the dark opening of the tunnel, the train comically alludes to the action of sex and Thornhill’s masculine vigour through a fast-paced, powerful and mechanised motif.

The window open to the rain, on the other hand, comes from A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and released in 1951. This shot has a glowing radio in the foreground and a forlorn-looking ceramic dog, while through the window the rain falls down on an open-roofed car. This composite view of inside and outside elements is preceded in the film by impassioned kissing between George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), two co-workers in the Eastman swimsuit factory. Turning slowly from the bodies dissolving into the shadows, the camera pans solemnly to the window as Alice repeats George’s name in a low voice and samba music plays on the radio. Read in relation to the illicit embrace, the open window suggests Alice’s receptiveness to George’s advances, her lack of defence against desire,

Top: Spellbound, 2013, Sara Oscar Above: Detail from From Here to Eternity, 1953, Sara Oscar

27BREATHING ROOM —

THIS ELABORATE PROCESS OF CAMOUFLAGE, CODING AND VEILING OF SEXUAL NARRATIVE IS BROUGHT INTO FOCUS BY OSCAR’S SERIES OF IMAGES

while the rain falling steadily into the open car alludes to the carelessness and recklessness of their behaviour, which results in Alice’s pregnancy, evoking ideas of exposure and damage.

The hand and lit cigarette, however, is a slice of From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), and extracted from a steady pan down the coiling smoke of a cigarette to the hand holding it. Pausing for a fraction of a second on the hand, the camera pulls outwards as Loreen (a beautiful hostess played by Donna Reed) rises from embracing Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), an army private stationed in Hawaii. Squeezed firmly between index and middle fingers, the cigarette takes on distinctly phallic overtones, and the long wisp of smoke, which tumbles and weaves into a diaphanous cloud at the top of the photograph, suggests something of the sensations being experienced below.

Through the careful arrangement of mise-en-scène, and the imaginative involvement of the viewer, these domestic or nondescript spaces and actions are turned into symbolically charged terrains of lust, desire and implied satisfaction. Phallic things like cigarettes and trains are handled and in motion, suggesting the mechanics of sex and penetration and the compulsiveness of desire. Open things like cars and tunnels are exposed to the elements and entered at speed. Space, objects and actions are deliberately connected to the body; sexuality spills out of the human drama, pervading the mise-en-scène.

By contrast to the explicit sexuality of popular Hollywood films today, such as American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999) and Friends with Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011), these films employ a coded language to express and act out desire. Almost all the films in Oscar’s series were made in the 1950s under the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of industry guidelines designed to protect public morality. The ‘Hays Code’, as it was dubbed, after the Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays who was appointed chief censor in 1922, expressly forbade licentious nudity (in fact or in silhouette), any inference of sexual perversion, and cautioned against the depiction of ‘lustful’ kissing, first-night scenes, rape, and a man and woman in bed together.1

Given the strictures of the code and the power of the censor in enforcing them, filmmakers developed inventive ways of bypassing it. They cultivated a return of the repressed sex scene in the form of a visual language strongly influenced by psychoanalytic theory. Although Freud distrusted the representation of psychological states on film, his ideas were fervently embraced in American popular culture and pervaded noir films.2

This elaborate process of camouflage, coding and veiling of sexual narrative is brought into focus by Oscar’s series of images. She presents a slightly teasing compendium of obvious sexual innuendo. These are now antiquated images of sex, and the slideshow presentation underlines their old-fashioned, outmoded nature. In this nostalgic mode of presentation, however, there is the suggestion that something has been lost from contemporary filmic treatments of passion, desire and sex, that in making the implicit explicit, an inventive cinematic language has fallen into disuse. Indeed the work as a whole pays tribute to the ingenuity of these brilliant pieces of filmmaking normally lost in the flow of cinematic time. Each image is isolated from its context and cut into a new sequence that draws our attention to the precise crafting of mise-en-scène, lighting, camera angles and movements. The resulting photographs are clever, witty, poignant and grave and rearranged into a sequence of images without referents; they suture over sex, leaving only suggestion. Oscar’s carefully constructed and over-determined pictures offer a lexicon of the cinematic language of implied sexuality, the investment of space, objects and actions with intense psycho-sexual significance.

Georgina Cole, 2013

1 The Motion

Picture Production

Code of 1930 can

be found on the

Arts Reformation

website at www.

artsreformation.

com/a001/

hays-code.html

(accessed 9 July

2013)

2 See Nicholas

Christopher,

Somewhere in the

Night: film noir

and the American

city (Shoemaker

and Hoard, 2006)

190-92

Detail from A Place in the Sun, 1951, Sara Oscar

29BREATHING ROOM —

Clare Thackway and I had the best of intentions. We wanted to conduct a series of interviews. Not as an interrogation, but as a way of explicating the work on the artist’s own terms. Such interviews don’t determine the final meaning of a work, but they can supplement it, and at best they can generate new ideas. The interviews fell through. Not because of any hostility between interviewer and artist. We just had trouble getting in touch. We were never in the same city, or even the same time zone.

Thackway makes portable planetariums out of tents. Tents are for camping. For most of us, tents are part of that purgatory known as healthy recreation, a characteristic feature of periodic migration from the cities to isolated patches of landscape that have been designated as “scenic”. The purgatory is always brief—a vacation followed by a return to work—but camping is also implicitly a rehearsal for a future catastrophe, a forced exodus in which an entire city flees in to the wilderness, like the Israelites in the Sinai desert. My father, who forced me on many camping trips, told me decades afterwards that the word “sin” comes from the name of the “Sinai”. To be “in sin” is to be in a perpetual state of suffering in an estranged landscape. That is, your camping is a manifestation of your sins.

As is typical of Australian artists, Thackway understates her intentions. Schooled in the modesty of a culture that conceals its origins, she describes her installations as “an avenue for escapism”, as if they are trivial—heterotopical novelties that can be enjoyed and forgotten at will. Outwardly reticent, they also politely adapt to the contingencies of a group show, sitting quietly on the floor until the viewer enters them. Thackway is lying. They are not trivial, they’re gravid with theology.

As she well knows, the tents Thackway chooses are in the shape of domes, the basic form of sacred architecture in the West. It’s the architecture that descends from heaven, the architecture that denies gravity, not to mention the architecture of the womb, and in the case of the formosa style of Renaissance church it is all three. It’s also the architecture of the bubble, the private atmosphere, the grey nomad and the feral. Once inside Thackway’s tent, you realise that you are in a panorama created by two digital projectors. You are on a private desert island, surrounded by water on all sides, and sometimes crashing over you. It’s a cosmos in a suitcase, a travelling valise pregnant with the origin of the world.

CLARETHACKWAY

Detail from The View From Here, 2013, Claire Thackway

31BREATHING ROOM —

As Thackway notes, the work offers the possibility of experiencing that ‘oceanic feeling’ that Freud warned against. The dangers of the oceanic feeling are well documented. It produces a feeling of profundity that is also a refusal to think further, a placid contemplation of oneness without the admission of specific differences, of conflicts, of context. The oceanic feeling is a bath in the irrational.

The last email I sent was from Venice. “Venice, eh?”, Thackway wrote, “lucky you.” Praise like that is always loaded. It could be read as “you spoilt brat”. As is universally known, a week in Venice is a week in Disneyworld, except that the props are authentic, and it’s an earthly paradise if you can overlook the plumbing. This is false. Venice was founded not so much as a paradise as a campsite in hell, constructed close to the dead huddled on the beach, and every single stone is the product of artifice. The city began as a refugee camp, built behind a maze of channels in a malaria ridden tidal swamp, a last resort from barbarian tribes as the Roman Empire collapsed in the West. Some of the refugees fled further east to Byzantium. Others had nowhere to go other than into the sea, so they stayed amongst the fishermen, perched on mudflats in huts built on pinewood piers. With their syncretic Christian and Roman beliefs, they prayed to the saints and watched for auguries from shoals of fish and flocks of birds. On the sand where the birds roosted—the birds knew where their young would be safe from the tides—they made a covenant with the Adriatic and built their parishes. The city was an act of faith.

Within each parish church, in each dome, this act repeats itself in iconography. The saints watch down from the heavenly firmament as the holy spirit is shown descending in the form of a bird. A hundred variations of the same message: peace be with you, there will be a new beginning.

Adam Jasper, 2013

Detail from The View From Here, 2013, Claire Thackway

33BREATHING ROOM —

NADIAWAGNER

As we move about in our daily lives, we pass through series of rooms and other enclosures that segment and contain volumes of the largely invisible and unnoticed atmosphere that sustains us. While breathing is involuntary and intrinsic to survival, it is also exceedingly fragile and relies on the delicate equilibrium of molecules in any given space. Our biological instinct to breathe is monitored by our sense of smell, as the chemical structure of atmospheres are processed directly by the oldest part of our brain, the limbic system. Here, at our proto-mammalian core, they are consolidated with our emotions and long-term memories before we can access them objectively or linguistically. As we evolved a bipedal stance and increasingly used our hands to mediate our relationship with the world, this animal sense has been relegated in favour of sight, hearing and touch. In Nadia Wagner’s work, however, scent is brought to the foreground of our sensory experience revealing a new perspective on our spatial relationship to our surroundings and our vulnerability to the atmosphere that sustains us. She achieves this, not through allegory or symbol, but in a direct, corporeal experience of literal ‘breathing room’.

Engaging with Wagner’s work in this exhibition requires curiosity tempered with a degree of trust. The work consists of a bottle filled with a chemical solution, paper test strips and a contemporary gas mask. Visually, this tableau is both an invitation and a warning, yet its meaning cannot be accessed presciently through visual cues alone. Contained in the bottle is a solution of the ester, isoamyl acetate, a chemical compound with a variety of naturally occurring and industrial functions. Smelling cloyingly of imitation banana, it is present in several fruits as well as being the pheromone released when a bee loses its sting, inciting the hive to swarm. Industrially, it is used as a solvent and to evoke the flavour of banana or pear in foods. However, in the context of Wagner’s work, its most important quality is its volatility. It is this volatility that makes isoamyl acetate what G.W. Piesse, the nineteenth century English chemist and musically inclined taxonomist of scent, considered a ‘top note’, a scent consisting of small, light molecules that strike the senses quickly and intensely before dissipating within five to fifteen seconds. It is this speed of penetration that made isoamyl acetate an ideal substance for testing the efficacy of the seals on gas masks, a WWI invention used to counter the poisonous gas attacks of trench warfare that altered a sites atmospheric make up, turning one’s enemy’s natural breathing instinct against them. The inclusion of the skull-like gas mask in this exhibition is an explicit technical/historical link with the isoamyl acetate. However, whilst as an object it is symbolic of our reliance on our fragile atmosphere, in practice, it also throws our relationship with space into relief.

isoamyl acetate.

“ One cannot separate body from mind, nor the senses from the intellect, particularly in a field where the unendingly repeated jading of our organs calls for sudden shocks to revive our understanding.” Antonin Artaud, 19931

35BREATHING ROOM —

Victoria Carruthers Carruthers completed her Ph.D at the University of Essex in 2012 on the work of Dorothea Tanning. Her dissertation examines some of the recurrent themes that underlie Tanning’s oeuvre and the artist’s preoccupation with feminine embodied experience. Victoria teaches modern and contemporary art history at the University of Sydney, COFA and the National Art School and her research interests lie at the intersection of visual art, music, literature and cultural studies. Recent publications include essays on Tanning’s sculptures and the music of John Cage in Art, History and the Senses, an exploration of gothic imagery in Tanning’s work, a critique of Marc Quinn’s sculpture and an examination of the surrealist poetry of Joyce Mansour.

Georgina Cole Cole is an art historian, lecturer, and museum educator. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010 with a thesis on doors and architectural imagery in eighteenth-century genre painting and has published articles on space and art in interdisciplinary journals. Her current research project addresses visual histories of sensation, with a particular focus on representations of blindness and the blind in the early modern period. She is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School, and Coordinator of Photography Programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Lauren Commens Commens is a Sydney based artist who works mainly in photo-media. Her practice explores the idea of poeticised architecture, specifically the poetic representation of interior spaces. Her work is a meditation on space that suggests the uncanny, the melancholy and the fragmented memories of moments past. Recent exhibitions include the collaborative work We Are Sol Lewitt shown at the 13 Rooms Parlour Project, 2013 and Autonomy at Fraser Studio, 2012. Lauren is in her final stages of completing a Bachelor of Design in Photography and Situated Media at The University of Technology, Sydney.

Yvette Coppersmith Since graduating with a BFA (Painting) from VCA, 2001, Coppersmith’s practice has focused on portraiture and expanded in the past 3 years to include interior-scapes. Exhibiting in Melbourne and Sydney, as well as a finalist in The Archibald, The Doug Moran, Portia Geach, RBS, Fletcher, Arthur Guy, and the winner of Inaugural Metro Art Prize. Commissioned portraits include Rupert Myer AM, Justice Rosemary Balmford, Rabbi Fred Morgan. Coppersmith is included in collections of Art Bank, Benalla Regional Gallery, Victorian Supreme Court, Temple Beth Israel, Melbourne High School, The Knox School, Holding Redlich Lawyers, and private collections. Coppersmith is represented by Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne.

Mark deVitis De Vitis is a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at the National Art School. He also coordinates the Art History course at the University of Sydney, as part of the University Preparation Program. In addition to his teaching, this year he will contribute to the Diploma Lecture Series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and has two publications in development. A chapter on intermarriage and cultural exchange will be published through Ashgate later this year, and an article on dress, transgression and social collaboration will soon appear in the Swedish art journal, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift (Journal of Art History).

Lisa Gorton Gorton’s first collection Press Release was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award and won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Lisa completed a doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University and was awarded the John Donne Society Medal for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Lisa has written a children’s novel, Cloudland. Her second poetry collection Hotel Hyperion, also from Giramondo, came out this year. Her novel The Life of Houses is due from Scribe in 2014.

Mike Hewson Hewson is an installation artist from Christchurch. His practice is a dialogue between art and architecture, questioning the nature of our relationship to civic spaces. He distorts the existing features of sites in order to amplify the viewer’s experience of an environment and challenge established perceptions of space. His background in Civil Engineering has complimented his recent practice allowing Hewson to work both at a large scale and with structural materials. In Sydney, he has held a residency with the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, and in Christchurch his installations have metamorphosised the earthquake damaged buildings in the cordoned red-zone of the CBD.

BIOS

The experience of this work has three interactive stages, each of which reveals new possible interpretations. By smelling the isoamyl acetate with a test strip one becomes aware, first, of the choking intensity of the smell as it hits one’s respiratory system, and second, by the speed with which the scent diffuses as the molecules separate throughout the entire gallery space. The next stage of the work is to trial the mask with a fresh test strip. Tightening the mask around one’s head one must concentrate to search for vestiges of odour before sealing oneself in to the artificial atmosphere, which is arguably the smallest of interiors or breathing rooms, linked to the outside by a near-impermeable membrane. Breathing through this barrier heightens an awareness of one’s own interior, one’s lung capacity and the ten to twenty cubic metres of air that we pass through our bodies every day. The overall effect is a matryoshka of volumetric spatial parameters, spiralling out from within one’s body to incorporate rooms, buildings, cities and the stratosphere.

Whilst Wagner’s use of isoamyl acetate has an historical and scientific precedence, its use in a gallery space is also noteworthy. Galleries are, on the whole, exemplars of neutrality. Serving as vessels for an ever-changing array of objects, they themselves often have a low visual impact and, like much of the Western world since the eighteenth century, are deodorised to allow for the focusing of the higher senses. Scent is indeed a distracting force, often colouring experiences with acute, but undefinable emotions and memories that we have trouble finding a direct vocabulary for. Indeed, there is little or no successful taxonomy of scent in any Western languages. The scent of isoamyl acetate, however, functions on a slightly different plane as a chemical simulacrum of a naturally occurring odour. By isolating the essence of a particular, complex and opaque scent, such as that of a banana, the hyperreal image of a banana can be triggered identically without it being directly tied to any singular personal experience, evoking a similar reaction in each of us. Isoamyl acetate is also an inherently ambiguous scent. At once sweet and lolly-like, its chemical intensity is repugnant. Bridging the dichotomy of the foul and the fragrant, it stymies our limbic reaction, allowing us to focus on its effect as much as its meaning.

Eschewing the hypermnesic or nostalgic aspects of our sense of smell, Nadia Wagner uses scent to heighten our awareness of our respiratory system and of our reliance on the atmosphere we pass through our bodies at a traverse every day. She evokes a consciousness of our fragile ecological equilibrium alongside a vertiginous sense of our existence in the vastness of the atmosphere; in other words, a direct, corporeal experience of the sublime. Twinned with this reaction is the work’s presence as an oblique memento mori with the skull-like gas mask and the bottle of sweet scent forming a wearable, and inhalable tableau, bringing to mind both warfare of the past and an uncertain ecological future. The quote from Artaud that begins this piece was written about theatrical performance, yet ‘the unendingly repeated jading of our organs (calling) for sudden shocks to revive our understanding’ is an elegant summation of Wagner’s work; a theatre of the senses.

By Sophie Hopmeier

1 Antonin Artaud,

‘Theatre and

Cruelty,’ The

Twentieth Century

Performance

Reader, eds.

M. Huxley, N.

Witts (London:

Routledge, 1996) 27

Michael Hill Hill is Head of Art History and Theory at the National Art School, where he lecturers in modern and contemporary art. His research interests include the Baroque, sculpture, and classical architectural theory. Michael has recently completed an interpretation of the geometry in Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and is currently writing a study of the art historian Leo Steinberg.

Sophie Hopmeier Hopmeier is a recent graduate of the National Art School, having also completed an Honours degree in Art History and Film Theory at the University of Sydney. In her artistic practice and theoretical research, Hopmeier investigates the affinities and interstices between art theory and art making with a particular interest in cinema, post-structuralism and ethnographic collections. From late 2013 to 2014, she will take up the Storrier Onslow residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and the Hospiz residency in St Christoph, Austria.

Eloise Kirk Kirk is a Sydney based artist. Her work is interdisciplinary and primarily includes small scale sculpture, distorted found objects, collage and taxidermy. She has exhibited in various Sydney commercial and Artist Run Spaces, including Papermill, Roslyn Oxley and Mori, as well as regional and interstate galleries. Eloise completed her Masters of Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts in 2013 and is a current recipient of the re-imagined Frazer Studio residency in Surry Hills.

Sara Oscar Oscar’s recent work has focussed on the cross over between photography and other mediums such as illustration, painting and sculpture. She uses photography as a performative tool to explore systems of classification and the representation of time and history. Sara received her doctorate (Visual Arts) from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, in 2007. She recently presented The Law of the Series at MOP Projects (2012), and her group exhibitions include Photographs Arranged in Series at Sutton Projects, Melbourne, 2012, and The Containers Project, Next Wave Festival, Federation Square, Melbourne, 2004. She was nominated for the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship Exhibition (2004) and received the Kodak Award for Excellence in Photomedia (2010).

Adam Jasper Smith Jasper is an art historian and curator based in Sydney. His doctoral dissertation was on minor aesthetic categories (University of Sydney). He is an occasional contributor to Cabinet, Frieze, Art Review, and Art & Australia, among others. His most recent exhibition ‘Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century’ was held at the UTS Gallery, Sydney.

Clare Thackway Thackway is a painter and video artist who currently lives in Canberra. She studied at the ANU School of Art and the National Art School and has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. In 2009 she was awarded the Marten Bequest traveling scholarship and in 2011 she was a finalist in the Splendid mentoring program through which she developed this work The View From Here.

Jaime Tsai Tsai is a Sydney based art historian and curator. She recently completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney (2012) with the thesis ‘Impossible Topographies: the spatial art of Marcel Duchamp.’ Her research interests include the nexus between the art/architectural object and twentieth century philosophies of space. She is a sessional lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, the University of NSW, the University of Sydney and the National Art School.

Nadia Wagner ieoos.com

Donna West Brett West Brett is an art historian and independent curator based in Sydney. Her doctoral thesis Seeing and not seeing: photographing place in Germany after 1945 presents a theoretical and historical analysis of German photography of place after 1945 (University of Sydney, 2012). Exhibitions include Joseph Beuys and the ‘Energy Plan’, University of Sydney 2012 and The stranger’s eye, Peloton, 2010 and publications include essays in Memory Connection, Photographies and Art Gallery of NSW collection publications. Brett is also a member of the editorial committee and reviews editor for the Australian and NZ Journal of Art.