Deceased Estate

The original plan for deceased estate involved the acquisition and sculptural manipulation of an entire individual’s deceased estate. The idea was to join the objects together using rope, thereby creating a giant ball of “stuff”- similar to a ball that a dung beetle might make with cow poo. The concept was a sculptural meditation on the materials which we collect in our lives, a description of who we are or would like to be.

The idea seemed like a natural extension of a previous work- the cordial home project. Much of the strength of the cordial home project lay in its articulation of its sculptural mass. Although a house is a highly psychologically resonant object, the exhibition of the reconfigured object didn’t seem to be an overly voyeuristic exercise.

The more we thought about the premise behind deceased estate, the more unsettling it became. Although we still believed in the proposed object in a formal sense, the idea began to seem like a first year artwork (the one where you find an old suitcase full of stuff at the junkyard and do something cool with it and a bottle of shellac) with a professional budget. The entire collection of a dead person’s belongings exhibited by a pair of artists seemed too vampiristic. The more we thought about it the more it seemed like a bad idea.

A great source of much of our work probably lies in our traumatic experience of moving out of a warehouse in Surry Hills. Not that living there wasn’t fun. But when we got out of the slacks warehouse we had to tear apart the entire inside of the building, leaving just an empty shell. We had to do this as a compromise with our landlord, rather than paying alleged rent in arrears. It wasn’t all that bad as most of the material was recycled into the warren lanfranchie memorial discotheque. But it was a sad thing to do, tearing apart our own home. The most stupid part was tearing apart a wall of our room. Inside the wall, we found a water tap attached to the struts of the framework. This would have been very strange and mystifying experience had Sean not put it there three years previously in the hope of puzzling the individual who would tear down the wall in the distant future. Einsterzende neubaten!

The violent act of tearing apart your own home before its time is maybe a universal experience for artists. Any artist worth their salt will be able to give you a tale of warehouse paradise lost over a glass of cab sav at a gallery opening. It’s the same old story combining post-industrial building, artists and real estate investors (you probably know who wins that story). This year we were really lucky to be able to stay at the glasshouse, an old textiles warehouse on the Rhine River, situated on the meeting point of France, Germany and Switzerland. Of course it was too beautiful. Massive glass windows, the river literally at your doorstep, close to the supermarket. It was a speculator’s wet dream. Its days were already numbered when we got there. Most of the artists had already moved out, making the decision to jump rather than be pushed out. So we had the world’s biggest bedroom- one thousand square metres! With only a futon, desk, lounge chair, two backpacks and dirty clothes to fill it.

Downstairs, next to the gallery that had never had a single show (a sad combination of troubles with the landlord and artist ego), in the foyer was the detritus of four floors of disgruntled artists. Bits and pieces of stuff- furniture that was too big for their new residence, old artworks that didn’t work out, beer bottles, boxes of unused paints, reams of virgin drawing paper, magazines, lots of wood. We would pass this pile everyday to get to the elevator. Sometimes we would take a bit of wood out to burn on the barbecue or take an extra chair to sit on. Sometimes we’d add a bottle or two. It really was a great shit pile. A testament to the paradoxically high standard of living artists enjoy in the west and their chronic lack of housing stability.

As usual, it wasn’t until we had moved out that we realised the connection between the Rhine warehouse and our original idea of deceased estate. The contents of the foyer were essentially the contents of a deceased estate! Unlike the original plan, the contents of the ball, its location and the artists who put the work together were intrinsically linked.

Thus deceased estate was surreptitiously created, in an empty warehouse, in a gallery that never was, by two artists who never paid any rent there!

Deceased Estate was made possible with support from The Australia Council of the Arts.