[T]he defeat of colonial rule was the defining event of the 20th century – not 1917, or 1949, or 1989. Tom Nairn1
Since the late 1960s site, and locality, have been inscribed as subject in contemporary art –
and have become the object of critical enquiry. They are coded as primary signs in the production and reception of the work. The break with the hermetic, self-contained, self-referential, qua-modernist, work is understood to have been signaled by Harald Szeeman’s exhibition
When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head (Bern, 1969) that privileged and categorized “multi-formal or non-rigid art,” “conceptual or ideational art,” “earthworks and organic-matter art,” “geometric abstraction,” and “procedural and process art”. The typologies [and the works we see in photographs of the exhibition] share a concern with site-specificity – reflecting their surroundings – and process.
The first audience for this work had to relax their attitude towards a historicist model of the exhibition [read salon] and a similarly historicist attitude towards the object – as the gallery had moved, along with the work, into ‘the expanded field’. In the United States artists and critics had already made a series of breaks with the academic and then modernist conception of art.
But the institution of art including: the conditions of its display – the museum or MoMA; and its public reception – the audience, hadn’t budged. This is why I, like many before me, refer to an exhibition, and a curator, that moved the whole ground.
This is hardly news but I write with intent. The artists and the work that are the objects of my essay are from Australia, and are new to European exhibiting culture. This relocation evinces a new reading and a new set of referents: apposite to artists working in the antipodes or post-colo- nial condition for whom Europe and European art is specter. Moreover, they produce site-specific sculptural installation that demands grounded critique. The task of writing about art made under these conditions is to chart its conceptual development from source to site – reflecting how the work itself unfolds.
***
Readers familiar with the writing of the magical realists – Miguel Angel Asturias, Mikhail Bulgakov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie – know the power of historical coincidence: and recog- nize the immanence of the local. Australia underwent a profound change, under the guise of new- liberal economics, in 1988–1989. It hardly registered in the annals of World History focused on the tumult of the Wall coming down but it changed the nature of social and capital relations in that country permanently. Along with the deregulation of the banking sector to attract foreign capital, the relaxing of corporate ownership laws also to attract global investment, the re-floating of the Australian Dollar pegged to the US Dollar, the Hawke Labor Government [the first new Labor government] enforced fee-paying upon the university education system. It reads, versus the ‘Velvet Revolution’ and the collapse of the DDR, like the small plop of a stone in a large pond: yet the ripples are still roiling on the surface of Australian society.
Announced in 1987 only a few months before the commencement of the 1988 university year students of that class – and their families – had no opportunity to save the requisite sums for fees.2 The effect on those people whom didn’t have sizeable residual savings to call upon was ‘incendiary’ and an immediate social division was enacted along monetary lines. The repair was State sponsored student debt. Modeled on the US system, students unable to pay cash fees could borrow the value of their fees and a sum equivalent to a basic state stipend [eligibility for state stipends for undergraduates was narrowed to the point of elision] for books and contribu- tion towards living costs. A geographic social division was also effected living costs are much higher in Australia’s two metropolis – Sydney and Melbourne – than the other cities – Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, and Perth – so students living there were placed under greater financial strain.3 Additionally, university fees were higher for the topflight institutions in those cities because of student demand so debt burdens and the necessity to work in part-time employment to-make-ends-meet were greater, placing extreme pressure on actual study and productivity (and changing labor/employment relations).
The small stone cast radically altered the Australian way-of-life. Until that point a measure for success in Australia was ‘home ownership’ or at least ‘home mortgage ownership’ that is the ability to borrow from a lending institution to finance the purchase of a dwelling. And university graduates typically belonged to the group of people destined to higher income and attainment of an Australian way-of-life. No longer. At the completion of their degree many graduates had accumulated debt to the point of canceling their chance of homeownership; instead their principal income would need to be channeled into acquitting their tertiary legacy and not the accumulation of equity towards home ownership. Students whom were graduating from non-vocational programs such as the Fine Arts, Humanities, and Liberal Arts, traditionally impoverished fields, were the most disaffected group – to which Claire Healy, Sean Cordeiro, and myself belong.
A blow was struck to the order of property relations like no other.
Fast-forward to 2000 and the Sydney Olympics. This was an ‘Australian’ event that wasn’t overshadowed by the march of European history. Like every Olympic capital the city was gentri- fied for the sake of global and televisual tourism. And while positive benefits were accrued by the populace in the form of improved commuter infrastructure and improved aviation infrastructure these were outweighed by the deleterious nature of the changes: that are actually measured as successes by State and corporate business linked to the earlier deregulatory and capital reno- vations. Sydney attracted the world’s attention – it became what Wallpaper* coined a ‘world
city’ – and tourists and capital and US Dollars flowed, and continue to flow, in its direction. The overall effect of this flow is inflationary as prices of consumables and commodities increase to match the buying power of the internationals. Nothing increased more in value than property.
In fact Sydney’s harbor-front property (especially with a view of the Sydney Opera House or Harbor Bridge) became a benchmark for the bullishness of international rent and realty markets. Meanwhile, income of a large proportion of Sydney-siders has fallen behind the rate of inflation (or even remained static since the election of the Howard Government in March 1996). Living standards are lagging and the prospect of attaining the cornerstone of the Australian way of life,
a home, is rapidly disappearing over the hill for an increasing number of the population – and the monthly rent is more difficult to pay (leading to the rise of ‘apartment hopping’ or urban nomadism moving to cheaper rental locations consonant with inflation).
These are the Sydney/Australian social conditions from which Cordeiro and Healy’s practice has emerged which they have stated plainly themselves:
Our collaborative practice was born from our experience of living in a city that was trans- formed by an Olympic games. Having lived on the margins of a city that was dramatically altered, not by war or natural disaster, but by an athletics carnival has left an indelible print on our work…
***
The aforementioned processes are hardly unique nor is the entwining of artists’ fortunes with
those of the urban fabric: art and gentrification have been marching hand-in-hand in New York, Cologne, and London for 40 years. And artists escaping hand-in-hand from those newly gentrified burbs at an equivalent rate. This is certainly the case of Berlin, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien where the exhibition is situated, since 1989. As has been written about many times, Berlin because of
its expanses of depopulated former-DDR living spaces has become a virtual artists’ community as practitioners from all over the world have migrated to Berlin for rental prices much cheaper than home. Because this sort of immigration doesn’t represent a monetary capital flow – it is a cultural/ intellectual capital flow – it hasn’t had an inflationary impact on cost of living.
The New World faces new problems and Cordeiro and Healy belong to the first generation wholly caught in the cycle. They also belong to a generation of artists whose practice is entwined with a burgeoning circuit of [Australian] traveling scholarships, visiting artist or residency programs, and the consolidation of corporate and government sponsorship of the visual arts and the exporting of national art – and artists – as adjuncts to policies of culture linked to Foreign Affairs and Trade. I might hazard that the mobility of this generation has been aided by freedom from property own- ership or that, to an extent, it stands in for property ownership – an artist’s measure of success (or feeling of safety) is measured by having another residency to go to.
***
The generation that has emerged – in the developed world – unable to afford owning a home is
roughly equivalent to what we have come to understand as ‘Generation X’ the term popularized by Douglas Coupland’s ‘user-guide’ Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture (1991). We know that GenXers spend a high proportion of their disposable income – as it is useless saving for ‘investment’ – on commodities, consumables, and entertainment including dining-out and travel. This pattern of consumption represents an outward investment in self as the commodities and public activities are signs that can be read by others of the tribe. In a sense they fill the void produced by their inability to ‘dwell,’ requiring permanence and rootedness, with things. Stuff that often has to be discarded because it falls out of fashion – meaning that despite the metaphysi- cal investment with the commodity it is an investment that comes cheap and there will be a new metaphysic around the corner.
***
This relation to property, nomadism, and the fate of the work’s destination are the material descriptors of Cordeiro and Healy’s work. The first two terms have been constant in the couple’s practice – from Australia to Europe – but the third term is inscribed via scale in its European location. The work produced at Bethanien has to travel: either be sent to Australia as the notional ‘home’ of the artists or follow them to their next location. (This could be a case of urban nomad- ism as they are thinking of remaining in Berlin beyond this residency). Meaning that it has to be easily demountable and affordable to freight: this is an economic reality for Australian artists work- ing in the Northern Hemisphere who live, along with New Zealanders, at the mercy of the longest freight-haul. 5
The recent work The Plastic Menagerie 2006, made in Berlin but not on show, is a monument to pop-cultural plastic disposability and signification. It is a whacky timber frame and glass house enclosing four swimming pool inflatables: a crocodile, a chicken, a dolphin, and an orca. The fact that three of the animals could easily be used to represent Australianness from a Berlin perspec- tive (a recent exhibition of Australian art at Hamburger Bahnhof was full of ‘creatures-shop’ art) could explain why it’s been sent to Australia for an exhibition. Proving the importance of site in receptivity. It could also be related to the legend of the Australian artist Ian Fairweather who in 1952 built a raft to ‘escape’ Australia once and for all. A Scotsman Fairweather had become enamored with South East Asia but was too impoverished to buy passage. Cordeiro and Healy have made a flotation device for taking them back: or at least a sculptural work that could return by its own device should they be unable to fund freight.
The photograph Takadanobaba 2005 is case-and-point. It documents an intervention by Cordeiro and Healy within the interior of an artists’ residency in Tokyo, Japan in which they lived for 3 months. (The title of the work is the suburb of Tokyo in which the apartment is situated). With an aesthetic dexterity sympathetic with its surroundings – evincing Japanese interior design or Zen – the photograph documents a temporal sculpture/installation that gathers the entire contents
of the house into a stack against the wall. It is a case of what you see is what you get, as the belongings are what previous residential artists have left behind: and what the couple [will] hando- ver to the next resident. Nothing is known about the previous owners of the work so the photo- graph doesn’t scan from a psychoanalytic perspective – unless analyzed as a holiday snap taken by the artists (were they that impoverished we might wonder?) It does, however, express the antipathy of belongings to travel and the contingency of the acquisitive impulse (artists charged with defining material culture, objectively, still make bad buys).
***
Migration and its control, linked to the defeat of colonial rule, is the major crisis currently whip-
ping European politics and culture. And comes on the heels of the crisis of ‘globalization’ under- stood from the perspective of capital and commodities. Cordeiro and Healy’s practice, which is grounded in the cultural effects of both phenomena, is a reminder that forces typified as negative or destructive produce unexpected corollary and the disenfranchised can make positive contribution.
1 Tom Nairn ‘The New Furies’ New Left Review, no. 37 Jan/Feb 2006, p. 134 2 It is worth noting that the Australian education calendar runs from February-December (not September-July). 3 Sydney and Melbourne are both larger than Berlin with populations approaching 4.5 million and 3.5 million, respectively. 4 Statement emailed to the author by the artists 5 Alternately, the work needs to be configured as temporal installation.