ART FORUM SERIES 12: Artist Talk with Christina Mackie

Another Art Forum Series advertisement i received via email:

ART FORUM SERIES 12: Artist Talk with Christina Mackie

---

Thursday 2 September, 12.30pm

Highly regarded British artist Christina Mackie makes sculpture, in which layers or elements are often separate and complete in themselves. The final constructions are composites, and abstractions of meditations on subjects that can be emotional, physical or socio-political. She uses a wide variety of materials that have ranged from DNA to watercolour, in scale from microscopic to monumental.

The installations have a definite physicality which is secondary to the idea. The "making" is a method and an instrument to contemplate the idea. The work is not a narrative or an illustration but an exploration. She is currently working on geological formations, the landscape as a character. Christina Mackie is Arts Council Oxford Melbourne Fellow, 2010. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain, the British Art Show, in the Pusan Biennial 2008, CCA Kitakyushu amongst other places.

----------------

Imagine stepping in a dog turd, or at least you think its a dog turd.  Until you inspect the sole of your shoe and see within what was first a rather homogenous brown mash cute little pieces of corn, fennel seeds, strands of spinach. Considering the contents of the turd, we may be led to believe that the "meditation" we trod in was sculpted not by a canine but by a homo sapien.  Maybe they are not layered through the turd (the spinach strands would provide an exception), but we can surely call these constituents of the turd "elements", each still "separate and complete in themselves".  I'm going to claim that feces - that each feces - is a sculpture, which i could argue via the writings of Freud.  Yet i needn't leave the confines of the art market - i mean art world - to prove my contention: Piero Manzoni's famous "Artist's Shit" works are now part of art history; Will Delvoye has made a machine-installation, called Cloaca, that produces human-like feces; and Chris Ofili's use of elephant dung fetches great re-sale prices for his paintings.  These days, to make shit art, one only need be an artist.  

But what, you may ask, does this have to do with the work of Christina Mackie?  Maybe not much, which is also what the above advertisement for Christina's artist talk tells us about what it is that Christina the artist exactly does or makes.  The terms are so general as to be able to represent almost anything, telling us nothing other than a jumble of contextless art-theoretical keywords in the process.  Thanks.  For example, "The final constructions are composites, and abstractions of meditations on subjects that can be emotional, physical or socio-political."  So Christina meditates on a a range of diverse subjects and makes "abstractions" from these meditations.  Does that mean she talks about her thoughts?  Quite profound.  And these abstractions, installed in an art space or presented as art, "have a definite physicality which is secondary to the idea."  Is Christina here being Platonic, or is she being Kantian?  What is accomplished by stating that they have a "definite physicality"? Even the most conceptual art works take some corporeal form, even if only as text on paper and performative human behaviours that perform an understanding of the language game.  Since the corporeality of all art is mundanely self-evident, "definite physicality" must mean something else. It must be a philosophical statement.  It is obviously not Kantian, since physicality is only definite with reference to the form of human intuition, which brings the form of space, oh, and good ole' time, to experience as experience.  As the form of all possible human intuition (the other i'll let you time-keepers guess at) space - in which physicality must be sensed - is neither an idea nor at the mercy of the idea (otherwise a-priori synthetic judgements would not be possible).  Physicality is then, in its specificity, a synthesis of intuition and the categories.  But again i've been sucked into a segue, by way of which i hope i have partially elucidated what a complex philosophical claim is being made in the statement "definite physicality", which is made even more complex by adding that this "definite" (not uncertain but certain) "physicality... is secondary to the idea."  Whoa, where's my valium.

With such general claims made about works, we can only be moved ever further away from what it is that Christina actual makes.  But wait, maybe Christina does not simply make...

Now is the time we must turn towards the odd bracketing, vis quotation marks, of "making".  Such bracketing means we must reconsider what making not only means, but is.  It problematises making.  Yet the way in which this concept and/or act is problematised is not further explained.  Although the rest of the sentence may qualify this "making": "The "making" is a method and an instrument to contemplate the idea." Hence this problematic, bracketed "making" is both a method and an instrument.  Towards what?  Towards contemplation of the idea.  This sounds all very deeply Platonic.  Yet it cannot be: for Plato, the physical things of this world only illustrated, in a fallen, imperfect form, the Idea (well, that's the knuckle version of the story).  Art is hence destined to illustrate ideas.  But Christina's works are not an illustration, but an exploration.  An exploration of what?  If the contemplation of the idea is tied to the process of "making" as "method" and "instrument", but the finished work is an "exploration", where does this leave the idea, which the "definite physicality" of the finished, installed work is secondary to?

Admittedly, i am quite at a loss with trying to extract from the Art Forum email exactly what it is that Christina Mackie "makes" (or, rather, methodologises and instrumentalises into a contemplative being directed towards the idea).  So i looked her works up on google, and i must admit i definitely like them!  But I can find no correspondence between the description of her "practice" i received via email and the very corporeal, sculptural works that showed up on google images.

ART FORUM SERIES 10: Liv Barrett

I received this unfortunate email a few days back:

ART FORUM SERIES 10: Liv Barrett
Thursday 19 August, 12.30pm Liv Barrett lives in Melbourne and works across distance. Her practice developed from writing and is now a broader curatorial project that places art at the centre and extends to publishing, design, poetry, fashion, theory and discourse. In 2010 she founded Free School with Jarrod Rawlins and Nicholas Mangan with the aim of expanding the available pools of knowledge and conversation. In October she will present the first part of Hotel Theory at Y3K, a project that began from a piece of text about the city of Los Angeles and people in hotels 'playing' themselves. Mateo Tannatt will be travelling to Melbourne from LA to present work and performances. She is also a contributor and founding member of jahjahsphinx. She works at ACCA and Uplands Gallery.

Now i expect, or at least have the artlessness to hope, that Liv Barrett didn't write this multiplicitous beast of a media release, although she is probably responsible for some of the admissions therein.  Let's enter this medusa's lively, very professional and, of course, precise philosophical language, a language that clearly and movingly communicates to we, the unenlightened lay-lumpen and 'art-fan', exactly what Liv Barrett is and what she can teach us.  
Liv lives in Melbourne and apparently 'works across distance'.  Maybe, like the poor man who, spanning a deep crevice in one of Kafka's parables, gets jumped upon, Liv Barrett is a bridge.  For bridges work across distance. The internet also works across distance.  Hence maybe Liv sends emails, likely of her CV, across the globe, or maybe she has her own blog which, to our dismay, we are not informed of (well, if you can be bothered googling the term jahjahsphinx, you can prove me wrong).  Gravity also works across distance.  Indeed, it is action at a distance.  ESP, if you are a believer, also works across distance (and in cultural circles - or rather pyramids and dreamcatchers - it is a hip-thing to faux-reflexively believe and exploit such mystical auras).  Maybe working across distance relates to the succeeding sentence of the email, working across the concrete distance of a bundle of letters and introducing the reader to a brief genealogy of Liz's 'practice'.  The term practice is, in this context, used to refer to the practice of art in the same manner by which an accountant or solicitor refers to his or her practice. For in these very rational times we all must practice something, and hopefully professionally.  Liv, as the center of this practice, must then be the centre of gravity around which the phenomena belonging to this practice - namely art and associated ephermera - revolve.  Liv, we are told, places art, just like a bestowing sun, at the center of this practice.  Art is then identical with gravity and the bestowing force of the sun.  All this occurs within the subject that is Liv Barrett.  Liv is a solar system of living art.  Liv's practice, we are told, began, or rather developed, with writing.  Yet it seems Liv could not hold back the telos of her quintessence, which broke beyond the eidos of her personal logos - hungry for other forms to express itself through - to become 'a broader curatorial project' that includes 'publishing, design, poetry, fashion, theory and discourse'.  Now that's quite a post-modern mouthful.  It seems Liv Barrett, whose gravity is that of art, has her gifted hands in everything, seamlessly transcending and uniting the spheres of poetry, philosophy, design, the business of literature and... fashion, creating a higher synthesis of these in the form of a 'curatorial project', an actual post-modern gesamtkunstwerk.  And this renaissance individual lives in the very same city as I, and works at not one but two galleries!
It would, however, be quite unfair to judge Liv and her curatorial, i mean art, practice from the intestinal jargon that excreted this email.  Yet, despite the pressures of professional conformity extant in the art world - the pressure of fashion/fad - Liv must be held partially responsible insofar as she has obviously allowed herself to be thus represented by the writer of the email.  This responsibility amounts to the following: Liv has allowed herself to be represented and, in this communication, disclosed by art-jargon.  Yet if we are to look further into the matter, we may well find something else rather problematic, being that of the broad mixing of disciplines and the relation between this tendency in art, post-modern theory and the reduction of all human activity and imagining to a form that can be traded and promoted, namely the commodity form.  Once upon a time such an inter-breeding was possible under the name of religion, but Liv's practice is certainly not falling beneath this sign.  Rather, in a world where economic considerations have tended to unify all spheres beneath an economic rationality and its associated, necessarily self-deceiving ideological spin, this gesamtkunstwerk would appear to be something like an advertisement for 'our' present economic freedom (at least Adorno would wave his critically disdaining hand towards this claim).  The description of Liv and her 'practice' reads very much like a CV.  All her activities are easily reduced to this sellable form.  CVs work because human labour is something that can be reduced to - and allows itself to be reduced to - a commodity; a thing to be perused, bought and traded.  Or else it resembles a prospectus to be read by an investor.  Or a menu.  Any specialist (sic) writer of CVs will tell you about the necessity of keywords.  In terms of art-jargon, we see several in the first paragraph of the email (i won't dare enter into the second paragraph, breathless from the first): practice, project, theory, discourse.  I have touched upon the former jargon term, but must now ask unto the latter two.  What is meant by these terms insofar as they are used as art-jargon?  Is Liv Barrett a philosopher, since philosophers are said produce theories?  Yet we are not told that Liv is a philosopher (though i'm sure she dabbles in the matter), and we cannot readily leap to the conclusion that she is.  What then is meant by the inclusion of the terms theory and discourse, things or activities that Liv Barrett's 'curatorial project', which 'places art at the centre', 'extends too'?  Both terms are of course used, amongst other places, in the spheres of structural and post-structural philosophy.  I will leave it up to the reader to research the place and genealogy of these words, for to do so rigorously would take many devoted years.  It is enough for our purpose here to say that these jargon words are used such that the aura of the philosophical debates in which these terms play a role shines across the commodity Liv Barrett!  Just in the same manner as, in an advertisement, the aura of a mountainous landscape is expected to influence our impression of a car, or how a disreputable online university may garnish it's website or degree certificates with aesthetic borrowings from bluestone universities.  The mixing of disciplines, supposedly transcending the former boundaries of high and low culture - a very post-modern phenomenon - also functions as a kind of jargon with its own aura, advertising the post-modern currency of an artist or, lo, a curator.  In effect, this boundlessness once more mimics the boundlessness of the commodity form and of a global free-market economy that must be able to circulate and submit every space, place and sphere to its form of equivalence.  The apparent boundlessness of a post-modern renaissance is perhaps just a surface shifting circumscribed by the commodity form, destined to celebrate this surface because it has rid itself of any potential for historical depth.
Now may you all work across distance by turning up to Liv Barrett's speech!