Bump in at Chan

Chris Raja writes about the first few days of bump in at the Chan for the Art of the Nomad

Wednesday: Day one at The Chan

I’m with Leanne Waterhouse, Siyang Zhou and Sarah Pirrie at the Chan Contemporary Art Space. The space is large and bare and over the next seven days it will need to be filled. I’m one of six curators for this show. It’s my first time curating and I am approaching my task with trepidation.

Who said curating was about long, boozy lunches? It is more about building walls, moving panels and addressing existential questions. Will you carry that panel over there please? At this moment the most important person in the gallery seems to be Stewart, the carpenter who is drilling nails into the panels and attaching them together to make walls. It is physical labour and essential but I’m looking forward to seeing the art. Having been in Alice Springs I am not sure what the other curators have got. Will the other curators/artist’s work fit in with mine? Has the art work arrived safely?

Thursday:  Day two at The Chan

More panels.  More moving. Building walls. Chips Mackinolty, whose speech at MAGNT was the catalyst for the exhibition, breezes into the gallery for a chat. In his speech he asks the question: Who is a real Territorian and how should they be represented in a Territory that is the domain of Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal artists? Mackinolty is here with Frank Gohier from Red Hand Prints. Mackinolty argues that we, non Aboriginals, are now the real nomads in the territory. We come and go as we please. 

As the other artists and their work arrive we unwrap the art like greedy children ripping apart packaging. It is an eclectic collection of work. In Temple Export, Zhou builds a prayer room inside a wooden shipping crate. The crate is decorated with the image of Ma Zhu, a goddess with the power to control the ocean and to whom Chinese sailors pray before taking a long journey.

I’m please the work sent from the artists I’m working with arrived undamaged. As I unpack Rod Moss’s Big Rooster I’m surprised to learn Moss hasn’t had a major show in Darwin. Certainly, it’s time for him to have a retrospective here!

 Sia Cox’s work looks magnificent and delicate. Her fabric sculptures have travelled well from Alice Springs to Darwin. She is certainly about to make an impression. Rupert Betheras who has already made an impression in Darwin as a footballer, having played for St. Mary’s Football Club and Collingwood, will be hard to miss. His muscular, three-meter long, Australian Line of Spiritual Salvation once stretched is too big to bring to the gallery. We need to hire a large vehicle.

Friday:  Day three at The Chan

Suzi Lyon, the other curator from Alice Springs, has arrived. It’s nice to have two curators from Alice Springs interacting with artists in Darwin. The divide between Darwin and Alice Springs is palpable. This is a good opportunity for us all to interact and collaborate. Being a writer I am acutely aware that there isn’t much dialogue between territory artists and few opportunities like this for collaboration. Ian Hance begins creating his on-site installation Signals from the frontier using etched and inked zinc plates, motor vehicle parts, enamel paint, maps, acetate and red velvet plush cording with chrome bollards.

Saturday:  Day four at The Chan

 Looking around the gallery most of the art works are actually addressing similar themes and considerations. It seems road trains, transport in various forms, drinking, ecology, land, rubbish and rest, albeit unsettled rest,  seems to me to be the major preoccupation.  Amongst the artists and curators, there are also a number of different cultural backgrounds and influences here.

The history of migrants in the Northern Territory hasn’t been documented enough. In particular, I’m thinking of the Afghan Cameleers, who were really Indians and Pakistanis, who helped the early explorers and pioneers settle this country. The fact that the exhibition is in the Chan gallery makes it hard to ignore the Chinese influence on local history.

Sunday: Day five at The Chan

Mackinolty and Gohier are setting up their area. They are creating an installation that includes a bar and a tongue-in-cheek, history of Bogans. Included here is Colin Holt’s, Boganopoly, 2012, acrylic paint on wood and glass,  Holt’s Bogan World, 2012, an acrylic on board, Mackinolty’s, Bogan kids’ names and Franck Gohier, The bucket, 2007, an acrylic on board that is clearly a reference to a popular fast food chicken outlet. They are thorough in their critique and their installation includes Queensland Rum, eskies and a critique of Bogan names. For those that are unclear, the term Bogan is Australian vernacular, usually pejorative or self deprecating, for an individual who is recognisably from a lower middle class background. On the other side, of their bar is Sia Cox’s work, Resting and Love at the Gap View Hotel. Suzi Lyon’s, Shaped like a bird, 2012, digital sound recording of a road train can be heard. Underneath is a dusty red swag. Nearby, Siyang Zhou is busily putting the final touches to her prayer room.

The territory is a wonderful place. It is full of spirituality, alcoholism, madness and spectacular beauty. So there is little wonder it attracts artists.

Louisa, an ABC reporter and her cameraman, from 7:30 NT arrive and interview several artists and curators. After being interviewed, Suzy Lyon flies back to Alice with three more days to go for the opening.  

Will the real nomads stand up?

Chips MacKinolty

Just who is a “real Territorian”? and how should they be represented in a Territory that is the domain of Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal artists?

Consider this: over the last 20 years, the Territory’s population has risen by about 100,000 people. An assumption is that a good proportion of this is down to migration of people from interstate, a false idea.

In fact—since figures were collected in 1982—there has been a net loss of population towards interstate migration of around 14 or 15 per cent overall. On average, the NT loses about 500 people a year are permanently leaving to live interstate.

The only accounting for the growth in population is through international migration, natural increase and the growth in the Aboriginal population, which has grown from 22 to 30 per cent of our population since 1981.

They are, if anyone, the “real Territorians” The rest of us are—by and large—the “real nomads”.

The recent re-run of the debate about who is a real Territorian is a false one. The argument is mostly around the circumstances, which allow some nomads to call themselves “Territorians”, and those other nomads are to be dismissed as mere Southerners who should just go home and stop destroying our Territory Way of Life.

This exhibition takes on the problem of the “art of the nomads”, with a handful of developing Territory curators, Suzi Lyon,  Chips MacKinolty,  Sarah Pirrie,  Chris Raja,  Leanne Waterhouse  &  Siying Zhou . They in turn look at the work of J9, Rupert Betheras,  Simon Cooper,  Sia Cox,  Bill Davies,  Trevor Jenkins,  Ian Hance,  Franck Gohier,  Colin Holt,  Suzi Lyon,  Chips MacKinolty,  Rod Moss,  Suzi Lyon,  Henry Smith,  Ben Ward,  Leanne Waterhouse,  Hayley West,  Bronwyn Wright &  Siying Zhou. 

Triumph of the Bogans

Jeff Blamey, Melbourne, 2012

If you thought the most important events in the non-Aboriginal history of the Northern Territory were the expeditions of discovery of Stuart, or the surveying parties of Goyder, think again. The arrival of the Bogans from the late 20th century is having far greater effect in shaping the Northern Territory than trifling events such as the Bombing of Darwin, Cyclone Tracy or self-government.

We tend to judge Bogans in material terms, but these are misconceived; it is Bogan culture that has been wholly successful. It is not a culture embedded in bourgeois cultural items, such as original books, paintings or music, but in the act of adoption and consumption of a narrow and conformist range of artefacts. Their creativity lies not in the vapid pursuit of “the new”, but in a cultural hegemony through conformity: in remixed songs rather than new ones, prêt-à-porter foods rather than cordon bleu, the derivative rather than the daring.

Bogans have a vital knowledge about the pursuit of happiness which few other Australians have tried to acquire. Other Australians crossing lonely suburbs have died of thirst within a mile of hidden Bundy or VB which, with the aid of Bogans, they could have tapped. Lost, they wander aimlessly through environments which display the hidden signs of plasma televisions. They often conclude that the world is mean and hungry, not realising that some regions in the course of four seasons provide a wider variety of KFC and McDonald’s than a gourmet in Paris would eat in an extravagant year.

Indeed, if a Bogan from Karama in the early 21st century had been captured as a curiosity by a Stokes Hill Wharf cruise ship, and if he had travelled all the way to Double Bay and on to Toorak, and seen how the average Australian lived, he might have said to himself that he had now seen the Third World and all its material poverty, hardship and cultural sterility.

In the Northern Territory, the Bogans have thrived in their newly discovered Eden, nowhere less than in the northern suburbs of Darwin and the pioneering outposts of Palmerston and beyond: this paradise is indeed witnessing the triumph of the Bogans.

As scholars, we must learn to understand the Bogan and celebrate—perhaps even embrace—this way of life: the wearing of high vis chic clothing, their ritual displays of Southern Cross tattoos, their harmony with the environment, and the fact that their apparent wanderings actually form a regular pattern of movements between work and play, between drinks and fishing.

As other researchers have pointed out[1]:

The bogan today defies income, class, race, creed, gender and logic. The bogan is defined by what it does, what it says and, most importantly, what it buys. Those who choose to deny the bogan on the basis of their ... home, their stockbroking career or their massive trust fund choose not to see the bogan. They merely see old class battles revisited. Likewise, the bogan is no mere “tradie”. Even if tradies remained low-income workers, many bogans are affluent. And they set themselves apart by their efforts to stand out by conforming as furiously, and conspicuously, as possible.

… (i)t is time to bring to the world’s attention the means by which we can keep the world’s bogans happy. The word bogan has had a bad rap of late—still associated with wife beaters, flannelette, VB, utes and mullets. But this conceals the new, modern bogan. The bogan with money. The bogan with aspirations. The bogan with Ed Hardy t-shirts.

I can only concur, and the Northern Territory provides the perfect environment for that happiness to be achieved.

List of works

Franck Gohier, Keep Left, acrylics plus mixed media on hand riveted aluminum

Franck Gohier, The bucket, 2007, acrylic on board

Colin Holt, Boganopoly, 2012, acrylic paint on wood, glass top

Colin Holt, Bogan World, 2012, acrylic on board

Chips Mackinolty, Bogan Baby names, 2012, inkjet print on paper 

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[1]                   http://thingsboganslike.com/about, accessed 1 March 2012.

Living in the middle of everywhere

Suzi Lyon, Alice Springs, 2012  

In responding to the premise that those in the Territory who are from elsewhere fit into a nomadic genre, three Alice Springs based artists come to discuss how they came to be here, in the middle of nowhere, and what it means for them.

Many people living in the central part of the Territory at least, come from elsewhere. Some travel, linger, and years later realise they are still here. Others come for specific jobs or projects, leave, leave not to return, or they return again and again so that the lines that define where their home is, blurs. I personally feel I have three homes: Alice, Northern New South Wales and New Zealand,  and move regularly and easily between the three to feed my soul rather than my body,  to keep the links  and relationships with the familial, with other ways of  being, and  with other physical  properties of earth and sky.

And I do this because I can. Time and space is traversed easily and frequently via online airline bookings.  Like a rubber band with many trajectories, I and my fellow Centralians fling outwards to every point of this land, and return.  Other journeying, usually of the family kind at the end of the year, involves the big drives that eventually empty you out of this wide open land, edging you into increasingly defined spaces that converge finally into the constructed angles of towns and cities. The reverse drive, half way across the whole continent, returns you to a small desert town in the middle of a blazing summer, perhaps slightly shell shocked, and wondering why indeed you do live here, or repeat this madness year after year. And there is the loss too, the great loss of friends who move away, far away, and how easily and suddenly you can feel abandoned and insignificant.

But as the summer eases, the year takes on its momentum. The perspective of the country opens up into you, and you open up to it. You can be reminded that here, in the middle of nowhere, there is more active involvement and conscious awareness of the rest of this land, and therefore this does feel like the middle of everywhere else.

And it is important not to forget those who are born in this land, and whose land it is like none other. Working on an Alywerre community, about a half day’s drive from Alice, I was with some men and we were painting a mural together on a big tin shed. They were nice blokes, very polite. They were smoking a lot of cigarettes, and I asked them if they could smoke away from me, as it was making me cough.

Next moment when I looked up, they were nowhere to be seen. I scanned the horizon, and there they were, having downed their paint brushes, way over under the only tree in the vicinity, smoking.

Later I asked one of them, Richard, had he been away from his country much?

He said yes, he had been to Adelaide once.

I asked him, how he had liked it down there.

Oh, I didn’t like it at all, he said, it was really boring.

How come, I asked?

You couldn’t see anything was his reply. All the buildings got in the way. If you wanted to see, you needed a hill, and they were really hard to find. 

I looked around me, past the smoking tree, out to the few houses all painted a desert kind of pink, beyond the scattered hulks of slowly disintegrating cars, desert grasses swaying in the wind, along the  twisting line of red river gums along the creek bed, up onto the red ridge of rocky outcrops, further to convoluting ranges, on and on into a vastness of sky and space, and agreed that indeed you could see an awful lot out here.

And this is why we are here.

List of Works

Suzi Lyon, Prayer Swag, 2012, canvas, cotton, straw, print  

Suzi Lyon, Shaped like a bird, 2012, digital sound recording

J9 Stanton, Ode to those who didn’t stay, 2012, projection and sound

Ben Ward, Environment Map V3.1, 2012, enamel teapot single channel eight hour video loop, iPod touch

Henry Smith, Terra Firma + Fire, 2012, oil on canvas

Henry Smith, Terra Firma + Water, 2012, oil on canvas

Henry Smith, John Hayes Rockhole, 2010, oil on board

On the Move- Travel Practice of the Nomads

Sarah Pirrie, Darwin 2012

The Northern Territory has a restless, aspirational psyche. It’s preoccupied by notions of the frontier and the city’s place on the fringe of South East Asia’s global economic machinations, be it considerations of future suburban growth, new townships, the deployment of US marines or projected mining operations. Contrast this bundle of nervous energy with the sustained dynamics of the region’s Aboriginal people and Environment. Change here cannot be made manifest through a mere number plate slogan. It requires a travel practice  which negotiates the ancient past with today’s and tomorrow’s generation, all existing simultaneously in seemingly impossible alignment.

It is here we confront the travel practice of territory artists and identify how their activity provokes important considerations of the relationships between time and place. Whether using GPS technology or undertaking the simple act of walking, both local and incoming Territory artists are Industrialised nomads. More than a mere expedition from the centre to the periphery, travel as it relates to the Territory Nomad fulfils a genuine need for spatial and temporal connectedness. To begin travelling is to acknowledge a starting point and a destination, inviting a conscious acknowledgement of past, present and future and a subsequent intimacy with subject and place.

Bronwyn Wright, Ian Hance, Bill Davies and the response collaboration of Trevor Jenkins’ 2012 Scarecrows by Siying Zhou and Leanne Waterhouse all acknowledge their nomadic underpinnings as they pass through the Northern Territory and give pathos to moments of change. Each has a travel practice which captures the junction between the conceptual frames of their artwork and the transitory physicality of place.

In our preordained environment, local sites often provide an opportunity to rethink relationships to place while expressing interconnectivity with the rest of the world. Bronwyn Wright’s 2005 earth drawing Running Dog and Ian Hance’s 2012 on-site installation Signals from the frontier resonate within this exhibition as still images or archival fragments of the main event. For Hance the early car wrecks signal a reference to past histories and impending loss as the crumpled metal skeletons make way for new suburbs or dissolve into the earth in a salt corroding reckoning with Nature.

Both Hance and Wright use Global Positioning Satellite technology to assist in their investigative and making processes. This global connectivity also illustrates the ephemeral reality of place. Hance’s research of pre-Cyclone Tracy car wrecks leads him to Leanyer Swamp rekindling memories of Wright’s footprint and extensive use of this site. Meaning of place remains eternally linked with personal counters and guides.

For Bill Davies’ and Trevor Jenkins the artists’ walking presence is realised through the art making process. Davies’ horizontal drawings manifest his journey within their construction and undulating presence. Davies’ travel is one which is actively experienced, as demonstrated by his various work boots aged with wear. Accompanying this are his walking tools; walking and painting sticks dipped in paint. As a contact sport Davies’ traces and retraces marking and dancing with time and place.

Encapsulating a true travel practice Trevor Jenkins invites a collaborative spirit and an active community response through his ephemeral ‘rubbish sculptures’. In this exhibition, artists Siying Zhou and Leanne Waterhouse recreate Jenkins walking trail through a documented tableau. Trevor Jenkins is a local artist and homeless advocate who walks each day collecting ‘rubbish’ which he ritualistically piles by the side of the road creating ‘scarecrows’. These roadside memorials are extremely popular with Darwin residents and invite open discussion and free opinions about all our travel practice.

Through these and other travellers we re-evaluate the contribution people make to place and consider that a moment can be instantaneous as well as the culmination of a lifetime’s achievement.

 

List of Works

Bill Davies, No Fixed Address, 2012, Black and white ink and oxide on dessin canson paper

Ian Hance Signals from the frontier, 2012, gallery Installation: Etched and inked zinc plates, motor vehicle parts, enamel paint, maps, acetate; On-site Installation:

Found car wreck, etched and inked zinc plates, red velvet plush cording with chrome bollards

Bronwyn Wright, Leaping Dog, photo and photographic documentation of event

Trevor Jenkin, Siying Zhou & Leanne Waterhouse, Scarecrows, 2012, digital print on vinyl of scarecrow installations  

In The Gap

Chris Raja, Alice Springs, 2012

Driving through The Gap is something I take for granted, but not so long ago people couldn’t just walk into Alice Springs uninvited. They had to sit down at certain boundaries, like The Gap, and ask an Arrernte custodian’s permission to enter – and sometimes they weren’t welcome. Today I might travel through The Gap six times a week. Everything’s changed. With this in mind, I approached my task of contributing to ‘Art of the Nomads’ with trepidation.

I immediately considered including the work of Rupert Betheras, Sia Cox and Rod Moss, all of whose work I was intimately familiar with. Like the work of these artists, I feel closely connected to the idea of being a ‘Territory Nomad.’ But I wanted to understand it more. Consulting a dictionary, I discovered the term ‘nomad’ comes from the Greek nomas from nemo, to pasture, an ironic concept in the middle of the desert, but one that suggested a kind of nourishing, rejuvenating quest.

It made me re-evaluate my idea of what a nomad was, and is. Growing up in Calcutta, I’d thought of nomads as being Aboriginals, Mongolians and some tribal Indians. I thought these people were true nomads as they roamed seeking seasonal foods and fresh water. Since settling in the Alice, the definition of this word ‘nomad’, keeps altering. There are ‘grey’ nomads, trans-national nomads – and artistic ones.

When I first came to the central desert, it struck me how many Australian colloquialisms describe places ‘beyond the beyond’ – beyond the black stump, the never never, the outback, walkabout…they’ve all got associations with a lack of belonging. The nationalistic, tribalistic idea of ‘our country’ surely isn’t a nomadic idea!

The more I moved around the country, the more I thought about the meaning of the word. Leaving, then returning, to a place forces one to see it more clearly. A simple act of movement, like walking, helps form the raw material of our intelligence. The history of nomadism can be traced back to the first Homo sapiens leaving Africa, even if most societies, having started out nomadic, ended up sedentary. As a general rule, Bruce Chatwin writes in Songlines, migratory species are less aggressive than sedentary ones because the migration is a leveller. The journey dissolves the need for hierarchies and displays of dominance (even the fearsome Khanates of Central Asia exercised a kind of democracy, with regular assemblies which decided matters of law, war and peace).

On Mohammed Street, some African and Indian men are playing badminton. Across the road at the Gap Youth Centre, Arrernte boys mill about. Someone’s playing drums as a mob of desert dwellers wander past, talking animatedly. A woman shouts something in a language I don’t know. This is a place of drunks and criminals, adventurers and missionaries, misfits and artists. It’s a place where you can slide into eternity or obscurity, or both. As always, amongst the mad, the dispossessed and the spiritual alcoholics, are the artists.

Cutting into the narrow Gap is the Todd River, a dry sandy river bed lined with tall eucalypts. The ranges loom all over this place, a constant reminder of time’s incomprehensible dimension. While walking ‘round The Gap, along the river, I was surprised to discover that, I too, am a nomad. I’ve travelled a long way, seeking new adventures in different lands.

The desert and its inhabitants fascinate me, as they have other artists and writers: from Sydney Nolan and John Olsen to Xavier Herbert, Robin Davidson and many others from Australia and around the world. And now, Sia Cox, Rupert Betheras and Rod Moss.

Sia Cox makes a striking impression with her fabric sculptures. Her sculptures are portraits of people she knows; people who make an impression on her with their personalities.

Rupert Betheras an intuitive artist, evoking wide-ranging interests and life-experiences. I feel his paintings almost act like a diary, but in this diary he isn’t simply telling you what he is doing or where he has been. Certainly, the places he visits and the people he meets invariably end up influencing his work.

Rob Moss’s paintings grapple with big questions about identity, friendship, place and belonging. His work depicts the centre of Australia in a unique way. He paints his Aboriginal friends in various scenes and guises.

What all these artists have in common is a Western visual aesthetic that informs their depiction of this timeless land and its ancient people. They are all brave, curious and complicated.

List of Works

Rupert Betheras, Australian line of spiritual salvation, 2011, oil and enamel on linen

Sia Cox, Resting, 2012, mixed media

Sia Cox, Love at the Gap View Hotel, 2012, mixed media

Rod Moss, Big Rooster, 1992, synthetic polymer & graphite on dessin canson paper

Thinking about nomads

Siying Zhou, Darwin, 2012

Nomad: a member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals and has no permanent home. (Oxford English Dictionary)

To consider the subject of nomad seems an invitation to query who we are. Nomads can be any nationality, any age, any race and work in any area of society, thus projecting a sense of equality. What can we gain from understanding the life of a nomad? Taking three common activities--packing, preparing and praying--as entrance points, the work of three nomadic artists are offered for contemplation and dialogue.

1. Packing:

The action of packing transfers objects into containers of varying forms, ready to move to the next destination. When the material, size and functionality of the containers have all been considered, this luggage can reveal an economic status, social position, a particular attitude towards life and cultural background.

In Cooper’s work Luggage Limit, four bags made of blue and white striped plastic sheeting are shaped into disfigured human bodies; a different limb is missing from each body bag. Sealed by zips, the bags are hollow and filled with air. The work speaks of the movement of vulnerable people. Aspects of migration are exposed: what you can take with you as an immigrant or refugee, whether physical, cultural or psychological, is limited and incomplete.

2. Preparing:

In the process of packing and moving, the complexity of life is summarised and realised as masses of objects. Every object from the past is revisited, evaluated and selected. It is a process of making decisions and judgment. Some objects survive the reshuffle, others are left behind.

West’s sculpture So Far poses many questions about this selection process. Should we keep everything? Should we be loyal to objects? Turning a tablecloth from Paris and her wedding dress from Yogyakarta into an organic shaped artwork, West injects the objects with fresh memories at this new stage of life. Through the meditative process of cutting and sewing, West psychologically moves on and considers her current situation as ‘so far away, yet so far so good’.

3. Praying:

The movement of people and prayer can offer the world a view of ritual culture, a discovery of the unseen or unknown. The wish for wealth and happiness flows along all stops visited, and a package of spiritual beliefs comes along for the ride. Temples of differing religions are built to provide a home in the search for a peaceful mind, connecting the past and future, refilling strength and obtaining a sense of security.

In Temple Export, Zhou builds a mobile prayer room that consists of a wood crate with bicycle wheels. It can be taken apart and folded flat for easy transportation. Simulating the function of a temple, the crate is decorated with the image of Ma Zhu, a goddess with the power to control the ocean and to whom Chinese sailors pray before taking a long journey. The work tends to address nonstop religious practice by the nomads and directs visitors to stop for a moment and pray. Zhou intends to draw out positive energy and hope for a better life and prosperous future from this ceremony.

Under imposed or voluntary travel, nomads are drawn together by the force of continental drift, political boundaries, obligations and sometimes by love or hate. Journeys are not only mechanical and physical, but are to be considered as emotional and organic. Lives can significantly shift when new destinations are reached. Cooper, West and Zhou are invariably connected through their nomadic journeys and stories.

List of Works

Simon Cooper, Luggage Limit, 2010, plastic.

Hayley West, So Far, 2012, fabric, cotton.
Siying Zhou, Temple Export, 2012, mixed media.