sarahwalkermfa

[sarahwalkermfa]

Roslyn Oades, Bob Scott & Collaborators The Nightline, 2018. Commissioned & produced by Urban Theatre Projects. Installation, performance as part of Right Here, Right Now 2018. ‘The Nightline is an audio portrait of the night inspired by locally-sourced anonymous phone calls, left between the hours of midnight and 6am. Visitors to The Nightline are led into a mysterious late-night club, which promises companionship to the sleepless and rest to the restless. Inside they encounter a dimly lit room full of lonely tables, each equipped with a modified rotary-dial telephone and personal switchboard. The phones ring, inviting visitors to pick up and listen in. Like a cabinet of curiosities, guests are encouraged to curate their own listening experience by plugging freely between eight channels of content provided on their switchboards. As the work progresses the phone connections begin to deteriorate. The levels of phone interference continue to increase until the audio experience spills out to include an immersive surround-sound system. The room itself becomes activated, a haunting of sorts, as though the act of listening in has conjured up an electrical storm, and fragments of an epic dream-like shared-story from the city at night emerges.’

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Sarah Walker s3702933 VART3615 Dossier Critical Annotation, May 2019

As my thinking about my own practice coalesces, my collection of precedents is organised around three major topics - use of text in art, comedic tactics, and use of speculative fiction.

My interest in text is currently driven by writing by W.J.T. Mitchell, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes around the tension between narrative, which seeks to advance plot and story, and description, which arrests motion and endangers the structure of narrative. Gerard Genette says that ‘Description typically “stops” or arrests the temporal movement through the narrative; it spreads out the narrative in space’. ⁠W.J.T. Mitchell states that ‘if description takes over, narrative temporality, progress toward an end, is endangered, and we become paralyzed in the endless proliferation of descriptive detail’.⁠ In order to convey the paralysing impossibility of comprehending disaster and oblivion, I am using overwhelming description in my projects to create narratives that stall and become lost in an explosion of dense, expansive, anxious words. I am therefore collecting works that disrupt narrative through obfuscatory text, using various techniques, including fragmentation and volume. Fiona Banner’s work in particular drives a lot of my thinking and research.

Given the heavy nature of many of my areas of interest, I am fascinated by the disruptive potential of levity as an attitude in artworks dealing with taboo themes. In the same way that the sublime attempts to create a moment of wonder and re-entry into the habitual,⁠ comedy wields the capacity to diminish the power of taboos, and to force the audience to reconsider social cues and habits around prickly topics. The use of laughter as a tool for defamiliarisation and catharsis creates space for otherwise uncomfortable and unwieldy ideas. I am collecting works that use absurdity, exaggeration and surprising juxtaposition of form and content, in order to facilitate a process of revelation for the audience member. The writings of Heather Diack, Albert Hofstadter and Simon Critchley are leading my thinking here, with their focus on the power of comedy to make the familiar strange through laughter, leading the recontextualisation of habitual thoughts and behaviours.

Finally, I am collecting works that use speculative fiction in order to confront ideas of apocalypse and social collapse. Particularly, I am interested in pieces that use sound and text to collapse temporal logic, so that the borders between the real and the fictional, the present and the future, begin to collapse. I am lead by playwright Fleur Kilpatrick’s writing about the potential of fiction to bring physically or temporally distant crises close to the audience member, to encourage an experience of empathy and solidarity. This methodology is one I have used in my immersive sound walks and text-based installations, and the precedents I am collecting are leading my own making and thinking in this area.

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Siying Zhou. The National Anthem of AO-SSU-CH'UI-LEE-A - a karaoke video, 2016. Single channel video. 2’28”.

Zhou’s work demonstrates the power of expected participation. The video work, installed in front of a microphone, demands interaction from the viewer, creating an immediate and alarming moment of decision-making. The karaoke setting is an offering with strong social associations, and one that forces the audience to realise that while the tunes of the national anthem that are playing feel familiar, the words on the screen are not. It is not until the participant attempts to sing the text that it becomes apparent that the displayed words are poor transcriptions of English text, laid out as Wade-Giles phonetic symbols (widely used to help English speakers pronounce Chinese). The effect is to force the singer to perform in an awkward, uncomfortable form of Chinglish, situating them as an outsider attempting and failing to perform a deeply nationalistic gesture. The work plays with translation and the political complexity of language with wit and subversion.

The feeling of not knowing what to do, and of not understanding language, is one that I am particularly interested in currently, as I develop a new sound work around not being able to read the scale of disaster in a foreign country. Zhou’s piece presents the possibility of locating the participant at the centre of linguistic dissonance with style and humour, an approach I hope to bring to my own making.

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David Rosetzky. No Fear, 2008. Audio, MP3 players, headphones, wall painting. 10 minutes, 42 seconds. Cast: Margaret Cameron Installation view Circle of Friends Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

No Fear expands the world of an audio work beyond the edges of the audio itself, such that the site in which the work is heard, and the people who occupy it, begin to bleed into the world of the recorded sound. In this work, Rosetzky locates his listeners in an inoffensive pastel space, replete with benches. This comfort creates a community of listeners, who become increasingly aware of each other and of the vulnerability of collective exposure as the text of the work continues. In describing the work, curator Robert Cook says, ‘Listeners tend to feel increasingly on edge, under review, forced to ponder everything about their psychological make-up and how this impacts on their relationships. The fact that this occurs in a group environment is disturbing; we feel exposed in front of others.’ 

This process, by which the presence of others begins to fracture the intimacy and safety that normally exists in the private, hermetic space of the headphones, is of particular interest currently. I am in the early stages of producing a sound work around a failure to intervene in a disaster, in which I hope to cast the people in the gallery around the listener in tacit roles within a disturbing narrative around the bystander effect. In the same way that Rosetzky frames the people around the listener as potentially suspicious onlookers, I aim to blur the space between fiction and reality, to create a sense of distance and mistrust between the listener and the crowd in which they exist. 

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Erwin Wurm. How to be Politically Incorrect (Looking for a Bomb), 2003. C-print, 126 x 184 cm.

Erwin Wurm’s How to be Politically Incorrect series satirises the limits of social correctness and the edges of correct behaviour. By presenting ridiculous acts that flout standards of personal space and privacy, he questions the many ways in which our physical and personal freedoms are stymied by governmental and social rules. By pushing these ideas to a ludicrous conclusion, Wurm opens space in which we are left to consider the ways in which we are actually and subtly invaded, especially in public. 

This approach led my most recent video work, Will and Testament, in which my attempts to record a video will are violently interrupted by censorship that limits my ability to use any word or euphemism related to dying. As Wurm does, I sought to extrapolate norms and taboos (in my case, around the discussion of mortality) to absurd limits, in order to reveal the social discomfort that exists around frank discussion of death. 

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Saydnaya (the missing 19db), 2016. Sound desk, speaker, light box. 

Abu Hamdan’s work seeks to physicalise and spatialise sound as a deeply political and complex quality, the consequences of whose invisibility and intangibility can be at best, complicated, and at worst, fatal. Saydnaya (the missing 19db) is a powerful example of the act of showing, rather than telling. By making the terrifying quiet at Saydnaya prison in Syria visible and apparent, the horror of the experience of imprisonment there becomes both awful and accessible. Watching the levels controllers on the sound desk rocket up and down provides an eerie sense of unseen presence; a ghostly quality that provides both a sense of human urgency and loss to the work.

Saydnaya offers a lateral approach to torture and fear, where the audience becomes trained and attuned to tiny variations in sound. In this way, it locates them as provisional prisoners within the work, where listening is a matter of life and death. This endowment of the audience with characteristics of others is one I seek to use in my audio walks, where I attempt to place the listener within a speculative narrative in which they are in or witnessing danger and disaster. By encasing them in the narrative, I seek to force a moment of empathy and camaraderie with those in distant places who are experiencing these fictional threats as real dangers. 

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Samuel Beckett. Breath, 1969. Play script.

Beckett’s absurdism, maddening loops and deconstruction of language’s ability to convey meaning have long been of interest. I have long enjoyed his stage works for their playfulness, complexity and layering of humour and despair. Breath in particular manages to be an elegant reduction of life to a single gesture (birth, breath, the accumulation and discarding of relationships and belongings, death) while also remaining deeply tongue in cheek. Though collected as a play, Breath is perhaps more closely aligned with performance art, or a type of visual poetry. The ludicrous brevity of the work, which ends almost in the moment in begins, the stage littered with trash and bodies, the sly suggestion of reincarnation and a neverending cycle of meaningless existence, all create a sort of onstage haiku, where enormous effect is expended and wasted. The work is loaded with potential meaning, packed into a throwaway joke of a performance dripping with affected self-importance and pretension. When it was first performed, London audiences hated it. I love it. 

Beckett’s irony and ability to stuff complicated content into a comedic one-liner feeds into my ongoing interest in the ability of humour to unlock heavy content. Breath manages it with unusual flair. 

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Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster, 1980. Blanchot’s text exists not only as a deep critical engagement with the impossibility of articulating and framing disaster linguistically as it occurs, but also becomes a physical demonstration of this concept - the book exists as a type of fragmentary, disastrous text where sense-making is disrupted and damaged.  For Blanchot, the disaster ‘ruins books and wrecks language’; it is the ‘limit of writing.’ For him, the description of the disaster is impossible; ‘the disaster de-scribes.’ This concept, of the inherent falling apart of sense and language around catastrophe, has deeply informed my practise this semester, and has guided my recent works. In Bolt Upright, I sought to use language on a vast scale without allowing structure to take over. In this way, as in The Writing of the Disaster, I attempted to allow the text itself to demonstrate its own limits and incapacity. For Blanchot, ‘to write is incessant, and yet the text only advances by leaving behind lacunae, gaps, tears, and other interruptions.’ This notion of narrative sense-making as requiring act of discarding and breaking is deeply fascinating to me as I consider expectations around linear narrative, and the ways in which existential chaos and the possibility of disaster threaten not only our physical selves, but also our narrativised selves, which rely on a logic where events flow in an expected and rational way. Blanchot creates a piece of academia-as-artwork, where things go wrong both in content and in form.

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Liam O’Brien. Empty Avenues (Best of Season One) (excerpt), 2018.  Ultra high definition single channel video, 16:9 17:34 min [2:29 min excerpt]. As I consider ways to use comedy and narrative disruption to approach concepts around death, O’Brien’s latest work is an excellent test of the relationship between these approaches. Empty Avenues is structured as a Youtube ‘best of’ compilation video of a fictional sitcom in which a main character gets a new housemate - a floating void named Lacuna. The use of a laugh track becomes increasingly disturbing as the man questions his life, his role as an artist, his failed dating record and the reality of his existence, drifting into suicidality. Scenes in which a conversation with the void ends with an attempt to stab a fork into a power socket, or to sling a noose over a ceiling beam are smash-cut with banal conversations, interactions with a small dog (provoking soundtrack ‘aww’s) and slow pans around the set in which the show is set, which the main character occasionally notices in all its artificiality. 

The work becomes a fascinating investigation of depression and futility, of the strange schadenfreude of the sitcom, of the artificiality both of narrative structures in media and of the ways in which we build and maintain personal identity. 

In particular, I am interested in O’Brien’s use of juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy through fractured narrative. The supercut form means that scenes whose pathos is immediate and alarming (the man screaming ‘Help! Help me!’ out a window as canned laughter roars) are twisted and diminished by sitting alongside much softer comedic explorations of existential despair (the man throwing bills into the void to dispose of them, for example). The overall impact is one that constantly shifts between cruelty and jocularity, where shifts in tone create a dissonance that encourages reflection on the attempts to build and maintain meaning.

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Alex Goldman/Reply All. 88% Parentheticals - The Envelope, 2019. https://player.fm/series/88-parentheticals 2′14.

Created as a joke by the makers of podcast Reply All, 88% Parentheticals is a one-gag clip that slots into a surprisingly complex discussion around the role of plot versus description in creating and advancing narrative. Gerard Genette says that description typically “stops” or arrests the temporal movement through the narrative; it “spreads out the narrative in space’. 88% Parentheticals extrapolates this idea to a ridiculous extreme, where a single introductory paragraph becomes so bogged down with asides, sub-thoughts and tangents that narrative flow falls apart.  W.J.T. Mitchell states that ‘if description takes over, narrative temporality, progress toward an end, is endangered, and we become paralyzed in the endless proliferation of descriptive detail’. This two minute mock-podcast demonstrates the frustration that occurs when this paralysis occurs. To do so, it uses what Simon Critchley calls the ‘unheimlich effect’, using comedic tactics of exaggeration to create defamiliarisation. Through our infuriation at the inability of the host to complete a single uninterrupted sentence, we become aware of our expectations around the acceptable level of description in narrative, and of the ways in which narrative-based podcast forms are driven by brisk, constantly moving plot information.

This approach was one that I sought to employ in my text work Bolt Upright, which nested parenthetical thoughts to such an extent that a single moment was blown out over twelve thousand words of tangential description. The strangeness of the balance between narrative and description being upset is of continued interest to me as I consider the ways in which storytelling conventions define our ways of understanding complex ideas. 

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Ivan Argote. Untitled (Madrid), 2012. 19’18”. Argote’s hypnotic compilation of reaction shots, documenting moments in which the public responds to an unseen, unheard gesture or remark from the artist, has been an excellent reference for my video work Ado (Pillar of Salt). His excision of context from the shots, where the viewer is unable to retrieve the inciting event to which the people are responding, builds a sense of tantalising, frustrating mystery that grows as the work progresses. Attempts to read the faces of the individuals fail to illuminate what could be happening off-camera, creating a strange unfolding of a moment that is both comedic and somehow deeply unsettling. The not-knowing at the centre of the work proves almost maddening in its opacity. Without the information required to situate ourselves in relation to the event, we are caught in a moment of deep but inaccessible emotionality, emphasised by the extreme slow-motion of the shots.

In Ado, I similarly indicated the existence of an event behind the camera, leaving the viewer to watch me responding to something only experienced as light and expression. This methodology created, as it does in Argote’s work, a strange space of possibility, where viewers begin to read narrative and potential input into the space of the video. This gap is Iser’s ‘constitutive blank’ - the gap in the artwork that the audience fills in order to complete it. The use of slow motion and silence emphasises the efficacy of this technique - the more that is left out, the more that the audience can fill in. 

[sarahwalkermfa]

Fleur Kilpatrick. Whale, 2019. Play script.

*

I am deeply interested in Fleur Kilpatrick’s writing around using fiction in performance as a method for colliding truths around climate change that can often seem distant, with the physical space occupied by an audience. She suggests that by implicating an audience in narratives of disaster and decision-making, it is possible to create a sense of urgency around ecological issues otherwise viewed as being ‘other people’s problems. 

In particular, she writes: 

“The instant the thought pops into an audience member’s head ‘well this would never happen around here’ … when you think that thought its shadow follows close behind ‘but it is happening somewhere’.  And then there is a heap of shit you have to confront.”

Her latest script, Whale, is structured around a town hall meeting. Each audience member is given a number, and told that they are delegates, each representing an island. They are told that they are gathered in order to choose one island to sink beneath the waves as a sacrifice, a ritual or magic trick that will instantly and forever fix climate change. Several delegates are chosen to give speeches, and the audience is made to physically cast stones to choose the sacrifice. After a climactic end to the first act, a celebration of having ‘solved climate change through immersive theatre,’ act two becomes a metaphorical space of complexity and truth, where simple solutions are ineffective, but the need for immediate and authoritative action becomes clear. In locating the audience as island delegates, each of whom is at real danger of being swallowed under the waves, she forces each audience member to experience and embody the stakes faced currently by island nations such as Tuvalu.

Kilpatrick writes about the importance of walking the line between hope and despair when it comes to climate narratives, stating that too much of either mode results in inaction. Whale is deeply funny, a tactic that aligns deeply with my own work, but slowly implicates the audience in cruel decision-making, and leaves them with a call to political action. This use of comedy to draw an audience into a work, which then demands recognition and action of them, is of great interest to me. As a theatrical tactic, it is Brechtian - never allowing the audience to forget the limits of the performance, forcing them to take a stance on the issues at stake. Her use of direct address in particular is informing my making with my video work Witness. 

(See: ”Grappling with climate change through music, theatre and film. Fleur Kilpatrick: Whale.” Narratives of Climate Change Symposium (University of Newcastle, July 6 2018). Transcription.)

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Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller. Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, 2012. Video walk, 26 minute walk. Produced for dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany. * Cardiff and Miller’s work exists in a curious intersection between Situationist concepts of psychogeography and narratives of speculative fiction that are more often found in cinema and novels. Their work collapses time scales, aiming to create a sense of temporal confusion in the viewer, where place becomes layered with possibility. Their work also creates a sense of deep spatial awareness, a sense of profound connection with place of the sort that the Situationists sought to achieve through dérives and tasked walking. Their walks, in particular, use the profound intimacy of binaural sound recordings to create a fragmented map of broken narratives that create a sense of unease and uncertainty in the participant. While their walks tend to include recurring features and characters - tape recordings, recountings of dreams, characters caught mid-quest - the overall plot of these walks tends to be opaque, dreamlike and ultimately atmospheric rather than narrative in nature. The Alter Bahnhof video walk is one of their few walks to make connections with the nonfiction history of a place (Cardiff has spoken about consciously avoiding this strategy, as an outsider who usually has no deep knowledge of the areas she works in), by referencing the history of Nazi trains at the station. This sudden prick of reality in the work interests me, and opens up the possibility for these works to take on a more focussed role in impacting the participant. By placing the participant in a slippery time space in a location of complex historical power, the work creates a deeply felt engagement with the horror of the space, made all the more impactful by the collapsing of temporal scales. The effect is a sense of ‘this happened’ colliding with ‘this is happening.’ In my thinking about my audio walk Seep, I used this work as a jumping-off point as I sought to create a piece that layered an alternate future onto RMIT Brunswick - one in which Melbourne had been flooded as a result of climate change. I was interested particularly in how using Cardiff and Miller’s binaural, fragmented audio strategies as a way to situate a fictional, apocalyptic future could encourage the participant to think about our current climate change policy. Where Cardiff and Miller tend to stray away from a certain Brechtian politics in their work, I sought to lean into this approach, to force a sense of surprise, where ‘this isn’t happening’ slips into ‘this could happen.’

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Fiona Banner. Top Gun, 1994. Graphite on paper on canvas. 4860 x 2285 mm. * Fiona Banner provides a strong precedent for my recent large-scale text work, in her early handwritten pieces describing, in painful detail, American action and war films. Banner’s work uses text at an extraordinary scale, rendering it all but unreadable (Michael Archer describes the way that Banner’s font size relative to the overall work ‘makes it all but impossible simply to read the text’, and how ‘a blink, a line break or some other factor has disturbed and fractured the visual experience, sending the eye off elsewhere‘). In doing so, she spatialises not only the entirely of a film in one visual field, but also a certain psychology of loss of control over story.  Michael Bracewell writes that in Banner’s work, ‘the function of text becomes that of volume, but skewed, and alive with authorial tension’. I sought to use volume similarly in my own work, to express a similar sense of what Bracewell calls ‘obsessive compulsion’ in the desperate attempt to grasp and control meaning and panic.  Where Banner’s work tends towards a political engagement with narratives around war and heroism, I share her fascination with the possibilities of language to inhibit and collapse meaning. 

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Darren Almond. Perfect Time, (8 x 3), 2012. Twenty four synchronised digital clocks. 119 × 90 × 15 cm

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Tracey Moffatt. Fourth #2 from the series Fourth, 2001. Colour print on canvas, 36.0 x 46.0 cm.

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Bill Viola. Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), 2014.