#surpllus

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TIL 6 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: DAMIANO BERTOLI - CONTINUOUS MOMENT (2018) • Comprehensive monograph on the work of Australian artist Damiano Bertoli. • “Melbourne artist Damiano Bertoli is best known for the ongoing series ‘Continuous moment’, a multidisciplinary practice that offers a paratactic investigation of artistic experiments, social projects and theoretical legacies that inform the history of modernism and contemporary art. At the centre of much of this thought and production is a delirious pragmatism that draws on material as diverse as Pablo Picasso’s 1941 surrealist play Le desire attrape par la queue (Desire caught by the tail), originally performed under the shadow of Nazi occupation, the aspirational practices of Superstudio (1966–78), which sought to live without architecture, and the occultism of the homicidal sect led by Charles ‘Willis’ Manson. What is decisive, in any case, is that for Bertoli the unity of this practice resides in a display methodology that echoes a number of avant-garde principles that question the backward looking gaze." - Nik Papas • Published by Surpllus. Designed by Ziga Testen, Edited by Brad Haylock. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with accompanying essays by Justin Clemens, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Nik Papas, Chris Sharp, Liza Vasiliou. • Available via our website and in the bookshop today. • #worldfoodbooks #DamianoBertoli #Surpllus #ZigaTesten #BradHaylock #JustinClemens #HelenHughes #HelenJohnson #NikPapas #ChrisSharp #LizaVasiliou (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[andreameachammfa-blog]

11. Justin Clemens. Preface. 2011. In Minimal Domination. Surpllus. Melbourne

My primary preoccupation in Studio 1 was influenced and heavily driven by critical social theory, including intersectional feminism and queer theory. I noticed and was provided feedback to the same effect, that being heavily driven by critical social theory resulted in making overly didactic art. I found myself encountering what Justin Clemens described as the fraught relationship of paradox between the socially critical artwork and its exposure to the public realm. Clemens explains further that an artwork that “speaks critically to society, must paradoxically achieve this from a position of powerlessness, relying only on the apt use of unique sensory tools of communication” where art’s “ability to communicate that, which cannot be expressed didactically, is where its potency is derived” (p.15). Clemens’s writing is a key precedent in the development of my practice and I revisit and ponder Preface regularly. In fact, thinking about art’s unique sensory tools influenced a shift in the materials I choose to make work. 

[photodustorg]

ROBERT ALBAZI: DIE SONNE

When did the star dissolve, or was it captured by the sequence of squares and squares and circles, circles?

‘Paris 7AM’ Elizabeth Bishop

.

Earlier this year, Runes: Photography and Decipherment was exhibited in a small room at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Curated by Australian artist Justine Varga and art historian Geoffrey Batchen, the exhibition included mid-19th-century daguerreotypes and calotypes; NASA satellite photographs; abstract, colour-field works using expired photo paper; and the digital code of a scanned heliograph. The result of complex processes, many of these works bore traces of their making: a strip of static interrupting part of a satellite image of the moon, represented the moment the satellite hit the moon’s surface; and the Rothko-like bruises of black and white in a print by Alison Rossiter were the result of developing expired and un-exposed film. 

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes: ‘the problem of science cannot be recognised within the context of science’. To understand the ways in which science uses imagination and invention in its pursuit of truth, one must, according to Nietzsche, ‘see science under the lens of the artist’. As Varga and Batchen note in the exhibition catalogue, the works in Runes are ‘all indexical traces of specific phenomena or actions’, but for me their true interest lay in their poetic potential. A NASA image from 1964, for instance, resembling a chewed patch of monochrome pixels (in fact a picture of the heat patterns in the outer gaseous layers of the sun), made me think about filaments of gas turning through the sun’s corona, rising like long hair underwater.

.

American amateur astronomer Lewis Rutherfurd’s 1870 photograph of the sun, Die Sonne, manages, as Varga and Batchen write, ‘to reduce a gigantic sphere of flaming gases to a perfectly circular and therefore comprehensible abstraction’. Looking at the pale yellow disc, however, I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed. It was far more interesting to imagine Rutherfurd taking the photograph. 

I imagine Rutherfurd opening the back door of his house, and, while standing in the doorway, calling out to his wife Margaret that he’d be back in the late evening. Perhaps he never spoke to his wife like this, and would instead leave the house without talking to her in the stern and childish manner of those men who, when offended or confronted (often by their partners), go for long, solitary walks. If Rutherfurd did leave in this way, his walk was short—through the garden and into his private observatory built, with the money inherited from Margaret’s family, in 1856. Once inside, he might have sat in a wide, wooden chair, tapping his foot on the ground and absentmindedly scratching the surface of a black button on his waistcoat while thinking about Margaret, star clusters and the Pleiades rising like smoke. At some point, Rutherfurd would have stood up and walked slowly to his large telescope. Before preparing a glass plate, he might have held his slightly smaller right eye to the lens and seen the point of a leaf, a section of wing, flick of sky, and sun. Rutherfurd’s slightly smaller right eye would shake as light moved through the iris. Sunlight would stain Rutherfurd’s eye. And, after lifting it from the lens, straightening his posture, and turning to look at one of the grey walls of the observatory, he would see, for a few moments, bruises of light against the surface, like those we see, flaring for a moment, whenever we close our eyes.

Notes

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Paris 7AM’ (1946) from Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011, 28.

Justine Varga and Geoffrey Batchen, Runes: Photography and Decipherment exhibition catalogue, 2, 9.

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Penguin Books, London, 1993, 4, 5.

Photo credits

Runes: Photography and Decipherment, install shot, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2018. Photo: J. Forsyth.*

Lewis Rutherfurd (USA 1816–1892), Die Sonne [The Sun], 22 September 1870, albumen photograph, 38.0 x 30.0 cm (frame), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington. 

* Works, from left to right:

Lewis Rutherfurd (USA 1816–1892), Die Sonne [The Sun], 22 September 1870, albumen photograph, 38.0 x 30.0 cm (frame), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

NASA (USA), Associated Wire Press Photo: ‘Polar Caps’ found on Sun: A computerized picture of the sun’s corona, or outer gaseous layer, which was made by the OSO 7 satellite and released by NASA, 3 December 1971, gelatin silver photograph, 19.0 x 26.5 cm (image), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

Man Ray (USA/France/USA/France 1890–1976), La Voie Lactée [The Milky Way], 1973, gelatin silver photograph (signed and dated), 15.5 x 26.0 cm (image), 27.1 x 37.2 cm (frame), collection of Justine Varga, Sydney;

Marion Hardman (Australia b. 1951), Untitled (from the Bonnet Hill series), c.1977, gelatin silver photograph, 45.7 x 45.7 cm (frame), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

NASA (USA), Associated Wire Press Photo: Target for Surveyor 7: Mountainous area around the crater Tycho, one of the roughest spots on the moon (taken by the Lunar Orbiter V spacecraft), August 1967 gelatin silver photograph, 38.7 x 34.7 cm (frame), collection of Justine Varga, Sydney;

Thomas Barrow (USA b. 1938), Untitled (from the Cancellations series), 1975, gelatin silver photograph, 27.94 x 35.56 cm (image), 42.0 x 52.3 cm (frame), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

Alison Rossiter (USA b. 1953), Velox T4, expiry date October 1, 1940, 2008, unique gelatin silver photograph, 20.2 x 25.3 cm, collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

Anne Ferran (Australia b. 1949), Untitled, 1985, gelatin silver photograph, 41.5 x 33.8 cm (frame), collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington;

Justine Varga (Australia b. 1984), Untitled, 2014–15, chromagenic photograph, 25.0 x 21.0 cm, collection of Geoffrey Batchen, Wellington.

Bio

Robert Albazi is a Melbourne-based writer. His work has appeared in the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writer’s Program, un Extended, Art + Climate = Change, and other publications. In 2016, he was assistant editor for the Lisa Radford anthology Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense, thanks x, published by Surpllus.

Please consider following PHOTODUST on Twitter and Instagram.

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[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-4 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: LISA RADFORD "Aesthetic Nonsense Makes Commonsense, Thanks X" (2017) For the past twenty years, Lisa Radford has written alongside (and sometimes about) contemporary art and artists in Melbourne. Along the way, her fictocriticism has captured many minor local histories that speak to politics, friendship, popular culture and a myriad of other subjectivities. Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense, thanks X brings together a selection of over fifty texts, including catalogue essays for Centre for Style, David Shrigley and Blair Trethowan, alongside other texts previously published in contemporary art journals including Art & Australia, Discipline and un Magazine. Co-published by Surpllus and West Space, the publication includes contributions from Geoff Lowe & Jacqueline Riva (A Constructed World), Fiona Macdonald and Jarrod Rawlins. Designed and edited by Brad Haylock with editorial assistance by Robert Shumoail-Albazi. Available in the bookshop and via our website. #worldfoodbooks #lisaradford #surpllus #westspace (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TIL 6 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: DAMIANO BERTOLI - CONTINUOUS MOMENT (2018) • Comprehensive monograph on the work of Australian artist Damiano Bertoli. • "Melbourne artist Damiano Bertoli is best known for the ongoing series ‘Continuous moment’, a multidisciplinary practice that offers a paratactic investigation of artistic experiments, social projects and theoretical legacies that inform the history of modernism and contemporary art. At the centre of much of this thought and production is a delirious pragmatism that draws on material as diverse as Pablo Picasso’s 1941 surrealist play Le desire attrape par la queue (Desire caught by the tail), originally performed under the shadow of Nazi occupation, the aspirational practices of Superstudio (1966–78), which sought to live without architecture, and the occultism of the homicidal sect led by Charles ‘Willis’ Manson. What is decisive, in any case, is that for Bertoli the unity of this practice resides in a display methodology that echoes a number of avant-garde principles that question the backward looking gaze." - Nik Papas • Published by Surpllus. Designed by Ziga Testen, Edited by Brad Haylock. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with accompanying essays by Justin Clemens, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Nik Papas, Chris Sharp, Liza Vasiliou. • Available via our website and in the bookshop today. • #worldfoodbooks #DamianoBertoli #Surpllus #ZigaTesten #BradHaylock #JustinClemens #HelenHughes #HelenJohnson #NikPapas #ChrisSharp #LizaVasiliou (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)