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Doubt CrONICAL May 26 2006
Discussion between Simon Horsburgh, Lou Hubbard, Sanja Pahoki, Kiron Robinson, Lani Seligman, and committee members David Simpkin, Harriet Turnbull, Adrien Allen, Katie Lee, Jason Maling
Apologies: Teddy Wu Kwok Ping
AA: The primary idea of these discussions is to create a type of document alongside the exhibition – quite apart from a catalogue. It’s also a nice form of closure at a time when everyone is on the way out (the second last day of the show).
Can we start with the development process for this show? The way I see it is that Kiron and Lani floated this idea of doubt first, then chose certain artists. Is that how the process begun?
KR: Yes. Pretty much. We had some discussion just between Lani and I, and thought it would be a great idea for a show. So we were looking for people who had doubt as an active presence in their way of practicing.
AA: Rather than an active theme that you chose to illustrate with artists work.
KR: Yeah.
AA: So you weren’t taking on the role of curator, but were more facilitating the practice of the artists?
KR: Yeah, and it was important to that end because we weren’t curating. We all started at a point with no pre existing work to be presented. The idea was that we could loosely work together, so it was important that there was some relationship between us to help that go on.
AA: But it was your idea with Lani that Doubt was intrinsic to these practices?
LS: We had a discussion about which artists we thought had Doubt as an active role in their practice. We knew everyone’s artwork quite well too. So we thought that there would be lots of points where the work would converge.
DS: I don’t think we’ve had six artists with the combined strength of this work before. We’ve had six in group shows before and we often come into problems. Not with the work itself but just with the way it comes about, and this one just seems not to have had those problems. For example Lou’s soundtrack that influences every piece – the fact that you’ve all been able to accommodate that…
AA: I think here you’ve all worked between the polarities of collaboration and ‘owned’ practices . There’s a feeling here that at no point do you register a subsumed authorship – each work is autonomous and defined, yet the whole is very cohesive .
JM: I’m interested in picking up on what you said Kiron about the starting point being about doubt within the practice, but not doubt in terms of a theme. When you encounter this work there is definitely a sense of connection which suggests you have congealed separate works – formalising a set of connections. Perhaps it has become a theme of sorts…
So when did the plus come into it? (The original title was Doubt +)
KR + LS: Laughter
KR: Someone else should handle that question I think.
JM: The experience of the viewer coming into the show, is one of being presented with doubt. When you say that you were seeking artists who’s work manifested doubt in their practice – I think it is very present in the show. I haven’t related that back to the way each of you went about making the work, but instead encountered the work on the level of: ‘Okay, the doubt is present only in the way you’re asking me to deal with it.’
KR: We had a discussion early on about how we wanted the show to look as one thing, and wanting to manipulate the viewer into a position where they were having a doubt experience themselves, rather than just illustrate it to them. I guess there was a lot of trust that it was actually going to work.
SH: There was a lot of trust. It evolved quite organically from those original discussions and decisions that Kiron and Lani made. There was a lot of discussion in meetings and we were really pushing it the whole way along, but at the end of each meeting there was a real sense that it would be okay. Ideas were being thrashed out, but there was a trust because of the artists involved and the way that they approached their work – It would all come together in a way and it came together more seamlessly than I think any of us thought it would. Even up to the last meetings when Sanja, became involved – because you had just finished your Masters – and were in that space where you had just completed a major project and you were trying to deal with this project as well. Things were up in the air to a degree. I was surprised how everything fitted together so beautifully.
AA: So would you say that was partly due to the fact that you’ve worked together before?
LH: We’ve never worked together before.
SP: Apart from me and Lou, we’ve worked together for years.
KR: We haven’t formally worked together before, but there is a sort of knowledge going across.
SP: That’s cos we’re all from the VCA.
Laughter.
KR: We had a strong connection.
AA: So you had an understanding of each other’s practice, but you hadn’t all worked together before.
How important was it to have the meetings in the gallery? There is a sophisticated spatial understanding here, did the fact that you were able to get in here prior to install help that?
JM: The respect and trust involved informs the connections. Each artist understands what they’re dealing with and they’re not looking to dominate.
AA: I would say that Kiron & Lani’s pier is the material anchor of the show. It’s navigational, literal and material. It is the piece that everyone else’s practice could have just responded to. It could have been a call and response type of situation. But it isn’t. Obviously there is a discreet feeling to Sanja’s lightbox and Simon’s works in that they hold their own – yet together with the bold, material gesture of the pier they are more than the sum of their parts, and as David mentioned Lou’s sound permeates every piece. There’s tension in trying to look at, or look through, Sanja’s celestial window and at the same time being absolutely saturated with the aggressive noise of a collision. There’s a synergy that is pretty intuitive as opposed to being strategic.
DS: As soon as Lou’s forklift is not there, like right now, (it’s turned off for the sake of the recording) it is still a forklift – we can hear one right now, on Johnston Street below.
AA: People say to me ‘How can you put up with that noise?’ but it’s just an encapsulation of what’s already present. I mean, the Cleanaway rubb Simon had shown here (Flying Carpets 2004), and the others seemed to know this space really well, and Lou and I had shown here, and it was good to meet here as well. We were fortunate because some of us were familiar with this space and knew it really intimately. I think that might have helped with interrelationships, and it was good to have access to the space during development.
So you wouldn’t have had to have really long meetings to discuss whether to block out the windows for instance, because you would have known what was available here, and that it could be done and you could get on with things.
SP: Yeah.
SH: In the later meetings when some of the work was starting to really evolve, and Lou’s piece was – I think yours was going pretty much from the start, wasn’t it Lou? – and my bubble piece was sitting around in my studio we had a couple of starting points, and we sent some images around via email. Once we had a few images floating around we could meet in the space and really start to visualise. Kiron and Lani’s piece was really ambitious and you weren’t really sure how it was going to be, and just how the bend would work around from the corridor and into the gallery space. Your work really defined what space might be available to the rest of us.
JM: So were decisions about particular works made at the meetings? The pier upending – was that a result of a conversation or was that already decided by Kiron and Lani ?
KR: No, I think it was a result of conversations around and about this actual space and particularly what was happening with the movable wall and then the consideration of sight lines and each point where you are stepping.
JM: The more successful shows seem to be the outcome of a series of conversations and this is another example of this process. It’s hard to see what role a curator would have in getting a better result.
AA: Another example of the artist being a better curator than the curator…
This process differed from the usual process in that we (the committee) were largely absent during development meetings. I think we made one intervention in the beginning, when I said that doubt was so ubiquitous that it’s almost meaningless. I still believe that – I mean the whole of Modern art is predicated on doubt, let alone Postmodernism. It’s not a criticism that extends to the actual show, but as a proposal it seemed too broad. After that comment I don’t think there was a conscious decision made to be hands off, but there was a strong feeling that your group had a contained working process and it wasn’t necessary for us to intervene or add to that.
JM: I think intervene is too strong a word.
DS: There was that time when both Conical and Doubt had meetings scheduled here coincidently on the same night. That’s the reason we’re sitting on one side of the tape recorder and Doubt is on the other side.
Laughter.
AA: In the same way that people hesitate at the gallery entrance wondering whether to step up to the platform or not…
KL: It is amazing how fearful people were to walk in. The amount of people that have asked me whether they can walk on that platform. In some cases you can understand it, you come into a space and it is intimidating, but I think it’s really amusing in this show, because if we said, ‘no’, it would be interesting to know what the show would be like from the entrance/exit door. Adrien, did you find that too?
AA: I did. It was a bodily, physical obstruction and once past it you move into a world of illusion which is an interesting take on doubt and a clever use of the platform’s functionality. The platform becomes a pier becomes a sculpture becomes an image. However if the show carried on in that morphing vein, it could easily have been a one trick pony. This very literal turning up, at the end of the pier is however a signal to viewers that the whole show turns on a pictorial bend.
LH: It’s a fulcrum. The pier is a fulcrum to the way that the direction of the space is managed. It’s directional, but not directional. It’s found a material manifestation. I think one thing that we couldn’t and probably shouldn’t have even tried to convey to the committee about Doubt was that we so seriously had doubt or uncertainty as a material manifestation in each of our works. Not as a template or an overlay but it’s actually at the centre of each of our practices and I think that each of us understood that in such a material way that it was hard to convince until we could actually show how the works would find their own identities but also their interrelatedness. And space, irrespective of what the practice is, whether it be, photographic, installation or video or whatever, the question of doubt is the starting point and the point at which the work finds its resolution. The metaphysical or the question of whether something happened, or can you stand on this work, or whatever – the question is made material. It’s made material through space and it’s made material through its very being.
Lani and Kiron must have known intuitively that that was the case with each of our practices. So there was a very deep respect for our practices from the beginning and that we would in turn, honour that. So Doubt would therefore always be rich and palpable because it was a truth in each of our practices. So it was difficult, as all art practice is difficult, but it was not something to be shied away from, but something to be taken by the throat and dealt with.
AA: You mentioned resolution. A question that has come from some viewers is: If works are as resolute as they are in this show does that remove doubt for the viewer?
LH: There is a wealth of doubt. If something is resolute, you can then have its residual, the experience is a residual aspect of doubt. It sometimes comes from being quite concrete.
JM: But doesn’t that then become the subject?
LH: It can become the subject, and it’s posited quite differently in each of these works. So for some it is the subject and for some it’s the experience and that is I think one of the tempting parts of why this show might work. I don’t know, I haven’t got the feedback you guys have got, but why it might be quite scintillating for a viewer is because at each point they are quite thrown by where doubt is to be found.
DS: These subtleties and these plays on illusions that are here are brought to the stunning fact that when you actually leave the show, you invariably smash your head on the top of the door. I’ve done it twice, I’ve had a week 1 scar and a week 3 scar.
So this ‘dissolve’ that’s here at the end of the jetty – and I keep thinking of that Jeff Wall photograph, you know that wind photograph, I can’t think of the name of it, but you know in (obscure French film) where there is the dissolve of that character, where he discovers he is you know…
LH: Shot
DS: Exactly, and I keep seeing this at this end of this pier and there’s all these lovely moments, when I can consider all these parts, and then I go out and it’s just brutal, it’s like, ‘bang’.
SP: So what’s the thing, if it’s resolved there’s no doubt?
AA: I’m acting as a conduit to some audience responses that you haven’t been privy to. Some of the responses have been: tight show, strong show, coherent show, very resolved practices, but it’s not about doubt. And I think, ‘so what?’ – whether it’s about doubt – it brings us back to the initial discussion about illustrating a theme.
JM: There’s also this expectation that doubt is aligned with confusion. You get work that tries to be, you know, all over the shop, but there is an assurance in this show, so I can understand that response as relevant. You know: Where is the relationship to doubt? Doubt is usually unconscious. You are not aware. You are trying desperately for resolution, but perhaps someone comes up and says, ‘nuh, you’re all over the shop, you haven’t worked anything out’. And you say, ‘oh, right, okay’. There is an experience here of precision. An assurance and a consideration.
SP: I also found though, that naming doubt, with having it at the forefront – I don’t know if it was because I was exhausted because of my masters show – but I found it really difficult to respond to ‘doubt’. I found it kind of hard, you know, when you can’t make any work. What do you call it?
Everyone: a blockage.
DS: You still have to put a handle on it. You put a name on it and you have to work with it, and it’s going to colour all group shows. You are simply going to go through the process. But I suppose you don’t have an inflatable letter piece made up, placed somewhere, and photographed and have that as pre advertising for the show (Press release image). Maybe that’s coloured that vision a bit too, because people are seeing that ad and saying: Okay, we’ve got this doubt image.
JM: You mean the silver lettering image?
DS: Yeah. The silver lettering – spelling it out.
SP: We were trying to make work that responded to doubt. If viewers think there are other themes that resonate more, well I don’t think that’s a bad thing. You know it could have morphed into some other things.
AA: Isn’t that doubt plus. Jason’s question about the plus interested me, because the plus really did suggest a sort of mocking of doubt, it assumed that there was a naming there that you were not entirely comfortable with.
LH: Okay, there’s another aspect to this doubt. When people have said to me, ‘It’s a very tight show,’ I say, ‘Yes, it is elastic tight.’ It’s the tightest show I have ever been in, but sometimes in the face of doubt you buoy yourself against uncertainty and you can be sloppy and loose in that sort of passive-aggressive binary, you know: ‘Hey this is all over the place’ or you can say, ‘Oh yes, nothing’s wrong, I’m in control.’ And I think there is this fantastic certainty in this work that does beg the question: Where is the doubt? And that’s not a bad strategy.
AA: I’m absolutely with you. I’m not suggesting that’s those responses were my own view. I was saying to Simon earlier that I find the work of John McCracken incredibly absolutist, yet he takes it to such an absurd, hyper level of self-importance that it become completely neurotic. All it ends up doing is reflecting the paranoia of the world back to us.
LH: And look at Colin McCahon rallying against God, in the face of that question: ‘Where is my fucking God?’
AA: It becomes more about thought process than any kind of certain position. But, we are also talking about people coming in cold through the gallery door. People who may not know your independent practices.
KR: We were hoping to give people the experience of being checked, checked against their own expectations. They’ve been set up for something and they’ve got an idea of what that is, and then they come to that check.
LS: We had a week to set up, but we had to build the pier. That’s the first time that the work materialises in the space, so you don’t know how it’s going to work. You have this idea in your head, but the next thing you know, it’s the opening and you are trying to understand your relationship to the work, and you know people are giving you your opinions…
It is about the space, and the relationship of the work to the space.
AA: How does the experience of exhibiting together change things? I’ve seen all of your work in individual situations
SP: For me, it was the meetings. You feel like you’re part of an artist’s community, and I really felt connected. In that sense it was a positive experience. But I don’t know if it changed the way I work, more that there are people who think about things the way I think about things, and that there are people who are committed to an arts practice against the odds. I found the peer support and camaraderie really useful
AA: I mean you’ve taken on a particular form or vernacular haven’t you? The group show…
LH: I found that in trying to honour the trusting, collaborative nature of our group I was revealing my hand – my process to the others, in a way that I normally wouldn’t unless I was inviting someone out to the studio. It’s not that it’s an ad hoc process, but it’s a struggle for me, and it’s a process of elimination. I found that I was emailing images of works where I’d go, “Ah! I’ve had a breakthrough” and then I’d think it was shit the next week, so I don’t know if I added to some confusion and I hope that the trust would continue through these strange images that I was sending on to the lead up to the resolution of the work as it is now. But I realised that I was revealing a lot
DS: Is it the front door of your work space, or the back door of your work space?
LH: What comes out
DS: No your actual video image in the show, the actual site of the video (the video was shot near Lou’s VCA office). It’s the back door of your work space? When you go to a coffee break, you go to that door?
LH: Oh, yeah it is, I know that space very well.
DS: The battering ram at the front door and the back door is different. It means a bit to the work
LH: I do know quite a bit about how my practice does evolve and really I was sharing that doubt, and I hoped that I wouldn’t lose confidence along the way. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that’s one of the doubts that I give myself over to. My own experience has led me to an understanding where I try to sure myself up, and hope that I have a reasonably strong piece for this occasion. I went through a struggle where I felt that I had to have a number of resolved works that I could eliminate over time, as other information came to hand, so I had many doubt works, I had about 4 more works that I could have put in to another doubt show. So I needed to be ready on all fronts to work out which way to go
JM: But, that’s the responsiveness required when working with a group of people.
LH: Yeah, but I felt quite responsible in that respect.
DS: For me the foundation of this isn’t the pier for me, it’s the soundtrack to the video, because it’s the kinetic energy, where all the others have the potential energy. They are all about to do something. You know, jump off the pier, or the shower screen is about to crush that ball, and it provides this unusual soundtrack to all these pieces. It holds those pieces. It doesn’t hold them together, it just shapes and colours them.
LH: I felt the need to get a clearance on that sound track pretty early on, and we didn’t know until fairly late in the stage if Teddy’s piece would have a soundtrack and what that would do to mine. But I flagged this soundtrack at the first meeting and it does have this sort of gunshot sound and I put that on the table right at the start.
SP: When I went to Lou’s place and heard the video I thought that was fantastic, and I was really confident about showing that.
LS: We felt that too, from early on that the sound was an incredible aspect. We knew from early on then that there would be this very strong sound throughout the whole show.
SP: Because you were aware of the pier before the sound
LS: Yeah, it was the initial phase.
AA: To me the sound is material. It is aural but incredibly territorial. I find the soundtrack all pervasive – it almost invades the other work and really stretches the trust. There’s a lot of group shows I can think of where that couldn’t really occur, you know, having the speakers installed outside of the space where the video is… in the others’ territory.
DS: Over the head of the last show by the way, the last show which was called tortoise (Testudo) – it’s always been a bit of a worry
AA: So we have this aural assault becoming material – the aural as object. The sound as a palpable filler or occupier.
We have an install response in this gallery when the wall is open, which I call the ‘donut phenomenon’ (pinched from an urban planning term) where everything clings to the edges seemingly pushed there by a centrifugal force. Here there are two bold responses to that phenomenon – the pier piece and secondly this sound.
LH: Well we weren’t sure how far the pier would extend toward the fireplace and Simon didn’t know about his table. Because I also had a table, and I also had an entirely put back together turtle, and I really didn’t know until the last minute if I’d bring it out. I was ready to move on any outcome.
SH: When discussing the soundtrack, we were talking about it in the sense of a texture. Because all along there was this concern about the group show, and how to bind it together in a way that wasn’t overt, and that wasn’t addressing an obvious notion of doubt. The sound, I think we all realised, was the binder for all the works. And it came down to when Lou was thinking about the position of her speakers. We were all walking up and down the pier and making comments about how it sounded from within the space, how loud it should be, whether the speakers should face out toward the gallery or in toward the Enclosure. So we were all really prepared to work with that sound from the start.
AA: It’s the binder, but it’s the aggravator as well.
JM: At what stage did the crushing and the splintering turn up?
SH: In the sound you mean?
JM: Not only the sound, but in your imagery too
LH: At the first meeting I think we were talking about…
SH: I had the broken light globes
LH: And we said that mine would be uncouth and crude and yours will be very refined, but we’ll both have the crushing and so I said: I can live with that.
SH: The umbrella was resolved reasonably late in the piece as a wall drawing. I’d found it – a found object on the street and had photographed it where I found it, then dragged it back to the studio and it was just an object that I couldn’t turn away from. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, I wanted it to be a form, but it just kept collapsing and collapsing, so I thought I’d draw it, and I layed it out and took some photos of it and I just found that I was responding to the object and the material, and the structure of it as well. And that’s how it resolved itself, and then there was the other tension, the idea of pressing it flat.
JM: Did resolving that piece happen in relation to the group discussions?
SH: I think it did come up, the potential to resolve that came up in a meeting
JM: So resolution was largely born from the discussion?
SH: I’d say so. Yeah, because I’d put it aside and I’d started working on another process, but it came up in discussion and it gained legs that night.
DS: I’d like to talk about that wall (the open hinged wall) having Simon’s isolated image on it. So often that wall is treated with a blitz – an attempt to fill it, yet the wall is working so well with only one thing on it.
AA: Particularly with your assurance in transforming a found object into a pictorial object. I don’t see much vacillation there, it’s a very decisive transformation I think. You’ve used the big ‘hero’ wall to great effect. It’s an assured placement and an assured transformation.
I wanted to ask you a broader question. A couple of you have had studios and exhibited at Gertrude CAS and you’ve all been practicing for a fair amount of years, and you do a show like this – a really admirable show in so many ways – where do you go now? What do you do?
LH: You come back.
AA: I mean, some may choose to re-package group shows and tour them, some may get pissed off with the whole group process and immerse themselves in independent practice for years and then reconnect on a different level years later, some are anxious to court curators independently. I mean this show could be, should be, in a number of larger public institutions, but won’t be.
SP: I find it weird that the feedback has been so positive. I don’t know why some people like one show. I guess most of the shows you do you think it’s okay, and sometimes you think you’ve done something really amazing. I mean you can’t really predict what people are going to relate to.
JM: From our experience with the show following this (Marking Time) is that we’ve gone through the same process that you’ve been through. It’s felt like a very organic thing and the realisation will be, I hope, well beyond what we imagined when we started. I find that a really interesting journey. Especially in relation to the so-called professional, institutionalised, public spaces. This is far better than what you see in those spaces
AA: But you’re biased.
JM: I am biased, yes.
SP: So I guess it is encouraging when you get positive feedback, to think of a life beyond. Maybe it’s the sound, and the pier, because everyone has to traverse that pier…
JM: You do get these great shows and they just disappear. You have to have something else that makes it sustainable.
SP: But you know, what makes it a good show? Is it because it’s in this space? What makes it great?
AA: Sure, the work observes and responds to the space sensitively, but it’s also the adaptability of each artists practice in responding to each other and to doubt as an intrinsic method of working – that’s what makes it successful, not just the fact it’s in this space. Your practices combined or individually would be sensitive to any space.
LH: But there’s something about the pier and coming up the stairs… You can’t discount the space.
AA: What about the theatricality of the show? It’s partly the space, but it’s also partly the fact that so many artists, you included, choose to darken the space.
LH: You can dissipate theatricality by offering a pictorial out, and this is actually a very pictorial show. I can’t speak for viewers. I came in on Sunday and had my own time with the space, which was the only time I’ve had with it. And I thought, yeah, we’ve harnessed the theatrical.
AA: So you’ve got away with the theatrical by your use of the pictorial?
LH: Yes.
JM: Yeah, we were thinking about this as well. We were looking at the show and David said, ‘Why did they black it out?’ and we said: Okay, well they’ve got video projections and they require low level light. There is a practicality behind it – not just a strategy.
LH: It wasn’t just for that reason though because we could survive with just one window. There was only one pictorial out, which was Sanja’s window.
AA: The option to turn the space into a naturalistic space is always there and it surprises me that it’s not used more than it is. It feels as though there is always this desire to fortify the space. It does seem to be the default response. Do you think so David?
DS: Yes, the default responses – we were just mentioning these to ourselves. I mean, the roof (the exposed hip roof with its rafters) gets taken out of play in this show. It just gets dispossessed and placed in the pier. And a number of the works dispossess the default responses.
AA: Is it that there’s enough competition in this space without letting in the outside?
JM: First, you have to go up a staircase that is only so big. Then, where are you going to put something? Where you initially thought? You have to take into account the physicality of the space, not to mention: How are you going to get these components up here?
It’s the same thing with the light. You have to be so aware of what you can achieve in a week. To say ‘I’ll just try having this window uncovered or we’ll just see how it develops’ – that’s pretty rare. Often the artists back off and prefer the control.
AA: A more general question about artist-led centres like us: How do we make them grow beyond the perceptions of the funding body? – you know, the usual perceptions that ARI’s (artist-run-initiatives) are ephemeral, careerist, young, DIY, etc. We aim to occupy a different level – especially as we see programming in the public spaces becoming more audience orientated and less about the artist – this show supports that level of ambition.
LH: I really value my independence and the ARI’s offer me that. I come up with my own pressure to create the work, and as I still consider the work to be emerging, I want that opportunity to go try it out. I’m still really considering each outing an opportunity to deliver to me some new information about my own way of working, so it’s really vital. There’s an interface that I have with me…
JM: And you don’t think you’d have that opportunity in another gallery?
LH: I couldn’t in a commercial gallery. I’m completely unbankable.
DS: Is that a doubt or an anxiety?
LH: It’s a positive doubt.
DS: I’m not saying that you don’t mind, but I’m just saying you don’t know that that can’t happen.
LH: I can’t know. The idea of a commissioned work would be really strange.
DS: It would be foreign.
LH: I really want to surprise myself and continue to surprise myself.
AA: I find that really nourishing. In here some emerging artists feel there is a pressure to perform.
LH: There should be an effort to perform in EVERY space.
AA: But perhaps that pressure to perform is undermining of risk. I mean, we’re saying, ‘ok you can come into this space, but it better be good’.
LH: But a good failure is worth more than a mediocre success.
AA: I guess we’re relaying our doubts back onto your doubts. You’ve given us the opportunity to doubt, and we’re running with it!
LH: You’ve got to be fairly genuine. You can’t just have doubt, you have to really have it as your edge. You’ve got to doubt what’s come before, you can’t believe your own bullshit, you’ve got to doubt what’s over the edge. It has to be in your practice, you have to be interested in that gap.
