The human remains presents as a type of epistemology. It provokes questions regarding our perception of self and with the super forces of existence and infinity.

Caspar David Friedrich meets the New Age in Alesh Macak’s metaphysical meditation on the sublime and our relationship to it. With a sound-track evocative of those hippy–trippy binaural beats and the kaleidoscopic mirroring of imagery (landscapes of vast rocks, flowing water, gushing waves, expansive skies, the natural and man-made world) becoming a regenerating mandala, no longer are we looking from the top of the precipice, now we are immersed; looking within it, through it, and beyond it. For me this is the most mesmerising and evocative element of the installation.

The sandpit (in the room, under the seat) is a benign paradox in relation to the transcendental imagery on the screens. It plants our feet firmly beneath the bench, a reminder of our biological embodiment yet it takes us on a journey of associative memories and sensory stimulation. Nostalgic of childhood, its confines are restricted yet it provokes play and the creation of imaginary (unseen) realms.

Meanwhile, in deep space entire galaxies explode and mutate throughout a multi-dimensional expanse of time that is impossible to comprehend.

Alesh Macak, The human remains, Westspace, Melbourne, 24 February – 17 March 2012.

Why are people making so much art? What’s on this month? The more I think about it, the more I think about it … Oh jeez, I’m a bit strung out, I couldn’t make it to the NEW13 opening at ACCA. Wanna come with me? Have you seen this? What did you think of that? I need funding! Oh I’m too busy to catch up for coffee, I’ve got so much art to make for my big show.

‘Nature is a language—can’t you read’, pleaded Morrissey.

Deep breath, pulling in air I think of a loved one far away. On the out-breath I hope it makes a small breeze that travels across the ocean and perhaps tickles their ear a little.

‘Make vibes not things’, says Caroline Anderson, a party artist. Was Bez, from the Happy Mondays, a party artist?

What ignites the party? It can come when the waitress offers you the special hot sauce that nobody else in the café seems to have at their table. Oooh, yummo, it’s hot and from South America. Thanks Caz! Surprises are the spice. Plan something to forget the plan and see what happens. Wrap something to unwrap it. Wow, it feels more special when it’s wrapped. It comes in threes. Meeting two Indian guys walking a small dog at Williamstown beach, then back at home a housemate cooks you an Indian meal. Pop in the bath and digest, rest your muscles after that long walk. Stars fall from the sky and Carl Jung gives you a wink, and you’re reminded of the way your mother ran her fingers through your hair in the bath as a toddler. So you do a little piddle on the carpet near the heater. It smells, but your housemates won’t mind because it also awakens their child within (or their mother). I’m not sure, but it’s a party within. Hi Mum, thanks for coming! No worries babe.

‘Funnily enough, the first step to becoming an absolute babe is admitting you’re a total loser’, Crystal Diamond writes.

Caroline Anderson, The Chinese horoscope show, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, 16 February – 10 March 2012.

‘All the world’s a stage, and all the people on it merely players …’

Elvis Richardson has, for some years now, built a body of work based on the found archives and stock images of a personal nature that people (apparently willingly, and sometimes for profit) present to the world. Whether it be the collections of slides found on eBay that contributed to Slide show land (2004–08) or the stacks of discarded home-video VHS tapes in Bastard love child from 2006 (more revealing than a bookshelf, you might say), there is a wealth of material out there that reinforces the need for self-projection and self-realisation through audio-visual documentation.

You don’t need to be a contestant for Ms Burlesque Victoria (another cultural event that I attended this week) or the producer of a home-school version of such an out-there display posted on YouTube to realise that we live in an age where the public–private boundaries seem to exist only to be transgressed. The domestic sphere has replaced the studio as the scene for many a documented gesture. The use of photography has never been more ubiquitous in this world of commercial and/or social media.

With this canvas in mind, and motivated by her own requirement for a place in the sun in the form of available real estate, Richardson has been undertaking online research into the regional and outer suburban property market to come up with an expanding gallery of images. Posting the results on Facebook, Richardson’s selection reads like the scenic backdrop to a familiar and much-loved soap opera that is real life.

Carefully presented and primped for the camera (with suitably soft lighting, selective angles, close-ups and focal points), many of these interior views of furnished domestic spaces have attracted comments that draw on their resemblance to Brides of Christ, Absolutely fabulous et. al. Like the catwalk models that ‘sell’ the clothes off their elegant, thin backs, these bedroom scenes, with their soft toys and colour schemes, ‘add value’ to the bare bones of the simple domestic interior and reveal a sense of personal pleasure and pride in their creation. So, too, in other images there is a strong sense of absence and loss—much like what we might associate with the sense of entering a crime scene. Either way, and with many shades of lifestylism in between, we become complicit in the spectacle as voyeurs and critics.

In this project, as in her many challenging and customised intrusions into the secret life of objects, Richardson has revealed a sense of the uncanny in their re-presentation for an audience. What makes this collection of images all the more elusive is their sense of suspended animation: in Low-Resland there is no download on a down-payment.

The bedroom is a work-in-progress by Elvis Richardson. Images below viewed March 2012.

Shane Cotton’s recent paintings are dark, almost Gothic arrangements of cultural iconography floating on moody and uncertain fields. They draw on the post-colonial histories of the artist’s native New Zealand, but still carry a familiar charge for Australian audiences. In these works history is an ominous and uncertain place; ever open to revision, it haunts the present like the disembodied tattooed heads and ghostly texts Cotton repeatedly employs.

There is currently a painting by Cotton from 1997 on display in the new Art of the Pacific Gallery at NGV International. It’s quite different from recent work, but the core intent seems the same. Alongside work from regions as diverse as the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea and north Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, it suggests various possible histories.

Resonances extend from this painting throughout the exhibition: its horizontal divisions recall the contemporary Ömie bark cloths on the opposite side of the gallery, while its palette of rust browns and ochres is shared by any number of other works. Even the animated and brightly coloured Sisu dance masks echo in the graphic rendering and loosely decorative text that winds through Cotton’s painting.

Like the two works by Colin McCahon in an adjacent corner of the gallery, Cotton’s painting also links to Euro-American traditions of art making. In this sense it represents a kind of hinge point between histories, suggesting a cross-regional perspective that traverses multiple traditions and forms. Here the trajectory of art history is shown to be always relative, always open to revision.

Inaugural display, Art of the Pacific Gallery, NGV International, Melbourne, 28 May 2011 – 31 December 2012.

4:17 pm. What happens to time if we fold it in half like a piece of paper, and then unfold it? Are the wrinkles at the end or the beginning? This is a poorly recalled line from one of the 6000 films sampled in Christian Marclay’s epic video work, The clock, currently on view at the MCA, Sydney. The clock is a filmic ensemble of references to (real) time: it is a marking of time. The work is a pummelling of continuity and an unrelenting tide of the tessellated, criss-crossed—edits operating as objects?—as opposed to sequential action and event. A comparison to The clock assisted my (difficult) rethinking of Nicholas Mangan’s Some kinds of duration.

A concrete photocopier is dull-ly and appropriately lit by a fluoro light within the gallery space. Two projections, one silent, are in constant motion. One in particular is lusciously rubbly. These three works, which comprise the guts of Some kinds of duration, appear to this viewer to work together to a clean brevity. I am reminded by a friend that the work was noisy and dirty, but this isn’t how I reflect on my walk around it.

How to feel for manufacture? Like Marclay, Mangan’s recycling and imbricating of fragments speak loudly of process and construction. This comparison feels particularly useful in the search to locate Duration’s narrative charge. Writer Zadie Smith suggests that The clock is a subjective ‘factual response to the fantasies of film’. Duration’s components operate as fantastical responses to the facts of time and place. Searching for a narrative kick, Duration appears attenuated while, in comparison, The clock pivots on brevity.

Each element of Duration reflects on archaeology—the central axis on which the exhibition seems to scenically spin. Archaeology: the excavation, systematising, and the piecing together of remnants to reveal the various narratives connected with quotidian human relations. Some of these things are whole and some of these things are fragmentary. And like Marclay’s work, there is real-time and staged-time pushed hard up against each other. Some kinds of duration positions its collection of historical references adequately enough for a momentum to build. But, perhaps to the viewer’s detriment, the fantastical is slimmed-down and the work retreats in the repeat.

Nicholas Mangan, Some kinds of duration, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 10 February — 1 April 2012.

by Jonathan Nichols & Hannah Mathews

JN: I was a bit disappointed with the Ute Meta Bauer talk last week. It was interesting to hear about her choices and curatorial influences but not much of an insight into the ‘why’ behind her preferences and ideas. It would have been interesting to hear about her current work at MIT and ideas for the Royal College where she said she has authority to reorganise. She came across as more a senior management figure than a curatorial figure. Maybe she could have presented a ‘before’ and ‘after’ organisational chart of MIT for instance or spoken about her objectives for the reorganisation of the Royal College. But instead her focus was on the curatorial work she has undertaken and the influence of Dada and early Constructivism on this.

HM: I didn’t get to see this talk but I had been looking forward to it. It was the most recent public lecture given by a slew of international visitors to Melbourne over the past six months. Having such an active lecture program has been exciting. I’ve felt like I’m living in a big city again! You make a good observation though. It sounds like Ute Meta Bauer’s talk followed your usual public lecture format: chronological, explanatory, PowerPoint, Q and A. I wonder what brief she was given? Perhaps this could have inspired more interesting content. We have been presented with different formats by other speakers though, mainly artists. I’m thinking of the Austrian artist Peter Friedl who presented his lecture ‘The impossible museum’ out at Monash while he was here for the Melbourne Festival. And also Philip Brophy and his series of lectures presented on the nude as part of the recently opened Adelaide Biennial. Both were more performances that adopted the lecture format. Berlin writer Jan Verwoert’s talk in Melbourne recently was also akin to this. He kind of threw a cultural drift-net out through art, film and popular culture to illustrate a proposition.

JN: There has been TJ Clark (London/NY), Chris Kraus (NZ/NY/LA), Paul O’Neill (UK) and Olaf Nicolai (Berlin). It has been great—and I’m wondering too why the rush of blood this last six months? But I agree Verwoert is a player. Meta Bauer even commented on this as well. For me though his ‘performance’ was not so important—I saw the Melbourne lecture not the Adelaide keynote ‘Anti-material materialisms’. His conversation about trauma and art making—a mechanics of empathy—reminded me of Pierre Klossowski in essays like ‘On the collaboration of demons in the work of art’ (1981) and even some of the thinking you get in Geoff Dyer’s book Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi (2009). (Both rare fish.) What I like most is the objectivity Verwoert seeks in the project of art making, for instance, where he says something like ‘concentrate on the hand and eyes—you don’t need to sacrifice the body every time’. It sets a different type of agenda.

HM: His use of the word ‘mandate’ struck me. If I understood correctly he was saying that artists don’t need a mandate to validate their practice and they don’t need to prove their authenticity constantly. It’s OK to have space between self and art, and it’s even better to let every piece come out and form a whole of its own accord over time rather than forming it into some resolved intention of practice. I found that understanding and generous. Funny thing is, so many artists choose to attach themselves to a mandate. Very few seem comfortable to let only their eyes and hands do the talking. Where has that come from?

JN: Wow, it’s true this word ‘mandate’ is out and about. I was in India in January and the word was used there. I’m pretty sure Verwoert is saying mandates are plain wrong-headed when it comes to art—mandates are just not part of the mechanics of an artwork. Something has shifted post-2008. The idea is that if there is a mandate in place (where an artist follows a predetermined position or entitlement) how can the ‘art’ ever overcome this determination—the artwork could only ever be subservient to these issues, offering nothing more.

And true, so many artists have attached themselves to politically acceptable mandates. It’s terrible and maybe will all come to shame.

HM: You mentioned the German artist, Olaf Nicolai, earlier. He’s a senior artist, a thoughtful and considered one. His grasp on his own practice and its relationship with the world around him is critical yet philosophical. He knows deeply, yet holds lightly. The lecture he gave on his work at the Goethe Institut in October was premised on this position. How did this sit with you in comparison say to the talk by Irish artist/curator/educator Paul O’Neill?

JN: Olaf Nicolai is pretty cool and I don’t think he’d be surprised by the sort of content Verwoert speaks about. Paul O’Neill’s curatorial dictum of ‘background/middle-ground/foreground’ scared the daylights out of the crew I sat with. But I think O’Neill knew how demeaningly tight his curatorial prescription was and I got the sense he wanted to leave well remembered in sunny Melbourne. It was way more out there and radical than what I heard from Ute Meta Bauer. Looking back, it makes me think Verwoert might say something like: ‘Paul O’Neill’s trauma is about class and poverty’.

Ute Meta Bauer, public lecture, MUMA Boiler Room Lecture Series, 21 March 2012. Jan Verwoert, ‘Breaking the chain: thoughts on trauma and transference’, MUMA Boiler Room Lecture Series, 6 March 2012 (and ‘Anti-material materialisms’, Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week, 2 March). Paul O’Neill, ‘The exhibition-as-medium, the exhibition-as-form: three principle categories of organisation: the background, the middle-ground and the foreground’, MUMA Boiler Room Lecture Series, 24 October 2011. Chris Kraus, public lecture, MUMA, 14 October 2011. Olaf Nicolai, artist’s talk, ACCA/Goethe Institut, 7 October 2011. Peter Friedl, ‘The impossible museum’, Monash University/ACCA/Goethe Institut, 19 October 2011. TJ Clark, ‘The art historian and the poet’, the Wheeler Centre, 15 June 2011. Philip Brophy, ‘Colour me dead’, Parallel collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA, 3 and 4 March 2012.