In April 2013 a workshop and showing of Yvonne Rainer’s iconic performance piece, Trio A, will be held in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. I plan to participate in the four-day workshop to be hosted by the VCA.

I was introduced to Trio A via YouTube a few years ago. I had spent the summer in Europe, house-sitting a friend’s apartment and visiting with lots of artists. I was struck by just how strongly choreography and the relationship between object and the moving body had returned to the centre of many young artists’ practices.

Interestingly, my friend, who is a senior artist actively interested in the world and how people are thinking and making, had a new addition to his already extensive book collection—dance. I spent an indulgent month reading my way through a rich collection of catalogues, anthologies and monographs on the likes of Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, Pina Bausch and, of course, Yvonne Rainer. It was Brown’s and Rainer’s works in particular that engaged me: Brown’s relationship to the visual translation of dance, authorship and the authentic revival of works, and Rainer’s tough paring back of dance’s theatre, her focus on the objective presence of the body and its movement, the stringent nature of her No manifesto (1965), and her revision of the relationship to audience.

Trio A is a significant work for any artist working with movement. A short work, originally five minutes long, it is a task-oriented performance; a sequence of single movements, one following the other fluidly but without repetition. The piece is executed without regard for the audience. It has been performed in both theatre and gallery environments and adapted and interpreted by dancers and non-dancers alike. Rainer has in fact titled the work under a number of iterations that have allowed her to include film, written and spoken word in its presentation (for example, Trio A geriatric, where Rainer verbalises those actions she can no longer physically perform), and be performed forwards, backwards, in cycles and by others.

A few months ago I read an article (October, no. 140, 2012) by an American scholar, Julia Bryan-Wilson, who has written extensively on Trio A. The article detailed her accidental participation in a Trio A workshop held at the University of California in 2008 and the challenge of relating to the work in a physical rather than cerebral manner. Her article struck a chord with me. I realised I am excited about becoming part of the Trio A alumni yet terrified of being an actual participant. I’ve become so used to relying on my brain that I’m anxious about relying on my body. Perhaps it is that reduction that is at the essence of Rainer’s piece: that space where the mind becomes just another muscle in the body.

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1978, video, 10:30 minutes.

I recently had the pleasure of a studio visit with Melbourne artist Colleen Ahern. Ahern is a talented painter, best known for her domestic-scale paintings that portray popular musicians of the 1970s and onwards. The works are skilful and filled with love: there is a tender thrum of fandom in their composition and a nostalgia in her chosen palette.

The last time we met, Ahern was working on a series of paintings based on photos she had taken of musicians performing on TV, on shows like rage and various music docos. The portraits captured her beloved musicians within the physical frames of the visual media through which we access music culture: a trippy colour burst; a line of static caused by the pausing of a VHS recording; a vague reflection of the viewer on the screen. Each portrait foregrounds a particular technological glitch. The series referenced the platforms through which we engage with our musical heroes and also the distance between us and them; the distance that allows them to remain accessible but untouchable, out of physical reach but close enough to gaze upon and listen to with adoration.

Ahern’s latest series began with the Neil Young song, ‘Cortez the killer’, which appears on the 1975 album Zuma. The song tells the story of Hernan Cortez, a conquistador who conquered Mexico for Spain in the sixteenth century. The song got Ahern thinking about what Cortez might look like and she began working on a number of paintings and drawings that depict her vision of the conquistador and elements of his escapades. These works continue Ahern’s desire to connect with musicians and make concrete and tangible her particular personal relationship to the music itself.

Where these new works get particularly interesting, and I think elusive in their purpose for Ahern herself, is that they have been the motivation for an extended series of drawings and paintings that depict numerous men, like Cortez, whom Ahern has never actually seen. These portraits are generated from Ahern’s imagination—they are not based on source images or narratives that she has created around them. The portraits themselves are as clearly depicted as if sketched from life and are motivated by her desire to create a series of faces that exercise her skill with various facial features. Each portrait embraces a different style: colonial, post-war Europe, contemporary. Each one is unique.

This series strikes me as particularly ambitious and challenging for a portrait painter. Ahern’s only source material exists in the slippery space of the mind and yet she is able to return to it, time and again, over a period of months. The works left me enthused, impressed and excited. But most significantly they left me wondering when was the last time that I could imagine, let alone capture the likeness of someone I had never laid eyes on before.

Ahern’s latest series is the stuff of true imagination matched by equal skill. Somehow, for me, it bridges the fandom of her earlier paintings with the anonymous characters of her favourite songs.

I’ve been struggling to summarise my thoughts on dOCUMENTA (d13). In the weeks immediately following its vernissage, the general response seemed to be one of elation and excitement, with several claiming it was possibly The Best exhibition of the 21st century. It wasn’t to be missed. On arriving in Europe two months later, however, the vibe was definitely cooler and much of the opening energy had (understandably) lulled. Responses, especially among artists, were mixed.

dOCUMENTA is undoubtedly the most highly anticipated curatorial event on the calender and a thoughtful example of high-end cultural tourism. This year’s dOCUMENTA was curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (whom we know from the 2008 Biennale of Sydney), and most definitely informed by Chus Martinez (who is less well known in Australia but is a formidable intellect and ex-chief curator at the MACBA in Barcelona). It was a mammoth affair, as most dOCUMENTAs tend to be, but this year’s expanded its footprint further, including:

– 4 years of preliminary encounters, seminars and preparations (tick)
– a 100-day exhibition and other activities in Kassel (tick)
– a series of seminars and a 30-day exhibition in Kabul (new)
– an 8-day seminar in Alexandria (new)
– a 14-day retreat in Banff (new)
– the publication, 100 notes—100 thoughts, comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations and conversations (new).

d13 brought together art and research, science and the humanities, past and present. It platformed existing and new conversations among artists, scientists, writers, inventors, philosophers, poets, activists and more. The event underlined art as a living and breathing thing in time and across time, inside and outside the art world, inherently interspersed. To me it read in the context of Donald Brook’s idea of art being anything that affects memetic innovation—and not just those items ordained by us as members of the art world.

In its holistic approach, d13 was too vast to gauge the shape of and imbued with such dynamism that it was difficult to discern the sum of its parts. It existed more as a set of ideas, lines of the body; not so much exhibition as personality, with characteristics and public and private moods; comparable, possibly, to a universe. It left me without conclusion (a nice space) but became more clear in its conceit when I came across a recent quote by Christov-Bakargiev which referred to the exhibition as an ‘obsolete twentieth-century object’. In its scale, structure and skilled conflation of disciplines and activities, d13 exploded the conventional notion of the exhibition.

But sometimes we want an exhibition. At an art event we want to see Art. At an art event occurring every five years we particularly want to see Very Good Art. Most of us, 99% of us at least, are not in a position to travel to four different locations around the globe to experience a curator’s full intent.

The best works on display at d13 in Kassel were the ones that brought art and life together through the artist’s distinct eye, without didacticism or a mandate to educate. Pierre Huyghe’s work, untitled (2012), was remarkable, a truly altering art experience that freely allowed the audience to negotiate their way through a living yet crafted environment that mulched together classical concepts of fertility, entropy and leisure. Murky, uncertain, sensorial and at times foreboding, Huyghe’s work offered a truly profound and unsettling encounter. Joan Jonas’s work, Reanimation (2010–12), although badly situated, offered another high point. Here we viewed the world around us—specifically landscape, its pilgrimage, precarity and representation. Jonas took us on an aesthetic journey that was revealing, sumptuous and smart and didn’t make us feel talked at. Even Trisha Donnelly’s vignettes, which have nothing to teach us outside of the act of looking itself, were quietly potent.

d13’s curatorial approach was no doubt conceptually exciting and challenging, as a good dOCUMENTA should be. For those seeking a more focused and fulfilled object–audience experience, however, it perhaps offered a more uneven encounter. While the director of dOCUMENTA (14) is yet to be announced, let me put my wish list out there: I would like to see a dOCUMENTA that is as conceptually ambitious as this one yet physically modest; a tough and concise selection of works that encourages and rewards close looking; something with a little less fat and spend. If possible, something gentler on the feet would be nice too.

dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 9 June – 16 September 2012.

Last Sunday I attended a private function held in celebration of the showing of Russell Gray Goodman’s Daytona dreamer as part of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. Russell Goodman was a Melbourne artist whose untimely death in 1988 cut his life and emerging artistic practice tragically short. Daytona dreamer, a kinetic sculpture of complex construction and presence, has been methodically restored and refurnished by Russell’s brother, Chris Goodman, over the last four years. It was exhibited for the first time in twenty-two years in the front window of Industria for the festival.

Russell Goodman started out as a painter but a mind for design and construction, and an interest in the constructivists and the Bauhaus soon led him to make intricate kinetic sculptures that explored themes of creation and destruction. Like many artists of the 1980s he was concerned with the fragility of humanity in light of nuclear armament, the AIDS epidemic and dominant right-wing politics. Goodman hung out in St Kilda and was part of the growing local scene that was frequented by artists and musicians and typified by venues such as the Crystal Ballroom and The Espy. It was in St Kilda that he died after being violently attacked by a local grifter.

Goodman spent two years making Daytona dreamer and it was first exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1988 as part of a series of solo exhibitions by young artists. Later that same year Goodman drove the disassembled work up to Sydney to be shown at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery as part of the exhibition New artists: Melbourne. This was his last exhibition.

Chris Goodman is a systems architect who spoke admiringly of his brother to a gathered audience of family and friends last Sunday. The four years spent refurbishing Daytona dreamer for exhibition no doubt lent him a unique opportunity to reconnect with his brother, and the work’s restaging brought obvious joy to those who knew Russell.

As I walked home that night I passed by Daytona Dreamer lit up and in action in the Industria window. Its messages about creation and destruction—the spinning wheel, the pumping hammers, the pulsing lights—and how closely these reflected the short life of Russell Gray Goodman reminded me again how powerfully aligned art and life can be.

Russell Gray Goodman, Daytona dreamer, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, Melbourne, 20–29 July 2012.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how we experience art. Mainly because my own ability to visit shows has become so limited for a time. Openings are out, studio visits impossible and any exhibitions I do get to are on the fly. My only conversations with artists of late have been more social, over coffee. While we are talking about various things, the only looking involved is at each other.

This is interesting to me because the art—physical/material stuff—is completely mediated and removed from my day-to-day. I’m hearing about it from those who have seen something and have something to say. I hear the gossip. I’m seeing what’s online. I’m looking at art in two dimensions, documentation-style on the iPhone, gallery websites, blogs, magazine reviews, email, Vimeo and catalogues posted in. I feel like I’m entering into a new relationship with art. And I’m not sure it’s healthy.

Experiencing art in this way is useful in the sense that it’s easy to access, broad in scope and, as the Internet tends to do, one thing leads to another—lands you in places of discovery that were not anticipated. You can repeat your visit, archive material for future reference and learn a lot without actually being there. But something in all this is most definitely missing.

I had a startling thought last week—it was still dark. What if I woke up and the Internet was broke? My art consumption would go down a good 90%. I couldn’t view documentation of shows I will never see, review archives of things I’ve already missed, email back and forth about this work or that space. I couldn’t even make an application to the Australia Council. I’d be paralysed.

Solution: next week I’m doing something I haven’t done in a long, long, long time. I’m taking me and my girl to the NGV and walking through every single gallery and viewing every single work on display. I’m going to saturate myself in the physical encounter one-on-one (maybe two-on-one). And in the process hopefully remind myself how individually complex the game can be. Or not.

I’m in the middle of developing a new project. The idea has been with me for years. Percolating away, sometimes urgent—spurred on by a new piece of writing, experience or thought, and sometimes hanging back—quiet.

I’m now at the stage where I’m starting to implement its structure in order to move along its conceptual development and physical realisation. I’m having conversations with people about it: artists, writers, dancers, makers. I’m debating it with unforgiving friends who are my best critics and supporters.

I’m presenting the same idea over and over again but in different ways, re-ordering it, changing its emphasis, editing out parts that no longer hold, introducing nuances which are only revealing themselves as I go. I enjoy this stage. This is where the kernel starts to go pop! And where the energy starts to connect from myself to another and another. This is where the project’s nucleus takes shape and then continues to evolve. Takes form.

It’s also the revealing part, the part where I feel myself really risking something. The search for money and venues and support can be tough but when the idea is strongly embedded compulsion motivates in a way no job can. Sharing an idea with others—something so personal and generated from within one’s own purview of the world—leaves me excited yet anxious. It’s the most vulnerable position I know of.

I often consider this practice and how in the artworld those of us who are making and creating each undertake this risk with punishing regularity. Artists, writers, curators—we each put ourselves, our very minds and vision, out there, over and over again. Our currency is so personal and so close that often I find myself wondering about other disciplines and industries: How much of themselves do they put into their work? What makes it worth it for them? Are they as addicted and compelled as we are?

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.