The artists in this exhibition focus on the point at which material objects have become denuded, tumbled-down, or ruined. For Walter Benjamin, the urban archaeologist and flâneur, objects on the point of ruination have an afterlife that reveals the complex relationship between old and new. The truth of an object, Benjamin tells us, was disclosed at the point where the context for its original existence had faded. And whilst Benjamin draws attention to this aspect of the afterlife of material objects as a kind of ghosting of the nineteenth century, he also situates his fascination with the aesthetics of ruins as a foil for the inexorability of modernity. Arts writer Brian Dillon takes a slightly different slant when he explains that, the aesthetics of ruination manifests as ‘a set of temporal and historical paradoxes.’* On the one hand, the degradation of architecture can be seen as a measure of time past and on the other hand, the contemplation of the temporality of the ruin may also point to the future; a future where we can imagine the present day as an impending ruin.
In the Australian context however, questions arise as to how we situate the concerns of ruination and its afterlife within the rubble of postcoloniality. Certainly ideas of the afterlife are played at a different register to those in the various European cities through which Benjamin ambled and perambulated. Many of the early settlers lamented the absence of ruins. It was as if they had no access to the chronology of the countryside without some gothic pile to point the way. Almost completely unable to read the subtle cues of a landscape en-chanted and held in a constant state of vivification by its Aboriginal inhabitants, the colonisers set about renaming Australia in a vast reconfiguring exercise. Thus in the Australian context of place names which commemorate abject disaster and faint echoes of other distant homes, the afterlife may also be read in the Aboriginal place names that casually declare vast patterns of absence. It ghosts the abandonment of agriculture beyond the Goyder Line, and haunts the innumerable convict buildings where the context for their original existence has faded.
As present day urban landscapes are developed and devolved, buildings can be tumbled down or built up as dramatically as floods and fires change the Australian countryside. Another aspect of the spatial enigma of the built environment can be seen in the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’, those huge building sites that proclaim chaos on a grand scale, and whose monolithic concrete structures, on their way to being completed, resemble the drosscapes of the twentieth century. This term, coined by geographers, describes the abandoned steel and concrete structures left over from old wars, half built freeways or the rusting hulks and detritus from the altered face of industrial manufacture. In outliving their usefulness on one level, these objects have become rich pickings for contemporary artists.
And whilst the artists in this exhibition, like Benjamin in his longitudinal Arcades Project, traverse their streetscapes, cityscapes and landscapes almost as artistic boundary riders, they also inhabit the city of printmaking. This city is a place where the technical skills of the artist are almost indivisible from the social construct of printmaking. It is also a place of precarious process. Total control over the materials and techniques of printmaking does not necessarily equate to total artistic mastery. A tension is created, therefore, where in order to resolve an artwork, the printmaking procedure is often pushed to the extreme edge, where physical alteration through printmaking methods can easily result in ruination. In that sense it can be said that decay is one of the organising principles behind the procedures of printmaking, or to put it another way; the means by which images are salvaged from the ruins is also one of the alchemical mysteries of this process driven form of art making. At each stage the artist is involved in a minutiae of considerations, and after a series of trials and errors, a kind of distillation is achieved and the print is ushered into the world as an afterlife of the process.
The artists in this exhibition - Aleksandra Antic, Sonya Hender, Jake Holmes, Michele Lane, Suzie Lockery, Lorelei Medcalf, Vicki Reynolds, Olga Sankey, Josh Searson, Mei Sheong Wong, Margie Sheppard, Sandra Starkey Simon, Simone Tippett and Georgina Willoughby - express a sophisticated response to the afterlife of decay and destruction. For a number of printmakers, an engagement with the dilapidation of the print matrix often leads to a heightened awareness of the textures and surfaces of the places in which they live and work. For some, semiotics becomes subsumed in a greater consideration of the aesthetic qualities of lost signs. Others bear witness to the dramatic severing of historical continuum through the vicissitudes of war. A number of artists co-opt and express the sudden mutability of the corporeal self. While still for others, the far reaches of the imagination play out the spaces that may be described as speculative ruins.
For Benjamin, writing about navigating the convolutions of Paris was a way of aggregating the multifaceted relationship between old and new. For this group of artists, however, printmaking as a form of image making has become a way to enact the afterlife of their own permeable places, denuded material objects, thresholds and interstitial zones.
* Brian Dillon, Ruins, (Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, London, 2011), 11.