ACT XII: NEW WORKS ON PAPER
Twelve acts in time: staging art on paper
Raymond Arnold, Jon Campbell, Gunter Christman, Jazmina Cininas, Lesley
Duxbury, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Mitch Lang, Noel McKenna,
Deborah Paauwe, George Popperwell, Bernhard Sachs, Hossein Valamanesh
George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne
UTS gallery, University of Technology, Sydney
Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide
Since its birth over 2000 years ago, paper has been both currency and
disseminator of culture and ideas. Its relevance has long since reached
global proportions. Who of us in the Western world, despite the advances
of technology and aspirations for a 'paperless office', does not encounter
paper everyday? Paper transmits information, conveys ideas, and is the
most democratic of supports. But above all, paper has a memory. It bears
human marks and meanings almost sacrificially.
The works in Act XII are linked by two things: they are made
on or with paper, and they coalesce in a performative thematic context,
which broadly considers notions of staging in art and the artistic enactment
of ideas. The act of making art - the creating process - is intrinsic
to the finished product. So, in addition to the message, story, symbolism,
subject or motif, and the artist's own predilections and history, an
artwork is as bound by the act of its creation as it can be by the period
and milieu of its creation. The gestural act is a moment which sums
up an accumulation of moments (as a part of history and its place in
the artist's life) and is a function of time.
...
Using diaries of a different kind, Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison have
made an art of their everyday. In Melbourne in 31 days and
30 days in Vienna, the most recent of eight collaborative artists'
books, they couple detailed diarised text - more stream of consciousness
than interpretation - that chronicles the pair's activities over a predetermined
period, with the collected haberdash of life. Together with scanned
images, hand-drawn pictures, notation and intricate embellishment, the
books make for insightful and delightful reading. Part of a journey,
the book made in Melbourne became a performance piece at the Weinstation
in Vienna in March 2002. The performance was a turning point, metaphorically
blurring the experience of the months. The experience of the Vienna
trip was compiled for another book on the artists' return; the gestural
act in real time.
The openness and delicacy of these works can also be seen in Haby and
Jennison's pale, luminous prints of fantasy lands. Their The plight
of the birds and The tears of the elephant are two optimistic
tales, depicting a search for happiness in which narrative time is mapped
by the fine longitudinal lines that pattern the print surface. In recounting
real stories and creating imagined tales, Haby and Jennison engage the
motions of staging - shifts in time, scale and space - to make art out
of art's own enactment.
An extract from Twelve acts in time: staging art on paper,
Act XII catalogue
Lesley Harding, Curator
