Vitalstatistix, Author at Vitalstatistix - Page 3 of 5

VITALSTATISTIX STATEMENT – 12 OCTOBER 2020
Casey Jenkins – IMMACULATE

A PDF version of this statement can be downloaded HERE.

See Casey Jenkins’ statement HERE.

Vitalstatistix unequivocally expresses our support for the artist Casey Jenkins, and their work IMMACULATE. We are extremely concerned about the Australia Council’s decision to rescind its funding of IMMACULATE, and the broader implications this has for Australian artists and arts funding.

In late June, Vitalstatistix selected Casey’s project IMMACULATE, an intimate and durational artwork about transforming and reframing the conception of a child through the lens of queer experience, for participation in Adhocracy 2020, our national experimental arts hothouse held annually in September.

Adhocracy is a creative development initiative for new experimental artistic works in Australia. During September 2020 we published video and written outcomes from IMMACULATE HERE and Casey participated in two artist talks. All of which were very well received by our audiences.

Casey Jenkins’ artwork IMMACULATE is documenting a deeply personal experience, in line with much of their practice, of the process of becoming pregnant by donor insemination and the artist’s desire to have a very wanted and planned for second child. It is an artwork about an experience that is entirely legal and extremely common yet surrounded by ideological positions as the responses to this work have made abundantly clear.

The materials of this work are Casey themself and the representation of their body. Casey is the only person in this artwork. Those engaging in ‘pro-life’ rhetoric around this work misconstrue what this project is.

We categorically reject the misrepresentation of this work as Casey being paid to become pregnant or the artist having a child as an art project. Casey has not broken any laws and the Australia Council have acknowledged this.

We selected Casey’s work for participation in Adhocracy from a highly competitive national call for proposals, and we have been delighted to work with this acclaimed Australian artist. We regularly work with artists who make embodied work, who create from their lived experience, and who explore feminist and queer themes. The work is extremely pertinent, which is one of the reasons why it was selected.

Like much of Casey’s practice, IMMACULATE has two sides to it: a reflective and stripped back quality of a work made alone from home totally reliant on the passage of time, alongside an incisive critique. As stated on our Adhocracy website this work is “creating a sanctuary for witnessing and reflecting on non-hetero and solo reproduction, the controls put on a queer body which resists being controlled, and the hope, fear and strength inherent in the process of conceiving alone.”

The use of the body in art is certainly nothing new. Nor is discussion and depiction of conception and pregnancy, in art, where the pregnant person’s body and the pregnant person’s body alone, is the subject, in line with decades of feminist work on this topic.

Maude Davey OAM, performance artist and a former Artistic Director of Vitalstatistix, has written:

“In my opinion Jenkins is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, standing alongside and in the tradition of artists like Patricia Piccinini, Mike Parr and Stelarc. The medium in their most celebrated works, is their own body. The body has been used by many significant artists, (Jackson Pollock, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Japan’s Gutai Group, Einat Amir, to cite a very few examples) particularly over the last fifty or sixty years, revolutionising the way art is thought about, approached and perceived.

Jenkins’ work therefore, is clearly situated within a respected and valued contemporary art tradition. Use of the Body allows artists to refuse mechanistic conceptions of art as the creation of objects that can conform to culturally agreed upon standards of value. This medium claims a subject position for the art as well as the artist, requiring the art to be approached viscerally as well as intellectually. Our encounter with a Body based artwork directly evokes empathy and compassion, as well as a kinaesthetic (sympathetic physical) response”.

The misrepresentation of IMMACULATE, and the Australia Council’s decision to break a contract with an artist and rescind its funding of the work, has deep ramifications for Australian artists. Artists need to be able to make work about lived experience without fear of having their lives assessed for “incalculable” risk or controversy to the Federal Government.

This kind of extraordinary intervention sets a precedent for all artists funded by the Australia Council. It has created an enormous amount of fear and trepidation amongst artists, especially those most vulnerable to these types of attacks, such as queer artists and artists whose practices are embodied and/or experimental, as well of those who have stood up for Casey.

The Australia Council, whose function is to support artists and uphold freedom of artistic expression at arms-length from Government, needs to feel empowered to stand by artists – especially when they are subjected to concerted campaigns by the IPA, religious conservatives and other assorted haters.

We don’t counter conservative attacks on artistic expression, arts funding and artists by dissolving under pressure and throwing people who could be seen to be at the margins under the bus.

Vitalstatistix is proud to support and stand by Casey Jenkins alongside all the artists we work with.

We can confirm that in the course of this issue Vitalstatistix has been asked by the Australia Council not to allocate funds from our peer-assessed grant for Adhocracy 2020, granted by their Emerging and Experimental Art section, towards our payment of Casey Jenkins’ fee for their participation in our curatorial project, Adhocracy. We can confirm that we have reluctantly agreed to this condition and have paid their small fee using our own earned income rather than any funding agency’s grant to our organisation.

Emma Webb OAM
Director, Vitalstatistix
12 October 2020

Please see below for Vitalstatistix’s narrative of the timeline around this issue

Statement about the timeline

Vitalstatistix selected IMMACULATE for Adhocracy 2020 in late June from a highly competitive national callout process.

Shortly after we selected Casey’s project, we became aware that Arts Centre Melbourne had also selected the same project for their Take Over program, unanimously and with a great deal of enthusiasm just like our curatorial panel, and that they had begun to contract Casey on 7^th July. Vitalstatistix and Arts Centre Melbourne briefly liaised about IMMACULATE, in a collegial and positive manner, until such time as Arts Centre Melbourne withdrew from the project.

Through the process of developing the website for our public launch of the Adhocracy 2020 program (adhocracy.org.au) where we acknowledge project-specific funding bodies and other partners, we were made aware by Casey that the Australia Council had accepted a variation of a peer-assessed career development grant awarded to the artist, from an international project that could not happen because of COVID-19 travel restrictions to a suite of other projects to occur in Australia, IMMACULATE being one of these.

These types of simple variations to peer-assessed grants have been extremely common in 2020. The original project and IMMACULATE have much in common materially and thematically; being made from the body and lived experience, exploring solo queer parenting. In the process of applying for this variation the artist double checked that the Australia Council understood the nature of the work. This variation was confirmed on 4^th August and then again on 13^th August.

On the 14^th August, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article about IMMACULATE; then on the 18^th August, conservative commentator Peta Credlin and the Director of Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs, Dr Bella d’Abrera, presented a highly negative discussion of the project on Sky News. Over this period of time the Australia Council confirmed to the Herald Sun and Sky News that the project was in receipt of Australia Council funding.

On the evening of the 18^th August, the evening before Casey’s first planned outcome, a live video, the Australia Council contacted both Casey and Vitalstatistix, separately, to ask for an overview of ethical considerations and legislative compliance (which was provided immediately by the artist and over the following two days by Vitalstatistix).

On the 19^th August, Casey and Vitalstatistix were asked and agreed to temporarily remove the Australia Council logo/funding acknowledgment from publications of the project. The Australia Council informed us they were seeking some legal advice; it was strongly suggested that this was in order to confidently support the project and that it was hoped this advice would be confirmed within a week.

On the 20^th August, the Australia Council confirmed that Vitalstatistix should not pay a fee to Casey Jenkins from our Australia Council grant towards Adhocracy 2020 until such time as the issue was resolved, which we reluctantly agreed to.

Emma Webb, director of Vitalstatistix, wrote to the Australia Council: “I am also concerned about the precedent this could create in regards to funding curatorial projects such as Adhocracy – will you go through all the projects we have selected, months after the funding is confirmed, to see if there is potential for controversy? I hope and believe the answer here is ‘no, of course not’.”

The same email included a summation that confirmed:

Casey Jenkins is:
>Engaged in a lawful process of attempting to conceive a child;
>Making an artwork that documents their lived experience which is completely in line with their body of work and practice;
>Absolutely transparent about what the artwork involves to any organisation that has funded the work;
>Publishing the artwork in a lawful and sensitive manner.

Vitalstatistix is:
>Supporting the artist, artistically and emotionally;
>Monitoring the process of the work’s implementation alongside Casey;
>Publishing the artwork in a lawful and sensitive manner, as part of a curated program of 28 artworks responding to themes that include isolation, home life, healthcare and queerness.

On 26^th August, Casey received correspondence from the Australia Council which indicated that legal advice had not yet been sought and asked Casey to agree to a new variation that would not include IMMACULATE. In response to querying of this approach it is was suggested that Casey was “regrettably” not accepting a “compromise”.

At this time, Emma Webb emailed the Australia Council: “With the greatest of respect, genuinely, it seems to me that the Australia Council has suddenly this week – quite apart from the conversations had last week – attempted here to procedure Casey into accepting a variation to a funding agreement that is not ideal for their work or situation, in order to avoid the trouble. I’ll reiterate again from my email earlier today: we thought you were seeking legal advice last week in order to make sure you had everything covered in order to confidently support the project – to now hear you are seeking it regretfully, is quite disconcerting. It is perfectly reasonable for Casey to question why their work is being called into ethical and legal question by the Australia Council, after a variation inclusive of Immaculate was previously acceptable.”

Casey Jenkins and Emma Webb met with Australia Council staff on 28^th August, where it was agreed that the Australia Council would seek legal advice and then provide clarification of their position to Casey. At that meeting it was acknowledged that this had been handled insensitively by them. At that meeting an Australia Council representative made a statement to the effect of ‘You do know that our Prime Minister is a religious man and could defund the Australia Council’.

On 4^th September, the Australia Council provided Casey with a legal undertaking to sign. A series of communications occurred between the artist and the Australia Council, up until 18^th September, in which the artist repeatedly communicated to the Australia Council that they were attempting to obtain legal advice.

On 22^nd September, the artist informed Vitalstatistix that Australia Council CEO Adrian Collette AM had phoned and emailed them to advise that he and Australia Council Chair, Sam Walsh AO, had decided to rescind the decision to fund IMMACULATE, citing “incalculable” ethical and legal risk.

See Casey Jenkins’ statement on this HERE.
A PDF version of this statement can be downloaded HERE.

Isolation Conversations is by Shopfront Artist-In-Residence Jane Howard. Jane speaks with Kate Power about how COVID-19 has affected their work, their process and their lives.

By the time Kate Power and I find time to talk in late May, the lockdown restrictions in South Australia are already starting to lift. Both at home, with few places to go and little to do, we have still struggled to find the time to meet. Time between our emails stretches out as life gets in the way. Finding a window where we can both speak is surprisingly hard.

Finally, we find an evening to talk over Zoom – the video platform which so rapidly became an essential service in our lives.

“I’ve been so full up,” Power tells me about this strange sense of never having enough time. “Time-busy at the [book] shop [where she works], but also just emotionally quite full, I guess, like everybody is.”

Power was to be the first artist in residence at Vitalstatistix this year with her new work, Bedroom, under the mentorship of Sydney-based artist Sarah Rodigari. Scheduled for the 16th to 29th of March, in the week leading up to the residency it was two-and-a-half months after China alerted the World Health Organisation of an unusual pneumonia, one-and-a-half months after the first cases in Australia.

While numbers of the infected and dead were growing in China, Iran, the US, and Italy, Australia still felt relatively isolated and safe, with less than 300 cases. Melbourne’s Grand Prix was cancelled, but Adelaide’s festivals powered forward. “You could still fly,” says Power. “Things were less strict.”

“There was less awareness of what was going to happen.”

As the residency dates neared, Power and Rodigari started thinking of contingency plans: perhaps they could work together for the two weeks, and then quarantine themselves after. “I was kind of like, ‘oh, after Sarah leaves I’ll just quarantine for two weeks and it’ll be fine,’” Power says.

“And Emma [Webb, Director of Vitalstatistix] said ‘to be honest, I don’t know if you are going to quarantine for two weeks, given that you’re willing to do this.” She laughs.

Lockdown rules rapidly escalated. Bans on gatherings of more than 500 from March 16, then on more than 100 from March 18. “Non-essential” businesses closed from March 25; the same day South Australia enforced border controls. The staff of Vitalstatistix transitioned to working from home. And Power and Rodigari started their mentorship via Zoom.

Waterside Workers Hall, says Power, “was totally empty. There was this vast feeling of a huge space, of all this time, to make my work in there. It was exciting, but also quite daunting at the same time.”

Bedroom is an exploration of trauma, but the world Power started making the work in is drastically different from the world we now find ourselves in. “I was so ready to tap into that [trauma],” she says, “and to just embody it in my work and to fully try and open it up and now it feels like … What does that experience mean in this time? And it feels so distant now.”

“It feels a bit like you’re working through mud when you’re still trying to work on your other thoughts and projects.”

While lockdown forced Power’s residency to take on a very different shape over those two weeks, this shifting amorphous state has continued. With the hall sitting empty, no longer being used for performances or weddings or development, Power has continued to go back: this vast chasm all for herself.

Every Wednesday, for two hours, she and Rodigari keep working together. It has been a new process, one of “just chipping away at something slowly.” It is, she says, “not a luxury you really ever get.”

“I was meant to have a showing at the end of this, but of course that’s not happening. What can happen now that there’s time and space and in-between times?”

“I’m kind of thinking more about a slow process of developing something for the day when we will be able to come together again,” she says, and pauses.

“But I don’t know, maybe that’s a bit short sighted or something.”

Power’s artwork has mostly been in sculpture and video art, this was to be her first live performance. But its creation has been forced to happen through a screen.

“It makes me think: maybe the live element isn’t necessary?” Power says, only half-asking. “But I just feel so committed to keeping on trying.”

It feels we are experiencing a glut of online performances: pre-recorded shows on YouTube; companies staging play readings via Zoom; cabaret via Instagram. And yet, I have been feeling like these grasps at relevance have been empty. I don’t have the space – emotional or mental or physical – to connect to this work. It just reminds me what we have lost.

“I’m so interested in connections and intimacy and how we interact,” Power says. “The same kind of format but filmed and then put online, or a live event but online, I just can’t engage with that.”

If the last three months have taught us anything, it seems planning ahead for a future is a furphy. How can you imagine a future when the truth of your present shifts every day? What does it mean to think about performance and coming together, when we have no idea how long COVID-19 will disrupt our lives? Thinking about the future is always part of making an artwork: thinking of its future state, its future form, its future audience. Alone in Waterside Workers Hall, perhaps for Power these thoughts of an unknown future are perhaps louder than they would usually be.

“Every time I walk into the main hall,” says Power, “I think about the future and when I’m back in that space and how weird it will be to reflect on this time when it’s bustling again. Imagining when I’m at the next Adhocracy and being like: remember when you spent heaps of time alone in here?”

“It’s such a social place. and all of my associations are to do with connections and conversations and exchanging of ideas, so to walk in with the presence of that but not tangibly … “ she trails off.

“I think it means it feels really beautiful to work in because you are surrounded by that [energy] constantly, through memory and architecture.”

I tell Power how I have been thinking less about live performance, and more about the conversations in the foyer afterwards. The sharing of art in space and in time, conversations happening incidentally but crucially. “Those conversations can be so minimal, or seemingly unrelated, even, to what you’ve seen. Whatever picks up from that moment when it ends,” she says..

The liveness, “kind of cracks [an artwork] open more.”

“If you think about seeing a video in a gallery or a sculpture in a gallery there is that intimacy that is quite narrow, in a way.” But, she says, of performance, “there is an energy of continuing it on.”

Adelaide feels so removed from the world right now. We have been so lucky in how few cases we have had, how short a time we were in lockdown before things started to open up again – how lax our lockdown rules were, in any case.

But is there anything Power feels like she could carry forward from this period of time?

“Boundaries, I think,” she says. “I’ve been finding it easier to maintain boundaries for when things are right. I guess because I’ve been not socialising as much, I’ve realised how little I need to socialise.”

“You just don’t have to.”

Darling Vitals family, this is quite a long message and I appreciate the time you take to read it in these difficult days.

Our Federal funding outcome

Vitalstatistix was extremely disappointed to receive news on Friday that our Four Year Funding application for Federal Government support from 2021-2024 was declined by the Australia Council for the Arts.

As our dedicated supporters will remember, Vitalstatistix was defunded from multi-year Federal funding in 2016 alongside a swathe of colleagues from around Australia, in the wake of the Federal Government’s cuts to the arts under then Minister for the Arts, George Brandis.

In the four years since that loss of funding, Vitals still went from strength to strength.

We responded through prioritising our creative development programs – our residencies, labs and events such as Adhocracy, and their associated year-round public programs of free showings and artist talks, which we know our audiences love and regularly enjoy.

We also presented significant public projects including: works in partnership with Adelaide Festival, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the Art Gallery of South Australia and many others; performance seasons at our beloved venue Waterside of exceptional Australian new works that South Australian audiences would otherwise not have seen; and our five year climate change project Climate Century, among other keynote projects.

We have spent the last year applying to the Australia Council’s Four Year Funding program for small-to-medium cultural organisations; proceeding through the expression-of-interest stage, submitted in April 2019, and then submitting a full application in November 2019. This is no small endeavour, practically and psychologically, as many of you know.

This latest funding outcome for Vitals does not technically represent a loss of funding, unlike some of our colleagues such as the brilliant Restless Dance Theatre – among many others –, to whom our hearts go out: we know the devastating shock of such an announcement.

However, for Vitals and many others, this heartbreaking result does represent a loss – one of potential, of work for artists, of new Australian art and culture, of the capacity to realise our vision for progressive contemporary art and community life.

For many of us, it feels like the Australia Council is in the business of palliative care at the moment. As Ben Eltham outlines, not for the first time, in his excellent Guardian piece yesterday, Australia Council funding has declined by nearly 20% since 2013; and around 60% of their budget is still quarantined for a small group of the largest performing arts companies. This doesn’t leave much left for small-to-medium organisations and especially for independent artists. It means that each time the Four Year Funding program is offered we will invariably see more and more small organisations defunded or unfunded.

As you would be aware, the Australian Government, rightly and in response to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, is currently spending an unprecedented amount of nearly $200 billion on various initiatives.

While some arts organisations and arts workers will benefit from some of these broader measures, as yet not one dollar of this spending has been put towards forward thinking arts specific initiatives to keep our sector alive. As Ben Eltham says, “There is enough money to fund Australian culture properly of course. It is simply a matter of political will.”

Of course, the times we are in show this to be the case for many areas we supposedly could not afford even a month ago – a raise in social security, free childcare for people who keep our society running, and many other things.

Somehow, in this current extraordinary environment, the arts have not managed to secure any new investment. This is how impotent the Australia Council, chaired by ex Rio Tinto mining boss Sam Walsh AO, has become. This is what the Federal Government thinks of the arts. We must work to change this.

We encourage our community to be actively involved in the current campaign for a Federal arts rescue package, to ensure no worker is left behind and to save our creators – please join and stay in touch with National Association for the Visual Arts, Live Performance Australia, Theatre Network Australia and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance for actions that you can take. #CreateAustraliasFuture #SaveOurCreators #NoWorkerLeftbehind.

The future for Vitalstatistix

Vitals turned 35 years old in 2019 and we are not going anywhere but onwards.

While the Four Year Funding result has been extremely disappointing, to say the least, we are very fortunate to have the generous support of the Government of South Australia and the City of Port Adelaide Enfield, alongside the many larger cultural organisations we regularly partner with and of course our community of artists, audiences and supporters.

We are also fortunate to have current Australia Council project funding for Adhocracy, and we will make the most of their new small ‘Resilience’ grants, as we encourage all artists and small arts organisations to do.

We have our beautiful home, the Waterside Workers Hall, that provides our organisation an anchor for our contribution to contemporary art and community life. And we are extremely adept at making not much go far, Port Adelaide style!

Over the coming months we will be creating our plans for 2021 and beyond. These plans will focus on the things we do best – supporting artists to develop incredible new works, through residencies and artist labs; enabling them to show works-in-progress; connecting Australian artists; continuing to be a cultural hub in Port Adelaide; prioritising women, queer and First Nations artists; and undertaking keynote projects, where we can secure project funding and creative partnerships for these initiatives.

However, it is impossible to not grieve for the projects and works we had up our sleeves for you, if we had received the Four Year Funding, I will admit.

Meanwhile we are proceeding with our national call out for proposals for Adhocracy 2020, with some significant changes responding to the COVID-19 crisis. We are committed to getting this funding out to artists, so please do apply by May 25 – INFO HERE.

COVID-19

You can read our initial response to COVID-19 HERE.

In line with important public health measures, our venue Waterside is indefinitely closed and our staff team are working from home. This closure means that all of our 2020 public program, including some projects we had yet to announce, are cancelled or on hold until further notice. We are honouring all artists’ fees associated with these projects for the whole of 2020.

We are exploring other ways that we can offer some small, flexible funds to artists over this time and we have a number of new projects we still hope to announce for late 2020.

We know that our closure, and all the closures, significantly and disproportionately impact on the livelihood and mental health of independent artists. We remain committed to working for a better, fairer and just deal for artists and arts workers, and promoting community, kindness and justice more broadly.

Our love also goes out to the members of our choir-in-residence, Born on Monday – we know that not meeting weekly is really challenging and frustrating for many participants.

Comrades, all of you, we look forward to celebrating our reopening of Waterside with you at a time in the future. That is going to be one epic party.

Lastly, my big love to my wonderful staff team – Emma, Toby and Isobel – and my brilliant and supportive Board. Team Vitals is powering on.

In solidarity,

Emma Webb
Director, Vitalstatistix

Image Credit: Climate Century 2015 – Winds of Increasing Magnitudes by Sundari Carmody and Matthew Bradley. Photo by Sandra Elms.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artist Rebecca Conroy about her interests in economics, labour and artist-led study of these topics, along with her new work Iron Lady, in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency.

Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary director, curator, producer, researcher and writer, working across community, PFsite-based events, discursive practices, and intercultural collaborations. She has worked with key arts organisations in Australia including Performance Space, Campbelltown Art Centre, Pact Theatre, ArtSpace, Urban Theatre Projects, Watch this Space, Lismore Regional Art Gallery, as well as collaborating with artists in Sydney and internationally, in the USA, South East Asia and Europe.

Iron Lady is in residence at The Mill, presented by Vitalstatistix and PADA, during the Feast Festival in November

Rebecca, can you tell us a little about your practice and your artistic communities?

Rebecca Conroy: I grew up in the performing arts, but have been straddling disciplines ever since I graduated from theatre school in the 90s. Moving into artist run spaces introduced me to the visual arts world, and now I use my art-swipe-card to gain access to economics, housing, urban planning, and the like. I feel like my practice has always been morphing and lurching in these kind of passionate increments, some conscious and some less so—more like a blurred connection of messy evolving lines of enquiry.

I am interested in work that is cheeky, oppositional, and sort of ruptures things; I prefer straddling, mimicry and Trojan strategies—to survive and maybe avoid capture. Work that is self-aware of its power as art operating within the institution—a self-conscious art.

I also use it therapeutically or as a solution to a problem. Yurt Empire was certainly this, as a response to the housing crisis in 2011 which evolved into a large-scale collaborative experiment; making installations as dwellings we attempted to smuggle them onto a series of development sites south of Sydney. In some ways, I like to make pragmatic works that appear on the outside to be ridiculous propositions, but are actual tools or weapons, instruments that can be wielded, mostly as disguises. I think that’s one of the distinct advantages of the art field—it can use its licence to say what it is and is not, and to alter the frame in which it is interpreted.

When I returned to Sydney in 2004 from a decade living and working in Indonesia, I needed to seek out the ‘kampung’ and ended up in the inner-city neighbourhood of Chippendale setting up a warehouse. With a bunch of others, we co-founded ‘The Wedding Circle’ which ran studios, a gallery and experimental event space. Maybe from a deep longing for Java, the local laneways (or ‘gang’ as they are called in Indonesian) became little capillaries connecting all of our warehouse spaces. Every era feels definitive, but this really felt like the last hurrah for lots of artist run warehouses in that part of Sydney, whilst also being the time when Sydney artists were starting to connect with their nearest neighbours. We used this as a springboard to create an exchange and festival event over four years with artist run spaces and communities from Java. Naturally called it Gang Festival, and published a book called “Gang re:publik”. I like occupying terrain, or wearing its DNA and seeing what happens if you just replace or delete or alter the gene sequence.

You have a body of work and collaborations that explore economics, and do so through artist-led research models. Can you tell us a bit about some of these projects such as Dating an Economist and the Marrickville School of Economics?

RC: Yeah for the past 3 years I have been interested in the superficial distinctions drawn between art and economy and creating works that respond to the nexus of these seemingly disparate fields—I really think they are both involved in the business of making stuff up and speculating, and determining what is of ‘value’. I also enjoy the opposition and friction between them. This is essentially where the ‘Dating an Economist’ project came from. I wanted to reclaim the authority that economists assume in determining and knowing ‘value’, and contest this in a less formal, more intimate setting, which introduced factors of the unknown and unpredictable. By placing them in a date situation, it also put into play feelings, emotions, and the irrational – or rather the way the human behaves in relation to gendered power.

The MSE (Marrickville School of Economics) is another example where I tried to talk back to the authority of the London School of Economics and question the general hegemony of economy as a field of discourse and ideological blunt instrument shaping everything, leading us to “knowing the price of all things and the value of nothing”. The MSE by-line was ‘Let’s unfuck the Economy’ and its challenge was to expose the inadequacy of economic thinking to our worlds. It also questioned the increasing influence that bankers and business people have in the arts world. For example, Ian Narev the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank is also the chairperson of the Sydney Theatre Company. Imagine if artists were on the board of banks? Why is there this implicit and presumptuousness when it comes to knowledge, expertise and value? So MSE was a curriculum that I designed to offer artists access points and pathways into interrogating the assumptions of these disciplines. It was also an opportunity to offer up all the research I had been doing as a series of curated reading lists and literature that was responding specifically to the issues that affect artists, in particular how the rise of flexible casualised labour and a precariat workforce was approaching the condition of the artist-labourer. There is a bunch of art-labour stuff happening in Europe and North America but not so much in Australia. With MSE, which also had an iteration this year as part of the Folkestone Fringe in the UK, the intention was to generate some interest and collectivise knowledge and contacts in this field. The sessions were curated around a thematic and readings, and culminated in a presentation with a non-artist or collaborative project that had some pedagogical use-value.

Much discussion of new economies is basically about promoting entrepreneurship and capitalist ‘innovation’. Yet there are ideas and models that challenge neoliberalism too. What are some of the key ideas around new economies that you are most interested in?

It’s a really interesting time when the distinction around words and concepts like community and sharing have been so thoroughly co-opted and integrated into experiential capital. So part of the ‘fun’ at the moment is finding yourself at events that bring together these segments in misplaced and confusing ways.

Recently in Paris I was fortunate to attend ‘Ouishare’, an international gathering of share economy, alternative economy, and community led enterprise activists, entrepreneurs, and advocates. Elsewhere I have described it like TedX meets Vivid Sydney with the catering done by Hillsong. In other ways, the existence of something like Ouishare is testimony to the tenacity of capitalism.

Instead of addressing the systemic flaws—poverty, climate change, housing crises—as driven by the current configurations of power, well-meaning, mostly white activists, add yet more innovative “solutions” to the mix (as if a lack of ideas was the problem) and in the process, elide existing struggles and erase the histories experiences and lessons learnt.

I tend to find these spaces fascinating to the extent that I am puzzled as to why someone could so much time creating a solution to a ‘problem’ but seemingly zero time understanding how the problem emerges and continues to persist, in the first place. I am conscious particularly that white folk, and particularly men, need to put more energy into listening to those who are at the coal face of those problems.

To this extent I don’t push for artist led solutions, because I think artists have some kind of magic solution, but simply because as a field of practice and body of ideas and approach this is the industry or sector that I relate to, and have experience with.

I think in this way also that artists need to see themselves as part of these same dialogues that are happening around different ways of doing economy—and by extension the practice-led seems to be a great way to be shifting politics. Whether your hands are stuck in soil, or energy systems, or food, or other materials, the doing and the practice I think are great vehicles to rethink political economy and ways of being-in-the-world.

You recently spent three months in Europe for a range of residencies and conferences exploring some of these ideas. Can you tell us about this?

I spent time at PAF (Performing Arts Forum) just outside of Paris. This is an old convent, one-time-cult, and now thriving artist community which hosts “meetings” and themed residencies for large and small groups. It’s quite unique and quite my cup of tea, mixing as they do philosophy and critical enquiry form an artist led practice. I also spent 2 weeks in Tuscany (just awful) with a bunch of great thinkers and community workers learning about P2P economy and alternative models for community housing, food, energy, and governance shaped by municipalities. My contribution was thinking through the artist led-laundromat that is currently in development (see below). It was so incredible to listen learn and just bear witness to the sheer volume of things happening in this field. Artists should be really excited about this. It’s good news for us!

Like women and artists generally, Iron Lady is a service provider and she is also in the business of emotional labour. Can you tell us about her and what you will be doing when you are in Adelaide in November?

Iron Lady emerged from my interest in libidinal economies, the role of intimacy, and my predilection for female assassins and the deceptively harmless, in particular how the subversive can be folded into the ordinary and the everyday.

I was also fascinated with how many clichés I could pile into the one-dimensional character as device, and still generate ambiguity. So obviously Margaret Thatcher is one dimension of the Iron Lady, marked as she is by her lack of empathy and shrewd economic rationalism.

Underlining this is the humble domestic ironing service which underscores all other forms of gendered laboured performed by women in the household, which is why the Iron Lady includes these value-added services on her artisanal menu. Woman as soft generous sounding board, Woman as honest appraisal, Woman as bleeding heart, Iron Lady can perform all these. Illicit affair? Iron Lady can also do that.

Secretly she’s also spraying your collars with Oxytocin—an enzyme that makes you emotionally vulnerable.

During my two weeks, I will be operating a boutique artisanal ironing service, which only caters to cis-white men working in the corporate sector. Essentially, it’s a data mining exercise, a bit like military drills you carry out with friendly combatants. Whilst servicing this ‘market segment’ I will be gathering useful knowledge about how they operate. I will solicit my clientele using a combination of stealth marketing and door to door sales work. And a very good-looking outfit. I will be offering a basic wash and steam press with a free consultation to determine which of the nine value added services from the menu they would like. The work is a made-in-residency work and will expand and move in as yet unknown direction as necessary. For example, recently Iron Lady was given the opportunity to make a cheeky foray into Sydney Contemporary art fair. Moving through the ‘art-kelp’ as my designer Emma Price likes to say with affection, with my business card and my Assassins swag, I discovered that I am going to have to have a firm grip on the narrative otherwise I risk a participant feeling like the jokes on them. OH NO!

Artworks like Iron Lady, and another project you are developing called A Very Beautiful Laundromat, can act as businesses and art simultaneously. They could be seen as a type of public art, or as a type of social enterprise. Are they or are they not? Can you tell us more about the artistic framework of your work?

This is a great question which I always have fun trying to answer as a way of pushing the thinking about art outside of all the tired binaries—art/politics etc.

Essentially I like making work that does both at the same time, or that can shift from one to another constantly. Life is perhaps too short for things to only exist as ‘art’ and not also be threaded into the lived experiences as a response to making life happen, just as social enterprises seem like missed opportunities to also express art or have ridiculous moments, rough up the edges a bit, or carve out some space for deep beautiful thinking.

The artist run laundromat is a response to the feast and famine economy and will provide occasional paid shifts for artists in between gigs, whilst also being a gathering space for the social and the discursive. I am working with three other top ladybirds in the arts and finance worlds to make this come alive. Our business outfit is called Money Laundering.

What could people read to know more about these ideas?

The websites for the projects have some great resources, in particular:

Other artists whose work I dig in the art/economy field are:

Caroline Woolard who has done a bunch of stuff around artist trade schools and commons real estate
Cassie Thorton who is the Feminist Economics Department
Kate Rich who runs Feral Trade

At the beginning of September, Vitalstatistix presented Adhocracy, our national arts hothouse. Adhocracy featured nine project and around forty artists, all developing new experimental and multidisciplinary artworks. You can read about why Adhocracy (and the artists it supports) are important here.

This year’s commissioned residency project for Adhocracy was Second Hand Emotions, led by Mish Grigor, Sarah Rodigari and SJ Norman with South Australian artists Celeste Martin, Grace Marlow, Jennifer Greer Holmes, Rebecca Meston, Sarah-Jayde Tracey and Suzannah Kennett Lister.

Second Hand Emotions was a queer, unashamedly process-driven and discursive project responding to the provocation of ‘love and feminism’. The Second Hand Emotions zine, produced during the residency, can be seen at Fontanelle’s Love & Feminism exhibition on until 8 October as part of FRAN.

For our (slightly belated!) September blog we are publishing a speech delivered by the Second Hand Emotions lead artists at the opening event on Friday 1 September.

Our next Vital Conversations blog in October will feature a solo interview with artist Rebecca Conroy, also discussion feminist themes of affective and emotional labour, and her work Iron Lady in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency during November as part of the Feast Festival.

WE TALKED

WE STARTED BY TALKING

WE’VE BEEN TALKING FOR TWELVE DAYS

WE’RE STILL TALKING NOW (AND …..NOW)

WE MADE LISTS

WE INTERROGATED EACH OTHER

WE ASKED NICELY

WE CATEGORISED IT AS A COLLOQUIAL DISCURSIVE MODE

WOMEN SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING

(NO, PEOPLE SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING)

WE COVERED LOTS OF GROUND

WE DEFINED AFFECTIVE LABOUR

SOME OF US GOOGLED PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS

WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF FEMINISM

WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF EMOTION

WE WERE LOST IN A SEA OF CONTRADICTIONS.

WE WORKED 10-5

BUT REALLY WE STARTED AT 11, THE REAL WORK STARTED AT 11. BEFORE THAT WAS COFFEE, AND WRITING, AND CHECK INS.

WE MADE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE, WE MIGHT JUST MAKE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE?.

WE DECIDED NOT TO GIVE ANY HOMEWORK

BUT THEN WE GAVE A BIT, BUT WE IT WASNT REALLY HOMEWORK, IT WAS ALMOST HOMEWORK, SO IT WAS STOOP WORK.

WE TALKED ABOUT EMOTIONS

WE TALKED ABOUT ART

WE TALKED ABOUT POLITICS

WE TALKED ABOUT LIFE

TENDERNESS. RAGE. GRIEF. LOVE

WE TALKED ABOUT FUCKING.

THEN WE WOULD GO HOME AND THE REAL WORK WOULD START

THEN WE WOULD DO THE OTHER WORK THAT WE HAVE TO DO FOR OUR OTHER JOB, OUR MONEY JOB. THEN WE WERE TIRED BECAUSE WE REALISED WE WERE WORKING ALL DAY AND WORKING ALL NIGHT.

WE WORKED IT OUT

WE INVITED GUESTS

WE BROUGHT IN EXPERTS

WE HAD A SKYPE

WE HARDLY EVER AGREED BUT WE WERE USUALLY PRETTY POLITE ABOUT IT

WE TALKED ABOUT FEMINIST HISTORIES

WE TALKED ABOUT ART HEROES

WE TALKED ABOUT PROJECTS THAT WE MIGHT MAKE

WE TALKED THROUGH OUR HISTORIES

WE DEFINED OUR EXTENDED ANCESTRY

WE TALKED ABOUT INSTAGRAM EYEBROWS

WE TALKED ABOUT THE SOMATISATION OF EMOTIONAL

WE ASKED QUESTIONS

WE WERE LATE

WE ARRIVED EARLY

WE SPLIT INTO GROUPS

WE DIDNT HAVE A BOSS

WE DIDNT HAVE A LEADER

WE WERE ALL LEADERS

SOME LEADERS SPEAK MORE THAN OTHER LEADERS

WE LAUGHED

WE WONDERED IF SOMEONE WOULD CRY

WE MADE FUN OF EACH OTHER

WE TRIED TO LISTEN

WE TALKED ABUOT THE BODY

WE TALKED ABOUT THE MIND

WE TALKED ABOUT THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE TRIED TO EXORCISE THE DEMONS OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE TRIED TO DISPEL THE MYTH OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE FELL BACK, EVEN US, ON THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE WERENT SURE HOW TO SHARE ALL THIS WITH YOU

WE WERE TIRED AT THE END OF EACH DAY

WE WERE TALKING AS A POLITICAL ACT. WE WERE TALKING AS A SPACE OF ACTION. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE AND WE TALKED IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN SILENCED. WE TALKED TOGETHER IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN ALONE. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A WAY THAT AFFECTIVE LABOUR MANIFESTS.

WE HAD A WINE

WE USED THE WORD CUNT AND RECLAIMED THE WORD PUSSY

WE HAD ANOTHER WINE

WE WENT PERSONAL WE WENT POLITICAL WE WENT INTERSECTIONAL

WE ASKED QUESTIONS – ARE YOU A WOMAN? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

WHAT SHAPE DOES RAGE TAKE? WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE VIOLENT?

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CARED FOR SOMEONE?

WE ASKED VIRGINIA WOOLF, WE ASKED AUDRE LORDE. LESLEY FEINEBERG. MAGGIE NELSON. NINA SIMONE. TWIN PEAKS.

MY BACK CATALOGUE YOUR BACK CATALOGUE

WE WONDERED IF YOU CAN COMMUNICATE TWELVE DAYS OF CONVERSATION IN FIVE MINUTES

WE WONDERED IF WE COULD ENCAPSULATE IN THAT OUTCOME ON WHAT IS INHERENTLY AN OPEN ENDED NON DIDACTIC MULTIFACETED DIALOGICAL SPACE OF SELF REFLECTION AND SHARED FRUSTRATION

WE FIGURED OUT THAT YOU CANT ENCAPSULATE IT

WE FIGURED THAT YOU CANT EXPRESS IT

THERE’S NOTHING IN HERE ABOUT COLONIALISM

BUT WE KEPT IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS

WE TRIED TO KEEP IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS

WE STARTED OUR FORTNIGHT WITH A DECOLONISING GESTURE, AND WE CARRY THAT WITH US NOW, AT THE END.

WE WONDERED WHAT ELSE WE MIGHT TAKE AWAY FROM IT ALL

WE PROPOSED MOVING SILENCE INTO ACTION

WE WONDERED WHAT WE MIGHT IMPART TO YOU

WE WANT TO SAY THANKS FOR HAVING US

WE THINK WE’LL BE THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR A WHILE

Image: The entire Second Hand Emotions artists on the final night of Adhocracy.

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists SJ Norman and Meg Wilson about their multidisciplinary practices, the queering of feminism, and their upcoming projects for Adhocracy 2017.

SJ Norman is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Their work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Norman’s primary medium is the body and live performance remains the core of their practice: working with extended duration, task-based, and endurance practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks. They are a proud Indigenous Australian of both Wiradjuri and European heritage. They are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions.

Meg Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist who works predominantly with large-scale and site-specific installation and performance. Her visual art and theatre design practices are mutually influential and frequently overlap. Meg aims to provoke imposed perplexity, uneasiness and a sense of drama in the everyday, through explorations of the performativity of space and the audience encounter with the ordinary, set within the context of the out-of-the-ordinary. She is developing live art event SQUASH! at Adhocracy 2017.

Meg and SJ, tell us a bit more about your practices and your artistic communities.

SJ Norman: I make a lot of different things but I’m mainly known for my performance and installation work, and my writing. Many people would call me a live artist, which is fine.

My artistic community is a very dense rhizome which stretches across the globe. It includes quite a lot of people who would not call themselves artists.

Meg Wilson: I’m very fortunate to have an artistic practice that spans several disciplines, from visual and live art to performance and design for theatre. This has come out of fairly unconscious desire not to be defined by or associated with any one genre or form. I started out as a painter and became known as a textile artist, then an installation artist. After art school, I studied interior design and eventually found my way into design for theatre, allowing me to satisfy a constant eagerness for making and resistance to monotony between personal projects.

As I have largely gained experience by volunteering and interning with various companies and designers that I admire, I have managed to form meaningful and supportive relationships with a diverse and extremely generous group of makers and collaborators that I can now call upon for guidance – locally, nationally and somewhat internationally.

It is the overwhelming generosity, sharp intelligence and sheer bloody persistent guts of my community that excites me and allows me to see a future for what we do.

SJ, you are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions with Mish Grigor and Sarah Rodigari. You will be joined by a team of local artists to explore the theme of ‘love and feminism’. What does this theme conjure for you?

SJN: The very first thing that springs to mind is the question of affective labour. I want to know what a “Labour Of Love” really looks like under late-capitalism. Certainly one of the most enduring questions of Feminist discourse is that of the feminization and devaluation of specific kinds of work: un-waged reproductive labour, certainly, but also the care and service professions. I think about how we do or do not value this kind of labour, how it is distributed, how some bodies are burdened with a greater expectation to provide it than others.

I think, also, about how individual potential to convert this labour into capital- be it monetary or otherwise- is determined by numerous governing factors; if we use very broad brushstrokes, we would say: principally race and class. There are infinite levels of nuance to unpack underneath that, though.

I think, also, about how Feminism as a discourse has had, and retains, a more difficult relationship to certain types of affective labour than others: I’m referring, specifically, to sex work. When you say the words “Feminism and Love” to me I am going to think about the monetization of love and the burden of societal stigma that exclusion which is the reality for so many people who find economic agency by trading emotional and sexual labour. I think, specifically, about the systematic exclusion of sex workers and advocates from the broader terrain of feminist politics and discourse, the way that mainstream White Feminism continues not just to fail sex workers, but to actively work against them. This, along with Transgender rights, have come to the fore (once again) as the battle lines along which one type of Feminist is distinguished from another.

A lot of people are calling this a generational divide, but as far as I can see, this is demonstrably untrue: I know plenty of SWERF’s in their 20’s, and plenty of radical sex work advocates in their 70’s.

Generally, I think about all the sex workers in my life who expend their life energy fighting abolitionists, people who would no doubt identify themselves as Feminists, who are intent on pushing back on their rights, denying their agency and dehumanising them generally. I think about how little this community sees by way of solidarity. I think about how endlessly exhausting this is for a great many people I love and it enrages me, frankly.

I think about what love can look like as a radical act: I think about Audre Lorde’s oft-misquoted doctrine of self-care. I think about what love as resistance looks like, what radical vulnerability and generosity look like. I think, especially, about what that looks like in the context of a de-colonial politic. I think about the love that exists between people who share struggle. I think about de-colonising desire, and what that looks like. I think about the love that is held in abundance by Elders of all kinds.

I think about how words like “No” and “Fuck You” can also be said with love. I think about the loving rage that sometimes seizes me and forces action.

I think also, about the twisted and damaged love I’ve received, as a survivor of both familial and intimate partner violence. In all cases the perpetrators were women, who called themselves Feminists. People are complicated. So is love. The myth of Feminine nurturance is a pervasive and deeply oppressive one.

I think about my marriage, which is not recognised legally in this country. I think about the love I have for my wife, and the love they have for me. I think about our ironic use of the word “wifey” for each other even though neither of us identify with womanhood, much less wife-hood. I think about what this word marriage means when we apply it to the daily lives of two non-binary, feminine presenting trans people, who are spurious of any state sanctioning of our relationship, but very happily chose to engage it anyway, on our own terms.

I think of the ferocity of love that comes from my Tiddas. I think about how the word Sister, when it comes from an Aboriginal person and especially, a feminine person, holds an entirely different bond of kinship and solidarity and love than when it comes from a white woman. I have a white sister- my immediate blood sister to a different mother- and she is the only non-Aboriginal person I would ever suffer to address me in this way.

As a non-binary transperson I don’t permit the use of feminized forms of endearment or address in relationship to me by anyone, at any time, with the exception of Blak kin. I think about how both love and feminism mean profoundly different things in different contexts.

Given all of that, it’s not surprising then, that Feminist is a term that I struggle with. But then, I don’t know any Revisionist Feminists (and I guess that’s my species) who don’t struggle with the term Feminist and the weight of complex expectation and ambivalence that comes with it. I struggle with it in the same way I struggle with Queer, with trans, with non-binary, and, in a different but intersecting way, with Aboriginal. I struggle in the sense that all of these words denote both an identity, an embodied and encultured experience, a struggle, and a political and theoretical terrain which extends far beyond the boundaries a singular terminology could mark out. They contain multitudes and they contain deep conflict, and in all cases it’s a conflict that pervades my life and my body. They are absolutely structural to my existence in the word. And yet, their failure is also inherent. They can only function as placeholder text for something far more immense and slippery. That is not to diminish any of them, or to diminish the richness and the functional political value of language. But it becomes problematic when we assume a commonality of meaning.

What does it mean for me to claim the title of Feminist, when Julie Bindle or Shiela Jeffries call themselves by the same name, and our politics bear absolutely zero resemblance to each other?

I’m generally more at home calling myself a militant Blak non-binary Queer than I am with calling myself a Feminist. Which is not to say I reject the term of the discourse, either. Not at all. I’m just more personally invested resisting gender-based oppression than I am in upholding what seems like a fairly nebulous, flawed and highly selective agenda called “Women’s Rights”. I don’t even know what that is, beyond a fairly narrow set of parameters that excludes me and almost everyone I care about.

Meg, SQUASH! is the third in a trilogy of works about sport, women, aggression and competition. What draws you to these themes?

MW: I feel like there was a point in my life where I made the decision to become an artist over an athlete. Somehow I thought that as a woman becoming an artist was more feasible than making a living as an athlete. I find sport fascinating as a kind of microcosm or intensified version of everyday life. It allows for behaviour and attitudes that are rarely accepted outside of sport, and yet these are attitudes and behaviours that can still be frowned upon for female athletes.

Women, aggression and competitive nature are very interesting areas of investigation. I have experienced high levels of violence and aggression. I would also say that I am a fiercely competitive individual, however, I think that most would describe me as a relatively calm, fair and softly spoken individual. I find this somewhat hidden or unspoken behaviour and the rules surrounding it intriguing. There are platforms in which aggressive behaviour is permissible for women…but only to a certain extent. Then there’s the realm of female aggression and damaging competitive attitudes against other women and ourselves.

You both, at times, work with duration, pain and the body. Can you speak to us about why this is and who/what has influenced you artistically?

SJN: People have been asking me this question for 13 years, and honestly I’m still not sure how to answer it! I have worked with duration and endurance differently in every work I have ever made, so there is not a single answer.

There is an assumption that performance makers who work with pain or physical mortifications of any kind are in it for ultimately exhibitionistic reasons. That might be true for some artists, and you might be able to apply that reading to the work of others if your engagement is superficial.

I am actually profoundly disinterested, and actually quite annoyed, by the Spectacle of Pain. I am annoyed by the fetishism of endurance, too. The fact that I do something for 12 hours is not interesting in and of itself. I’ve worked longer and more grueling shifts in hospitality. Women have longer labours than that.

Likewise, sticking a few pins in myself is not challenging or interesting unto itself- I do much more physically hardcore things for fun, on my own time, and I don’t call it art. What is interesting is the artistic application of those practices. I think there is an assumption that if you are making body based work you are out for the shock value. This is such a boring, persistent and reductive reading. It’s a distinctly elitist, western discourse and a masculinist one at that; this voyeuristic display of physical dominance. It’s also deeply false, in my case at least. I couldn’t care less about shocking people – I am actually much more concerned with ushering an audience past the shock threshold so we can get on with the more interesting and intimate business of transmutation, dreaming, and magic.

Ultimately that’s what draws me to these practices. Repetition, duration, trance states- all of these things are tried and true pathways to the Ecstatic and that is what fascinates and drives me the most.

They are capable of opening doors into the numinous through which both performer and audience can enter. They are ways of dialoguing with the unseen, and a way that the bodies of strangers can speak deeply to each other, there are sublime openings and exchanges enabled in that space if you pilot it right. There is big healing to be found there. I made my first solo work in 2006, after several years of ensemble performance. I set out on solo practice with one objective in mind: I wanted the body of the audience, be that an individual body or a collective body, to be as strongly engaged and implicated in the work as the body of the performer. I wanted to create frameworks for co-manifestation of complex and volatile states. That remains the case today.

A lot of diverse interests have fed into this path: early in my practice I studied Butoh intensively, in Australia and Japan. I had been a self-harming teenager and a BDSM-practicing adult. I have been a practicing witch for as long as I can remember- I was steeped in both western occultism, mysticism as well as the deeply inscribed ancestral cultural patterning throughout my upbringing. I possess more than a passing fancy for techno and entheogens, and have been going to dance parties and raves since my late teens, and these spaces have and continue to teach me a great deal about collective transcendental ritual.

I am also an Aboriginal person who has been divested of a direct connection to my ancestral customs and rituals, or at the very least, the set ritual vocabularies which might have been passed to me by my mob had my family managed to maintain that continuity.

I am deeply driven by the need to give form to the conversation that is taking place continually in my body by other, more improvisational means. This kind of performance has been a way of giving voice to haunted flesh, to a roaring in the blood. I am interested, also, in taking a de-colonial stake in a field of practice which has historically been overwhelmingly white and which has relied heavily on dubious pseudo-Shamanic posturing, unreconstructed primitivism. In some respects, it is an act of very deliberate de-colonial reclamation.

MW: At the moment I know that my body can handle endurance and pain and this is a strength within my practice. I know that there will be a time when endurance is no longer my strength and that the pain will be all too overpowering and damaging. This too may become an area of interest for my practice. I don’t know. I know it hurts more with every project, as I acquire a new injury related to age and relative disuse of certain muscles and joints in recent years. I think of it as a really honest language for an artist. There is no way of hiding emotion in an endurance event and there is no certain way of influencing, determining or predicting an outcome. In this way I find it both exciting and intimidating.

I am mostly influenced by local artists, whom I have come to meet and know through their practice. Artists I have recently been influenced by include: Mira Oosterweghel, who uses both her own body in performance, but also delegates performance to other artists; and theatremakers, THE RABBLE, whom I was very fortunate to spend 2016 with as Lead Artist Intern. Theatre for THE RABBLE is a conversation that sits somewhere between extreme pursuits of the body and mind, exquisite beauty, pain and comedic and political intelligence. Emma Valente of THE RABBLE has continued to act as mentor for my artistic practice into 2017, and is dramaturg for SQUASH!

Meg, you have participated in Adhocracy numerous times over the years, in different ways. Tell us about the Adhocracy experience from an artist’s point of view (participating artist and artist in the audience).

MW: In 2014 I took part in my first Adhocracy residency, Future Present, alongside 9 other SA artists under the guidance of Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects. At this point in time I was at a major crossroads in my career as a purely visual artist. I had become interested in interdisciplinary and collaborative art making, having only ever worked in solitude in a largely isolating manner. Exposure over a two-week period to the methods of artists largely unknown to me, allowed me to explore process and take risks in an environment where no idea was precious. I learnt how to make in a space where it was okay to be vulnerable, experimental and chuck things out when they’re just not working. It was during this residency that I first met and collaborated with performers and theatremakers, Ashton Malcolm and Josephine Were. Together, we continue to decipher and define a language of making that sits somewhere between live art, theatre and performative installation and have been prolifically generating works across all disciplines.

In 2016, I was able to take part in Adhocracy as part of a newly formed collective of artists: Hew Parham, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro and Sascha Budimski, on Tension of Opposites. This was the first time all of the artists had worked together and the work was in its very initial stages of development. The platform of Adhocracy allowed us to test the viability of the team’s working relationship within a collaborative framework, and to devise material in a compressed (and somewhat intense) fashion. With access to multiple audiences and the ability to talk to the work and respond to critical feedback and discussion over the three days of presentation of the work in progress, was extremely beneficial to the team and the direction for the work leading into its next stage of development.

Adhocracy is also just a very excellent opportunity to observe and to chat. To see artists come from all over Australia to share their process, listen to early creative thoughts and engage in a national conversation, Waterside in Port Adelaide, is actually just a giant treat every year.

SJ, last time you were in Adelaide, you presented a new work Stone Tape Theory, as part of PADA’s Near & Far exhibition and the first Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. The work then went straight to SPILL in the UK. What is the experience of presenting your work in Australian and European contexts as a queer, Aboriginal artist?

SJ: The short answer goes like this: I am a bi-cultural, globalised, neo-colonial, late capitalist, Indigenous Diaporic, queer subject, and unpacking what that means is a big part of my practice and life. Just to widen the context: I come from a background of geographical and cultural dispossession: I was raised by a single Aboriginal mother and we moved around a lot. Just as she had done, as the offspring of itinerant workers, and as they had done as people who were dispossessed of their land. So, spatial liminality is second nature to me. I’ve never called a singular place home and I doubt I ever will. I’ve been on the move pretty constantly between Australia and Europe for the duration of my adult life and practice. My practice has grown in the in-between space in geographical, discursive, formal and cultural terms. Thresholds and crossroads are my place in the world, everything I make is generated from within these spaces.

A work like Stone Tape Theory (STT) travels more easily between contexts because it is speaking quite broadly. First and foremost, it’s a work about mental health and my specific struggle with complex trauma. It’s not a work which has what audiences might see as recognisably Indigenous or queer themes, despite the fact that it is made by a Queer Indigenous artist and my subjectivity has entirely shaped its realisation.

Whether or not a work, made by an Aboriginal artist, which is not explicitly relating to their Aborginality, is still an “Aboriginal Artwork” is like enquiring after the sound of one hand clapping…it’s a question I hope we are all bored of, by now.

One of the tricky things, of course is, once an artist is identified as Aboriginal, they are not allowed to be or make anything else. Queer artists often fall prey to the same pigeonholing, but to a different, and I would argue, significantly lesser extent. Aboriginal artists who choose to (*gasp*) occasionally make work about other things are often treated by the art public and occasionally by their peers as somewhat treacherous or suspicious- it’s just further evidence of our failure to fulfil the criteria of a white-centric standard of Indigenous “authenticity”. This just a part of a bigger, and much more complex, structure of systemic exclusion which seeks to sequester Aboriginal practice away from the main body of contemporary art. It’s just another manifestation of a colonial imperative to keep Aboriginal people and artists firmly in our place. It was a bold choice for TARNANTHI and PADA to jointly present Stone Tape Theory in the context of a major review of Indigenous practice, because the dominant perceptions of what that can be remain quite narrow in Australia. Next Wave made a similarly bold choice by programming Concerto No. 3 in BlakWave.

I’m thankful to the presenters I have worked with in this country who have shown this kind of guts, and it does take guts.

I presented STT at SPILL London within weeks of the Adelaide presentation. It was the second time I had been commissioned by SPILL, the first was Bone Library in 2015. Bone Library had received a thunderous reception at the previous SPILL so the pressure felt very high. I made the work, as I make all my work, entirely on my own.

I had been without a fixed address for about 9 months prior to the presentation, I didn’t have a studio, and I was managing what can only be described as a fully blown nervous breakdown, I was really held together by frayed sticky tape at that point. So to say the work was pretty raw is an understatement.

It went down well in London, though I am sure it confused and polarised some people. It was not an easy work. It required some investment of risk and discomfort from the audience. Some people literally left screaming: even I was terrified to be in there sometimes, the force of energy summoned by the work was immense and occasionally tipped into actual horror.

I have a long history of presenting and working in the UK, in particular. It was really in England that I first established my practice, after I moved there in 2006. The live art community, and specifically the community in Bristol where I was based, had a big part to play in growing me up artistically. Much of my practice, especially with regards to the works which focus on the broader terrain of colonial history, have been born out of my own cultural and political bi-location between England and Australia. England still feels wildly foreign to me at times but then, so does Australia.

That said, adapting Bone Library for an overseas audience was a nerve wracking experience. First of all, there are protocols and relationships that I have to carefully observe and manage in order to take the work off-country. There were a lot of ethical questions which I had to very rigourously engage before the work was ready to tour. That took about 6 months of extra work.

I did not expect the work to receive the rapturous reception that it did at SPILL, or subsequently at Venice International Performance Art Week. It was a really humbling experience, because I saw how deeply audiences from literally all over the world (there were delegations from every continent at Venice) were able to connect with it.

The English really surprised me, to be honest. UK audiences are known for their coolness, and I also did not expect them to so readily connect with the work, and to do so with such depth and sincerity. People were bawling their eyes out, like really really crying, when I read the Elder’s welcome handed the bones into their care. Bone custodians from everywhere regularly write to me to express their gratitude for the work, for the insight that it gave them and the chance they had to connect with some sense of intimacy and agency to a history which has been denied. It’s not just Aboriginal people who are denied our truth when history is suppressed. Settlers are also denied the opportunity to reckon with their own part in that history and to heal their own relationship to it as the descendants of perpetrators. Similarly, the work has yielded incredible, heartful dialogues between me and others whose cultures have been marked by similar traumas. This is part of the cultural labour that I aim to achieve with Bone Library, and many of my other works.

I dearly wish I could say I had had the same experience performing the work in Australia. But sadly the work has only been performed to scale in this country once in its 7 year life span, for five days in Melbourne in 2010. Likewise, Unsettling Suite, the body of works that Bone Library comes from, has also only been seen once in this country, at Performance Space in 2013. Elders and Aboriginal community have expressed their appreciation of the work, as have quite a few emerging Aboriginal artists who have personally expressed to me how influential Bone Library and the other works of the Unsettling Suite have been on their own practices. This is hugely rewarding and sustaining for me to know. I had wonderful audiences for the 2010 performance and I know that and, that said, I’ll repeat that the work has been produced to scale once, in its 7 year life span.

In the 7 years I’ve been performing it, Bone Library has received a total of about 600 words in coverage from the Australian arts press, and a good 200 of those were expended by a critic fixating on my fashion choices, hairstyle and “air of contemporary urban sophistication” which apparently undermined her own expectations of what an Aboriginal person looks like…this is not me having sour grapes, by the way!

I also have a lot of really, deeply wonderful and nourishing support here, and owe a tremendous amount to the people who have backed my practice fiercely. I’m just alluding, perhaps not so subtly, to some structural disadvantages that have affected me as an Indigenous queer experimental artist working in this country.

We also have a problem, in Australia, with devaluing our own artistic legacies. This is a very colonial problem. Institutionally, whole local performance histories have gone criminally under-recorded in favour of a focus on the European and American cannon. This shows up, for me and other artists, in peculiar ways. For instance, recently, I was made aware of a graduate show at a well-known art college in which a student had made a piece that directly plagiarised a work of mine. I’m not talking about an obscure piece, either, but a work which I have performed all over the world, at least once a year, for the last 12 years. If a student had made a piece that was, say, directly plagiarising the work of any of my European or American peers, I can’t imagine they would have gotten away with it. But “local” artists are fair game because we are fundamentally valued less. Art students know everything there is to know about Marina Abramovic but they’ve never heard of Jill Orr. And our cultural memory here is so alarmingly contracted.

People who are students now, even in cities with such rich local performance histories as Sydney, know everything about the 70’s in New York but nothing about the radical work that was being produced in the 90’s in their own town, by living artists who probably live around the corner from them. I find this confounding and deeply saddening.

All of these things have been very good reasons for me to put a lot of distance between myself and Australia, at times. Distance is also essential for me to gain perspective on the things that I want to talk about here, especially with regards to de-colonial discourse. It helps me to generate and clarify ideas. It’s hard to do that here, because the problems you want to address are inches from your face at all times.

Tell us about something you are currently obsessed with?

SJ: I’ve been too concerned with survival recently to have the time for many obsessions, sadly. Hopefully that will change. Other than that, I guess my thoughts are quite occupied by environmental calamity and existential collapse, and the looming specter of theocratic fascism.

Planting a medicinal herb garden while the world burns, basically.

I’m also trying to finish writing a couple of books. I’m heavily pre-occupied with re-grounding back in Australia after 9 years predominantly based in Europe – that is a shock to the system. I am obsessed by all the things that are fucked about Australia politically and continually strengthening my own agency and that of those around me to resist, agitate and transform this neo-liberal colonial white supremacist political cesspit we’re all trying to survive in. I’ve also been pretty obsessed with body-building and weightlifting for about a year now, lifting heavy shit keeps me sane.

MW: To be honest, I’m not great with obsessions. I don’t really have interesting ones. I do become engrossed with current projects and then ways of switching off from projects.

The problem is that my projects often require a huge change to my lifestyle in order to realise a project outcome. Right now, I would say that I’m obsessed with the game of squash and becoming quite good at it (I hope).

The counter obsession is watching mindless documentaries on Netflix such as Locked Up – a documentary that follows prisoners in penitentiaries in the U.S., but I always find a link between these mindless obsessions and the things I’m currently working on.

As independent artists what are the kinds of initiatives and programs that you want to see further support for in the future? What excites you in Australian arts?

SJN: Top of the wishlist? I would like to see independent artists become unionised, the same as any other industry. I would like to see an end, once and for all, to the cult of genius and the speculation economy. I would like to see more initiatives that increase the industrial organising power of artists and arts workers, because we are an extremely exploited workforce.

I would like to see more opportunities for artists to become politicised and organised around labour and class, because right now the arts is dominated by, and upholding, overwhelmingly bourgeois cultural values to our great collective detriment.

I would like to see more opportunities for rigorous training and development for younger artists, in particular, outside of institutional frameworks. I owe my own practice to the training and mentorship I received at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. The Impact Ensemble was an incredible and totally accessible program. I would love to see it returned to its former glory. I would love to see more initiatives like it. I would like to see them abundantly funded.

I would like to see more de-colonial pedagogy. I would like to see a decentralisation of power outside of major institutions. I would like to see more and more and more Indigenous led organisations and more Indigenous people in positions of power within the arts. I would like to see how this would change the landscape for the better. I would like to imagine a future where Indigenous artists and people are running our own show, and the real depth, complexity, diversity and strength of our contributions as innovators, artists and leaders was give then value it deserves.

MW: I have obviously greatly benefitted from my relationship with Vitalstatistix and programs such as Adhocracy that champion experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and the importance of diverse audiences for works in various stages of development. As a former co-director of an Artist Run Initiative (ARI), I also champion artists who create opportunities that bridge gaps for other artists.

I highly support initiatives that nurture artists in their early stages of practice and those that interrogate artistic processes. It’s okay to have a good cry or two during this process!

I defer to an earlier question about artistic community with regard to what excites me about Australian arts. I just think that within the independent scene there is an overwhelming amount of support between peers and it is these relationships that allow us to keep kicking goals (shameless sports reference) as artists struggling in a pretty grim environment right now, all the while managing to sustain important, relevant and exciting conversations surrounding topics of substance that continue to matter.

tiny revolutions – a tiny conversation

The Music of Cher

Casey Jenkins – IMMACULATE

Isolation Conversations: Kate Power

A message from our Director

Vitalstatistix’ Board

Emma Webb on Climate Century

Download full program here

Book here

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A Celebration for the End of the World (As We Know It) – Broadsheet Adelaide

Download full program here

Book here

Rebecca Conroy

“WE THINK WE’LL BE THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR A WHILE”

SJ Norman and Meg Wilson