This installation was shown at the Chulalongkorn Art Centre in Bangkok and consisted of four synchronised video projections with a surround sound track. The projections were in two pairs comprising four sides of a square, one pair depicted myself crossing Lake Tyrell, an ancient salt lake covering 20,860 hectares, located 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. The other pair of projections showed crowds at Bangkok's weekend market. The salt lake footage showed a spare and barren Mallee landscape divided between the pink-brown of the lake and the bright, clear inland sky. I slowly, almost imperceptibly appeared out of this landscape walking towards the camera. At the point at which my body completely filled and blackened the frame I then appeared on the opposite screen, first with my body filling the frame and then walking away into the distance. For the audience I appeared to cross the space between the screens, momentarily blackening both, as though the gallery occupied a non-space between these two halves of the landscape. This experience was accentuated by the use of the surround sound track that enabled me to create the effect of my footsteps crossing the space from one side to the other, seemingly walking ‘through’ the audience. Perpendicular to these screens were another pair containing images of the large crowds that attend Bangkok's Chatuchak market. At about one minute before the point where my image crossed between the salt lake screens, the crowd stopped walking and stood about shuffling until just after I crossed over, as though signalling or acknowledging the moment.
I have long been interested in the gallery as a site and in how it might intersect with the space of video to activate the gap between screen and physical space. Addressing this formal challenge serves several purposes: first, it physically implicates the audience and challenges passive viewing states by impinging upon the physical space they occupy; and second, the relationship between screen space and real space is shifted from a dichotomous same/other, or real/unreal, relationship to a blurred or merged state. To this end I have previously explored the doubling or echoing of the gallery space through video tromp l’œil, and even improvised rough synchrony using a variety of means. However, ‘I’ve come a long way’ was the first occasion that I was able to realise my long-held ambition for working with fully – and reliably – synchronised video.
Synchronisation has obvious uses for a project that implicates and activates off-screen space by making connections across multiple sources. While the audience might be expected to understand that the link between the screens is created technologically, my intention is that through the suspension of disbelief the experience of that link is tied to and read into the content of the screens. In ‘I’ve come a long way’ this activation and linking of on and off screen space is achieved through a combination of surround sound and strict synchronisation. For some years I had been working with the idea that by linking screens in various ways, the space between them, the physical off-screen space of the venue, becomes charged or impregnated with the energy that connects the screens. Sometimes I have achieved this narratively, shooting the work onsite in the gallery, reprojecting it into the space and leaving gaps where actions are implied in the off-screen spaces, leaving audiences to fill in the gaps in the story. Other times it has occurred purely spatially or through the use of sound and eye-line cues that the audiences are able to pick up through their tacit knowledge of conventions for depicting spatial relationships in audio-visual media.
So, the ‘active absence’ created in ‘I’ve come a long way’ has been an important and recurrent thread in my work; it has manifested in multiple ways beyond the formal ideas outlined above but also as an element of content, some of which can be seen in the subsequent discussion of WIRE and Zanci Station: exploded diagram. The motif of emptiness recurs at multiple levels throughout ‘I’ve come a long way’: the Australian environment depicted is spare in the extreme; the soundtrack attached to it uses multiple signifiers of emptiness, such as overly loud footsteps and heat buzz; the Thai screens are full, yet their conspicuous footsteps and the muted tone of the atmosphere and voices render the crowd silent as well; and finally the central void of the gallery is not only a place to stand and watch but a void created by the vantage of the screens, that is, they all face inward to that centre, addressing it and accentuating its emptiness. ‘I’ve come a long way’ extends the mechanism and motif of the video installation loop from a formal device into a poetic one, finding me trapped within the screen. Even as I break the surface of one screen, I appear in another. I walk endlessly on, arriving only to continue on my way, passing through.
‘I’ve come a long way’ utilised new approaches (for me) regarding sound: it contained no sound from the original locations, everything was recreated in my studio to control the atmosphere and tone. I stripped away all the original sound from the Bangkok market and then remade the footsteps of the crowd. This meant that when in the installation, you were in the presence of a large crowd, eerily silent except for their footsteps. I intended this as a means of ‘loading up’ the climax of the work, the moment when my figure crossed the space. The salt lake environment was also constructed using Foley recording, the process of recording sound effects in a studio setting that are synchronised to events on screen such as footsteps, door slams, etc. The effects aimed to evoke the oppressive heat of the environment and isolate the figure in the noisiness of silence. These expressionistic devices, in combination with the naturalistic illusion of the pausing crowd and the spatial link between the screens, aimed for a psychological tone somewhere between the mundane and the metaphysical.
The appearance of the ‘environment’ outside the (non) space of the gallery in ‘I’ve come a long way’ was very significant for me, marking a step away from more solipsistic constructions of identity evident in my previous works (see Electro on the bibliography page for an example). In ‘I’ve come a long way’, my long-held interest in activating the site of encounter, had eventually led me to think (and go) outside the gallery to create a work that encompassed a greater sense of place, and to incorporate in my thinking expanded ideas of site at the intersection of narratives of place and selfhood. This move extended the notion of mutable identity prevalent in my earlier work into a space mapped by overlapping, multiple, and contradictory narratives of place and people. The work of Shelley Day Sclater was vital in reflecting my growing sense of narrative as a force at work in perception and cognition:
Narration is a dynamic signifying practice that is the work of embodied human agents in cultural settings. At times those settings are local, at times more global; the historical, social and geographic contours of our lives fashion the language and discourses that we employ to construct our stories and make claims about our selves. (Day Sclater 322–23)
This quotation encapsulates the ideas I encountered in Day Sclater’s work as a writer and editor of texts around narrative as a qualitative data form and therapeutic tool in the social sciences. The idea of a self that narrates itself into existence from moment to moment became key to understanding my own compulsion to generate narrative works and to understanding that contradictory accounts of a moment, series of events, place, or person could be equally valid. Language, in the context of narrative, became a creative conjuring, a calling into being. I came to understand the self-actualising ‘truth’ of narrative to shape our conception and in a feedback loop of self-fulfilment direct our experience and choices. This way of seeing narrative sat inside many subsequent works and ultimately led to my interest in broader historical narratives that have shaped the Australian identity, such as those discussed in WIRE and to a less obvious extent in Zanci Station: exploded diagram. This trajectory began with ‘I’ve come a long way’.
Where previous works had commented on the physicality of the gallery spaces, in ‘I’ve come a long way’ I used an expanded set of references pertinent to the cultural and geographic specifics of the environment in which I was working. In the process, the notion of place became contested ground as well. While I had never thought of gallery space as neutral it was, at least, a space with pretensions to modernist, rationalist neutrality, the best ground zero artists could manage. The gallery is a palimpsest rather than a blank slate, with its own histories but they are histories that are known – and contained. Now I had ventured into a much larger world, a site like the gallery, but a site that was more hotly, broadly, and variously contested. I was in ‘the landscape’ and the first question I had to answer was, what is a/the landscape? The most encompassing definition I have encountered comes from Jeremy Millar:
I had thought of the heat and dryness as reflecting the cultural and emotional barrenness that for a long time I associated with those spaces. Upon seeing again the environment I had avoided since moving to Melbourne, without any sense of intention or design I began to imagine a work in which I crossed a large wheat field. Over the initial period in which I explored the Mallee, the paddock became a salt lake. Meanwhile, my experience in Thailand was so familiar as a narrative of artists on residency as to render it banal. Somehow the isolation and separation of being in a foreign country had put my Australian home in stark relief and I could not wait to get home and create this walking image. I was invited to do the Thailand show and it fused with the halting crowd from Chatuchak market. In the process, my narratives of selfhood, via this personal journey, became more inclusive and began to address geo-cultural narratives of identity.
But while this personal story has a place in the evolution of the work, there were other logics at work in my choice of the Wimmera-Mallee as the backdrop for my performance. As I began to think about landscape performance, I became to look at the history of the landscape genre. Looking at its origins, the allegorical landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) or Chasseur in the Forest (1813–14) caught my attention. These figures contemplating dramatic landscapes can be read as reflecting the inner state of the subject but also exalting in the indifference and grandeur of the natural environment. This keyed into my desire to have the environment function as a reference to existing traditions and simultaneously operate as a psychological environment.
I also hoped that by choosing the Mallee the work could begin to reference the specific Australian landscape art tradition. There is a tradition in which the image of the vast Australian interior stands in for non-indigenous Australia’s encounters with the continent. The Wimmera-Mallee is a region that has appeared repeatedly in our cultural narratives, from the work of Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd to contemporary artists John Wolseley and Philip Hunter. It can indeed function as a type of shorthand for our interior, representing the reality of this anti-European environment as well as operating as a metaphor for the enduring sense of absence and difficulty that trails our history of engagement with the land and its original inhabitants. In this sense, ‘I’ve come a long way’ became, for me, a layered and complex meeting of various strands in a story of identity.
Although I am isolated in ‘I’ve come a long way’, I am placed at the centre of the work and the world it creates, and the milling crowd pauses to acknowledge my passing. Do the Thais care, or are they just being polite? They fidget, look self-conscious, and loiter only as long as is necessary to be courteous. They register my arrival, after the lengthy lead up, as something of an anti-climax. Humour of this type often finds its way into my work, but it is important not merely as a means of making the work accessible to an audience. For, while my art often finds the individual alone in an empty universe, this is not an entirely tragic situation, nor one to be taken completely seriously.
As a metaphor, the humorous encounter could be read in a number of ways and it is deliberately keyed into Thai Buddhist attitudes and social conventions, an aspect of the work that was well received by several members of my audience who sought me out at the exhibition opening and the subsequent symposium on performance and video to which I contributed during my stay. Beyond this reading, the work functioned to image the self-important and blundering Australian encountering the group-oriented and socially adept Thais. In so doing, it sets out to provoke discussion of the place of Australia/ns in Asia and allegorise the meeting of our cultures. This contextual reading of the work underlines the importance of moving out of the enclosed spaces of domesticity and the gallery. It cracked open the potential for larger contexts for my work.
‘I’ve come a long way’ presents landscape as a backdrop that is simultaneously interior and exterior, mirroring and containing the protagonist. It is a space that pulls us back to the protagonist through the abiding metaphor of the struggle against nature, whether that ‘nature’ is one’s own or that outside one’s door. As will be discussed in relation to WIRE, this use of landscape as a backdrop, canvas, or slate had its limitations and in subsequent works I developed more integrated ways of working with landscapes.
A landscape, then, is the land transformed, whether through the physical act of inhabitation or enclosure, clearance or cultivation, or the rather more conceptual transfiguration of human perception, regardless of whether this then becomes the basis for a map, a painting, or a written account. (Dean and Millar 13)
This definition was useful in placing the natural and artificial in conversation and linking rather than dividing them in a binary and dichotomous fashion. My move into the landscape was intrinsically linked to events leading up to and including my time in Bangkok in 2005–6 on an Asialink residency, the experience that was the genesis of this work. Before departing for Thailand, I had begun work on a project with Philip Samartzis and Philip Brophy, a landscape-based, live audio-visual work to be presented in Berlin in late 2006. The initial journeys out into the Mallee to collect footage for this project planted a seed in my mind. I grew up in Wagga Wagga on the western edge of the Riverina, a place akin to this Mallee country into which I was now venturing. Because I felt I had been ‘born’ upon moving to the city at age twenty-one, my rural upbringing was a memory I avoided for the most part, aside from the occasional colourful tale at a dinner. Starting to work in country so similar to where I grew up was a difficult but fascinating experience and one that continues to compel my interest some seven years later.
