WIRE consisted of four projections and a surround sound track. The projections broke up the space through floor-mounted screens offset from one another at a variety of angles and united by a surround track that contained environmental recordings in combination with minimal musical elements. The visual components were shot on high definition video, lending the work a lush realism. As with ‘I’ve come a long way’ the components were synchronised and through this synchronisation the protagonist (myself) crossed from screen to screen across voids within the gallery, collapsing space and time and emphasising his tenuous place in his environment. The work was shot at two sites: the Picardy region of France and the Mallee region of Victoria. Importantly for me, the work was exhibited in Mildura, a town in the heart of the Mallee.
In previous performative video works, I had focused on a personal, constructed subjectivity. As discussed, ‘I’ve come a long way’ was the first real sign of my practice beginning to look beyond the insular existentialism of my earlier, more overtly reflexive practice (see Electro for an example). In WIRE social narratives came to the fore and eclipsed what now seemed rather inward looking concerns. From this point, place and people, subject and context became increasingly confused and commingled. With WIRE, I took on a central myth of Australian identity, namely our tendency to found cultural identity on spectacular defeats and military tragedies, and I explored key sites at which the multiple strands of this myth coalesced. As with earlier works, I continued to explore video and performance as an interface between subjectivity and the narratives through which we bring ourselves into being. But in WIRE, such narratives increasingly broadened out to include ‘people’ (rather than my personal psychology) and ‘place’.
I began to think of sites as loci for intersecting and colliding narratives. The geographer Doreen Massey first articulated this notion in Space, Place and Gender: ‘[places] can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself’ (154). Massey’s ideas were a key part of the turn from decentred, undifferentiated, modernist space back to the specifics of postmodern place. ‘I’ve come a long way’ and other works of that period had led me away from the non-specific urban environments that had provided the backdrop for my performative works to that time. Specifics rather than generics became a key distinction, a philosophical one, which moved me away from a world-view in which one car, kitchen, town, or hotel room could be substituted for any other. As my ideas about place became more articulated and complex, different kinds of subject matter came to matter to me. I became less compelled to work with personal psychology and shifted instead towards paying close attention to particular places and the kinds of selves who intersected there.
As mentioned in the section on ‘I’ve come a long way’, I began to make works in the Mallee region of south-eastern Australia in 2006. This shift had roots in my personal history, in that it marked a return to places that were akin to the environment in which I grew up. I had relegated such places to the margins of my imagination, but through the camera’s lens, I began to remake my relationship to these sites. Simultaneously, the ‘I’ who performed these sites in my work also shifted. Previously, the landscape was one more void, like those of my earlier work, that could function as a canvas onto which to project a private psychological state. But now the ‘I’ who performed was not so much an isolated figure in some kind of inner turmoil but rather a proxy for other Australians who was attempting to understand or take on board the multiple complexities of a given site. My camera became more outward looking, showing ever more of the environment that had inflected the way the individual subject operated within the work. WIRE contains narratives that can no longer be considered personal. This work had taken a sociological turn, and the narratives it at once contained and questioned were no longer solely about individual subjectivity.
The Mallee, an arid region on the border of Victoria and South Australia, occupies the borderlands of Australia’s cultural imagination. This region contributed many soldiers to the war but is also where many of them returned when this marginal land was shared amongst veterans as part of the ‘Soldier Settlement Scheme’. Between 1918 and 1934, over eleven thousand returned servicemen were allocated farming blocks under the scheme. In this first phase of the scheme, many of the farms failed, whether undone in the short term by the unviable size of the blocks and lack of experience, or ultimately by the economic downturns and droughts of the 1930s (Keneley).
The men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) died for arbitrary and demented objectives in their early battles in France, places pulverised beyond recognition, changing hands so frequently as to render futile the very notion of boundary. They returned home to create and defend new boundaries in the landscape, boundaries once again destined to fail. While the scheme was improved following the Second World War, soldier settlers after the First World War had a very difficult time. In this installation the motif of wire, demarcating territory on the western front and again in western Victoria, serves as an appropriate marker for the embattled state of these men at home and abroad. WIRE traced the fences of soldier settlers, reading the archive of their labour to find poetic means for placing it in the broader context of their pivotal moment in Australian history. The work did not attempt to replicate the sweep of a comprehensive historical document but rather sought to 're-particularise' through the details of visual and emotional experience. This tracing did not seek to represent the AIF or the First World War but rather stand in for the searching, ‘narrativising’, and mythologising that sees so many Australians travel to battlefield sites across the world.
WIRE endeavoured to illuminate historically crucial areas of Australian geo-cultural identity, but not by creating or contributing to existing causal historical narratives. Rather, it emphasised the meaningless and the arbitrary. I felt that my own feelings and thoughts on the subject were the best expression for the re-reading I was striving after: the evidencing of my journeying through these environments was an experience that was fragmentary and visceral, representing not individuals or events but embodying a psychological tone. I keenly felt the pull to try to be sensitive and respectful to the suffering represented by these events while critically engaging with contemporary attitudes that memorialise, sentimentalise, and distort them. Within the work I expressed this by my journeying to and searching aimlessly through the frozen muddy field that is, and was, the Frommelles battlefield, and then sitting amongst the plough furrows and commencing to cut off my hair. In developing the work this seemed an appropriate gesture, bringing together as it did a number of potential meanings: an evocation of the uniforming process that young men go through to become tools for war, a shaming gesture that is enacted upon women who ‘sleep with the enemy’ during wartime, and a gesture of mourning. Hair cutting was a common practice in France, Norway, and the Netherlands in the Second World War to punish women who had collaborated with the Nazis. The IRA revived the practice during the ‘troubles’. Cutting of hair during mourning is widespread, or was historically, and may trace its roots in western culture to Old Testament references in Isaiah and Jeremiah.
The ‘I’ that is present to conduct this performance and ritual differs markedly from the protagonists of my earlier video works. Rather than the untethered and rootless disorientation imaged in earlier works, this protagonist’s confusion does not occur in an undifferentiated void. This wanderer has too many maps, too many roads.
The two environments – French and Australian – were treated very differently. The Australian footage was characterised by macro perspectives and a roving ‘forensic’ eye that sought to transform visual and sonic details into psychological spaces paralleling that of the bereft man. The Mallee was depicted as devoid of human life while the ‘absent’ man searches a country that is not his own. The French footage, meanwhile, was more controlled, objective, and conventionally ‘cinematic’. The Mallee was shot in the red sun of forty-plus degrees whilst Fromelles was filmed in the soft winter light of sub-zero conditions. The work contrasted these environments, summer and winter, north and south, to express the impossibility of bridging the gap between the present and historical moments.
Both environments are empty in different ways and fuse to evoke displacement and absence. In the Mallee we see a goat slaughtered at the roadside, tangles of wire and weeds, rabbit corpses and faeces in plague proportions. In Fromelles the wind blows across fields of frozen mud under grey skies while the protagonist engages in a Beckettesque journey amongst the screens, asking in poor French and German, 'Où est l'avant?' and 'Wohin ist der front?' The character does not attempt to represent or speak for the men of the AIF. Rather, he embodies the search for that historical moment and expresses the impossibility of finding it. An outsider, he is in a state of existential confusion reminiscent of Camus’s L’Étranger or Kierkegaard's ‘Young Man’ from Repetition. These images, in their dirt road wandering, draw upon the Agnès Varda's film Sans toit ni loi, the war time recollections of artists like Robert Graves ((1957) 2000), and the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon to construct an image of fragments, of fleeting encounters characterised by misunderstanding and confusion.
I have mentioned that I sought, through closely attending to the detail of each environment, to ‘re-particularise’ these places. This occurred through a specific set of camera techniques, and I have appropriated Miwon Kwon’s notion of the ‘departicularised’ place as a means to articulate this endeavour (Kwon 157). Kwon’s idea draws strongly upon the following quotation from Henri Lefebvre, ‘Inasmuch as abstract space [of modernism and capitalism] tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences’ (Lefebvre 52). In combination with Massey’s ideas around place (touched on earlier), I had a growing sense of the way in which my practice might, very literally, engage with ‘re-placing’, re-particularising place/s by focusing upon detail. The forensic scoping and micro-videography techniques that I developed during the period during in which WIRE was created sought to ‘re-particularise’ the landscape in just such a way. A term that I have come to consider useful in thinking about the manner in which all these works operate is ‘isolarion’. This is the name of a James Attlee travel book, which he in turn borrowed from the title of an exhibition by Sophie Tottie, Isolario, at Lund Kuntshalle, Sweden, in 2005. She claims it is a term for fifteenth-century maps that describe specific areas in detail but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to one another (Atlee v). For me this evokes a deep looking that does not claim the grand narratives previously associated with mapping the world: dominion and colonisation through knowledge. It also put me in mind of the Borges fragment from On Exactitude in Science, which describes a cartographically obsessed society in which maps are produced of such detail that ‘the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City’ (Borges 325). Maps of these fantastic proportions perfectly mirror/ed my own desires and motivations in this work. The idea of maps in which the mapping itself rather than the map is the end, in which immersion in the study and exact seeing eclipse the objective of the resultant schema, resonated with me. In WIRE and the works that began to use similar close seeing, I sought to re-inflate space through the distortion of scale such that it could not be contained within a vista, and re-inhabit time through extended choreographed takes. The process was unlike that used to construct images in which I was audio-visually present: it was physical in an entirely different way. I could not collect images from a shot-list the way I might when I needed to direct myself and others in performative works. I had to occupy both myself and place in an altogether different manner.
As I began to work in this way I rediscovered two of Bill Viola’s early works, Hatsu Yume (1979) and I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1982). Both works share the unhurried and settling quality that I was experiencing and seeking to represent. They were doubly significant as feature length video art works that could sustain the viewer’s interest. As such they demonstrated clear ways in which video could continue to differentiate itself from cinema and television and provide a third space. Of particular significance in this regard are the bison and bird sequences in I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. Viola slows the pacing right down and enters the space of these animals in a very respectful and non-anthropomorphising way. He does not narrativise the experience, subjugating it to a causal dramatic explanation. We simply look at these animals for extended periods. The sequences operate with no explicatory agenda or narrative drive but simply provide an audio-visual experience of places and the entities that animate them. Over their generous timeframe they encourage a shift in spectatorship that demands a cognitive state neither semiotic nor purely phenomenological. We neither read nor scan the images, nor do they become non-representational and entirely formal. What arises is a mix of the two that surpasses the aesthetic interludes of the most ‘uneditorialised’ of documentaries. The challenge for much video art is creating alternative modes of spectatorship, shifting the audience from the familiar and comfortable, yet impatient, way in which they consume TV or cinema. While there has been no end of boring video produced with this goal in mind, Viola allows for an alternative viewing state, for deep and reflective viewing without being reduced to an aesthetic, abstract audio-visual massage. Compounding the effect is the indifference of the animals he shoots, whether blankly staring back or not, they do not take part in our compulsive ‘narrativising’ of experience.
Yang Fudong’s East of Que Village provides a more contemporary example of this experience. The works have significant differences in respect to the content and context they arise from but share this quality of deep looking. Freed from the cinematic or televisual imperatives that would otherwise constrict their capacity to be so temporally spacious and generous to their subjects, Fudong’s compositions are quite cinematic, but his subject matter and the five-screen installation arrangement create an expansive temporality that allows for a deeply immersive experience across the twenty minutes of the work. Also important for me, East of Que Village is a return to origins for Fudong, shot as it was in the area near where he grew up in North China. In a tough environment similar to that of WIRE, Yang follows a pack of dogs that ultimately consume one another to survive. The bleakly allegorical and the realistic lie seamlessly and indistinguishably side by side.
As I developed these ideas in my installations, my encounter in 2008 with Doug Aitken’s Eraser, ten years after it was made on the island of Montserrat, was another particularly resonant experience in respect of the ideas above (1998). Aitken traces a line from one end of the island to the other, investigating small details as well as remnants of the inhabitants who had fled the destructive force of a volcano one year previously. The level of detail and the downward gaze scanning the abandoned landscapes of a deserted world were all points of reverberation with me. The immersive seven-screen installation invited a deep and contemplative experience. Counter-intuitively (and very significantly for my own project of re-thinking the depiction of place/s), the fragmented and distorted views of these installations all invite deeper engagement with place than the spatiotemporal continuity of conventional cinematic depiction.
In WIRE my endeavours to create audiovisual renderings of the complex lattice of narratives that make up places continued to develop with a greater care for the peculiarities of my working environment, both in the production and in the presentation of my work. This process continued in a quite literally 'enlarged' fashion in the subsequent work, Zanci Station: exploded diagram.
Working in the Mallee, I observed the decline of what has always been, at best, marginal farming country. I began to investigate the cultivation of the area and learned of the soldier settlement schemes. In September 2006 I travelled to Europe briefly for an exhibition. While there, I drove to the battlefields of northern France, where I was immediately struck by the lack of fencing. Growing up in rural Australia the barbed wire fences that line every roadside are so ubiquitous as to be rendered invisible. Given the central role of barbed wire in the First World War, its absence took on greater significance for me as I travelled through France. In this observation, the seeds of WIRE were sown. WIRE brought together the very different environments of the Mallee region of north-western Victoria and the Picardy region of north-western France, centring on the events of July 1916 and their aftermath around the visual motif of barbed wire. The work offered a critical reflection on our national pastime of battlefield tourism and the culture of sentiment and fascination that has attached itself to the First World War.
The 1914 Gallipoli campaign in the Dardenelles has been mythologised as the historical moment in which Australia’s nationhood was born. Nevertheless, the fighting in Picardy on the Western Front in the years that followed resulted in far greater losses and was considered by the Australian soldiers to eclipse Gallipoli in brutality and inhumanity. The Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 was the first engagement of Australian troops on the Western Front: they were slaughtered there due to the failure of British command and communications as well as the defensible, fortified positions held by the Germans. The battle was responsible for one of the greatest losses of Australian lives in one twenty-four-hour period with over 5000 casualties (plus 1500 British) compared to German losses of about 1500 (Carlyon 96). In 2008, Fromelles also became synonymous with the location of one of the single largest mass graves of Allied troops discovered in decades (Holt, Holt, and Commonwealth War Graves Commission).
Initially I used a telephoto lens to shoot at quite close quarters, often working with objects and plants on or just above ground level – if not actually shooting the ground itself. Although my preference was for these very long and slow shots to be quite smooth while still maintaining a scoping or questing – and thus spontaneous – quality, the telephoto lens also greatly exaggerated any movement I made. This meant I needed to hug the camera and tripod, and slow my body and breathing quite considerably. My seeing of and sense of being in the environment were changed considerably by this process. My experience of time, scale, dimension, and perspective were all deeply altered by the state I needed to occupy. These recordings became a type of performative engagement with the environments in which I was working. For me they offered a new and different type of record of that engagement. Henri Bergson articulates this experience of the body as a mediatory actor between the internal and external: ‘It [the body] is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act’ (Bergson 196). The conversational and bi-directional process he describes very aptly conveys the action that not only produces images but also witnesses my own sinking into place or ‘grounding’.
