Regenerative Strategies: A Celestial Reflection

by Jess van Heerden.

Less than two weeks ago, ABC News brought us the exciting announcement that Australian researchers, in a world first, are finalising a prototype designed to carry plants and seeds to the moon. The ALEPH (Australian Lunar Experiment Promoting Horticulture) project lead, Lauren Fell, expressed the team’s optimism for the project following recent testing, where prototypes containing brassicas were exposed to radiation levels equivalent to four days, eight days, and five years on the moon.[1] She suggested that by 2026, ALEPH will be able to keep plants alive for the whole journey to the moon, and possibly even several days post-landing.[2] Promising first steps in the emerging field of lunar horticulture. The mission, backed by the Australian Space Agency, is currently scheduled to launch in March or April of next year.
        What a lovely idea. A lush field of purple moon broccoli swaying across cheesy fields is a storybook illustrator’s delight. But why the interest in moon-grown food? Why not simply bring supplies from Earth, the good old method that has worked since 1969? Perfectly sufficient. Unless there are bigger agendas than moon travel at stake in this project. In a separate ABC News Radio interview, the interviewer (unnamed where the broadcast is available online) candidly asked Fell: ‘So if we are to live there, somewhere on the moon, if we are to colonise it, as you say we’re going to need to eat.’ This was shortly followed by a giggly, ‘I wonder if it [broccoli] would taste different, on the moon?’[3] It is a natural leap, the ABC interviewer’s nonchalant attitude suggests, to progress from moon exploration to moon exploitation.
        Australia is not the only government with its sights on interterritorial expansion. In August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s Vikram lander became the first successfully soft-landed spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.[4] This came four years after India’s first failed attempt and three days after Russia’s Luna 25 went off course and crashed into the moon’s surface at over 200 km/h (the crater resulting from the damage was conveniently captured via satellite imagery and published neatly as “before and after” photographs—thanks, NASA).[5] The rover dispensed from the belly of Chandrayaan-3, Pragyaan (‘wisdom’ in Sanskrit), shut down 12 days after beginning exploration, unable to withstand freezing overnight temperatures in the south pole of the moon.[6]
        Decades of inactivity followed NASA’s breakthrough moon landings. In fact, this is exactly what the head of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) blamed Russia’s 2023 failure on: ‘[…] lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research […]’[7] So, why now for the space race 2.0; what is suddenly so enticing about the moon’s southern pole? Simple. Ice. Lots more of it than NASA first thought when it broadcast the find to couch-sitters across the globe in 1996.[8] Ice, of course, is the loveable solid form of our blue planet favourite, H₂O, meaning a substantial supply of oxygen and rocket fuel (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen). I don’t know very much about space travel, but I am aware that getting a rocket to one of those potentially habitable planets, like Mars, demands an unimaginably large amount of fuel. The energy required to transport this fuel from Earth—where that pesky gravity thing runs rife—seems to be one of the key barriers to achieving the ex-White House bestie’s claims that a crewed mission to Mars is possible by 2029, and a ‘self-sustaining colony’ (again with the “c” word) will exist there within ‘twenty to thirty years.’[9]
        Could moon mining provide the solution? A convenient low-gravity base of untapped resources? And, it would seem, the Tasmanian-sized lunar territory remains up for grabs. The US Government certainly thinks so. It has for several years now. In 2019, the orange-sprayed, red-tied man—who proved in April that he wears navy suits even to Popes’ funerals—proudly announced an expansion of US military operations (it was big, really big, maybe the biggest ever). Said man introduced the “US Space Force” and “US Space Command”, explaining of these new military organisations: ‘Space. Gonna be a lot of things happening in space. Space is the world’s newest war fighting domain.’[10]
        Even when scheming of interplanetary habitation (a dream made possible by a new set of resources to exploit), Trump fell victim to Earth-centric linguistics. He said ‘the world’ but meant ‘everywhere’. But for how long will the Earth be the default measure? Is it not a matter of time until we cut our losses? One planet ruined, on to the next. More, more, more, just around the corner. This trajectory has already been set into motion. Have we not been building to this for years and years and years? How could it not be our inevitable next?
        Maybe we are a century away from headlines boasting Milky Way firsts: Within a hundred years of watching politicians nod sombrely about our precious, one-of-a-kind, solar system before announcing an additional five-year delay to the latest hydrocarbon emission-cutting scheme; less than triple digits off tutting in enraged dismay when it’s revealed that a trusted councillor used our taxes to get home for supper in a private spacecraft (he should face the Martian traffic like the rest of us); A breath away from domestic and international airfares denoting intra- and inter-Earth flights. But that’s probably the Earth-centric thinking (I’m a product of my time). Even Styrofoam primary school diagrams know that Earth is an outer planet. Far less central than Mars or Jupiter, say. A distant brown station (it used to be blue and green, did you say? I’m not that gullible). A once-productive hub for coal and iron ore and that liquid ice stuff (there might have been other things that happened there too, but they’ve slipped from official records). Another deserted mining town. Those who could afford to get away, did. Those who couldn’t? We lost track. Nothing to name a transport system around. A stopover point—nasty, industrial place—for nostalgic tourists to tell tales about free oxygen from the comfort of their Club Med enclosures (okay, Grandma, let’s get you back to bed). A place we used to dump the debris until it got too full. Not to worry, waste management prospects are looking bright in the light of recent cross-galaxy expeditions. Limited resources plague only those old-school, theoretical economists. Or, perhaps, time flows in many directions. Are not trajectories superimposed? Mere fictions of linearity established after the fact. Gian Manik, and the 250-plus school children who participated in Regenerative Strategies, seem to suggest so.
        The ambitious project, which represented Vessel’s inaugural exhibition, saw the Naarm-based (former Boorloo local) painter collaborate with Year Ones and Twos from eight surrounding primary schools. Each school group participated in workshops where they were encouraged to “depict imagery from their immediate environment.” Although working within parameters denoting colour palette and brush size, the students remained free to respond as they wished, building tapestries of landscape by adding to one another’s work. The artist then added his own oil and charcoal marks to join the children’s acrylic. When reading the media release for the project, I was sceptical about encountering tokenism. How could a professional artist seamlessly place their work alongside the ad hoc bursts and inventive shapes of children’s drawings? Quite honestly, I anticipated that I would come across little more than smouldering remains of students’ work, kept well at bay by formal structures imposed to order and refine. But Manik’s thinned washes sweep over, under, across, and around in equal measure. So much so that it becomes difficult to tell which marks lay beneath or above. Which came before, or after?
        In Erosion Control Solutions, for example, luscious shrubs, in bouts of earthy lime, sprout in and around an assembly of inorganic slabs. The 200 x 300 cm oil, acrylic, and charcoal is the product of Manik and East Fremantle Primary School’s joint efforts to capture a faltering coastal front. The surely certain concreteness of each unfeeling structure is undermined by the growths that softly litter the composition. The artist, in turns, tones down vibrant hues with sweeping marks across the surface, and adds his own bursts of neon colour to match the naïve periwinkles and strong red-browns that eager student artists had not the time to mix. Visible layering of imagery evokes the notion of distant memories and unfolding dreams, calling into question which forms are present and which seem as though they are from another time or place. There are instances, too, where Manik clearly adds his own mark-making. Decisive sketches that hold their ground. Consider the scattering of bright, bubblegum-pink marks building across the bottom left to right of the composition. Yet even these have origins in the playful splatters of paint that hang excitedly off flurried forms, and the friendly, reaching shapes of illustrated children’s book trees. The artist’s marks are not a point of contrast. Rather, his more careful, controlled interventions are pared back by the inclusion of sporadic linework. The offerings of Manik’s brush are made to feel level with the children’s joyful counterparts. Even in Carbon Poems, the most figuratively structured work in the exhibition, tumbling slippage continues. This work, created alongside the young artists of Lance Holt Primary School, depicts three dominant elements: two winding mangrove trees and a section of riverside thicket. Yet pulsing throughout the work are ivory lines evocative of settling tides, shadowy blue river maps, and miniature trees with rounded bursts of foliage. One need pause only for a second to adjust our eyes and encounter swarms of shape, colour, and line. Markers of the work’s unfolding history.
        Each exhibited work offers an enchanting collapse of composition. Structures like “near and far” and “past, present, and future” are rendered obsolete. We cannot rely on pictorial conventions to guide us through each thronging sea of harmonious chaos. Instead, we need to seek out alternative ways of navigating and relating. Regenerative Strategies responds to looming apocalypse not with dystopian angst, but rather a reminder to recentralise the present. Manik appeals to us to think first of today’s children before tomorrow’s. He reminds us that the present is where the future is made and unmade. Such is forwarded by Timmah Ball’s poetic responses. The nine verses that constitute The Children’s Book of Planning are charted against each work. While they tread the nuanced theme that each painting offers, there is throughout, a unifying urge to turn them upside down. In some of Ball’s micro-narratives, illogical outcomes are entertained, calling into question the certainty of long-withstanding foundations. Like New Directions, where treehouses sprout to quell both urban sprawl and extinction threats to longed-for shade. In others, accepted practices are worn down to their ridiculous cores. Ball asks us to pay attention to, and learn from, children: thinkers and dreamers who have not yet embodied the patterns so naturalised to many adults that we no longer see them.
        What might such thinking mean when more widely applied? Let’s return to the news cycle: ALEPH and its moon plants. Interestingly, it was primary school children who set the project of plants on the moon into motion. Before ALEPH was an acremen, the Australian Space Agency were deciding what they would put millions of dollars towards sending up to the big cheese. Team leader Fell recalled in an interview with ABC that the surveyed kids’ delight in living plants on the moon was the birthplace of the groundbreaking project.[11] What would it mean if we took the playful thinking of Regenerative Strategies a step further. For the moon, at least, it could mean that legacies need not be prophecies. It might mean that the Australian Space Agency’s research leads to edible plants grown in places exposed to radiation (war zones or nuclear sites), or that grown, high-protein substances replace the need for meat and overcome issues of methane release and threats to biodiversity whilst feeding growing populations (drawing from similar research like the Gaia Project).[12] In the face of climate catastrophe well in motion, Regenerative Strategies is a reminder of the importance of earnestly considering alternatives—the urgent need to let playfulness guide us as we continue to make a future. Regenerative Strategies suggests that perhaps there are options half-hidden in the most familiar of places, if we’d only think to probe.

Regenerative Strategies by Gian Manik at Vessel Contemporary until 10 August 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” YouTube Video, 2:43, posted by ABC News, June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE

2. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE

3. This page has become unavailable since a few days ago when the article written. It used to be found at this link, which now is unfortunately met with an error code, apologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-17/australian-scientists-aiming-to-grow-plants-on-the-moon/105425836

4. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” The Guardian, accessed July 1, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission

5. “NASA’s LRO Observes Crater Likely from Luna 25 Impact,” NASA, accessed Jul7 1, 2025, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasas-lro-observes-crater-likely-from-luna-25-impact/

6. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission

7. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission

8. “Why we need to mine the Moon,” filmed 2024, YouTube Video, 8:06, posted by ABC If You’re Listening, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUy3lxnIuBo

9. “Musk Predicts Timeline for When Humans Can Travel to Mars,” filmed March 2025, YouTube Video, 0:30, posted by WSJ News, March 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lnRGL--NV0

10. “Donald Trump launches space force for 'world’s new war-fighting domain',’ filmed 2019, YouTube Video, 0:02, posted by The Guardian, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qylzX5r8Z8M

11. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE

12. “Gaia Project Australia,” La Trobe University, accessed July 1, 2025, https://www.latrobe.edu.au/industry-and-community/la-trobe-industry/case-studies/gaia-project-australia

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Images: Gian Manik, Regenerative Strategies at Vessel Contemporary, photography by Guy Louden.

Cast in (Mostly) Bronze at AGWA

by Riley Landau.

In the 1880s, when Rodin was modelling his monumental sculpture of Adam, Perth certainly was not on his mind. But 145 years later, set to the backdrop of Perth CBD’s mining skyscrapers, Adam stands nestled with 35 other bronzes (and the occasional marble and stoneware) in a rare survey of sculptures at AGWA. Cast In Bronze aims to exhume and resurrect the corpus of sculptural works acquired throughout the years in the State Collection. It attempts to convey the evolution of production, taste, and aesthetics of the third-dimensional form lauded for its classical beauty.
        Arranged neatly on plinths and stands in vaguely thematic clusters, the works concisely demonstrate the shifting norms of sculptural arts. From the neoclassical to abstract and cubist, all sculptures are given the time of day. As far as a humbly stated survey can go, Cast in Bronze has excelled. Visitors could be overheard remarking at the magnitude of large works like Adam, while others scratched their head trying to make sense of Barbara Hepworth’s abstract Curved Form (Wave II). My favourite quote came from a young girl, no older than 8, exclaiming “sculpture’s not my thing, but that’s COOL,” gesturing vaguely at Renee So’s Bellarmine XV. A good time was had by many visitors. But one crucial aspect was missing from this neat chronology.
        Like almost any sculptural retrospective in the Western world, a particular kind of body dominated the displays: the nude female body, specifically, ones sculpted by men. By my very substandard arithmetic, 12 of the 36 sculptures were female nudes created by men. A whopping third of the exhibition. This isn’t an attempt to claim that every 19th century European sculpture was crafted by a misogynistic pervert (although Rodin’s history with fellow sculptor and mistress Camille Claudel might suggest it a worthy branding), but in the backdrop of rising global conservatism, it was disappointing to see the lack of acknowledgement of such a crucial element in the history of sculpture.
        That is not to say that the woman issue was completely ignored in the exhibition. In fact, it was very much acknowledged throughout. But in such a way that seemed fearful—as if by presenting an even remotely feminist reading of the artwork might have turned the state gallery into a dystopian warzone between curator, director and trustees. The only explicitly feminist reading of a work was provided for Renoir’s Tête de Venus [Head of Venus]. The didactic was placed uncomfortably below eye level, facing away from the entrance, hiding from prying eyes as if ashamed. It remarked about the way ‘downcast eyes permit the viewer to gaze on her unclothed body, thereby transforming her from subject to object..’ The double full stop in the quote is verbatim from the wall text, not my mistake. Was this feminist reading an afterthought? It certainly seems like it. Crammed onto the closest available space, barely proofread, and stereotypically on a bust of Venus, rather than any of the other nude women with downcast eyes. It seems hardly enough to comment on the objectification of one woman when several of the other women were similarly portrayed in powerless positions.  Why do we only make this comment when it is regarding a goddess of sex, and not several of the other real figures offered in the gallery?
        To make matters worse, the acknowledgement of women’s objectification was thrown out the window about three meters behind Renoir’s Venus. Rodin’s sculpture La Faunesse a genoux [The Kneeling Fauness] was lauded for its ‘figure that expresses a barely restrained sexual energy.’ It feels almost predatory making such an observation of a clearly young figure, whose arms sit behind her head drawing attention to her fully nude, classically beautiful, body. The young fauness is as vulnerable as Venus, perhaps even more vulnerable. The intended and idealised heterosexual bourgeois viewer of the fauness might even delight more in the full rendering of the female body that the Venus lacks. The obvious issue with this line of argument is that the gigantic nude statue of Adam in the centre of the gallery. Rodin’s Adam also holds a downcast gaze, his contrapposto stance emphasises his blaring muscularity. Why then is Venus an object, but Adam a subject? The answer may lie somewhere in the cultural milieux that distinguished male from female bodies. In Rodin’s depiction, Adam retreats into himself in an attempt to cover his nakedness. This suggests a moment immediately after consuming fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In this moment, Adam claims agency of his body and denies the viewer the same sensuality that is afforded to Venus and the fauness. Male figures may choose to reveal their bodies, women rarely receive this choice. This answer certainly isn’t satisfactory and leaves a lot to be desired. This should be concerning, considering a few minutes of theorising achieved more acknowledgement of gendered difference than Cast in Bronze expresses in its entirety.
        Among the most humorous aspects of this erasure occurs at multiple points, when texts acknowledge the dominance of female bodies but do not dare tease that line of questioning to fruition. James D Linton’s Andromeda is acknowledged as being a popular subject for male artists yet fails to mention that the story of Andromeda is the quintessential male fantasy of a helpless woman’s need for male salvation. We are similarly told that cubism was “often focusing on the female figure,” without any critical discussion around what that meant for the women depicted.
        The hail Mary of the exhibition’s woman problem comes in the conclusion of the main wall text. It acknowledges that ‘many of the sculptures on display concern themselves with the human figure.’  It is then noted that contemporary artists like Renee So are included as interventions, “examining figures that are valued and valorised by artists and public, historically and to this day.”  While this is always a welcome addition, and So’s historically-inspired sculptures were particularly delightful to see, it is unclear why the gallery would, at once, cram in some contemporary works and, simultaneously, omit any real critical, feminist, and art historiographical discussions around women in sculpture. Interestingly, the media release mentions that contemporary artists often interrogate the ‘depictions of female bodies by male artists.’ Given this, why is it that the less widely read media release can speak so directly, but the more visible wall text is in empty and ambiguous art speak?
        Ultimately, this erasure minimises the leaps and bounds sculpture has made in recent years. For every male artist sculpting idealised bodies, there is a female sculptor making brilliant works. But by failing to acknowledge the traditional objectification of women, AGWA leaves the viewer unenlightened on the significance of artists such as Renee So, Kathleen Shillam, Barbara Hepworth and Linda Marrinon.
        I am sure Cast in Bronze was no easy curatorial feat—summarising modern sculpture in 36 works from the State Collection is not likely to produce a complete picture. Even with this in mind, there was so much more potential available to create an honest and critical history of 19th and 20th century sculpture with the available works. Alas, for an exhibition about bronze, it left me feeling jaded.

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Images:

1. Barbara Hepworth Curved form (Wave II) 1959. Bronze, steel, 24.5 x 43 x 39.5 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1963. © Bowness, Hepworth Estate.

2. Renee So Bellarmine XV 2016. Stoneware, 45 x 38 x 38 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through The Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2019. © Renee So. Photos: Rebecca Mansell.

Missed Shows and Mini Reviews 

by Darren Jorgensen, Riley Landau, Amelia Birch, and Sam Beard. 

The following are a mix of mini reviews rejected from publication in the 2025 issue of Memo Magazine. They are also exhibitions that missed a longform review in Dispatch during 2024-25.


Polarity: Fire and Ice
Tim Georgeson, Maureen Gruben, Cass Lynch, Mei Swan Lim, Adam Sebire, Indigenous Desert Alliance.
Fremantle Arts Centre, 10 February – 28 April 2024.

The ice was much better than the fire in this exhibition of First Nations responses to climate change. The fire was the usual kind of video work that follows Aboriginal people around with high-definition equipment and an ethnographic romanticism. We’ve seen it all before. Some firestick farming, some burning trees, abandoned cars and the laying of Aboriginal hands onto bark as if they are healing the Earth from the ravages of colonisation. It’s ABC TV for the art gallery, and in Fremantle there’s a reliable rent-a-crowd of white sannyasin children tip toeing around in ethical footwear to keep the attendance numbers flowing. The rhetoric around the show felt all the heavier after the driest summer in the south-west, killing ancient trees, and this may have been why the four-channel video work AnthropoScene VII: Sikujumaataarpoq (2023) showing Greenland’s ice fields was so effective. Adam Sebire’s meditation filmed by drone named all the different kinds of ice the Greenlanders have put a name to. Sikuiuitsoq: sea always covered by ice. Maniillat: uneven, pack ice. And so on. I watched it three times, missing my friend’s reggae band, just to feel like there was somewhere coldly different out there, somewhere beyond Australia with its dying forests and the stifling, ineffectual politics around imagining what a different, post-climate change or post-Aboriginal culture might look like.
Oui Move In You
Laure Prouvost.
Pert Institute of Contemporary Art / Perth Festival, 7 February – 30 March 2025.

Oui Move in You saw award-winning French artist Laura Prouvost present a range of video and installation works throughout PICA. Across these works, Prouvost explored the relationship between female bodies, connection and generational transformation. Visitors pushed through heavy red velvet curtains to enter a strange enveloping red rood. In this space, visitors were presented with the work Four for see beauties (2022) where plants, skin and tentacle blur in a flurry of sensual bodily imagery. The room’s redness functioned as an intentional recreation of the womb. Ironically, PICA ensured entering the room required embodying a sperm and pushing past several layers of heavy curtains, reenacting sperm cells infiltrating the egg. Beyond the womb, visitors encountered various scenes. A grandmother explains the world to her daughter while in a different room, an old woman takes flight. Oui Move in You was an exhibition that truly deserves to call itself immersive; one where art was experienced as a bodily and spatial sensation. The only drawback is what can only be described as the bad pun overshadowing the exhibition name. Oui Move in You evokes corny French wordplay and poorly timed puns. What is gained by this cheap nod to Prouvost’s heritage? But if you can look past the title, Oui Move in You was a staggering display of Prouvost’s masterful visual storytelling.


Form and Feeling 
Stanley Spencer, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Kathleen O’Connor, Frank Auerbach, and others.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 21 December 2024 – 4 May 2025.

2024 was the year of green: BRAT, Wicked, and the moodily verdigris walls of Form and Feeling. The exhibition is an ambitious yet understated contribution to AGWA’s programming in a year dominated by significantly more vibes-based and pocket-lining curatorial swings. Pulling from the State Art Collection, Form and Feeling is a joyful web of trial and error that tracks the turn towards early 20th century modernism in English and Australian painting. Of particular focus are those who trained at or were influenced by London’s Slade School of Art. It is refreshing to see so many works exhumed from AGWA’s idle storage and presented in a narrative that prioritises a complex history of internationalism over parochialism, the latter approach to this period a trapping  far too often adhered to by so many curators. The works exhibited included just as many sketches as paintings. Form and Feeling hits its stride when it engages in these tensions of exchange, trial and error, and the sometimes dissatisfying or indecipherable tedium of creation.
        The throughline of this exhibition is not always clear. It is ostensibly about the collection of British art by Australian institutions during the 20th century and how these collections impacted Australian artists. A small display of some Kathleen O’Connor sketches does double-duty engaging with the lack of female representation in these collections, but such a criticism could be taken further. Collecting is one side, the other is the ongoing responsibility of institutions to invest in the conservation and research of work by such underrepresented female artists. For many institutions (AGWA included) the works of female artists that did manage to slide into the collection are in such poor condition after years of institutional neglect that they are simply in no state to be hauled out of storage. This is a digression, but a more self-reflexive criticism would have been an incisive curatorial addition to addressing the pervasive “women issue” in these kinds of collection-based interrogations.
        Gripes aside, Form and Feeling sings when stripped back to the methodical draughtsman-like process of labouring until striking gold. The show gives that titular tension, between replication and emotion, space to breathe and is witnessed most notably in hangs of Frank Auerbach and  William Dobell. An extended passage displays over a dozen sheaves of Auerbach’s wretched chicken-scratchings, needled at and agonised over until  (finally!) Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station, Night is revealed in its oil-slicked industrialist russet and olive, chaotic and complete. The wall-text speaks of Auerbach’s interest in capturing the ‘all-at-onceness’ in his art, and the choice to wreath the final Mornington Crescent in all its preliminary iterations surprisingly compliments, rather than detracts from, this ethos. Perhaps Form and Feeling is, too, best enjoyed in its all-at-onceness.


Double Canvases
Simon Denny.
Bill’s PC, 5 April – 5 May 2025.

Two works by Auckland-born Simon Denny shown at Bill’s PC in classic fashion: minimal, placed on pine plinths, no faff, hanging lightbulb in 2 x 2-metre room, focused. It’s the visual art equivalent of sitting alone with the Sennheisers on, listening to Fred Frith. But instead you’re looking at two canvas-prints: photographs of old tube TVs with what appear to be title screens. One reads ‘Introductory Logic: Video Tutorial’ and the other appears to show a title further into the presumed “DVD”, declaring the ‘Key Concept: Soundness’ and ‘Sound = Valid + True.’ The pair of tellies are part of a series Denny produced during a 2010 residency at Artspace in Sydney, in which the artist borrowed phrases and key words from an introductory philosophy course he had enrolled in at the time. Fifteen years on, in the age of Tiktok philosophers, School of Life YouTube summaries, and “professional development” podcasts, the work appears out-of-time, retro, and oddly ambiguous about its own key concept. I find myself enjoying these objects through a sense of nostalgia for an era when tech/media and its increased distribution were often met with optimistic enthusiasm, as opposed to the current state of concern and scepticism. Perhaps Denny’s work already warned of the present, through its incongruous form and content—flattening ideas about reasoning into TV menus. Regardless of these reminiscences, the artworks remain potent and uneasy, best enjoyed in the stark presentation afforded at Bill’s.


Look, Look. Anna Park
Anna Park.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 20 April – 8 September 2024.

Anna Park is the second solo show that Rachel Ciesla has curated in one of the big, ground floor spaces at the Art Gallery of Western Australia as part of the Simon Lee Foundation’s sponsorship of Asian art in the state gallery. It follows an equally impressive solo of Farah Al Qasimi’s photography and video, both artists being part of a young, second-generation diaspora that are redefining Asian art through New York galleries. Park’s large charcoal drawings draw from American advertising and comic books of the 1950s, their speech bubbles and smiling faces a pastiche of David Salle’s paintings. Amidst a collage of venetian blinds, wallpaper and gratuitously white teeth, Park pinpoints the beginnings of global image culture in black and white charcoal drawings. During the 1980s Salle was a figure of moralising derision as New York’s art scene morphed from a hotbed of conceptual and political activism into a hyped investment bubble.  It may be that his critics overlooked what Park reveals in this fascination for newspaper and comic culture, as they contain the seeds of our own era of mass narcissism. The shades of grey in Park’s black and white drawings subdue the viewer by billboarding the zeitgeist without shaming it.

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Image credits:

1. Adam Sébire, anthropoScene Il: Tideline (detail), 2018, HD video still, courtesy of the artist.

2. Laure Prouvost, Every Sunday, Grand Ma, (detail), 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, image courtesy the artist, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels, carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid, Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

3. Simon Denny, Double Canvases, at Bill's PC, courtesy of Simon Denny / Bill’s PC.

4. Willy Lenski, Life may be seen as a gesture (detail), 1987, oil and synthetic polymer paint on jute, 50.9 cm x 92.2 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1988. © Willy Lenski 1988.

5. Look, look. Anna Park. Installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2024. Photo: Dan McCabe.

The annual ranking of the most influential people in West Australia’s art world, according to Dispatch Review.

Dan Bourke, Keywords, AVA

by Francis Russell.

When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. 

A quick review of the strategic human resource management literature on organisational values will reveal that a clear values statement is necessary in order to attract employees who will align with an organisation’s mission, attract customers who want to purchase an ethos as much as a product or service, to successfully guide the behaviour of employees, and to increase an organisation’s chances of successfully achieving its overall strategic goals.
        Underpinning this literature is the assumption that organisations owe a duty of service to society as a whole and not just to owners, shareholders, or a select group of stakeholders; in other words, discussions of organisational values must be understood within the broader discourse of corporate citizenship and the related notion that organisational culture can play a key role in the development and achievement of progressive political goals. As such, organisational values should not be reduced to simple branding or marketing exercises.[1] Instead, the development of an organisation’s values is part of subject formation—the production of modes of conduct that make an employee’s fidelity to their employer paradigmatic for evincing one’s trustworthiness and value in society. Indeed, the very name “strategic human resource management” is not just an example of terminological inflation, but creates a distinction between an older human resource management that functioned to ensure industrial compliance, reactively provided services related to team functionality and wellbeing, and ensured the smooth operation of key services like payroll, and a new kind of human resource management that concerns itself with proactively moulding an organisation and its employees in order to ensure that both live up to the expectations of a dutiful corporate citizen.
        However, and as has been shown by recent texts like Working for the Brand: How Corporations are Destroying Free Speech by labour relations lawyer Josh Bornstein, the reality of such interventions into worker subjectivity are much more disquieting. Putting to one side the lofty and abstract goals of corporations and large not-for-profits like universities and art galleries and museums, codes of conduct and organisational value charters are more tangibly used to silence and terminate staff for challenging managerial prerogative, contacting the media about corporate actions that would seem to violate an organisation’s commitment to good citizenship, and even for daring to express political opinions in one’s private life (and especially on social media). Bizarrely, and despite adopting organisational values that should make bad behaviour rare, Australian organisations regularly get into the press and the courts and tribunals for illegally sacking workers, committing hundreds of millions of dollars of wage theft, sham contracting, and exposing workers to life threatening conditions. As such, the development of and commitment to organisational values have become, at best, a sign of conformity and compliance with neoliberal capitalism and, at worst, a symptom of an over-identification with symbols that mask a fundamental absence of values, if not a kind of nihilism. In this way, the contemporary corporation or not-for-profit acts like the political conservative who becomes increasingly obsessed with symbols like flags and national anthems as the very democracy and nation state they claim to valorise is reduced to a handmaiden for the market.
        Keywords, a new exhibition by Dan Bourke at the recently rebranded AVA Gallery (formerly Sweet Pea) explores this aforementioned subject formation primarily through a series of suspended assemblage works combining second-hand soft toys and laser cut acrylic text. Somewhere between a butcher shop’s display of hanging meat and the bunting you might find at a child’s birthday party, each work displays stuffed toys shackled to vertically aligned text that spells out key values taken from leading Australian art organisations: integrity, diversity, ambitious, experimental, challenging, critical, responsive, collaborative, sustainable. In many ways, Keywords is an extension of Bourke’s sustained examination of the contradictions and perversities inherent to the professionalisation and commodification of the counterculture and the becoming-counter-cultural of the corporation and major institution—interrelated concerns that have underpinned well over a decade of compelling work. While Keywords could be seen as another example of contemporary art that explores the failure of art institutions to live up to their progressive values, Keywords is refreshingly generative in its attention to the specific libidinal and aesthetic dimensions of the subject formation I’ve discussed earlier in this review. Beyond mere condemnation, the materiality of the works in Keywords goes beyond the usual accusations of hypocrisy, elitism, or complicity to explore cuteness and flatness as central to the specific kind of alienation and reification one encounters in today’s knowledge economy. Indeed, as Tara Heffernan writes in the show’s catalogue essay,

Bourke’s use of toys also speaks to the infantilisation of the white-collar worker in contemporary managerial practices. As well as the excessive focus on team-building activities, think of the well-worn cliché of bosses treating their team like family—a cliché reinforced by sitcoms that focus on the social dynamics that develop between office mates. The fuzzy veneer of safety and care—and performative concerns with the environment, respect and diversity—conceal the malevolence of bureaucracies that, in reality, are primarily concerned with protecting their own interests.

This is perhaps where Bourke’s intervention is more thought provoking than conventional critiques of the corporatised art institution that focus only on its bureaucratic and elitist features. Rather than merely offering the contemporary worker an opportunity to perform the role of an aggregated and sanitised worker drone, the knowledge economy demands that one bring their full self to work, that they embody their work through a set of values that are lived day-to-day, and that they understand their place within the organisation as being part of a politically and socially powerful mission. All of which has been well-understood by artists and critics for some time—and has been argued compellingly, if not definitively, in texts like Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism—but what is less remarked upon is how cartoonish and flattened one’s self must become in order to be accepted at work. It is here, by way of identifying the contemporary knowledge economy worker with the figure of the Care Bear or Beanie Baby, that Keywords helps to reveal the combined aesthetics of cuteness and flatness that have come to form one of the key vectors of today’s power relations. As Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, authors of Cute Accelerationism, note

the dehumanizing vector in culture is no longer Terminator. Right now, it’s dollification [...] We are gradually coming to perceive even ourselves through the filters, algorithms, and two-dimensional space through which we relate to the rest of the world. All of the qualities that involves—flatness, plasticity, virality—find an acute locus within the culture of cuteness.[2]

We should not let this drive to infantilization, this injunction for the contemporary knowledge worker to consent to being squished and squeezed into a cute and flat form, fool us into believing that, beyond the subordinated status of the employee, there exists an opposed or adult world of management. Such a distinction does not operate at the level of a spatial hierarchy between those at the top and at the bottom of the greasy pole, but, instead, functions temporally. For most of our working lives we are forced to negotiate dynamisms and complexities inherent to the labour process, pluralistic situations that requires us to confront a multitude of correct and incorrect ways to respond and be responsible. At any moment, however, the contradictions, ambivalences, and double binds of industrial and political life can become flattened by management into a cartoonish world of heroes and villains, integrity and dishonesty, and excellence and mediocrity. Indeed, part of what can make corporate value statements almost totalitarian is the impossibility of fulfilling them; the quasi-utopian moral world imagined by corporate values requires one to be unobservant as a matter of practical necessity, which entails that, on judgement day, everyone becomes a sinner undeserving of redemption. As such, the contemporary knowledge worker increasingly witnesses, if not experiences directly, the nightmarish surreality of vague-to-the-point-of-empty values such as courage or respect becoming weaponised to crush worker opposition to managerial power or to eliminate an individual who has fallen out of favour with their superiors.
        Just like a children’s television programme that appears surprisingly sinister and unsettling when rewatched as an adult, what organisational theorist Robert Cooper called “organisational kitsch” functions, like all kitsch, to render those aspects of work that are disturbing ‘into something that is pleasing and pacifying.’[3] As Cooper argued, kitsch ‘oozes its way through those ‘theories’ of man-management we call the Human Relations school’. In particular, Cooper outlines three forms of human relations kitsch: firstly, the notion that industrialisation has separated humanity from an organic community it needs to be reunited with (with human resources playing a key role); secondly, that workplaces regularly fall into antagonisms that could be avoided with the right kind of intervention (as opposed to being the product of the class stratifications of capitalism as such); and, lastly, that a properly functioning organisation can assist to build a properly functioning society—or, that a properly functioning society is nothing other than properly functioning organisations—which, as Cooper states, is ‘kitschic because a management problem is kitschified into (and thus made more acceptable) a human and social problem.’
        Rather than being a phase we can hope to grow out of, the cute but increasingly frayed sculptural elements that comprise Keywords challenge us to take cuteness, flatness, and banality seriously as entrenched logics of power. As anyone who has paid attention to the dismal political failure of the Democrats in the United States will know, the libidinal economy of organisational kitsch cannot be successfully opposed by calls to finally take things seriously; as if a new-new sincerity could marshal a coalition of the alienated against the ascendant alliance of banality and terror. Indeed, and as Keywords helps to show, the unrelenting demand to take things seriously—especially our signature values—is fundamental to organisational kitsch. Moreover, before lambasting others for being childish and unserious we must first interrogate what a serious political project opposed to capitalism and fascism would look like, and consider to what extent this aforementioned flattening is in part a symptom of a crisis of confidence; a kind of defensive maneuverer in which an organisation or individual makes themselves into a small target for fear of being attacked. Nevertheless, and in the wake of a decade of corporate Memphis cloaked immiseration and far-right Studio Ghiblified AI slop, shouldn’t we also be suspicious of the notion, promulgated by influential contemporary theorists like McKenzie Wark, that cuteness might be ‘what the fascist revivalists fear most’?[4]

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Footnotes:

1. This is not to say that there is no relationship between value statements and branding, and, indeed, while the homogeneity and repetitiveness of organisational values—integrity, respect, transparency, excellence, inclusion, etc.—might lead one to think that such value charters have only made organisations indistinguishable from one another this to potentially miss the point—particularly for medium sized organisations, the adoption of seemingly generic values presents a reassuring brand identity to stakeholders: “trust us to conform!” 

2. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism

3. https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/23.3%20Cooper%20Organisational%20Kitsch.pdf

4. https://www.frieze.com/article/mckenzie-wark-politics-cuteness-246

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Photography by Lyle Branson. Courtesy the artist and AVA, Boorloo/Perth.