JIM ALLEN:
From Elam to the Experimental Art Foundation
- continued...
Blair French
Australian Works
In contrast to Contact, most of these
works produced by Allen at the EAF were of
apparently modest scale or undertaking; involved
looser, more porous frameworks; and perhaps
most significantly were characterised by a
focus upon the performative figure of the
artist new to Allen’s work.
This location of himself within the work may
in part have been motivated by very practical
reasons of what was logistically (financially)
possible within the framework of his EAF residency,
but what emerged across the works was an apparent
impulse towards an exploration on the part
of Allen of his own embodied experience
of the fundamentally phenomenological situations
he set up as the limit conditions of these
works.
Newspaper Piece was undertaken in
April on the same evening as Poetry for
Chainsaws as well as performances by Leigh
Hobba and Richard Tipping. Allen sat reading a page of a newspaper.
When finished he crumpled it tightly into
a ball and discarded it. He then retrieved
it, read it again, crumpled and discarded
it over again, repeating the process until
the page became illegible pulp. In Poetry
for Chainsaws Allen read Allen Ginsberg’s
poem Howl against the sound of three
chainsaws that he had set running on the floor
around him. The piece was prepared so that
each chainsaw had exactly enough petrol to
operate continuously throughout the reading,
but to splutter and fall silent just at the
point Allen finished reading the poem. The
floor of the EAF was concrete, so not only
did this compound the sound of the chainsaws
it also meant that they tended to shudder
and jolt about dangerously around Allen’s
feet. A third similar work, Sending/Receiving
, was performed in October also alongside
works by Hobba and Tipping. Here Allen had
performers call out extracts from literary
works The Third Policeman , Gravity’s
Rainbow and Tunc . Audience
members receiving the information called it
back to the best of their ability. All three
works explicitly addressed themselves at or
inserted themselves within problems of communication—gaps
in intention and meaning between ‘sending’
and ‘receiving’ positions in any
singular or set of communicative act(s). Each
engaged limit conditions for communication
and proposed pressure points where it broke-down
irrevocably.
For The Elsatic-Sided Boot, his major
contribution to the EAF post object art survey
exhibition, Allen issued an ‘invitation’
in advance to people wishing to “sound-off...
make sounds”. Participants were asked
to selected sound-making objects and leave
them in a designated area of the EAF exhibition
space several days prior to the performance
“thereby identifying themselves with
the piece.” The actual performance
took the form of four 15-minute components
where participants sat in an area marked off
by Allen attempting to communicate with each
other solely via their ‘sound’
objects. These were interspersed with ‘rest’
periods in which participants could stand,
stretch, walk about and introduce themselves
to each other. The area designated by Allen
for this piece was ‘roped’-off
by a strip of 35mm film wrapped around four
pillars. The film contained images Allen had
taken one day in Adelaide when he happened
to be passing by an intersection just as a
shooting was taking place down its cross street.
A man was apparently trying to hold up a gun
shop but was shot by police. It was later
treated as suicide). He didn’t present
these as exhibition ‘images’ but
rather as the physical ‘barrier’
delineating the space or environment of the
work in socially discursive as well as physical
terms. In addition he projected on one wall
a Super 8 film of a small model he had constructed
from Lego components, complete with soundtrack
of radio news broadcasts regarding violent
acts and disasters. All the debris from that
initial performance was subsequently left
strewn about in the designated space of the
piece for the duration of the exhibition,
as trace or material mnemonic of the night’s
gathering.
Like Contact, The Elsatic-Sided
Boot was an attempted critique of the
manners in which people are subjected to stress
(the social alienation of a modern, mechanistic
society) and the means by which they may attempt
to relieve this (on one hand via acts of random
violence, on the other by means such as those
enacted in the performance element of the
piece—seeking and being sensitive or
responsive to forms of communication and commonality
other than those binding the alienating structures
of daily life). In this work, however, the
processes of interaction and potential outcomes
were far less directed by Allen. It was not
unlike the type of exercise Allen and colleagues
set students at Elam where certain parameters
of action were given and general sphere of
activity to occur within those parameters
indicated, but both motivation and shape of
action (and therefore outcome) left up to
the participants to develop in the very process
of making, acting, and engaging with each
other.
The large text work, There are Always
Elephants to be Made Drunk, installed
at the EAF in September and subsequently at
the 1976 Biennale of Sydney, utilised press
material from this same Adelaide shooting
along with text (particularly conversational)
fragments sourced in a magazine article dealing
with the network of relationships that exist
within a single family, especially that between
a father and teenage daughter. Allen attempted
to map or grid these relationships out in
a diagrammatic form, replacing names with
numbers, so creating a piece that had the
appearance of a mathematical, scientific or
perhaps technical calculation. Similar to
O-AR 1 of the previous year in its
utilisation of textual fragments in need of
cognitive reconstitution on the part of the
viewer, this was a difficult piece to apprehend.
It set out to test discursive functions and
parameters of language acts in both direct,
one-to-one vectors and more complex cultural
networks. As Allen said of O-AR 1 ,
it sought “to create a gap between the
definitive statement and the residue of meaning.”
Here issues of communication difficulties
and information contamination were dealt with
in a very different manner from Allen’s
performance work. Nevertheless, a similar
idea of frissure between transmitted and received
utterances and thus dislocations (by and from
the social) of cognitive functioning and ultimately
meaning were made apparent via Allen’s
systematic pressuring of information structures.
On Planting a Native was undertaken
in response to the removal by the Art Gallery
of South Australia of a work by Tony Coleing—an
installation of black gnomes—from their
front garden/forecourt area, and the subsequent
furore regarding both work and its removal.
According to Allen, Coleing had consulted
local Aboriginal people prior to installing
the work, however an Aboriginal writer visiting
from Queensland had publicly objected to the
piece whereby it became a major issue in the
local press leading finally to its removal.
In response, Allen obtained a small gum tree
that he set up in a large box in the EAF.
For the performance he, in “the role
of someone to care and nurture,” systematically attacked the tree with
a knife, chainsaw, pruning shears, small axe
and oxy-acetylene torch, burning and taking
it apart piece by piece (including at the
end smashing the tub to remove the roots and
pruning them). Once the tree was completely
taken apart he reconstituted it by taping
its components to the wall in a perfectly
regular, geometric fashion (vertical trunk,
horizontal branches, leaves fanning off the
end of the branches in precise patterns).
Thus, to use Allen’s own deliberately
ironic phrasings, the “poor neglected,
unloved, native” was “reconstituted
in its best interests”
in a (blindly violent) act of cultural ordering
and regulating—an act of representation.
Throughout the performance Allen spoke to
the audience via a megaphone strapped to his
chest describing and reflecting upon his actions.
On Planting a Native posed a generatively
ambiguous relationship to its source. On one
hand it assumed an ambivalent distance from
the act of removing Coleing’s work from
public display (and the strange mix of interests
operating in support of that action ranging
from sectors of an indigenous community through
to a conservative ‘talkback radio’
local constituency refusing to see the work
as ‘art’ through to the host institution
itself); and on the other re-staged an act
of desecration which could itself have been
both (and at once) any act of public representation
of the European genera ‘native’
(irrespective of political intent) and the
denial or evasion manifested in its censorship.
On Planting a Native was clearly
Allen’s most culturally interventionist
work to this date. Indeed the social as subject
emerged in Allen’s EAF work in new,
more direct, more content-driven manners than
previously, and did so coupled with a stronger,
more overt communicative imperative. In performance
works such as Newspaper Piece , On
Planting a Native, Poetry for Chainsaws
, and Sending/Receiving there was an
apparent impulse propulsion outside the body
(and indeed consciousness) of the artist/performer.
Allen, for example, read or spoke at the audience
subjecting their perception to the potentially
unstable effects of multiple readings of the
same texts, or the discords and discrepancies
between word and action (between the act of
attacking the tree and its accompanying commentary;
between the intent of Ginsberg’s emotive,
polemical, textual rant against contemporary
society and its dispersal amongst a cacophony
of machine-age noise). But in doing so he
also tested or challenged audience tolerance
for this communicative act. So whilst in Poetry
for Chainsaws the act of reading (shouting)
must necessarily have constituted an act of
both physical aggression and cathartic release
on the part of the artist, but also for the
audience one of jarring, visceral assault
upon both sensory and cognitive faculties.
Conversely, in On Planting a Native
the body of the artist stood in metonymic
relation to the body of culture enacting acts
of violence (now via order, regulation, and
rationality) upon the body of an other—the
‘native’.
To conclude then, these EAF works resolve,
problematise and extend aspects of Allen’s
earlier practice insomuch as each relation
is in part synonymous with the other, and
necessarily incomplete. If we were to attempt
some more concrete summation, it might be
to claim that these later works foreground,
or expose, the very fundamental trajectories,
the tensile structures of Allen’s practice:
the striving at (and through) the conditions
for and instances of communication diffusion,
the points at which the clarity of the test-pattern
breaks down into static and the vectors along
which communication may be re-tuned; the search
for the most cogent means of direct, interventionist
response to social and material environments;
the figuring of pragmatic action, sensory
experience, and intellectual reflection within
shared frames; and the generative tension
between pre-determination and willful intent
within the bounds of emotional and cultural
convention. There are developments of course,
progressions of sorts and shifting concerns
and conditions patterning Allen’s practice.
But I maintain that it’s the often discordant
migrations back and forth between specific
works—between New Zealand Environment
#5, Arena , and On Planting
a Native ; between Contact and
The Elsatic-Sided Boot ; or O-AR
1 and There are Always Elephants to
be Made Drunk to cite but a small few
obvious examples—that most ignites their
respective agency, and via which we might
begin to apprehend something of the sustained
complexity and intelligence of Allen’s
post object work of the period 1969 –
1976.
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