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In 1976 Jim Allen made a number of performance works in Adelaide during a period of residency at the Experimental Art Foundation, including in one night in April both Poetry for Chainsaws and Newspaper. At the time Allen was a crucial figure as artist and educator in the development of ephemeral, post-object practices in New Zealand. He subsequently spent a decade in Sydney as Founding Head of the School of Art at Sydney College of the Arts and was a centraal figure in the foundation of Artspace. More recently Allen, based again in Auckland, has been developing new work alongside occasional restagings of some of the 1970’s works increasingly recognised as central in the history of experimental practice in both Australia and New Zealand. Here Artspace exhibits filmic records of two key works operating as new iterations of the original pieces, as independent works in and of themselves, and as manifestations of the potent currency of the recent past in contemporary practices located in the insistence presentness of the restaged event. |
Jim Allen first staged NEWS in 1976 under the title Newspaper at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. Since then he has repeated it several times.
Jim Allen sits on an ordinary chair holding a daily newspaper in front of him leafing through the pages. With a sudden impetuousness and intense vehemence he crumples the newspaper to a paper ball. Then he unfolds it again und starts reading again, before he crumples it up again as if taken by a new outburst of rage. More and more paper shreds reel to the ground, the newspaper deteriorates more and more and in the end is all but a rag whose leftovers curl around Allen’s feet.
We all read newspapers. May be today we read blogs, but certainly the newspaper is the classic medium for gathering information about the things happening in the world, politically, socially and culturally. It helps us to form an opinion about what we read.
Some newspapers are serious; some are media to manipulate, to spread gossip or cheap propaganda. There is only a blurry line between serious information and manipulation. “Embedded” journalists are hardly capable to provide neutral information, but the question is whether something like that exists anyway.
What is Jim Allen angry about? It is impossible for the beholder of the video piece to say what exactly he is reading, which means, that it is impossible to say that he would be angry about a particular kind of information or a particular way how this information is delivered. His anger must be therefore about the medium of information as such. If we suppose that any information is infected with and corrupted by opinion, we can assume that his anger his about this fact. About the factuality of the ubiquitousity of opinion that leaves no space for something else. Which could be truth.
But why does he restart his reading of what makes him angry over and over again? Why not trashing the trash and getting rid of it?
There is a fascination in humans about things that disgust us, that appal us, that embarrass us. We read the junk, the Yellow Press, the gossip, we read the nonsense about famous fighting couples and the disasters and catastrophes the upper class experiences, because it satisfies our envy, and we read about the disasters the lower class experiences, because it satisfies our need of feeling superior. We read and form our opinions because it helps us to ally with what we feel close to and to distinguish us from what we want to be different. To form an opinion is the form we use to find a place in the human society.
To form and to express an opinion is our form how to communicate where we stand. We communicate where we stand with animals like us – human animals, mortal animals. There is a way to become immortal – by being truthful to a truth. But the truth comes to us only as an event. And the event is worth to be called an event only as far as it can be called an experience. The experience is worth to be called an experience (and not just an occurrence) only as far as it cuts through the opinion, because experience is something that brings into the world something NEW. And the NEW is something that has no language and no place yet and is something we have no opinion about, because we did not know it before.
But if the truth is the truth only insofar as it is the NEW we have no language for, it is its destiny that people search for a language to spread it, it is destined to be transformed, to be taught, to be preached, to be communicated in the medium of language. To be corrupted. To be turned into an opinion. A conviction. A belief. To be truthful to a truth means then to keep silent about it. To avoid filling it with positivity, with a lesson, with a message, an evangelium, a conclusion. The only conclusion could be that there is none.
Jim Allen’s piece NEWS reflects the dilemma in which we are stuck. To be caught in the web of opinions with no other value than to keep the communication alive, and the want for a truth that would cut through that web; the need to live in the human web and the desire to go beyond. There is no conclusion to be drawn out of Jim Allen’s piece. The only thing we can do is to take seriously what we observe: a certain kind of anger and melancholy, desire and despair, hope and sadness.
Leonhard Emmerling is Director of St. Paul St. Gallery, Auckland University of Tecnology. |
In his ‘A simple Text about Jim Allen’s Anger’ Leonhard Emmerling succinctly describes the background and the basis on which this work was conceived. In considering the formal presentation of these concerns I have taken into account the ennui that comes with habit tinged with cynicsm and disbelief which in turn questions the foundation of our daily discourse. Some form of manic behavour as liet motiv or signifier such as dysfunctional, obsessive and compulsive behaviour seemed appropriate, as a means to structure and present the work.
This neurotic pattern of activity is boring in effect, and repitition renders it a meaningless exercise. As in real life there is no conclusion. The only constant is that the show goes on and we exract what we can from the experience. |
