Interpreting the Installations

It struck me recently that “installation art” was yet another aesthetic regime of which I knew next to nothing. True, from passing mentions and occasional photographs in the overseas journals, I realised that “art” had now come to include young women displaying their unappetisingly unmade beds in galleries, and spectacles such as Damien Hirst chopping a cow and her calf into halves, to exhibit the butchered innocents in tanks of formalin for public edification.

And I had heard that rich nutters paid millions of dollars to become the proud owners of such equivocal creations: an odd way indeed to flush off overflowing cash surpluses, which otherwise might have been given quietly to—say—cancer research.

The very word installation intrigued me. As a matter of course one “installs” many and various everyday things—from bathtubs to bishops. But art? Flat works such as paintings and drawings are “hung”. Three-dimensional sculptures and statues clearly are not. But was Michelangelo’s mighty marble David “installed”? Was Lord Nelson “installed” on his towering London column?

Did installation begin last century, when French artist Jean Dubuffet pulled the collective leg of the avant-garde with his sensitive arrangements of lumps of old concrete, tar, builders’ rubbish and plumbers’ leftovers? Aesthetes today whose tastes incline to installation are pampered, and need no longer trouble to seek it out in art galleries: it comes to them, free. From time to time their local councils appoint a “hard rubbish collection day”, when the municipal truck obligingly carts away all those household superfluities too big, too heavy or too dangerous to put in the bin.

The streets for miles are transfigured into evocative installations of old broke-back beds, burnt-out cooking ovens, retired televisions, expired ergonomic chairs and rejected refrigerators. Some creations are embellished by the application of suspicious-looking old mattresses and bundles of rusted-out old roof guttering. The concept of plein air has taken on a whole new dimension. In 1986, when Alan McCulloch published his Encyclopaedia of Australian Art he showed one small illustration entitled “Art from the Scrapheap”. What scope he would have today.

Yet not all installation artists are content with their enlarged kerbside domain; they continue to crave the dignity and authentication which follow exhibition in an art gallery. Or so it seemed to me last week, when I dropped in on the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, displayed at the National Gallery of Victoria. The Clemenger, financed by a generous benefaction from Joan and Peter Clemenger, has been a triennial event since 1991, and this one is to be the last.

I looked first at Concrete Forest, by Ah Xian. Crowded together was an array of about forty near-life-size busts of people whom our police force would describe as “persons of Asian appearance”. They were modelled in smoothly finished concrete, all coloured to the same rather unhealthy pallor: envisage one of those mushroom patches which sometimes go berserk after heavy rain. (Correction: think of toadstools.) Though desperate for understanding, the only association I could make was with that old quip of Sherlock Holmes: “All Chinamen look alike.” Was this “installation”? Or merely sculpture run a little out of control?

No such question arose with Forcefield 2. There, squarely on the floor of the NGV, stood a small but veritable country stockyard, roughly the size of the catching pens adjacent to woolsheds, or about the area of a small room in a house. The rails, painted gleaming white, bore in crisp black capital lettering along their lengths what appeared to be place names from the British Isles. No gate—the yard stood open at the front; a notice painted on the floor urged us: “Please enter the exhibit”.

Within stood an ordinary, plain domestic fireplace, its bricklaying appearing to have been done there on the spot. Along its mantelpiece was pasted a document which I found almost illegible, though it gave the impression of legal writing done with a nineteenth-century quill pen. The dry, dead upper branches of an old sawn-off fruit tree spread above. The floor was covered with the pasted-down pages of a book whose title page identified it as a volume of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

This exhibit is credited to Julie Gough, an artist who claims Tasmanian Aboriginal descent. She was born in Melbourne in 1965, and now lives in Hobart.

A full twenty minutes within and around the exhibit yielded me nothing whatever beyond the careful physical description rendered above, so I returned two days later for another tour of study. This produced only one pettifogging extra detail, missed on the first visit: the yard’s rails had been secured to the posts with modern Phillips-head screws; sturdy, old-time six-inch nails might have been more “in period”. But the cardinal fact remained: all Julie Gough’s painstaking carpentry, bricklaying and paperhanging produced no enlightenment of understanding, nor any enlargement of spirit. From her installation I had learned nothing and felt nothing. Reader: what would you have made of it?

Only then I turned to the rather elaborate Clemenger catalogue supplied (for $20) by the NGV. This I had deliberately kept unopened until I should have inspected the work itself. Knowledgeable interpretation and informed criticism are an essential element of our artistic experience; it is not unknown even for a painting famous for five hundred years to surrender fresh insights to new scrutiny. How much the more might our sensibilities need guidance in the unfamiliar fields of “installation”?

Yes. But surely an honest personal assessment can be reached only by a viewer who, as a first step, sees the exhibit with their own eyes; whose mind remains clear of the opinions or conclusions of others? To proceed otherwise is to resemble those flaky witnesses in court who, unable or unwilling to give forthright first-hand testimony, are coached in advance by lawyers on what they should say.

Only after generous promptings from the catalogue, it seems likely that Julie Gough intends to offer us at least the following ideas: her outrage at the nineteenth-century treatment of the Tasmanian Aborigines; the railings symbolise the sense of comfort and security by those dwelling inside them, but also the feelings of exclusion and dispossession of those left outside; the black-painted place names along the rails represent today’s farming properties which occupy former Aboriginal lands; the brick fireplace and the dead apple tree (we are told) represent the servitude and exploitation of Aboriginal children, though this connection still eludes me; the quill-penned paper along the mantelpiece reproduces a magistrate’s report on a case of mistreatment of such a child. The meaning is clear of Windschuttle’s pages pasted to the floor, and the notice inviting us to walk into the exhibit. We are invited to wipe our feet on Windschuttle. Gough actually (in the catalogue) expresses the hope that we will “blacken and erase this text”.

Julie Gough and all other Australians live (thank God!) in a country where she is fully entitled to express her strong minority feelings, and one respects her candour. But mere petulance or disparagement do not constitute answers to Windschuttle’s detailed and meticulous recent scholarship. In any case, given the strength of her feelings, her attack strikes me as ineffectual, feeble and obscure.

Provided that it would not offend the delicate standards of installation art, I have a suggestion for her. Why doesn’t she really turn up the heat on Windschuttle, and appeal more directly to her audience in the Australian idiom? She should “install” an old-time bush dunny; hanging near its door on a short chain would be a copy of a Windschuttle volume, with a hole bored through one corner. At least that would speak clearly for itself, without the need to seek help from twenty dollars worth of wildly opaque and pretentious art-speak catalogue.

Clearly, I have still a great deal to learn about installation art; whether I can spare the time might be another question.