Title: Nath Allan - contemporary glass

Date: circa 2006

Materials: Blown glass, contemporary art culture

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Hyaline Glass Studio, Mt. Lawley, Perth, Western Australia

Keywords: alternative identity, sculpture, blown glass, Nath Allan

Website: http://nathallan.com

Description:

This one is not so easy to describe.  Essentially, the artwork is the development of a narrative of my identity as the blown glass artist, Nath Allan.  In other words, I create and exhibit glass sculptures under the semi-pseudonym Nath Allan.  Its an interdisciplinary practice you could say.  Like using the skills involved in sculpture or glass blowing, or being a artist within contemporary society within an act of performance art, a very intensive and dedicated act of performance art in which assume this alternate identity.  This practice stands as an extension of artistic practice, as a project in its own right.

In 2004, I began training as a glass blower in Australia at Hyaline Glass Studio, a private run hotshop at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Since, 2006 I have been showing these works as Nathan (Nath) Allan. At first, this was a way of keeping my fine arts and craft-based approach to sculpture and art-making at a distance form the more experimental practice I had developed through the creation of interactive media installations, Net art, and performance-based relational events.  I thought making glass sculpture was a viable means of being an artist and interacting with the economy of the art world.  In short, making object-based sculptures meant something that someone could purchase and own. It was a back-up plan, to make glass sculptures that I could (hopefully) sell and finance my ‘true’ art- the more experimental installation and performance based works created and exhibited as Nathan Stevens.

Nath Allan with first glass sculptures, 2008.

Eventually, as my glass practice developed, I began to see this separation as a means of affording a perspective on my practice.  By dividing my artistic practice, I was in essence breaking it open, allowing me to see inside, to get a good peek at what was happening within my practice.  Each practice was subsumed by an identity to which I presented the respective artworks to my audience. As Nath Allan, I blew glass. The collectors and curators I was involved with knew me as Nath Allan.  As Nathan Stevens, I made no reference to my glass practice. While sharing some credentials, such as education and professional experiences, each identity has a distinct and separate biography.

Nath Allan with later work, 2010.

It was not until a point when I began competing for cultural capital as an artist against myself that I could realize the greater value of this dichotomy of my artist practice. I began applying to galleries and art spaces with these separate identities.  More than once did the work of Nathan Stevens lose out to the more immediate and physical materiality of the glass sculptures produced by Nath Allan.  An example being Australia’s largest outdoor sculpture exhibition, Sculpture by the Sea, an internationally recognized annual site-specific exhibition transforming Cottesloe Beach, WA into a landscape of sculpture. In 2010, the jury for this event chose 30 Australian artists to exhibit, including the likes of Robert Juniper, Ron Robertson-Swan, and… you guessed it, glass artist Nath Allan!  Unfortunately, intermedia artist Nathan Stevens’ work wasn’t selected.

Nath Allan's glass sculpture in Sculpture by the Sea, 2010.

By dividing my practice and keeping parts of what I do as an artist separate, I am able to look at and think about what I do if different terms. This is a reflexive act of self reference. Through one lens, everything I make is made under the same internal circumstances, drawn from the same experiences.  Through the other lens, certain experiences are influential in one practice while not in the other. In other words, I translate some experiences through an artistic language I speak when I work in glass, a different dialect of the language that I speak when I create other works, not working with glass. Language becomes a way of interpreting this bifurcation.

Many of the works I developed as Nath Allan, as sculptural craft-orientated works, took on a representational aesthetic: formless forms that were smashed and fused back together; fragile balancing acts; or markers that acted as reference points in my practice.

Nath Allan stacking glass forms, 2008.

Title: Half Lives

Date: January 2011

Materials: Wood, found objects, sand, stone, concrete, paper, other.

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Gallery Central, Northbridge, Western Australia

Keywords: Scale model, Bermuda, bridge, dimensional, tunnel, portal, studio

Description:

Half Lives was a project that resulted in a series of models that were shown in the exhibition what is displace?. These included a scaled model of a traditional covered wooden bridge from my home, Maine, USA entitled There ain’t no water down under…; a 2:1 scale model of the art studio worked in during the course of my doctoral research; a model of a tunnel to Bermuda; and a replica of a TransPerth public bus stop.

Inspired by readings of Michel Foucault’s (1967/1984) concept of heterotopia, Jorge Luis Borges’ Of Exactitude in Science (1946/1975), Deleuze’s (1968/1994) idea of the rhizome, and Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) conception of hyperreality, these models served to create a literal perspective-shift on my practice, creating spaces through which I could encounter my habitus as an artist and social situation/position and disposition within a field of practice. In the making of these sculptural models and installations I was attempting to create a space or spaces in which I could define, experience, and create myself spatially, which is inevitably tied to cultural and social forms. As I discuss below, each artwork functions to create a space in which I can develop and experience a form of separation and distance from as well as a form of connection to the place(s) of my practice, i.e. my home in Maine, USA, my art studio in Perth, Australia, the site of the exhibition, etc.

Model: There ain’t no water down under

There ain’t no water down under, Gallery Central, 2011.

There ain’t no water down under is a scaled model of Babb’s Bridge (Windham, Maine, USA) the oldest remaining covered wooden bridge in the state of Maine, USA. The original bridge was “burned by vandals” in 1973 and has since been rebuilt to original specifications. This model is re-constructed using Jarrah boards from a demolished wooden fence found on the side of the road in Jolimont, Western Australia. Upon peering into the entrance/exit of this model bridge, the audience would notice sections of the bridge were burned out, however the bridge continues on, seemingly into an infinite void.

In this model, the form of a bridge is important. A bridge is a structure that I identify with as connecting two places, yet delineating the separation of these spaces. This bridge was constructed in scale, however with a dimensional perspective that creates an illusion of an infinite void.

However, this particular form of bridge as a covered bridge is a form that was particular to my home in New England, a place where covered bridges were common. I was drawn to creating this particular bridge as it represented as space in my history, of growing up near the site of a covered wooden bridge.

A covered bridge forms a tunnel. The tunnel is a motif throughout my practice, as seen in the work Too Bermuda and the older work Other Side. The tunnel represents a voided space between places through which travel becomes possible. This tunnel represents a space in which I can experience an outside position in my narrative. Through the manipulation of scale in this work I transformed my embodied experience of space and place, thus creating an environment for multiple experiences to take place. Inspired in part by a reading of Deleuze’s concept of the “rhizome” which can be described as a chaotic system that connects different points in space and time. As O’ Sullivan (2005) describes, a rhizome is a structure ”[…] without centre or indeed any central organising motif. It is flat system in which the individual nodal points can, and are, connected to one another in a non-hierarchical manner… [fostering] transversal connections and communications between heterogeneous locations and events” (p. 12).

I interpret both the work and myself together as rhizomes, as the “multiplicity” manifest when I experience this work; the artwork as representation of myself as a place that is connected yet divided (as Debord (1967/1983) and Baudrillard (1994) have also discussed). It was this identification that spurred the act of burning portions of the bridge. After the structure of the bridge was constructed, I intentionally burned targeted sections of the bridge. Taken literally, the adage “to burn your bridges” means to destroy one’s social ties. This destruction of social ties became a powerful metaphor for past experiences of social structure in the creation and partial destruction of this work, which I needed to explore as a means of identifying the relational nature of subjective encounters on an abstracted scale.

Another intention involved in the creation of this sculpture was the dualism of the form as both a tunnel and a bridge. As such, this form is a form that exists in two places at once, and it is in this realisation that the work became activated in a sense that it allowed me to think about my own space as two places at once, similar to the idea of a “rhizome” that Deleuze discusses (O’ Sullivan, 2006, p. 35). However, this realisation urges the reflexive interrogation of myself: where I am from and where I am going? In this way, the There ain’t no water down under also functioned as a portal, transporting me to spaces that represented points of reference as experiences tied to places in the past and present of my self-narrative; serving as a reference point of change and transition between states of being in the making my of self. These models were referencing points in my identification of place, allowing me to explore my “multiplicity” of being, allowing me to break with my structure yet create that structure in representational terms.

Model: Too Bermuda…

Another sculptural model in the Half Lives series was the work, Too Bermuda…, a model of a subterranean tunnel through the core of the Earth to the remote North Atlantic island of Bermuda. From Perth, Australia (one of the most isolated capital cities in the world) a hole dug straight down would reach Hamilton, Bermuda (another extremely isolated location), strangely enough making these two places antipodes. This model tunnel, which is constructed within a scale model of my art studio is based on a scale replica of the Kalgoorlie Superpit (the largest open pit mine in Australia) transposed into an area of the city known as the “Perth Cultural Centre”, the location of Gallery Central, the art gallery in which this work was shown. Here, the form of a tunnel was further explored and developed into a site for self-exploration. The black hole at the mouth of this tunnel represents a point of the unknown, another void through which space could be created in an attempt to disembed myself; as a point of entry into the transition between here and there in a process of exploration. This tunnel provoked an abstracted sense of place and space, allowing for me to explore these relationships purely from my experience and understanding of the environments that shape my identity.

Developed out of a different project, A Third Life, the installation Too Bermuda…began as a 1:1 scale model of my art studio at Edith Cowan University, in which I was constructing an artist studio as a means of both creating an experience of making art and observing it. Through this project I sought to develop a simultaneous first and third person perspective on my practice as an artist. By making my studio as a model, I was attempting to create a site of a reflexive break with my practice. In order to do so, I would have to create a space that displaced the space in which I was creating it, thus the 1:1 scale model developed. In order to reflex to my practice, the work needed to present my practice in this process. Just as writer Jorge Borges’ famous allegory of simulation, Of Exactitude in Science (1946/1975), describes the Empire’s cartographers creating a map so detailed, comprehensive, and exact that it subsumed its own territory, in this artwork I seek to substitute a representation for reality in an attempt to know myself as an artist on such a scale. In my own way, through the process of constructing my practice as replicated model I give form to a phenomenon that French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1994) defines as the “precession of simulacra” (p. 1). In this theory, Baudrillard (1994) claims that contemporary modern society has substituted reality with its own simulation and that any human experience within this perceptual construct is simulated. Thus, reality as we know it, according to Baudrillard (1994), becomes hyperbolic or “hyperreal”. In reference to Borges’ fable Baudrillard (1994) suggests,

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (p.1)

Rather than creating a solely representational space, like a model in conventional terms, in my practice, through this work of art, I constructed a reflexive space in which I was making both the spaces that defined and identified myself as artist in such a way that I became abstracted to a degree of virtual dimensions. I interpret this to extend into, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” as Baudrillard suggests (p.1). By doing so I was both creating a space that was simultaneously representational and relational; a space was both here and there, that represented my internalisations and my external environment(s)- thus exposing a working model of my habitus as an artist. By being in control and out of control of being here and there, I am able to confuse the normative structural boundaries involved in creating art and being an artist, which are informing my habitus. In doing so, I create a temporary rupture in the structure and process of my identity formation. This is a representation of a simulation of representation, thus my own model of self-simulacra. As a process of inverted deconstruction of the structures that I create in which I am an artist, my practice as a process of simulacra that precedes my reality as an artist.

The artwork, at this point, created a break between reality and imagination by replacing itself, by simulating itself. However, the shift from the image of myself as an artist creating my situation as an artist is only observable in the differenciation that occurs between states of being. As an external structure that could then become internalised through representational means, in order
Figure 38. Artist, Nathan Stevens, constructing Other Side, 2008.

for the work to continue in this disrupted state of structural continuity, I created another space for the project to evolve. To further explore this break, I modeled the studio within virtual terms by creating a three-dimensional rendering of this project using the computer program Sketch Up. It was here in this alternative mapping, this third space of creation, that I was able to define my practice and create enough of a perspective shift that the artwork (as my practice) could reclaim the imaginary that Baudrillard (1994) suggests dissolves in the process of simulation.

In this instance, the work again functions as hyperreal, which I interpret as an associative break with the doxa of reality. In Simulacra and Simulation (1994), Baudrillard describes a society, more or less an ethos, in which reality is superceded by its symbolism. The result of this formation of society is the disappearance of abstraction and separation of the real and imaginary. For Baudrillard, the “imaginary of representation disappears” in the simulation of reality that occurs in today’s society (p. 1). He writes, “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences” (p. 2). However, does this work challenge a concept of hyperreality by recreating it? By creating a hyperreality of my own practice as an artist I am able to change it by reinvesting the imaginary as a construct within a certain version, or structure of reality.

At a point during its construction the studio the model became reduced in scale by one half, in order to continue working on it in my studio, both conceptually and physically. It was this point in shifting between full-scale to half-scale that afforded a reflexive opportunity to experience my place of creativity in two ways. Using remnants of the sculptural installation Other Side, I boxed up the studio model, containing it, capturing it within its own parcel.

However, I believe reflexivity quickly relapses into recursion making it necessary to continuously develop and explore new (reflexive) possibilities. At this point, the form of a tunnel to Bermuda entered into the project. Since my arrival to Perth, I had desired to create a tunnel, one which connected me to the opposite side of the Earth; a tunnel that could connect me to the other side, where I had come from. As within the project Other Side, in which I had created a model in which holes were dug into a section of earth, the artwork Too Bermuda… was an extension of this process of digging, and searching, however, with much more calculation and coordination. The accidental spilling of the earth and its contents within Other Side, took on a planned and organised excavation in the site of Too Bermuda… .

Creating the tunnel in the work Too Bermuda… represented a means of locating myself and developed as a way of making a connection, a direct physical and forced connection between a place of my past, Maine and a place of my present, Perth. While Perth and Maine are not antipodes, they are worlds apart, and I imagined that as locations in my life they were at opposite points on the Earth. Interestingly enough, after some geographical research, a tunnel originating in Perth dug straight through the Earth would reach the remote island of Bermuda, making Hamilton, Bermuda and Perth, Australia antipodes. In fact, it was only by a variation of 8 km that these two, strangely remote places, were not exact antipodes.

At this point, the idea of antipodes became conceptually poignant in my work; two places that could exist as the same point in space at different points in time. This notion seemed compelling and for this reason I chose to develop the work Too Bermuda… into an actual model. By constructing a model of this tunnel
Figure 41. Detail of tunnel opening in Too Bermuda…, 2011.

that would lead to an antipode, I was leading the way towards an understanding of a connection that I would make with myself.

The practice of map making or model making becomes a reflexive act in which I try to bend back upon myself through the abstraction created in these dimensional correspondences, articulated through the model, Too Bermuda…. In this way a multi-dimensionality exists for me as the maker at the intersection of self, time and space. It is here at this juncture in an abstract system of relations that I am able to almost step outside of the construct of one dimensionality and into another, much in the same way that I might be able to step into the model and change my relationship to myself on a physical scale. Passing through the threshold of the model, I enter into a not only a space, but a system of relations both subjective and objective, and it is here that I can experience myself from another perspective, in both image-form and…in both actual and virtual terms, in both representational and relational.

Model: LOSE WAY NOW

LOSE WAY NOW installed on the corner of Aberdeen and Beaufort, Northbridge, Western Australia, 2011.

LOSE WAY NOW is another scale model exhibited as part of Half Lives. Constructed from found materials, such as wood and concrete, this 1:1 scale model is a replica of a Transperth bus stop. Representative of the type of movement encountered in a process of self-modeling, this work references the disappearing reference points that Giddens (1990), Beck (2002), Virilio (1991), and Baudrillard (1994) all describe as occurring within a concept of reflexive modernity and global society. As the bus stop signifies both a point of departure and arrival it became a fitting symbol of the reflexive processes involved in my practice.

By modeling these spaces I am able to expose or externalise a structure that serve as markers within my travels. As points within a system of public transit, these bus stops serve to provide a network of connections, yet dislocated connections, becoming rhizomatic. As a system of dislocated connections, this suggests a circuit of movement and represent an abstraction of a structure that can govern our collective movement as individuals.

Within all of these artworks in the Half Lives series, opened and closed forms are present. Like windows into the private, symbolic spaces of the places in which I develop my sense of self-identity, responding to the internalisations that take place. These models in themselves become windows and doors into my habitus.

These models became the means to experience aspects of my identity through objective means, including allowing me to open closed off spaces in different ways. They functioned as objectifications of the world around me, which in turn manifest as subjective, internalisations, allowing me a space to move through into a position in which I might see myself differently, from another place and perspective; a place where I can control my change through creative means.

Within a theory of a relational aesthetic, Half Lives didn’t so much function within the classical definition as a relational artwork, but operated within what I interpret as a ‘self-relational’ aesthetic, or in other words a ‘reflexive aesthetic’. As direct extensions of self-reflexive objects or situations, they created what I interpret as a democracy of perspective shifts through which I could observe my situation as a multiplicity. These works became shifting reference point within my practice, as both an enacted process of becoming an artist and an instance of observation. As both a thing and an action these works cut between the space that exists in being and doing, and therefore function within a concept of habitus. In this way, these works can be interpreted as self-portraits, not in the traditional sense in the way I see myself, but in an abstracted sense in the way see the habitus through which I become myself. In this way they are re-presentations or what I define as self-models. As a self-model this work operates similarly to the form of a mirror, as an expression of self-analysis in a romanticisation of the individual post-Enlightenment. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia as a place that exists between places, he likens the mirror as the liminal space between utopian and heterotopian sites. Here my focus is caught between sites and sights. As self-portraits, or self-models, these works do not function to solely represent an image of myself, but rather function to present images of myself, and in turn re-present myself in a recursive reflection, or a reflexion of images that I draw out from the subjective spaces and relational matrices of my practical experiences. From a psychoanalytical perspective these works can be interpreted, much in the same way a dream might be objectivised. In this way, these works function within a context of reflexivity, attempting the both break a separation and create a connection.

In ways these works imagine a break with myself, by modelling spaces that create an objective space to experience my artistic practice. In a way, my entire practice can be interpreted as a heterotopia within my identity, a location expressing reflexive perspectives on my practice of art. It is a place/non place of the environment(s) of my reflexive, fragmented self-identity as an artist, or another artist, i.e. Nath Allan, or a traveler, a research student, a husband, a son, a man, a person, etc. As a way of separating my sense of self from the place in which I develop this experience, these spaces served to allow me an opportunity to rethink myself, the reflex as an individual to the environments and circumstances within which I exist.

Within Giddens (1990, 1991) theoretical model of reflexivity terms, these works are interrogations of myself through location, and as I have discussed become reference points in space and time, within my self-narrative. As interrogations it is necessary they are formal and physical as a means of existing on a scale that is relational to my body. They are present as physical manifestations and interpretations of myself as both a body in space and time, yet also a subjective being. All focus on my relationship to a specific place or location, these artworks as self-models enable the necessary break with the world, both literally and figuratively, thus allowing for the apprehension of the habitual nature of my relationship to the environments or objects these models extract and abstract. Each model abstracts my relationship to the object or environment in a different means.

As a model, LOSE WAY NOW abstracts by replicating as a false image of an object that imagines a route of travel, thus extending this route into the unknown possibilities of the future. This artwork represents the ultimate reflexive model as this model as a replica can be reinserted into the world of social relations on a number of levels, within the field of artistic practice as an art object or within ‘real life’, as an actual, functioning bus stop.

Conversely, as models they also serve to reinforce my relationship to the places they model as representations. They locate me in space-time and serve as markers in the history of my self-identity.

Title: FAIR 87.9 FM

Date: March 18, 2009.

Materials: Pirate radio station, FM transmitter, Internet, Computers, Microphones, Speakers, Automobile, Radio

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation/event, free radio, interact, collective art, transmission

Website: http://fairfm.info

Description:

FAIR FM was a nomadic community pirate radio station, initially created and exhibited during a month-long artist-residency at Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, Western Australia in March, 2009. An operational broadcast booth was built into the gallery, which housed broadcasting equipment including a mixing console, transmitter, computer, and a large antenna.  In the adjacent gallery space, a series of portable radios, including a small automobile, aired the station live to viewers. An array of advertising materials including promotional posters, T-shirts, and other media adorned the walls. Broadcasting on 87.9FM through the use of a low-power FM transmitter, FAIR FM had a broadcast radius of approximately 1km in Northbridge[1], which technically classified it as a micro station. The station went live on air at 2:00pm on Wednesday 09 March, 2009 and broadcast daily from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday until 05 April 2009. During these broadcasts, the viewers in the gallery and the public at large were invited to create, perform, and broadcast their own audio programming over the station, which resulted in an eclectic mix of pirated music, live spoken word, musical performances, and sound art. Throughout the duration of the four week residency approximately 15 individuals became involved in the station, including a street busker from Athens, Greece, a professional nightclub DJ from Sydney, the local Perth punk band - Red Triangle, and an array of other interested audiophiles, musicians, and sound artists.

The concept and motivation for creating this project was in response to my situation as an artist within the field of practice, which aestheticised an idea of social relationships, as in relational artistic practices. At the time, researching a theory of relational aesthetic in order to understand the relationship between artist and viewer as an inter-subjective relationship, I became focused on creating an environment in which the viewer could immediately transcend, or change their role as receiver in the often one-way communicative directive often experienced in a gallery setting. I was interested in challenging the boundaries of the inter-subjective experience facilitated by the work of art. This inspired the name FAIR FM, an acronym for Found Air Instant Radio, or Free and Interactive Radio, or any other acronym the users could create. Modelled after initiatives such as Radio Alice, a free broadcast radio station in Bologna, Italy in the late 1970s in which Felix Guattari was involved, I sought to create an open line of communication between the subjective spaces encountered in the gallery and the spaces that existed beyond.[2]

Specifically, I was interested in creating an artwork that moved beyond the subjective boundaries that I create when I make art as a form of self-expression. In other words, I had the urge to explore art making for others, in a way that I feel I had not previously explored in past projects. This meant pushing the boundaries of my practice into new, unseen, unknown realms.  Radio broadcast inspired me as an opportune medium to work through as it represented an invisible link through which one can communicate and connect beyond the boundaries of time and space. I have had experiences in my past working as a disc lockey at a small community radio station, WMEB 91.9 FM, in Orono, Maine, USA, inspiring another reason to use radio as my chosen medium of expression.

Through the use of radio broadcast as an expressive, artistic medium, in this project I desired to manipulate an everyday channel of media through which I could subvert the system of communication and exchange. Through subverting a communication system such as radio, I enabled an altered position in which I could experience my role as artist, or maker, in new terms, in this case in a reversal of roles, whereby the viewer or listener became the maker, or broadcaster and I as maker became the listener. In a system of radio the majority of its users are consumers, the countless throngs of listeners that complete the system as a form of mass media are at the end of the communication. Traditionally radio operates as a one-way medium of communication. Foreseen by 19^th century socialist Edward Bellamy, radio was pre-empted as the “collective telephone” in which the masses would be mobilised by the propaganda of nationalist corporations of industrial power (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 17). It is not difficult to see radio operating in the form that Bellamy foreshadowed.  While it may be argued that radio functions as a medium of expression[3], fostering and communicating the musical expression of individuals and communities, the current state of radio is a far cry from free with the majority of publicly broadcast channels produced by national, and multi-national media corporations. I was interested in facilitating others in an attempt to challenge these boundaries, which to me represent the power relationships that exist within the field, in the creation and reception of art, or in a way of subjectivity in general.

The creation of FAIR FM enacted my response to these observations. The development of pirate radio and free radio supports an idea of opening up radio as form of mass communication, operating beyond the boundaries of control and governance of communication often encountered in modern society; FAIR FM challenges this means of control. In short, FAIR FM questioned, to what degree are my own communications controlled by the formal constructs of contemporary society and my social role as an artist?  To what degree are my own forms of communication, my own productions, or programming, formulated through a similar type of conditioning?

Beyond my desire to confront these boundaries through this project, FAIRFM allowed me to explore my practice as an open, and evolving process of creative social interactions. Somewhere between performed and lived action, by creating a public pirate radio station I could create possibilities and opportunities to move between roles, to aestheticise exchange on a communal level.

When viewers entered the gallery, I often greeted them over air, which was broadcast through the radios stationed throughout the space. Inviting these viewers to enter the booth and become active users, I had a number of individuals, prompted by their own musical and audio interests to get involved in various ways (see Figures 22, 25).  However, these experiences were very limited.  In many ways it was the lack of interaction, the limitedness of the station as my channel of communication to the public. In most instances the station acted as a platform for individuals to perform.

Modelling FAIR FM within a theory of relational aesthetics, I was examining my own “inter-human” exchanges facilitated through the pirate radio station as the “aesthetic object” that Bourriaud discusses as “producing sociability” (1998/2002, p. 33). These exchanges occurred through the communicative aspects of radio broadcast. FAIR FM functioned as a means of enabling an extension of myself in a way that challenged my boundaries of communication. Through this challenge I pushed myself to experience my role as maker of my subjective self, as artist, in an extended form, through more temporal, distanciated processes.

Because radio broadcast, as a communicative means of interaction and exchange often functions in a one-to-many context, it can be an incredibly introspective process, and in turn self-reflexive.  FAIR FM extended this representation of one-to-one communication, however the majority of the time I felt is if my communications were “one-to-none”.  Becoming lost in the self-centredness of the radio station was another instance.  Sitting, often alone in the stations broadcast booth, I became very aware of myself, listening to and monitoring myself.

Knowing that the communications I created through the process of broadcast were being transmitted beyond the space of my own perception, I was sending out signals. These signals represented attempts to define my position. One program entitled, Organised Silence, a broadcast in which I transmitted only the white noise that was created in the process of producing the broadcast itself. This gap, its space, created a divisional space, a void through which I could find another form of distance between my place and myself.

The temporality of the various transmissions I created through FAIR FM became relevant as a means of producing observable instances of myself, occasionally interrupted by the presence of another, in which, I would offer the station to that individual allowing them to gain control of the transmission.  This immediate transfer, in ways allowed me to disrupt my subjective processes, and the communication, transmission of this subjectivity.  In ways this was the first instance of exchange that occurs in the collaborative effort involved in communication. The possibility of taking over a pirate radio station, in my opinion, affords the possibility of extending ones subjectivity into inter-subjective space, yet a space that is transient and ephemeral as the radio broadcast itself. However, this transfer between viewer and user, or in this case listener and DJ, never transpired to anything more than an exchange of control.  In hopes of further extending this process of exchange into a more sustained form, FAIR FM was revised into a second installation, which was included in the exhibition, what is displace?.

[2] Guattari’s interest in free radio was in its “form and mode of social organization” (Multitudes 21, 2005, n.p.).

[3] See article Wrightson, K (2003). An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology. As Wrightson explains, “In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result, many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume–music. Music–the virtual soundscape–is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul. Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism” (1977a, 77)” (2003, p. 3).

Title: Other Side
Date: June 01 2008.
Materials: Scavenged wood, paint, fake lawn, wheel barrow, earth, grass, time capsule
Dimensions: 4500 H mm x 4000 mm W x 2000 mm D
Location: Gomboc Galleries and Sculpture Park, Middle Swan, WA, Australia

Keywords: Sculptural, site-specific, time capsule, upside-down, emergence, displacement, memory, rhizome.

Description:

A sculptural installation consisting of a 4.5m x 4m x 2m shipping crate build from scavenged materials, constructed on-site at Gomboc Galleries and Sculpture Park in the Swan Valley, Western Australia.  Having been dropped by an airmail cargo shipment from the adjacent airport, the crate has crash-landed upside-down in (ironically) a sculpture park.

Within the crate, on what is now the ceiling is a small patch of fake lawn 4m by 2m bisected by a white picket fence.  The fence appears to have been damaged in the crash, broken open and hanging.

On one side of the fence is a wheel barrow, neatly cut by the inner wall of the crate, as if it the space had been sliced out of a movie set. Before the wheel-barrow are a series of small holes dug in the lawn, exposing the soil below (above), and a few odd mounds of dirt from the digging of the holes. A shovel hangs, stuck into one of the piles.

On the other side of the fence, is what appears to be a a volume of sod with soil intact, hanging open in the manner of a trap door, opening up into a large empty space above (below) the fake lawn. On the floor of the crate, directly beneath the sod trap door is a very large mound of actual soil that appears to have fallen through the hole in the lawn above.

Within the large pile of soil inside the crate, partially visible, is small, red metal container of some sort, which appears to have been buried in the earth (above), thus exposed accidentally as the soil came crashing through the sod trap door.

Unpacking this crate: processes of Other Side

This was the first project of a recent series of experimental and generative works focused on developing my praxis as an emerging contemporary artist engaged in the initial stages of my doctoral studies, researching my practice within the context of developing  a concept of sociality in contemporary art and media. This project, in particular, will prove to be substantial in the genesis of a relational perspective of self and my method of praxis and reflexivity.

At the time of this project’s conception, early March 2008, I had recently relocated to Australia to begin my doctoral studies and develop my practice as a contemporary visual artist. I was living in a share house, where my room was in the center of the house.

Behind the house was a sand pit covered in fake lawn Astro-turf with a large metal skeleton of a cage in it. While at the time I wasn’t cognisant of it,  these initial forms and spaces in my settlement down under seemed to have greatly influenced the development of this project.

Reflecting upon the premise of the project, constructing a very large shipping crate in a field amidst sculptural works, the initial idea was in response to this specific environment, a sculpture park full of monumental abstract formalism. I was attracted to the tongue-in-cheek allure of installing a monumental sculptural work, however not unpacking the work from its shipping container, thus the shipping container which houses the work itself becomes the sculpture.

The Other Side developed from here. While the satirical minimalism of the mismanaged shipment of art was amusing enough, I felt that the vast empty space inside of the crate was crying out for some creative invention.  Like a Trojan horse, the crate could take on an internal layer and silently infiltrate, or infil-‘crate’, this formalist theme-park with a more sophisticated conceptual intervention. It was from this point that “the crate” (as it came to be known by) began to grow and change, evolving through its various stages until it reached its current and final manifestation.

Infil-‘crate’-ion

What would this parcel to contain?  What would I ship to myself? Why was I shipping it?  My initial thoughts were of disruption and displacement.  As this was an aesthetic that I have been exploring in many of my past works, particularly in many of my video installations, ie. It happened just like that (2007).

Thinking on the site of the Other Side, a large green, grassy field, I immediately considered the possibility of extracting a portion of that field and encasing it within the crate. I also considered how the grass underneath the crate might grow up between the boards. The use of grass within the work was not only influenced by the site, but also had a strong parallel influence by the work of American installation/video artist Jeroen Nelemans.  I had the fortune of attending a residency with Jeroen the previous year at Vermont Studio Center and was inspired by his dynamic, living installations using grass or mold.

I began to think of the crate as a space where something dynamic could occur.  I envisioned, as the crate was upside-down, whatever was shipped within the crate might now begin to interact with the new contents of grass as it grew up through the crate into its shipment. A parcel containing a parcel (of land). The possibility of me shipping a patch of lawn and earth from an old site in my past to this new site in my present become a reality of the project.  Trans-planting an environment of my past into an environment of my present. In this way, this act was a metaphor of my relocation to Australia.  I began to consider what I was bringing with me, and within me to my new place of being.  The upside-downess of the crate I could now perceive as a convenient metaphor for my movement to the Southern Hemisphere, and a wry spatial consideration of my possible crash-landing down under.

As I thought through the concept of shipping something or place of my past to my present, I began to view the crate as a time capsule. A space were the memory and the presence collide and intersect. Where the artifacts of past are suspended until they are unearthed by the present. Where the past is sent to the future in a static state. The concept of time encapsulation developed.  Shipping my past into my future, when it arrives it collides with the present.  The Other Side is a variation of this process.

The crate was developing into a container, a capsule, for two diametric spaces, or two sites to meet. The intersection of these sites was a marginal space of the fake and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past and the present. This was a metonymically rhizomatic space. As I worked through the formality of these concepts, using the grass on the site as a means to begin to think about these diametric spaces, and how each space was to influence the other, I considered ways of focalising this intermediary margin between the two. As I envisioned rich and vibrant grass growing up from the floor of the crate into the dense, fake lawn hanging from the ceiling I became concerned with separating this space.

The fake grass on the ceiling was not simply a memory of a patch of grass, but perhaps could serve to demonstrate a process within a site that it represented. The crate could capture, like a photograph, or a snapshot, a memory of doing something, performing some task that could represent something meaningful from my history.  This spatial snapshot, this model could then be juxtaposed into a new space, and the event of this meeting, this crash landing could suspend them in a state of intermixing, thus this work is a snapshot of this collision or spaces, times, and activities.

An entry in the project logbook notes:

“May 01, 2008: I knew I would be shipping an environment, thinking about how the items in that environment formed as a condition of that environment, which was really what I was shipping, my experience of those conditions. After moving here [Australia] and realizing that I didn’t need to bring anything at all, I have begun to view environments a little differently.  I have always have attachment to objects and clothes, and these facades that we adorn our selves with or in in order to feel a certain way. Whether it is for pleasure, comfort, acceptance, etc. Things all provide certain levels of this.  Things are the vehicles that bring these feelings to us, rather than just instrinsically being that feeling, it is the experience of a thing in a context that allows us to find a certain feeling or idea within ourselves, as we relate to that relationship and the phenomenology of the world around us. SO I didnt even need to send anything, as it would become “lost in translation” so to speak.  Just needed to send the context for that experience, the environment, including all surroundings and conditions, including people…”

What was the task?

Somehow the idea of a lawnmower crept into the crate. Looking back to my logbook for the project it was unclear at the time.  The logbook reads:

“March 24th, 2008: Not sure where the [lawnmower] idea came from.  I thought of grass.  I thought of mowing it. Maintaining it and managing its appearance… Control.  So there was also this binary of control and out of control in the missing parcel property of the work.”

Perhaps the lawnmower was the representation of this control over the environment that I was encapsulating within the crate.  It was my attachment to the environment and the crates new destination, in the field of that sculpture park would provide a new environment for this ‘control’ to negotiate.  Yet, as I noted in the logbook, there was a certain lack of control that is explored through the haphazardly ‘dropping’ of the crate. It is this juxtapositioning of these contexts that I find motivating in the work.

Still not sold on the mower for its lack of personality, I opt for something more…well…me.  I recall a piece of advice given by a past mentor, “Your art should be personal, it should come from inside you.” From this point I began to think about the core concepts in the work and how they related to me.  The idea of a time capsule, the idea of shipping and moving, relocation, the ideas of memory and presence.

Over the last three weeks of building the crate in the studio the contents of the crate changed radically.  Everyday it was something different.  At some point a fence worked its way into the crate, triggering a memory of one of my many back yards growing up as a child who tended to move every two years or so.  It just so happened that in this back yard, as 11 year old, I buried a time capsule as 11 year olds do.  Eureka!  All this diggin and I’ve finally struck gold!

This was it.  It was this memory of this site where I buried a time capsule that I would extract from its virtual site, pack in the crate, and ship from my childhood as an archaeological pioneer of Cedar Forks subdivision circa 1992 to my present site as an arts researcher standing in a sculpture park in Western Australia, 2008.

I’m workin’ on a buildin’

Constructing the crate was no simple feat.  It required a great deal of initial thought and planning, not that dissimilar from planning the construction of a house.  In fact, most of the time while constructing the crate, I felt as if I were building a house, and in a strange way I was.  The crate turns out would house a space where realities meet.

In order to build the crate, I would need timber, and a lot of it.  The initial dimensions of the crate measured 4 metres cubed (as shown in Fig. 1 above). This equated to approximately…too many board feet.  Not only would the acquisition of these materials be expensive, structurally the 4 metre cube began to seem out of reach. I scaled the dimensions back to a more manageable 4 m H x 2 m W x 4 m D.

After being rejecting by all of my hopeful material sponsors, I decided the most appropriate source of timber would be from discarded shipping pallets.

I was collecting my material for the project from used shipping pallets scavenged from various building sites and businesses throughout the greater Perth area.  The pallets were then systematically stripped, de-nailed, counted, stacked, measured sawn, and restacked. The total number of pallets collected and prepared for use in the project: 101.  This equates to over 1100 boards, each containing a minimum of 6 nails to be pounded and pryed out.  In the industry, we call this ‘art work’.

After all of the material was collected from various nooks and corners of the city and prepped for construction,  the task of making 4.5 metre structural timber supports was no easy thing.  These had to be scabbed together with nail plates at alternating lengths.

The crate was constructed in bays with facade paneling, all entirely prefabricated in the studio and assembled on-site. Twenty-eight 1 x 2 metre panels were constructed.

The crate was designed to be modular, in that each panel would be interchangeable with any other panel in the crate, thus making assembly fast and simple.  Due to variability of the materials and other factors beyond control, this was not the case.  In fact each panel ended up in being colour coded to aid in the correct placement in the crates assembly.

Fieldwork

With a the shell of the ‘crate’ constructed and fairly stablised vision of the interior of the crate, the ‘fieldwork’ commenced 61 days after the initial conception of the project. The location was chosen after a few visits to the site.

May, 04, 2008: Install Day 1- Impact crater.

After the site was prepped with an instant impact crater and four corner supports anchored in the earth, the sod was left for ten days to re-root before the crate was to be constructed.

May 15, 2008- Install Day 2- Framing

With the help of my construction team, Graeme and Stu,  we transported the crate sections (4 stud-bays, 28 panels, and foundation) to the site and framed up the skeleton of the structure.

May 20, 2008- Install Day 7- Finalising construction

The framing and paneling of the crate was nearly finished after 5 days of building. The interior ‘roof’ of suspended fake lawn was installed, nearly ready for the contents of the crate to be installed.

May 21, 2008- Install Day 8- Interior Design

The interior of the crate was then ‘in’-fitted with various sized holes, white picket fence, large pile of real earth, custom wheel barrow, and other components of the ‘shipment’.

May 23, 2008- Install Day 9- Stenciling

The crate was nearly complete, just needed a paint job.

June 1, 2008- Install Day 11- Open to the public

Working Analysis

• Snail Mail?: The Rhizomatic Act of Sending and Receiving.

• Relocating memories and the act of re-membering.

• Crash-landing past into present in the future.

• Trojan Horse of Self: The emplacement of self into an other self.

• Other Spaces: Heterotopian memories of simulation, representation, and location

Keywords: Heterotopia, opposition, disruption, displacement, memory, rhizomatic, virtual, emplacement

(19/09/09 in progress…)

The project developed as an exploration of virtual and actual spaces of me, and the relationships between the two; the virtuality of a remembered history, the actuality of a presence. Looking at the boundaries between where these spaces exist. the relationships that become exposed through a circumstantial, unintentional act of uncovering.  Turf became a poignant metaphorical medium, where the grass of the project grew.

It was this space and this dynamic of becoming that I’m interested in. In the early designs of the project, fake grass ‘growing’ towards real grass was the key form. There is a dualism that occurs in this investigation, yet the work begins to open up towards multiplicity, which is rhizomatic in its essence.

There is a relationship to philosphers Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guttari’s concept of rhizome, the “theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation”. [1] Other Side is a model of certain relationships between my present and my past, this I suppose becomes the data within the Deleuzean/Guttarian rhizomatic model.  The memory, in its remembered form, in manner, is virtual.  My manifestation of this memory, in present, or in action, creative activity of producing the Other Side, takes on an actual form or quality.  The imitative quality of the forms used within the crate exhibit this virtual nature of the memory as a meme.

Coming back to the circumstances of the conception and development of the Other Side, it is important to consider my physical, spatial, cultural, and personal situation as me, Nathan that has recently relocated to Australia alone, living in room in the centre of a share house, planning his research as an artist, etc. In a lot of ways all I had was memories. Without much stuff, the only comforts I had were inside me.  Memories are directly influenced by the environment at the time of reflection and vision.  There is a connection that is made.  In some ways the Other Side embodies these connections in one instance, one imitation of the relationship as occured in my situation.

What did/does the work do for me?

It asks me to consider these relationships within myself.  How does my past relate to my future?  How am I present, presented, or represented through the processes I engage with as an artist? Specifically within this project, I focused on the relocation of my self, and how through time my self becomes continuously relocational from one perspective.  However, when this perspective is inverted through memory, or activity, or another process of engaging with my existence, or presence in the world, my self becomes static or suspended.

Relating the project back to myself,  thinking about the process, the act of collecting and sourcing the materials to build the crate, I had to rely on myself to resource the material to build the crate. The project became more about building this crate, designing the project.  At times during the building process, I felt as if I where building a home in the sculpture park, and actually home here in Australia.  Building a structure of my past self that was relocated to a new location, a new site for development and growth.  This new site would inevitably slowly overgrow the past, which in its suspended, remembered, virtual state would change and become enveloped by the grass of the present.

Unpacking this idea, it wasn’t my past self as a collection of experiences at a recent point in time, but rather based on a memory of something I had done as a child, 16 years prior to my relocation to Australia. The externalisation of this memory, focused the processual nature of the act the memory was based upon.  The memory that I was re-membering through the installation was that of the creation and burying of a time capsule in a childhood backyard.  I do not recall what was in the time capsule, but more so the feeling I had, awe, wonderment, and excitement of the act of burying things that I held as valuable, personal, and attributable to who I was at the time and how I understood the world.

(05/10/09)

Not only is the installation based upon a memory of this feeling, but also moves one step further in a symbolic act of virtue in a suspended state of attempting to recover, locate, or re-discover this ‘time capsule’. It is a multiplicity of the time capsule, relational to self, to others, to the environment.

It is in some ways a simulation of a memory, of a processual activity, a representational space that is at once many spaces.  In essence, the project formalises a “heteropology” via a heterotopian model of the mulitple spaces and encounters of memory and site. Michel Foucault discusses these concepts in his text Des Espace Autres (1967). Presenting the concept of a heterotopia, Foucault describes this “heteropolgy”, or the “simultaneous mythic and real contestation of the space in which one lives”, of the juxtaposing of relations to ourselves and the spaces that are occupied in one’s memory, culture, personality, knowledge, and being:

It is here, that the heterotopia exists.  The Other Side (the crate) exposes and comes to rest at this culmination of sites. The crate is a site that encounters the set of relations amongst the multiple sites of memory, presence, and process. Within this heterotopia of the Other Side, a sort of erosion, or a rupturing of the boundaries of these spaces occurs. It is here through this erosion that the unearthing of a new site, one that is at once a simulation and a real site is created.  This site is the collision of historical sites of memories, contemporary sites of artistic practice, personal sites of experience and enactment all within the field of my knowledge, expression, and being of self through intersecting spaces and times, presented, performed, and represented.

[1] Rhizome (philosophy). (2009, August 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:12, October 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rhizome_(philosophy)&oldid=308191501

[2] Foucault, M. (1984). “Des Espace Autres”. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité.