Entering the small, enclosed and heavily darkened room recently home to Joshua Daniel's and Sary Zananiri's exhibition Inglenook, one was transported from the customary white walled space of the gallery into the slow flickering shadows of projected images and the presence of two suspended ornamental cast glass mouldings. After careful viewing, the footage revealed itself to be a study of the original architectural details from which the casting moulds were taken and through which the viewer's gaze was directed along the once grand curved and carved lines of patterned foliage through the shifting movements of a handheld camera. Behind these projected images were the painstakingly produced cast glass mouldings which had been carefully mounted to the wall and corner ceiling so that the exhibition could thus be read as an attempt to echo the once grand presentation of the original decorations. That such an echo should only resound softly, partially mooted by the confined space and low ceiling of the gallery, was a concern delicately offset by the two projections whose scale and cinematic effect countered the physical confines of the exhibition space whilst concealing and unveiling the intricate glass forms as they flickered and panned across their surface. Taken in a single measure, the overall effect of Inglenook was one of a curious illumination, limiting and disclosing both 'original' and 'copy' at one and the same time.
Interpreted in this manner, the exhibition thus appeared as a site of considerable complexity in which glasswork, projection, site and history could be said to produce a circuitous interlacing of private interior and public display. It is also the logical corollary of this interpretation that one might be tempted to conclude that Inglenook was intended as a site responsive exhibition. Such at least was the view put forward by Melbourne based artist and academic Ruth Johnstone who in her catalogue essay for the exhibition detailed the work's genesis in the late nineteenth century ornamental plaster details of mould maker, James Cormack's North Carlton home. Such a classification can, of course, easily be seen as a way to account for an exhibition which involves the collaborative work of two artists whose particular choice of media - super8 film production and moulded glass casting - is, if anything, an odd artistic confluence. That the clearest thread holding these two diverse practices together is their joint focus on the original in situ decorative features of a particular architectural location allows one to say of the work that it is, at least nominally, site responsive.
There is, it should be acknowledged, much that is right about this view and one is not surprised to find ready confirmation of such an opinion in the various other statements put forward in support of the work. However, we are inclined to mark at this point a moment of disagreement between our experience of the exhibition and the interpretation of it put forward by Johnstone and others. This point of disagreement lies in our belief that although Inglenook may be legible as a site responsive exhibition it ought not to be viewed as governed by this intention. Such a view does, however, clearly organize Johnstone's reading of the exhibition and it is around this central node of intentionality that she can be seen to conflate the roles of historian and artist. Central to this reading is an understanding of how a notion of history might be said to make legible the crux of the work. The key movement in this regard would be Johnstone's passage from site responsiveness to fragment.[i]
Before moving to a critique of this term it should be noted that we are able, as with site responsiveness before, to take the deployment of this term as a mark of Johnstone's both genuine and literal attempt to record and describe the exhibition as it is presented before her. As such we would agree that a deep felt sense of fragmentation does indeed appear as a recurrent motif organising the exhibition's general tenor and tone. It is, for instance, clearly there in Zananiri's glass production where the artist, unable or unwilling to replicate the entire architectural room, has chosen simply to produce small fragmented sections of the architrave and lintel in order to synecdochically represent the whole. A similar sense of fragmentation can also be found in Daniel's projections where the artist's use of super8 film stock carries with it all the fragmented illegibility one usually associates with the conventions of the home movie genre and the childhood memories for which they now serve as an index.
If we were to follow Johnstone's line of argument in the direction that her reading of these aspects suggests we should, then we might find ourselves inclined to take both these aspects of Daniel's and Zananiri's artistic practice as figures of history itself. As Johnstone writes:
These captured broken moments, experiences and fragments can be interpreted as a desire for understanding. Investigation of historical material often deals with piecing together fragments of information. The complex interrelation of discrete elements will always confound any desire for a complete, easily graspable picture. A collection of small detailed works mirrors the process of gathering fragments of information about a site and its history.[ii]
To view the exhibition in this manner, however, we believe is to lose sight of that which makes it of interest to us as art, namely its singular presentation, within the complex stakes of a reductive historicism. The alternative to this position is not, or not simply, formalism. It is, in fact, a position more closely aligned to the current of thought that takes place under the title of post-structuralism and which, for our purposes, is most closely associated with the post-Derridean deconstructive work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Of interest to us in Nancy's writings with regard to the passage cited above is the dual significance Nancy lends to the form and figure of the fragment in his discussion of art. As Nancy writes:
Thus, there are two different forms of extreme fragmentation: on the one hand, exhaustion and finish, and on the other hand, event and presentation.[iii]
The first of these options illustrates the form of fragmentation Johnstone appears to find at work in Daniel's and Zananiri's exhibition. It is a form of fragmentation that we would claim presupposes a prior other existing whole and calls into being a transparent history of temporal continuity that sees the task of recovering and communicating this information as one of piecing together fragments. The exhibition clearly offers this situation as a viable option. It is, we might add, an option that finds material support in the artistic techniques and choices of Daniel and Zananiri, to which we might now include the colour film projections screened both onto and through the glass sculptures presenting a further allegory of a transparent history whose mediating structure is one of passage and distance. Site-responsiveness in this sense might be taken to signal the at once desire for classical unity and wholeness and the romantic recognition of its impossibility.
Nevertheless, despite the clear resonances that this first form of fragmentation can be said to find in both the techniques and commentary of Daniel's and Zananiri's exhibition, it is Nancy's other form of extreme fragmentation, the option that opens onto a general ontology of art, which interests us here. Central to an understanding of the stakes involved in this position is the realisation that this second form of fragmentation is not a way to filter any particular object external to the work of art - nineteenth century architectural ornamentation - but is, rather, a name for the complex set of attachments the work of art finds or fails to find in the world. From this perspective, the historical distance that once led to this world being recovered in the form of fragments has now become a measure of a wholly other order. An order which, we might note, following the work of Andrew Benjamin, shifts the spatial dimension of the work away from a concern with an anterior historical depth towards a relation of distance within the work itself, a spacing that cannot be overcome, but which in being as such allows the work its autonomy.[iv]
It is precisely this autonomy that appears most at risk in Johnstone's reading of the exhibition. By describing the exhibition in terms of its site-responsiveness, we would claim, Johnstone inscribes the sculptural and filmic components of the exhibition within a logic of representation of which, she concludes, they are unable to ever adequately measure. Nevertheless, the counterargument that we have been attempting to unpick from the critical vocabulary proffered by Johnstone is one that breaks with such a logic of representation. The work of art in this description lacks nothing. If we continue to insist upon the importance of fragmentation in the work then it is not the type of fragmentation suggested by Johnstone's review but rather that which folds the work back upon itself, interrupting its seamless continuity and offering it up to difference and interpretation.
It is this situation which both gives rise to and is occasioned by what Nancy terms the work's vestige, the inexhaustible fragmentation of the work's limits and borders that is constitutive of its presentation. What is at stake in this plea for the work's autonomy is nothing if not a challenge to the reading of the exhibition as site-responsive.
However if this all seems a reading far too heavily burdened by the weight of an abstract theoretical focus, then it is worth bringing these thoughts to bear on the material objects at the centre of the show. To return then to the discussion of the projections and casts we would suggest that the technique and arrangement of projecting the filmic interior scenes onto the cast moulds is not, or not simply, a figure for historical transparency, but is perhaps a moment that is best read alongside Le Corbusier's description of architecture as 'the precise and monumental interplay of form within light.'[v] It would, of course, require a far greater knowledge of Le Corbusier's career as an architect to perform the necessary translation required to bring his work into line with the exhibition at hand, nevertheless, it seems at least pertinent to us that Le Corbusier's modernist project eschewed all form of ornamentation that could not, in straightforward terms, be reduced to a practical function. However, if we are no longer inclined to take Le Corbusier's urban vision without a necessary grain of salt, then it seems not unreasonable to accept his functionalism with a similar word of caution. Modern architecture, we might say, traded an explicit concern with ornamentation for a more broadly conceived sense of design. This design is not fixed to the walls, but carried by the play of light and space. Postmodern architecture might be said to have emerged from this climate, and if this emergence carried with it a fierce return of ornamentation, it has in more recent and less overtly postmodern times, married it with an emphasis on surface, light and form understood more generally as 'mere' surface, spacing and the formless. It is clearly within this deconstructive line of thought that we are keen to place the architectural imagination we find at work in Inglenook.
We take it to be of equal significance that this architectural imagination is also the one shared by the modern museum. That such a situation is the case, of course, raises significant problems for both artists and their public. As Mark Wigley has recently written of the newly refurbished MoMA:
The issue.is not the usual one in museum design of whether the architecture competes with the art, but rather how the building contributes to the narrative that the curators wish to convey.[vi]
We would suggest that the most compelling aspects of Inglenook stake their claims against these concerns. Offering up both a model of the old and the new (museum), Inglenook forces an acknowledgement that the time of the old museum, a time of tradition and craft, has in a sense passed, and that if we continue to produce works that want to answer to these terms, then we must also admit that these objects now also belong to the time of the new museum, a time of cultural industry. As the product of two young and emerging artists, Inglenook may seem, in the end, somewhat ambivalent about this situation. Of course the point may be that, for the artists involved, choosing is no longer an option. The issue then is not whether Daniel's and Zananiri's project ought to be viewed as working within a means and spirit closer to Le Corbusier than it does to Cormack, but rather to see the way the exhibition works consciously to uproot its footing from within any one particular version of the museum. This task we are inclined to register as the circular passage from a traditional notion of both architecture and craft to a site in which such traditional notions appear as irredeemably lost. However, if this final term draws our analysis back to the terms underpinning the general argument put forward by Johnstone, it is important to see that this juncture has been reached by wholly different theoretical and interpretive trajectories. Inglenook, we would claim, maintains a clear divide between the roles of historian and artist and the exhibition, as we understand it, stands and falls on its ability to eschew the direct linkage between presented work and historical precedent that underpins the label site responsive. While we do not see the work as being in any way able to disengage itself fully from this term, the issues we perceive to be most at play are the complex stakes through which a work of film and glass, craft and projection can refigure themselves as the site of art's own carrying into effect.
[i] See Ruth Johnstone, Inglenook [Catalogue], Melbourne: Spacement Gallery: 2005
[ii] Ruth Johnstone, Inglenook [Catalogue], Melbourne: Spacement Gallery: 2005
[iii] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: 126
[iv] See Andrew Benjamin, Disclosing Spaces: on painting, United Kingdom, Clinamen Press, 2004
[v] Le Corbusier quoted in Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois' Spider, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001: 1
[vi] Mark Wigley, 'The 425 Million Steps from Intimacy to Elegance', in Artforum, XL11, No. 6, February 2005: 133
