The original version of this essay was published in conjunction with the exhibition ( Artspace 2003).
perpetual war for perpetual peace
Charles A. Beard
democracy is coming to the USA
Leonard Cohen
Brad Buckley’s new installation, the engaging and multifaceted Etiquette, is the next instalment of his ongoing, highly acclaimed, installation series The Slaughterhouse Project. In the context of Buckley’s overall 30 year oeuvre, with its apt Bataillean title, this latest work is representative of his post-Duchampian conceptual, formal and cultural concerns.
Buckley is one of Australia’s most committed artists, dedicated to a self-reflexive and rigorous critique of the artist’s role in post-industrial society. In Etiquette he continues his dominant theme – questioning the complex roles art, culture and language play in our private and public lives. He also continues to situate his installation practice squarely in the intellectual tradition of Western thought. This means that the work is inventive and witty, and that its distinctively imaginative and thought-provoking conceptual architecture draws upon important ideas from St Augustine and David Hume as well as from, George Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Michel Foucault, and other thinkers from the European tradition of post-structuralist thought.
Indeed, Samuel Beckett, among others, had a formative influence on Buckley’s drive to articulate important questions relating to art’s role in our society, and to ask: what is knowledge? what is truth? It was seeing Beckett’s Happy Days that forced a shift in the artist’s thinking about the nature of art and its impact on the operations of everyday culture. Beckett contributed to Buckley’s subtle ironic and playful sense of theatricality and space in his art, and his minimalist poetic of entropy, wit and black humour and its attendant self-searching, anti-idealist quest for existential knowledge have also coloured the artist’s far-ranging and rigorous interrogation of art and individuals, and his request that artists should commit themselves to their ideals.
In this context, Buckley’s work is unique in contemporary Australian art. His uncompromising aesthetic, cultural and epistemological interest in making art and artists – and by the same token, all of us, as individuals – responsible for their ethical responses to art, culture, sex and politics is multidimensional, yet non-didactic. Above all, Buckley is interested in the cultural politics of contemporary art, and, in the words of the late (and much missed) Edward Said, in the overall ‘wordly circumstances’ of textual production.
Central to Buckley’s oeuvre is his post-Fluxus concern to create text-based interventionist installations that re-contextualise texts as readymades, à la Marcel Duchamp’s definition of a tube of paint as a readymade (this is emphasised in the more recent critical writings of Yve-Alain Bois). This signifies Buckley’s ability to utilise concepts and forms drawn from not only deconstructionist sources, but, importantly, also from conceptual art and (post)modernist sources: Marcel Broodthaers, Lauren Ewing, Lawrence Weiner, Yasunari Kawabata, to name a few, have all contributed to the artist’s searching practice.
Buckley’s eclectic and trans-disciplinary embrace of Western art theory, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis adds another highly significant dimension to his art, an art that playfully but thoughtfully examines and questions many of the cultural, ideological, sexual and political fictions of late-capitalist culture. Buckley’s art practice is always concerned with addressing questions of individual and social betterment; his previous Slaughterhouse Project work’s title, The Light on the Hill, for instance, echoes the republican connotations of Jefferson’s Athenian-inspired democratic vistas, Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Had a Dream’ speech of 1963 and Ben Chifley’s wartime clarion-call vision of Australia as a republic.
He does focus on one question in particular: the possibility of Australia becoming a republic. The republican character of Buckley’s secular humanism is mainly anchored in the unshakeable belief that art that matters should address questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility. This signifies, for the artist, an inevitable negotiation of the manifold complexities of language, culture and power. Buckley’s unrelenting application of his forensic and speculative imagination to this critical objective in his work is impressive. Relatedly, it should be also observed that the way Buckley uses found fragments and texts as re-contextualised readymades is closely linked to his shrewd understanding of reception theory. The gallery spectator is often – and he or she definitely is with Etiquette – invited to participate in a rich and sophisticated phenomenological experience that requires a deconstructing of the nature of art, language and ritual in contemporary culture and politics. It is this context, the ‘space-in-between’ the installation and the spectator’s real-time negotiation of it – in other words, that critical part that collapses whenever the installation is not actually installed – that characterises Buckley’s deft post-structuralist and politicised understanding of ‘installation spectatorship’.1
Another noteworthy shaping force in Buckley’s transgressive project to reframe the cultural, the social and the temporal in his installation art is his intimate childhood familiarity with Australian postwar urban society and its socio-cultural values as seen through the microcosmic prism of his father’s popular Sydney Push hotel, The Newcastle.2 There Buckley experienced a ‘top to bottom’ humanist perspective on postwar ‘repressive’ Sydney worthy of a Robert Crumb comic: artists, novelists, academics, police detectives, wharfies, students, businessmen and politicians met there, united by their egalitarian desire for individual and social freedom. (Something not too dissimilar to scenes in one of Xavier Herbert’s rollicking kaleidoscopic novels – the author often drank there.)
Etiquette’s spectacular use of text, colour, neon light and space, and its interlocking architectural and spatial complexities, challenge the meaning and role of modern etiquette in the new millennium. But, as is to be expected, it also highlights the fact that contemporary art itself, particularly installation art, is essentially a ‘site of complexity’ (Rene Payant). Generally speaking, installation art not only activates a space within and outside ‘the white cube space’ (Brian O’Doherty) of the museological world; it also, crucially, questions the dynamic interrelationship between space, object and meaning, thereby taking into account the gallery spectator’s subjectivity as he or she negotiates the installation.
During the last two decades, installation art has become the postmodern art form par excellence in the international art world, for a variety of complex aesthetic, cultural, historical and technological reasons. But paradoxically, as Etiquette’s thematic, formal and technical considerations indicate, the genre is unstable as an art form, despite the fact that it is central to today’s ‘arts of presentation’ (Margaret Morse), precisely because it desires to overthrow or resist the idealist ideology of classical Western art–historical discourse and the museum world that that discourse promotes as a fixed space of aesthetic transcendentalism. Thus it attracts artists who seek to incorporate anti-binary and cross-disciplinary sociocultural concepts and forms into their work: installation art attracts social commentary and themes. And in Buckley’s case, as Keith Broadfoot has pointed out, there is clearly a process of doubling taking place, as his work strives to see and name art beyond itself from within a given site context.3
As you enter the red painted door entrance to the gallery room that Etiquette is situated in, you encounter a black space with two columns featuring two ‘snow white’ neon circles attached to them. On each of the four walls of the space is a white painted text and/or image, and they ricochet profoundly off each other. They are: (a) a silhouette painting of a couple having sex; (b) a short text appropriated from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four; (c) a painting of a 19th century rogering stool used in a Paris brothel; and (d) an unsigned text describing a personal encounter between a male narrator and a cocaine-intoxicated female at a party.
What immediately strikes us is the overall colour of black. It is used to, in Buckley’s own words, contribute to ‘the eroticisation of the space’. It affects the gallery spectator’s experience of the installation site itself and consequently defuses its own institutional subjectivity. Buckley’s grasp of installation as a noncommodity art form has a particular two-fold resonance to it: it is highly critical of the increasing ‘museumisation’ of installation art and the related paradoxical symbiotic tension that exists between it and the modern art museum, and, just as importantly, it maintains Buckley’s consistent and self-reflexive critique of the post-capitalist corporatisation of contemporary art. This inevitably leads us to another important aspect of Buckley’s art – its aesthetic, cultural and pedagogic concern with the future role of the artist in our society.
Generally speaking, the installation’s title, Etiquette, suggests a vision of well-behaved people engaged in polite conversation, sipping tea or coffee and discussing things in a shallow and non-provocative way that does not cut deep into the dream world of high-capitalist mass culture, to use Walter Benjamin’s apt expression. In other words, social intercourse that is regulated by an ordered world of consensual delusion, myth and ritual: nothing less than Theodor Adorno’s pessimistic Freudian-Marxian-Nietzschean view of the ‘administered’ world. The installation’s paintings and texts offer conflicting views of sexual etiquette and an attendant critical issue, particularly evident in the Orwell text – a political obligation that draws upon the complex merging of the personal and the political, a merging that is ever easier in our commodity capitalist society with its rapidly developing (via the new technologies of communication) global CNN ‘panoptic morality’.
Welcome to the post-September 11 puritanical and transcendental New World order of cyborg capitalism – a world that has been bifurcated into a surreal ‘them/us’, the ‘axis of evil’ (as defined by George W. Bush and his messianic Christian/Judaic-driven neo-conservative spin doctors) versus everyone else. All of them predictably espousing the cultural, racial and political orthodoxies and myths deftly x-rayed by Said’s eloquent and far-reaching Orientalist critique of Western otherness and so tragically epitomised by the recent Iraq war and the psychotic Orwellian ‘holy grail’ search for Saddam Hussein’s so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Critics as varied as Tariq Ali, John Le Carré, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal have in their respective ways commented on the Orwellian double-speak that has characterised recent US foreign policy and its ‘first-strike’ ideology of unilateralism. Orwell’s distinctive ‘windowpane prose’ style and, in particular, his unparalleled insight into the use and abuse of language are legacies of the English novelist and essayist that have had a considerable impact on Buckley’s art – and they are making Orwell, in these dark times of global capitalism, commercialism and nihilism, essential reading again.4
However returning to Buckley’s main discursive concern, to create an architectural and social space that situates the various conceptual, linguistic and pictorial antagonisms embedded in the installation’s paintings and text graphically and imaginatively, comes to the fore in Etiquette. Consequently, Buckley is concerned with questioning the sociocultural fictionality of what we define as acceptable human conduct and knowledge in our culture. This involves casting an ironic eye over official culture and its prevailing social and cultural myths.
But also, it suggests Buckley’s sustained polemical trajectory. His work problematises (a) contemporary elitist art institutions and their paradigmatic ahistorical values (‘art for art’s sake’) and (b) the corporate privatisation of the art world and the attendant post-Thatcherite phenomenon of the artist as a dandy court jester figure, a kind of ‘cultural broker’, in this new world order of aggressive global art/cultural imperialism. The New Empire of the Western hegemony of the visual arts radiates from its Roman epicentre – New York.
The installation’s black walls and red entrance, for Buckley, represent an ironic critique of the actual site in which Etiquette is set up: it is the artist’s endeavour to colonise the site by using a single colour. Furthermore, its snow white neon light suggests not only the significant role of electricity in the evolution of 20th century art (Constructivism, Futurism, kineticism, machine art), but also the installation’s antecedents – the various art movements of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that were central to the overall narrative of the dematerialisation of contemporary art: happenings, body art, earth art, performance, minimalism, conceptual art and video art.
While Buckley is concerned with the aesthetic, cultural and spatiotemporal configurations of Etiquette, he is also, characteristically, just as concerned with the linguistic and sociopolitical dynamics of his subject. These dynamics are vividly configured in the personal encounter narrative, with its ever-shifting play of power embedded in the etiquette of the situation between the male narrator and the woman on the stairs. Buckley’s acute pun-encrusted capacity to analyse art, culture and power as a triadic configuration that colours our everyday life is substantially evident in this text. For example, the female’s removed pubic hair (known as a ‘Brazilian’ in contemporary fashion vernacular) here signifies a readiness for sexual experimentation; this contrasts markedly with the degradation it implied for Jewish women who were shaved from head to feet in concentration camps.5
Finally, Etiquette’s main aesthetic and stylistic strategies – including the salient fact that it is a ‘silent’ installation – attest to Buckley’s post-humanist objective: to create art that is fundamentally concerned with compassion, empathy and social freedom. Etiquette’s bold multifaceted deployment of its texts as ‘readymade’ registers of art, language and power is particularly timely in our post-September 11 world of conformity, fear and terror. The Orwell text presciently points to our present time, where as Paul Virilio’s recent critique of our post-Auschwitz ‘hypermodern art’ of fear and the sonoriation of the audio visual- what Virilio has termed ‘pitiless art’ – suggests, citizens in our ‘multimedia democracy’ are being internally colonised and/or silenced by government control, propaganda and its ever-ready ‘war machine’.6 In contrast, Buckley’s invigorating ethically informed art practice belongs to Virilio’s ‘pitiful art’ category. It is art that is democratic, life-affirming, self-questioning.
(In memoriam: Edward W. Said [1935–2003])