Brad Buckley, John Conomos (editors)

Su Baker, Bruce Barber, Mikkel Bogh, Juli Carson, Edward Colless, Jay Coogan, Luc Courchesne, Sara Diamond, Lauren Ewing, Lucy Orta, Gary Pearson, Bill Seaman, Jeremy Welsh, Bruce Yonemoto.

 Re-thinking the Contemporary Art School examines the reasons for the art school and its continued existence, its role in society and what should be taught and learnt in the context of what is now a globalised art world.  The book also considers different art school models from innovative graduate programs, to independent stand-alone schools such as Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCADU) and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art to art schools, which are departments or schools of major research universities and the problems they face operating in what James Elkins describes as ‘marginalised in university life.’

Brad Buckley, John Conomos (editors)
Larissa Behrendt, Tim Bonyhady, Rex Butler, James Button, John Conomos, Mary Kalantzis, Joan Kerr, Jason Yet-sen Li, Humphrey McQueen, Jaqueline Millner, Catriona Moore, Peter Myers, Nikos Papastergiadis.

Republics of Ideas examines the social, political and cultural implications of an Australian republic in the context of the visual arts and new global economy. An expanded collection of essays based on two Artspace symposiums held in the lead-up to the Australian republican referendum.

that passes mountains, annulling walls and weapons, 

behold the one that makes the whole world stink!

…

     His face was that of an honest man,

It shone with such a look of benediction;

And all the rest of him was serpentine

—Dante, Inferno, Canto XVII

A little known fact about exhibition logistics is that curators and some artists shun red paint because it is the hardest to remove. It requires the tiresome commitment of numerous coats of white paint for it finally to disappear. This may be technical trivia, but it bears ironic weight on Brad Buckley’s installation, Every Great Idea Begins as a Heresy, whose most striking attribute is that the entire space is painted a deep, encompassing, prepossessing and unequivocal red. In its social and political implications it speaks for a recalcitrant condition. For despite warnings and testimonials to the contrary, states continue to have their sovereignty ignored, religious tolerance is tenuous at best, and rights of the weak are only observed if the strong know they will themselves benefit or will be brought directly into account. The red in this exhibition is deeply ambiguous: the blood of perpetrators and victims; the ideologies of self and other; the colour of passion and despair. 

Buckley’s work for over two decades has concerned itself with the distribution of power between individuals (which can be felt in sexual politics) or governments (in war, sanctions embargoes etc). As thinkers such as Bataille, Lévi-Strauss and Foucault have shown, these systems all share the same dialectical structure albeit with no discernible kernel. Art, like any other form of thought, at best seeks to articulate the point at which power is most clearly unlocatable, for it is only in the process of exchange that power is made visible. 

Buckley’s works operate within an overarching schema entitled The Slaughterhouse Project, which, a bit like Yves Klein blue, is an aesthetic armature, a strategy used for aesthetic infiltration, or infection. As the name implies, the Project is a conceptual device of cauterization, a way of exploring taboos, for investigating political anomalies, for venting dissatisfaction with social injustice. 

In 2003 Buckley staged the installation Etiquette, at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney. Red on entry, the interior black, its graphic centerpiece, delineated in Buckley’s now signature thick outlines, was a nineteenth century curio of furniture, the siège d’amour, a nice sounding word for a rogering chair (c.1890) used to support clients in tricky positions. On the wall were several texts, including ‘war is peace’ in block capitals. The excerpt on the opposite wall related the inner dialogue of a man in the early throes of sexual seduction. The trajectory of the work was clear enough: sex and war are both sites of domination and exploitation. Not to put too fine a point on it, the U.S. is literally screwing Iraq. And since then, we can only say how true this is. Iraq is a cesspit of violence on a hellish Dante-esque scale. It is now riven with so much sectarian violence that predictions of future peace are vain. Like its microcosm, the mind of someone who has suffered multiple rape, the situation is a mess.

As I write I still have fresh in my memory the leaked unofficial footage of the taunted leader, unshaven and disheveled, atop the scaffold, made into a martyr. The lasting image is not his perfidy but his defiance, his angry fearlessness which in death translates to courage. Another botch. The death penalty eclipsed debate over the extent of Saddam Hussein’s crimes. But the war in Iraq has left us with a question that is hard to face let alone to answer: maybe Saddam was like one of those parasites that, when excised from the body, causes the body to fail more swiftly and terribly? It is a question that is appositely posed to anyone against the injustices of fundamentalist Islam, of any outside agent that thinks it has the right to disrupt an alien status quo. Colonization and Christianity have a lot to answer for in this regard. 

The text for this exhibition, Every Great Idea…, is lifted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work which, in its superior way betrays an ambivalence to colonialism. In the quote, emblazoned on the wall in white type, the narrator sounds a whistle and its piercing screech causes panic, ‘Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering river’. This, the last line of the excerpt, is maybe less grandiose in its exoticism for today’s readers than it was a century ago. ‘Barbarous and superb’, the woman is transformed into a religious idol, with its sublime mixture of the stately and the hideous, casting her hands aloft, unperturbed, as if under a spell. Her attractiveness lies in her curiosity, not her familiarity. 

There is no need to rehearse the main points of this book, which numbers among the cardinal pieces of writing of the last century, except to remind the reader that it is set in the Congo which was the most iniquitous hell of all subjected African nations, all the more egregious because Belgium’s Leopold III said that he was doing the Congo a service, describing it in 1885 as ‘the noblest and most self-sacrificing scheme for African development that has ever been or ever will be attempted’.¹ Seen from this angle Buckley’s title seems to drip unctuously with irony: the victors write history, alas, and their ideas brook no criticism. The rhetoric is that ends justify means; we know better, and pain, their pain, is for a good cause. The Bush administration defends its belligerence with advising the world that it is we, the conservative U.S. minority that has introduced democracy to Iraq. 

The Belgians’ singular ‘innovation’, soon copied admiringly by the British, was to force men to work by removing them from their families, with the only promise of return with a few years labour. It decimated the nation and Congo, now Nigeria*, would never recover, for it broke up the entire social fabric and left only alienation, anger, and instability which has perpetuates the culture of death in so many parts of Africa, and which makes Conrad’s tale still so relevant today. Edward Said in his comments on the book is perhaps right to gloss over the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s famous condemnation of it—Achebe argues that art built on ethical grounds is not worth the name, in Conrad’s case his objectionable description of the indigenous population and his patronizing Eurocentrism—on the grounds that from Conrad’s ‘pitying contempt and exoticism’ there seeps out a ‘corrosive scepticism’ that threatens to eat at everything.² Conrad’s negativity is already presaged in the ‘darkness’ in title of the book which permeates everything, the recesses of the land and its people, down to the very soul of the protagonist, narrator, Marlow.

Buckley’s installation tropes two direct responses to Heart of Darkness, each pastiches in their own way. The first is America’s very own ‘heart of darkness’, Vietnam, for which Iraq seems nothing less than a carbon copy, a grisly recrudescence. Each time America took it upon itself to free the land from tyranny, then to its surprise found itself rebuffed yet pressed on, to the detriment of everyone involved (and through all the visible scars the Vietnamese still justly voice pride at having defeated the Americans). For the seminal film about the hell of the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now, Coppola virtually transcribed Conrad’s novel. It is a film that describes like no other the loneliness and terror that can inhabit our finite souls and that reduces the self-named saviours to a state far worse than those they purport to save. 

(It is also worth pausing to consider another looming catastrophe in the growing tension between the U.S. and Iran. The right wing media who concentrate on Iran’s pig-headed defiance, ignore the earlier chapter in that in early 2003 the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Bush a detailed proposal for negotiation. Iran agreed to make concessions about its nuclear program, adding that it would address the concerns about Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. In return they wanted Washington to draw back from its destabilizing interventions in the Middle East and to lift the longstanding sanctions. Needless to say Washington rebuffed the offer. And needless to say the present Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in no position to make a similar one.)

The second trope, less obvious than the first, is to be found in the somber, incantatory tones that echo from an unknown source within the installation, which is a reading of Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’. Written in 1925, the poem has the subtext: ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’, referring to the district representative of the enlightened European power whom Marlow travels to meet. Eliot maintained a lasting relationship with both Dante and Conrad with whom he joined hands in his own nihilist imagination. Before he deleted it in favour of the dedication to Pound, ‘The Waste Land’, had initially had as its epigraph ‘The horror! The horror!’ from Heart of Darkness. As its allusion to Kurtz allows us already to presume, ‘Hollow Men’ is dedicated to conspirators of all kinds, from Brutus to Cromwell to Guy Fawkes. But taken in a broader way, the poem is a contemptuous warning to anyone with the hubris to think they can intervene on history and change it. The poem is laced with a bewilderment at the ‘yawning abyss’ of being, as Kierkegaard called it in the Concept of Anxiety, that point when one finds that we are inadequate to the world, and that the securities of habitual identity will betray us in the end. 

So the import of the poem is for us to stay humble. The analogies that Buckley is trying to make are clear enough, and his lens is trained first at Bush jr. and to Australia’s current leader for whom he, amongst many, shares a deep loathing. Both posture as patricians but are bereft of culture, sorely wanting in beneficence, as neither spare a moment for real empathy for those in underprivileged distress—‘Remember us—if not all—not as lost/ Violent souls, but only/ As the hollow men/ The stuffed men’.

This is how, then, we might come to think of the amphibious, floating-falling figures in Every Great Idea…, as they embrace at once the murderer and the murdered. They embody the country of the repressed and the faceless individuals who are parachuted into strange lands to repress them; they are the civilians who get caught in a blast and the leaders themselves who presume too much. Indeed these white, ghostly silhouettes, suspended in an abyss of red, are emblems of the fundamental metaphysical condition of mortal anxiety described by Kierkegaard as ‘the dizziness of freedom which arises’ once it gazes down on ‘its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness’.³  It is the end-point of the perception of inner darkness. And there are certain circumstances that hasten the process, that drive us to that darkness more quickly, like the death of someone close to us, or the actions of false righteousness.

A planned circumstance of this installation is that the viewer will turn automatically to the text, because of the normal reflex of gravitating toward what might explain the unknown, in this case the work of art. Although I have already derived a good deal from it, it is worth emphasizing the void that the text opens up.   Anxiety comes from the perception that true agency, the real source of power, is outside of us. It is a formula that goes back to Kant who argued that there is a reality beyond the formal boundaries of our perception. Since then the fundamental question for artists has been how to represent this external quanta. Hence Buckley’s use of appropriated text as the metaphor of a consciousness, or of a whole world, that escapes our grasp. Appropriation is a false plenitude that registers a lacuna within the surface of knowledge; it is a consolation, an Ersatz possession. The text here hangs like a false possession, a foundling, and an epitaph in memory of past and looming disaster.

The other linguistic dislocation is in the climax that the passage describes, the terror caused by a banal mechanical screech, a bit like the Aztecs who treated as gods Cortez and his thugs because they had guns. For Buckley this sequence is not just a metaphor for violent conflict, it is the also non-concurrence that is at the root of its cause. The choice of Conrad is critical here, because Conrad was Polish and his use of English was, debatably, pragmatic, because as he said, it broadened his public. Curiously enough, English critics, challenged by Conrad’s heady syntax, exclaimed that he would be better read in translation and that he was a man ‘without country and language’.⁴

We might recall Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on Kafka who also wrote in a foreign tongue, though perhaps not as remote from his home as Conrad. German is for Kafka a ‘deterritorialized language’, comparing the linguistic decentredness to ‘what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language’. They also speak about Kafka’s adoption of the foreign tongue as a line of flight, or escape.⁵ As opposed to willingly corrupting the language, the decentred user responds to language in a more material (or what Deleuze and Guattari would go so far as saying, schizophrenic) way. Beckett, for his part, eschewed English in the end so as to get away from its ruses, the conceits of artfulness. 

Analogously, Buckley’s appropriation of text is as a readymade, a deracinated external element that has been recontextualized and manipulated. By being placed out of context and without attribution, the text is all but turned upside down and refashioned like Duchamp’s urinal; but like the urinal, it still stays a urinal, through its potential to return back to its original use; without the threat of that reversal it would cease to be a readymade. As with Conrad and Kafka (or the American blacks), the uses to which Buckley puts his estranged language, realized in his readymade texts are not intentionally disruptive to the fabric of the language itself except to dilate its potential, to reclaim it in a different name. Thus Buckley’s is an alternate kind of appropriation from the forms which rely on ironic distance, assuming autonomous critical distance from the images being subverted. Instead, here as in other installations of Buckley’s, there is a far more authentic relation to the irony attendant in any appropriation, as one feels that the artist is internal to and implicated in the critique. It is an ethical stance whose outcomes are often by necessity unpleasant. Buckley’s approach in this installation and others in The Slaughterhouse Project concur with what Eliot in The Use of Poetry explained to be the gifts, and the duty of any artist, which was to reveal ‘the horror’: 

It is an advantage to mankind in general to live in a beautiful world; that no one can doubt. But for the poet is it so important? We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.⁶

The final refrain has a particularly Conradian touch. The artist must give blood and reveal blood.

The blood red in Every Great Idea… room deserves a concluding remark. In a story familiar to an American audience, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’ tells of a man, the narrator, who kills another and conceals him under the floorboards of his home. Soon after he begins to hear the disconsolate pounding of a heartbeat, like a drumming tinitis in his ears to which others are oblivious. Eventually it overwhelms the man who, half-insane, reveals his crime. I like to think of the red in this exhibition in these terms, as a visceral substance that is hard to obliterate, and even when it eventually disappears it lives on as an inalienable truth, as a conscience, as a reproach that repeats itself as farce, and then re-repeats as an exasperatingly idiotic tragedy. 

1. Cit. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), London, Vintage, 1994, 200.
2. Idem.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte with Albert Anderson, New Jersey, Princeton U.P., 1980, 61.
4. See Robert Lynd’s review of A Set of Six in The Daily News in 1908: ‘Had he but written in Polish his stories would assuredly have been translated into English and into the other languages of Europe; and works of Joseph Conrad translated from the Polish would, I am certain, have been a more precious possession on English shelves that the works of Joseph Conrad in the original English, desirable as these are.’ Cit. Frederick R. Karl. Joseph Three Lives, New York, Farra, Strauss and Giroux, 1979, 648; see also Colm Toibin, ‘A Thousand Prayers’, New York Review, November 30, 2006, 53.
5. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis, Minnesota U.P., 1986, 17, 26.
6. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London, Faber & Faber, 2nd edn., 1964, 106.

— Edmund Burke

How to diminish friction, how to promote ease of intercourse, how to make every part of a man’s life contribute to the welfare and satisfaction of those around him, how to keep down offensive pride, how to banish the rasping of selfishness from the intentions of men — this is the function of good manners.

— Daisy Eyebright, A Manual of Etiquette: With hints on politeness and good breeding

Manners, or the rules of etiquette, permeate the minutiae of our everyday lives. Most manuals of etiquette, including contemporary ones, cite the main rationale for such rules as the enabling of smooth social interaction, as providing a guide to the art of living in close quarters with others.

But what is so revealing about Burke’s assertion is the relationship between these seemingly innocuous rules of conduct in ‘polite society’— about how to hold your knife or how long to wait before you RSVP— and the broader, increasingly coercive, framework of social control. We may consider absurd the obsessive, frivolous detail of certain rules of etiquette, yet we must acknowledge their insidious pervasiveness, the serious side to their frivolity, the fist in the velvet glove. A 2004 etiquette guide for US university freshmen advises: ‘Engage in table conversation that is pleasant but entirely free of controversial subjects’; ‘Never spit a piece of bad food or tough gristle into your napkin’; ‘Place glassware back in the same position after its use in order to maintain the visual presence of the table’. Our movements, thoughts and instinctive reactions are strictly circumscribed lest we offend, lest we attract the wrong sort of attention, lest we be shown up as outsiders who don’t belong. 

Whether consciously or not, much of our behaviour, and others’ responses to that behaviour, is moderated by these rules — rules so long ago internalised that we only become aware of them when we breach them. Their breach signifies the transgression of a boundary, sometimes between classes, often between cultures. For manners not only betray our cultural provenance, being in large measure culturally specific. They also betray our cross-cultural awareness, as evident when a gaffe of etiquette costs you the professional respect of foreign peers. Of course, the transgression of the rules can also signal our deliberate defiance, our assertion that, while we are familiar with them, we consider ourselves outside the rules. 

In most cultures, knowledge and observation of the rules of etiquette are thought to demonstrate good breeding. Strange how in that very phrase the link between sex and manners is already explicit: the two themes that intertwine in the work of Australian artist Brad Buckley. Buckley has a long-held interest in exploring the boundaries that separate the proper and improper, the moral and immoral, good manners and affront. It is an interest that has inevitably led him to research rules of behaviour, for transgression is impossible without rules — widely known and accepted rules. What is inappropriate would be unrecognisable without knowledge of what is appropriate. 

In his installation for La Chambre Blanche, Buckley continues his investigation of the link between rules of social interaction, sexuality, and morality, although also in the mix this time are the identifying markers of cultural identity. In coming to Quebec, Buckley was intrigued as to how the Quebequois distinguished their cultural identity from the French as much as from Anglophonic Canada and the Anglophone behemoth to the south. The approach he selected to explore this delicate issue was the metaphor of etiquette: he focused on the interaction between different sets of instruction on how to behave, musing on how rules of etiquette, particularly that pertaining to eating, from different periods in Anglo and French culture have gone to determine (or not) elements of French Canadian identity. The metaphor allows the issue a free-form complexity that evades making any definitive statement about cultural identity. Rather, such identity can be seen as comprising an ongoing series of negotiations on the minute level of everyday gestures and phrases, while at the same time having broader cultural and political implications. 

Buckley has created a sleek and refined environment that recalls generic, ‘international’ nightclub decor. La Chambre Blanche, windows and all, has been rendered black. The only illumination is a neon tube whose dim light catches the white of two wall paintings of archetypal white middle-class social groups — a couple at a table, men and women sipping cocktails at a bar — rendered in the simple graphic style of the early 1960s. The air thrums to the smoky but broken strains of Chet Baker (cool, white jazz) interspersed with ‘chat’ that on closer listening turns out to be carefully enunciated rules of etiquette on how to eat. (The soundtrack produced by Sean Lowry, a Sydney based artist/musician, and features the voices of Fabienne Larese de Pol and Rachel Scott.) Into this highly structured, monochrome scenario, Buckley has introduced the scent, colour and suggestiveness of fruit — figs, apricots, bananas — whose presence promises sensual pleasure. And to mediate the two: a female performer — local artist Annie Baillargeon — in demure black attire (with a gash of red lipstick), whose role it is to consume the fruit through careful observation of these rules. In keeping with the nature of the project, namely a  ‘residence in situ’ over six weeks, Buckley’s installation thus combines elements created in Australia together with those developed in response to the specific qualities of the site.

The woman’s contained and measured movements as she bisects an apricot with knife and fork, the plate delicately balanced on her lap, creates a palpable sexual frisson, a tension between what is proper and improper. For her sensual pleasure is accessed not through wantonness and abandon, not through transgression, but by obeying the rules. This raises a series of questions that underpin much modernist critique: Is the avant-garde value placed on transgression diminished if the ‘transgressor’ is unaware of the requisite rules? What is the relationship of etiquette to class and hierarchies of social privilege? How much does pleasure, and the full subjecthood it requires, rely on the acquisition of certain social codes? Does etiquette repress feminine sexuality — as in the feminist criticism of the imperatives of ‘ladylike’ behaviour that estrange women from their carnal desire — or does it indeed enhance woman’s sexual transgression?

Buckley’s work generally brings us to a place where space itself feels as if it is cross-hatched with the trajectories of power — institutional, cultural, sexual. We feel the pressure of conformity, together with the expectation of rebellion; we sense the strictures of social exclusion, together with the means to short-circuit privilege. In In media res, the latest incarnation of The Slaughterhouse Project — an ongoing series of installations that takes its name from Georges Bataille’s idea that modern Western society has been diminished by its disavowal of death — these trajectories of power also include those of nation and cultural identity. The conjunction of elements in Buckley’s installation compels us to consider what interplay of discourses has produced not only this, our, particular subjectivity, but also this particular place, that is, Quebec. 

The original version of this essay was published in conjunction with the exhibition (La Chambre Blanche, Quebec, Canada, 2005).

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])

1. On the idea of ‘the space-in-between’ apropos of (video) installation art, see Margaret Morse, ‘The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between: Video Installation Art’, in Margaret Morse, Virtualities, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 155–77.
2. The Sydney Push was an anarchist/libertarian ‘movement’ of bohemian intelligentsia influenced by the philosopher John Anderson, who taught at the University of Sydney from 1927 - 1958. See ‘Brad Buckley in Conversation with Nicholas Tsoutas’, in Brad Buckley (ed.), Brad Buckley, Sydney, Artspace, 2001, p. 11. Also see Anne Coombs, ‘Sex and Anarchy: the Life and Death of the Sydney Push’, Sydney, Penguin Books, 1996.
3. See Keith Broadfoot, ‘The End of the Line : Installation Art Today’, in Adam Geczy and Benjamin Gennochio, What is Installation?, Sydney, Power Publications, 2006, pp.  69–76.
4. See Luke Slattery, ‘The author as hero’, The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 24 July 2002. Slattery’s article is a review of Christopher Hitchen’s Orwell’s Victory, London, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2002. Gore Vidal is, undoubtedly, America’s most notable living literary radical and, it could be argued, the most eloquent exemplar today of Orwell’s political essay tradition of writing. See his scathing critique of America’s new world order of transcendentalist militarism: The Last Empire, London, Abacus, 2002.
5. On the historical role of depilation and female sexuality and the example of Jewish women in Nazi concentration camps, see Clifford Bishop and Alexander Osthelder, Sexualia, Cologne, Konemann, 2001, p. 350.
6. On Virilio’s concepts of ‘pitiful’ and ‘pitiless’ art, see Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose, London, Continuum, 2003. John Armitage’s introduction to Virilio’s overall theorising of aesthetics and politics apropos of contemporary art and the politics of silence is quite informative on the contextualisation of the book’s two essays – ‘A Pitiless Art’ and ‘Silence of Trial’ – in terms of broadening Virilio’s arguments concerning the ‘aesthetics of disappearance’. On Virilio’s concept of the aesthetics of disappearance, see Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York, SemioText(e), 1991. And, to conclude, on Virilio’s dromocratic aesthetics of the war machine, see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. P. Camiller, New York, Verso, 1989.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

If one were to adopt a late capitalist term to describe Brad Buckley’s mode of artistic production, it would likely be vertical integration. Instead, understanding his intentions more closely, I propose the term seamless. I begin here because The Slaughterhouse Project: The Light on the Hill, Buckley’s most recent manifestation of his ongoing series of interrogations, is one in which the closest attention to detail is required. In particular, the complexities of language, with all its inherent elisions, slippages, and parapraxes, from Freud to de Sausseure, to Lacan, Barthes, and beyond, must be considered closely.

The Light on the Hill is the title of Buckley’s early 2002 installation in Birmingham, Alabama. In a town marked by its complex bookends (which one might consider at one limit to be Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and at the other Birmingham local Ruben Studdard’s recent elevation to “American Idol”, whatever that might mean), The Light on the Hill stood as both a symbol and a symptom.

As I have noted previously¹, Buckley’s project is marked by the referential and symbolic significance of every stage of the process. From the invitation through the installation to the documentation, catalogue, and essay, each element of the project both presents and represents a unique aspect of the work. For The Light on the Hill, Buckley utilises a quote from Ben Chifley, Labor Party Prime Minister of Australia from July 1945 to June 1951. Buckley’s recontextualisation of this text stems in part from a reconstruction of the readymade². Recognising, as Marcel Duchamp does, that a tube of paint is a readymade, Buckley applies this test to text. He then utilizes the text in a distilled form, which results in what one might term an “adaptive re-use.” In a speech to the Labor Party Caucus on June 12, 1946, Prime Minister Chifley said, in part,

I try to think of the Labour movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a great objective - the light on the hill - which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for.³

What is unique is that Prime Minister Chifley’s observations, still regarded as a cornerstone of Labor Party policy, were closely resonant with the observations of a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., only a few short years later. Yet what Buckley’s invitation did, purposefully, was highlight a social and socialist agenda that was both antithetical and an anathema to much of the Birmingham population. From the outset, The Light on the Hill highlighted the degree of complexity with which Chifley’s social humanism stands against a southern American political system commonly marked by conservatism, “compassionate”Christianity, and high capitalism.⁴

In Tarrying with the Negative, Slovenian cultural critic and theorist Slavoj Zizek outlines the conditions under which national ideologies are often reinvented. In a chapter entitled, “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself,” Zizek discusses how a fascination with the ‘Other’ is manifest precisely through the ‘Other’s’ ongoing reinvention of the then decaying cultural or social models of the dominant regime. Zizek continues, suggesting that the Other’s surplus enjoyment, their jouissance, that stems from this reinvention, becomes the motivation for their persecution by the dominant regime.⁵   One could argue that Zizek’s analysis transfers subtly to contemporary southern cultural life.

What The Light on the Hill does, then, is to create an architectural and social space in which these apparent antagonisms can be critiqued, discussed, and deconstructed. Architecturally, The Light on the Hill consisted of a two-room installation and a sound composition that served to unify the two. In the first room, Gallery visitors entered the frosted double-glass doors to encounter fire-engine red walls with white wall paintings. The rear wall of the front room consisted of a line drawing of a watchtower, while walls to the right and left encircled and enclosed the viewers with chains. Intriguingly, few viewers seemed to realize that in precisely the moment they entered the installation, they had become chained within it, but subject of and subjected to an experience of confinement and restraint. One need only recall here Swiss-born philosopher (and author of The Social Contract) Jean Jacques Rousseau’s famous pronouncement, “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” In the south, in particular, this observation has particular resonance. For Alabama was, historically, one of the states that allowed the ownership of slaves.⁶  What is more complex, however, is the question of the role of chains – here one must consider the fact that in Buckley’s installations, the most obvious reading is not necessarily the most relevant.

The other, more complex reading of the chains resides in their symbolic function of the organizing strictures of culture. Here, one might think particularly about Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulations of religion as repression which he proposes most comprehensively in his Genealogy of Morals. The theme of a passive Christianity which stands against his revaluation of values becomes a recurring discussion, emerging in Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. There have been recent discussions regarding Nietzsche’s constructions of the value of slavery, many of which assert that his stand is not against the condition.⁷ A reading which equates commodity capitalism and subservience to slavery would certainly not fall outside Nietzsche’s ambit, and would appear, in fact, to be consistent with his revaluation of values. The Nietzschean construction of slavery which sees its value must lie closely aligned with his general opposition of overman and herd, of those capable of revaluing values for the construction of a stronger society versus those that, for whatever reason, are not. In this context, one might insert any number of signs for Buckley’s watchtower. Here, it stands merely as a trope, capable at its simplest level of signifying itself, but more capable, under consideration, as standing for those organizing principles, often self-situated, which enslave humankind.

It is possible to interpret the chains as the conditions through which the more radical elements of cultural control are maintained. Picture a society in which the purpose of confinement is not to keep others out, but to maintain what is within. This is a common notion in science fiction, but the most recent model of a closed society generally is the Western perception of the Communist bloc during the cold war. For this reason, when Buckley paints the front gallery red and the back gallery black for The Light on the Hill, one would almost certainly recall Le Rouge et le noir, by the 19th-century French author Marie-Henri Beyle, more commonly known as Stendhal. The author tells the story of Julian Sorel, a young man about to be put to death for a murder that resulted from a crime of passion. Consisting of a series of constantly shifting vignettes, The Red and the Black ultimately critiques the complexities of French urban and rural cultures, as well as the intricacies of a highly strictured religious and political realms.

What is more intriguing in The Light on the Hill is what one might term, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, the presence of the text. For the text, as an idea, is made manifest again and again. From Chifley’s quotation which positions the invitation, to the allusion to Stendhal suggested by Buckley’s choice of colors for the installation, through to the edited text which adorns the second room. There, one finds an edited text from Tom Sawyer, which read:⁸

Tom gave up his brush with reluctance in his face but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer “Big Missouri” worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material: boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite…and when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth…a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier and a dilapidated old window-sash. He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while – plenty of company – and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it!

What we encounter here, through the quote, is the miracle of commodity capitalism. For Tom, in an incredibly complex paradigm shift, exchanges undesirable labour for value, transforming it from an event he despises to one for which he is paid. In fact, people seem to line up for the privilege of performing the task. This is, perhaps, more insidious than the simple movement of capital, something that is more intriguing than the idea of surplus value being created through capitalism. For in the former, the surplus value is created by the disparity between wages, production, and surplus value. In the traditional Marxian system, a person sells labour for wages. In Tom’s case, he sells the opportunity to do labour - does no labour himself – and receives payment. In the end, the difference stems from the fact that the product of Tom’s labour does not necessarily create an object with surplus value that is the subject of market-based commodity exchange. At the same time, it does serve as a model by which people purchase “opportunities”, a term for which we could, perhaps, substitute the word markets. Or, instead, what the German philosopher and postmodernist avant la lettre Walter Benjamin would term “the dream world of mass culture”.

The second room, which contained the recontextualised, readymade quote from Tom Sawyer, was painted black from floor to ceiling. The work was lit with three cool white neon tubes which divided the text in half horizontally. Given the absence of color in this section of the room, one might consider notions of “blackness”. Particularly in the south, it is difficult to consider the idea of “black”, and almost impossible to utter the word. Buckley’s appropriation of text from Tom Sawyer, a text that in its original is difficult to quote from because of its language, is complex in and of itself. For those who do not know the work, it recounts stories of life on the Mississippi. It is perhaps less iconic than its counterpoint, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which tells a story of a journey. Regardless, Twain’s analysis of consumer capitalism is exquisite. He observes, wryly, that desire is directly correlated to attainability.

In The Light on the Hill, the unattainable objects are myriad, but may be distinguished by whether they are personal, physical, social or economic. For Buckley’s installation deftly critiques and makes visible each in precisely the same moment. The chains, discussed earlier, do mark physical boundaries, but they also delineate social, cultural and economic boundaries. In a “New South” determined to repress, if not erase, its complex history which bubbles just below the surface, it is difficult to separate any particular chain from another.

What unifies the seemingly disparate rooms into a seamless whole is partly the presence of a soundtrack. Comprised of two versions of All Along the Watchtower, pitch shifted and beat matched to mix seamlessly, Buckley takes viewers upon an ongoing journey of desire and defeat.

Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower first appeared on his John Wesley Harding album in 1967. At the time, Dylan had virtually disappeared from the popular music scene as the result of a motorcycle accident. Having left as the mystical minstrel of the epic double-album Blonde on Blonde, Dylan returned as a a country-sounding, ballad-singing troubadour reminiscent of his early-sixties folk days. What was particularly interesting about the 1967 release was Dylan’s wry construction of an identity. For in releasing the album, Dylan had created a simulacrum for the real Western outlaw John Wesley Hardin, a thug so mean it is suggested that he once shot a man for snoring. Whether it was intentional, or a mistake, it constructs a fascinating result. For by creating the fictitious Harding, almost someone else but individual in precisely the same moment, Dylan embodies French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s reading of the simulacrum.

I begin here because the interweaving of Dylan and Hendrix raises a number of interesting questions that in many ways mirror the complexities of southern social and cultural existence. Dylan, as John Wesley Harding, sings words that recall the quest for Manifest Destiny, America’s reach across the western plains and the Rocky Mountains to colonize the entirety of what was to become the United States. In that guise, Dylan’s plaintive song recalls a heroicism that is unexpected at that time.

The song reads, in part:

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”

Contrast this version to the one sung by Jimi Hendrix, which appears on his 1968 album Electric Ladyland, which rises to Number 1 in the US. When situated in the American south, particularly in Alabama, the song takes on an entirely different meaning. Recognizing the ongoing process of subjugation, the song stands as a call to action. Its roots then stem not from the folk tradition it would adopt were Dylan to sing it, but instead from the tradition of American gospel. What seems unusual is that the language and syntax apparently remain the same, but the Hendrix version of the song has much more in common with Negro spirituals. What is most significant, in relation to the iconography of The Light on the Hill, is that the transference of meaning towards the gospel/spiritual realm places the song in a lineage in which songs directly refer to freedom. One might consider here songs such as Wade in the Water, The Gospel Train, or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.⁹

By mixing the two together, Buckley creates a situation in which the desires for the older South are joined in an oscillating relationship with a desire for the opposite. While I do not in any way assert that Dylan’s version is one which calls for a return to conservatism, it seems evident that the lifestyle outlined by the concept of “John Wesley Harding” and its implications appear at odds with the gospel spirituality of the Underground Railroad and the Hendrix versions.

This is an astute perception by Buckley, and characteristic of his understandings of reception theory. In The Light on the Hill, Buckley transcends accepted stereotypes of southern culture to inscribe upon a site a complex suite of differing political, social and ethical concerns.

Finally, there is the question of freedom, of movement, of restraint. If one reads the text from Tom Sawyer as representative of modern global capitalism – as the creation of a market economy in which it is desire, and not commodity, which are both traded and fetishized – then The Light on the Hill stands as a critique of precisely this movement. It recognizes the fact that global capitalism, particularly goods, services, information and property, moves unfettered at precisely the same moment that the movement of people is more and more restricted. Buckley recognizes that despite apparent changes to the social structures of contemporary culture, particularly those of the American south, it is as if the freedoms suggested are entirely in opposition to those which have been attained. One might think here of Zizek’s introduction in Tarrying with the Negative, where he observes:

It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the “open” character of a historical situation “in its becoming”, as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost its hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by a new one.¹⁰

The Light on the Hill recognizes precisely this same openness. For if the South, if Birmingham, Alabama, stands as a site without a Master-Signifier (although for a number of reasons I doubt this is the case), then this openness stands as its only option.

I am reminded of a pair of Works Progress Administration-era murals that adorn the entrance foyer of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city. To the left, a man reminiscent of the Russian-born, American immigrant author Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark – suited, strong, social(ist) realist, standing over a city of men working towards an industrialized future. On the other side, a dark-haired Southern belle, antebellum gown flowing, standing over a group of African-Americans – in a field, picking cotton.

In all likelihood, few people who enter the courthouse notice this anomaly. But it seems to stand as a signifier for precisely the hypocrisy that Zizek observes, and that Buckley attacks. For in The Light on the Hill, by calling into question the complexities of social life, by demanding social responsibility, Buckley challenges individuals to live according to certain ideals.

I can only think here of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel-prize winner and author of the Letter from Birmingham Jail. There, Dr. King observed:

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.¹¹

These are precisely the same sentiments that Prime Minister Chifley had expressed in 1949. Buckley understands the ongoing need for social change, and the responsibility of artists to create works which challenge dominant paradigms through subtle, complex and purposeful means.

As an ongoing series of installations, The Slaughterhouse Project stands as a suite of works which call into question the roles and responsibilities of cultures to consider and address diverse concerns. Buckley’s recontextualisations – and his ability to recognize the fact that texts are always already readymades - are complex, and both closely and subtly related to the issues his interventions consider. Over the course of more than a decade, Buckley’s works have considered a range of apparently diverse thinkers. Yet each shares a common concern for the freedoms of individuals and the responsibility of communities, cultures and nations.

The Light on the Hill made manifest the universality of social humanism, drawing upon history, text, music, gender, and identity to question each. It stands as a key part of The Slaughterhouse Project, and a unique and thought-provoking installation.¹²  The challenge of art, as a key aspect of contemporary culture, certainly achieves Chifley’s objective of working towards the betterment of humankind.

1. For a detailed reading of Buckley’s works, please refer my essay The Slow Fire, in Brad Buckley, Artspace Publications, Sydney, 2002, as well as the many other excellent essays listed in the monograph’s bibliography.
2. Perhaps the most sustained analyses of this position can be found in Yve-Alain Bois’ Painting:  The Task of Mourning, in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, MIT Press:  Cambridge, 1990, pp. 232 – 235, and Thierry de Duve’s seminal essay The Readymade and the Tube of Paint, which first appeared in Artforum in 1986 and was recently revised and expanded to appear in his Kant After Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999, at pp. 147 – 196.
3. The complete text of Prime Minister Chifley’s speech can be found at the website of the Australian Labor Party, www.alp.org.au/about/light_on_hill.html
4. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extrapolate on the significance and implications of The Light on the Hill without outlining briefly some charcteristics of the larger Birmingham community.  In a city of 901,000, 68% are white, 30% are African American or black, and the remainder are are Asian or Hispanic.  78% of Alabamians were born in the state.  25% of the population has a Bachelor’s Degree or higher.  13% of the population lives in poverty, according to the US Census for 2000.
5. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, Duke University Press:  Durham, 1993.  See particularly Chapter 6, pp. 200 – 237.
6. For further research on southern slavery, one might consider the research produced by the Federal Writers’ Project between 1936 and 1938 entitled “Slave Narratives.”  Further information can be found at memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html.
7. One might consider here, particularly, the discussions in Greg Waite’s book Nietzsche’s Corps/e, as considered in Bruce Krajewski’s essay found at http://www.samla.org/sar/01wKrajewski.html.
8. The quote which appears is an edited version.  In its entirety, the text is: Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face but alacrity in his heart.  And while the late steamer “Big Missouri” worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.  There was no lack of material:  boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash.  By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with - and so on, and so on, hour after hour.  And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was  literally rolling in wealth.  He had beside the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door knob, a dog-collar - but no dog - the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old window-sash.
9. The significance of Negro spirituals and gospel music as a form of information and social activism is well documented.  For further information, www.negrospirituals.com stands as a respected reference point.
10. Zizek, ibid., at 1.
11. For the complete text of Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, please visit www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html
12. The installation proved too complex for certain viewers not used to installation projects.  One gentleman remarked, after having been in the gallery for some time, that it was “looking good for the next show”, and was puzzled to learn that he was in fact looking at the show.