Agatha Gothe-Snape held a studio at Gertrude from 2013 – 2015. Since leaving the Gertrude Studios she has exhibited in major international biennales including PERFORMA, New York curated by RoseLee Goldberg (2015) and the 20th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal (2016). Gothe-Snape was awarded the second Biennale Legacy Artwork project in 2016, commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the City of Sydney, resulting in the work Here, an Echo. The project consisted of a series of scored walks, from Speakers Corner in the Domain to Wemyss Lane in Surry Hills, made with Brooke Stamp and invited collaborators.
Agatha Gothe-Snape's practice stems from improvisational performance. It draws upon and records interpersonal and spatio-emotional exchanges around art and art contexts. It takes many forms: prosaic performances (including dance), looped PowerPoint slide shows, workshops, texts (including correspondence and found texts, as well as texts of a poetic character), visual scores and collaboratively produced art objects. It is marked by a minimal idealisation of colour and language and a frontal visual tactility. It results from agency being given to impulsive responses. Her process is without fixed limits and fosters transparency. The work inhabits spaces that are both physical and non-physical, and occupies thresholds that are negotiable.
Agatha Gothe-Snape is actively involved with Wrong Solo, a collaboration with
Brian Fuata and has been working towards I am a Branch Floating on a Swollen River After the Rain, a site-specific project presented by Wrong Solo in the street-front gallery of Gertrude Contemporary involving a number of participating artists. Gothe-Snape currently has a solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, curated by Haruko Kumakura. She is also a current artist-in-residence at Artspace, Sydney.
Agatha Gothe-Snape is represented by The Commercial, Sydney.
Laura De Neefe: Your practice is incredibly diverse, incorporating a multitude of mediums including projections, PowerPoint presentations, painting and installation, as well as performance and audience interactions. How do you decide what artistic form an idea should take?
Agatha Gothe-Snape: I think because my background is in performance, this sense of improvisation underlies my practice. I like to have a sense of agility always in what I’m doing, so that I’m always responsive to the task at hand. My work always responds to the context it is in and the parameters or demands of that particular context — whether that’s institutional or public or commercial, or a much more relational or casual context, so I really allow the context to determine what the output is going to be. For me that’s very important. I am surprised by what precipitates, that I don’t know what I’m doing and that the situation almost co-creates the work with me and being able to move between mediums is part of that deal.
LDN: You often incorporate language and transpositions of language in your works. What is the power of language to you? Is the visual aesthetic of a word or phrase as important as its meaning?
AGS: I’m not sure where my interest in language lies. My grandmother was a calligrapher and of course I’m interested in the formal qualities of the characters and my mother is a graphic designer, so I have this foundation in typographic analysis and so all the formal qualities of the language do underpin my interest. Often I am into destabilising those hierarchies, those aesthetic hierarchies. I think that’s maybe why I use Microsoft PowerPoint because it really de-skills my visual literacy of the form of language because it’s quite a blunt tool.
On the other hand, I love the potential ambiguity of language — the space between its instructional use and a more open-ended poetic deployment. I think my work operates between those two spaces, slipping between those two functions of language. Especially my scores, which are written, language-based scores for performances or work or transcriptions; they always present as both instruction and open-ended statement. They are never purely one or the other and they are always an invitation to the viewer or the performer or the participant or the witness to intervene, and the act of intervention is maybe simply the act of reading. It’s an invitation to enter that ambiguous space where meaning might momentarily arrive and then slip through your fingers. Something you can never quite grasp, but then something that can appear so crystalline for a moment.
LDN: The role of the viewer in the gallery space is a key theme across your practice and you often address this in a context-specific way. How do you consider the experience of the viewer in your works before an exhibition? Do the physical limitations and opportunities of a specific space influence the final work?
AGS: Here, an Echo that I made for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, that was very much a site-specific scored improvisation. As we were making discoveries about the site — myself and my collaborator Brooke Stamp — so too were the audience. It was almost a simultaneous discovery. I often want to make transparent these processes and procedures that I use to make the work, so I am in the dark as well as the audience until these moments of revelation and that’s very risky because often it can fail or fall through, but I really think that making myself vulnerable to an audience allows the audience to experience — that’s how I consider the audience’s experience, by allowing myself to be vulnerable to the act of witnessing. For instance, in Here, an Echo Brooke and I would walk from Speaker’s Corner in the Domain to Wemyss Lane in Surry Hills every day. That walk was public three times and opened up to a very large audience, and even though it was a public performance we were still accumulating information and even the nature of the audience being there changes the performance. Working in a very unfixed way means that everything is always volatile, and that’s the experience I want to give to the viewer. I think that’s the experience art always gives the viewer as well — even looking at a painting — and that’s why I love art because it offers spacious experiences, where the viewer is actually in power and I like the viewer to be able to understand that power they hold.
LDN: Tell us about your solo project at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Really I could only get glimpses, but I had three site visits and from those visits I gleaned particular information. From all that information I began to construct a type of score, but the score didn’t just have language in it, it also had shapes and materials. Those shapes and materials had an exhibition output, which is in the gallery. For the first time I made this physical score, where the gallery becomes like a vessel for all the score materials. Then I am working with other artists and I invite them to interpret those materials to produce a performance throughout the exhibition. They can perform it in the gallery or around the district. So it is another thing that develops and changes throughout the exhibition and is unfixed so I’m not exactly sure what the outcome will be.
It’s such a satisfying experience having such an open-ended proposition from the curator and then creating some kind of reality with her has been such a good process. Over the past two years, I’ve had three site visits to Tokyo and Haruko came to Sydney and did a three-day workshop with me, which was such a valuable thing. I guess my work is trying to find this space of understanding this relation between me and the viewer, or between collaborators, or between the curator and the artist. This was an instance where the relationship between the curator and the artist was the most important thing and because some of the work has language in it and she would have to translate it, she has actually produced that because I can never understand the translation, so I also had to have a huge trust in her that she understood me so well that she’s been able to translate my work. I think that intimacy in the act of translation is really profound and is kind of what the show has ended up being about. I guess that’s kind of what a score is about — translating one thing to another through a live act or through performance or through reading, and that is also what this relation with Haruko has been about, translating my experience into some kind of outcome in this culture that I am quite unfamiliar with.
LDN: For I am a Branch Floating on a Swollen River After the Rain at Gertrude you have been working with long-term collaborator, Brian Fuata. Tell us about your approach to collaboration, has this influenced the way you practise as a solo artist?
AGS: Again, because I came from this training in performance and acting, you’re often working in a group context where you are devising work together. But also because I’m a very social person, I find for me that ideas very often happen in relation and they very often happen at the moment of communication. The idea of the solo artist toiling away in the studio, sometimes makes sense to me, but often it’s in the act of iteration, the act of speaking that the idea takes form.
I feel that I have to have people to speak it to and my friends I think feel the same way. My collaborations are very much my relationships, my friends; they are my peers and they’re now very long-standing relationships that have been going for fifteen years, with Brian Fuata as Wrong Solo, but also with Brooke Stamp, who’s a dancer and choreographer. We also have a group of us in Sydney — Sarah Rodigari, Lizzie Thomson and many other people that come in and out. So we formed Wrong Solo as a sort of permeable membrane into which people could drift in and out and that’s kind of how we see this work at Gertrude, especially. We’ve invited these Melbourne collaborators to drift into Wrong Solo and maybe remain or drift out, and my father certainly occupies a space; another person is Shane Haseman who came to Wrong Solo and drifts in and out. I really like the idea that things are always changing and never fixed. Wrong Solo is never a fixed entity — it’s always subject to the forces of the social world and the material world and the economic world.
In my solo practice, so often the work is created with the voices of others. It’s hard to even say it’s a solo practice because my partner and my family and my friends are always implicated in the process in some way. Whether that’s as an active witness, or a live drawing or a confidant in the nitty gritty of working through things conceptually. The act of relation is always very central to me and I find it’s hard to do anything without other people.
LDN: What can you tell us about I am a Branch Floating on a Swollen River After the Rain, your collaborative project with Brian Fuata as Wrong Solo, which will open at Gertrude Contemporary shortly?
AGS: Brian and I love this quality of language — we love working with scores that do slip between instruction and absurdity but somehow we got into a situation where we were really unsure of what we were making and my father, Michael Snape, became very anxious about this and in his dream-state at 3am, similarly in a state between awake and asleep, between sense and nonsense he dreamt or put together a whole score for us and so it’s from this score, which we now treat as a sort of ‘ready-made’ that we are constructing for the whole of the show at Gertrude.
So we will have a video of Dad recreating this dream-state and contextualising where this information came from and Brian has used Dad’s score to do a series of performative improvisations over the last three weeks daily (ten-minute improvisations), which Brian will do again in the gallery on opening night — only ten minutes, it’s a very special jewel. The ‘liveness’ of that is very unique and it’s very important to see that if you want to have a sense of the origins of that practice.
Then we have invited a series of Melbourne-based artists to respond to my Dad’s score on some Saturdays during the exhibition. There will be three artists performing a
ten-minute improvisation each Saturday (nine total). It’s very short. We see it almost as a mould into which you cast your own performance, you can take opportunities from each score or you can dismiss them. It’s a score as any instruction is — only ever a starting point to incorporate or dismiss and we think it’s the performers’ task to decide what they do with any given information. We love this idea that people might completely transgress or diverge from the script or they might be very literal and that is all completely open. But we give Brian’s performance as a starting point, as one example of what you can do with the score.
We are also going to have — which I’m so happy with — on Monday we recorded Brian doing the score so we recorded a ten-minute improvisation which we will also show in the gallery, a two-channel video, which is just another example and it’s also kind of like a calling forth of the participants.
We are actually not going to put the text up in the gallery, instead we are going to put blank pages up. I’m trying to allow the score to sit implicitly inside the work, so the score actually is producing the work rather than being explicitly a text. Especially in Japan this was very important because English is not the primary language so I was always trying to work away from my dependency on having a text there. We are not going to have the score written, I don’t think, but we will have this motif of the empty page, the empty page of potential, the unknown outcome of each performer’s interpretation of the score.
LDN: It has been almost two years since you left the Gertrude Studios. Tell us about your Gertrude experience and the impact that it had.
AGS: I moved to Melbourne from Sydney for the opportunity to take up a Gertrude studio residency. It was about testing my practice in a different context, in a different city, taking myself away from all my closest collaborators and having a sense of space to make work again. It was the most valuable time. I made such amazing relationships and through Gertrude’s visiting curator program, I connected with so many curators and that’s how I came to be in the Berlin Biennale (2014) through meeting Juan Gaitán when he visited Gertrude. The constant exposure to different voices and different feedback is so important for your work; you are testing your work to a different audience that doesn’t know you really as an artist. As an artist from interstate, I found it really valuable to be working in a different community all of a sudden. You have to analyse, does that work still make sense in that city; what different feedback do you get. Just having that space is unbelievable, it’s such an amazing opportunity.
LDN: What are you reading at the moment?
AGS: I’m pretty much mainly reading stories to my two-year-old. My friend Aodhan Madden, who lives in Melbourne, sent me this beautiful text by Ann Carson — Every Exit is an Entrance — about the slippery worlds of sleeping and waking. He sent it to me a couple of years ago but it’s just so relevant to I am a Branch Floating on a Swollen River After the Rain.
LDN: Tell us about an exhibition or work you saw recently that has stuck with you.
AGS: When I was in Japan I saw the work of this collaborative group called Baby Tooth and actually one of the artists, Michiko Tsuda, I collaborated with in the video works at the Mori Art Museum. I was just so excited because they were working in such a similar way to me and my peers and we had never known each other or met each other. They were also interested in trying to articulate unknown forces — trying to describe them — exploring the space of relation between the audience and the spectator, working very much in this ambiguous space between art and performance and dance and being willing to not specify what genre they were working in. I found their work very exhilarating and it was also reassuring to see that other people were exploring similar territory in another place.
