Dear Diego cc: Alexie, 2025

The title of this public program performs the salutation. I will not repeat it. Yet another decoy, another beginning, temporary origin or middle masquerading as inception. A montage methodology, Fiona MacDonald and Sean Peoples bookending essays by Patrice Sharkey and Rosemary Forde; in the gallery A Yummy Fantasy faces off A Constructed World.[1] 

This dispatch is not correspondence. It is a rhizomatic mess of schizo methodologies and productive contradictions, a handover without instructions, a salute without an army. Diego Ramirez, in a Bureaucracy of Feelings, can a spreadsheet cope with cringe?

Etymologically, to dispatch is “to get rid of promptly by killing”. As Ragnar has noted, It is a deeply personal art history.[2]

Here in the antipodes, we like to have “Global North precedents”. A.A Phillips (1950’s) Cultural Cringe weathered only slightly by Whitlam’s sweeping cultural revolution of the 1970’s resulting in a plethora of 40 and 50^th birthday celebrations for arts orgs such as this. Culture, is the same age as Amanda Marburg and I, apparently.[3]

Artists asked to reshow, remake, redo that which they left being 20 years ago comes with baggage. Work is missing. Work is destroyed. Work is in collections of people artists might not know. Work is subject to life. A kind of terrifying irony bestowed on us — to be making exhibitions alongside very visible and public failures in policy — lateral violence, the censorship of artists and the rescinding of offers.[4] Policy is to police. Can looking at a very specific specificity of context mean the parochial can be examined in a manner that might alleviate it of its own burden shedding light on its paradoxes and pertinences?[5]  

This was an 18-month long séance with an archive of ghosts — thousands of images and texts evidential of the depth and complexity of practice, board papers that reveal nothing and everything, artists who don’t pay rent, artists who pay rent, underpaid employees, barely paid artists, a revolving door of volunteers, photographers, installers and lists. Lists of ideas, lists of peoples, lists of to do, lists of money, lists of lack of money interspersed with the incident reports sans political inference or noted personal grievances. Of note, perhaps just for me, but I like thinking also for us, a proposal for a show about grief, rejected at this time, the sentence read 20 years later, very-much-a-lifeline.[6]

Parallels and precedents.

In 2015, Hal Foster published a short text titled Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency.[7] Openly acknowledging that his focus is New York centric (what we love about West Coast Ed Rusha and Mike Kelley, or Dresdens Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter), Foster looks at what happened post 9/11, his suspicion of the death of irony and what he refers to as the “probing of the real”. In his examination of material, matter and concept, Foster loosely categorises art via adjectives “Abject”, “Archival”, “Mimetic”, “Precarious” and “post-critical”. These terms are not irrelevant in our military settler-colony, they too are linguistic symptoms paralleling our incomprehensible Mnemosyne.[8]

Second, Mark Fisher talks about our dimension of the future having disappeared — the futures slow cancellation while the 20^th century appears in high def on our screens – trapped and marooned amongst Capital Realism where almost nothing can be abstracted or extracted from the realities of business, Fisher proposes nostalgia and depression become productive escapes.[9] Chris Nolan’s Memento and Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his wife for a hat — our amnesia and lack of long term coding.[10] During prep for the exhibition, I emailed Art Historians: 

Dear *******, 

I am not sure where to direct this email, as numbers are such a funny stat to want in art. But I am working on this exhibition for / at Gertrude Contemporary for which both Rose Forde and Patrice Sharkey have written, based on their MFA and Honours papers which both look at local conditions in Contemporary Art History – writing and Melbourne “Arte Povera” respectively. 

 I know that Dave Homewood did his PhD on Dale Hickey et al. and I was wondering how many PhD’s, MFA’s and Honours papers in Art History look at contemporary or recent art history in Australia / Melbourne. 

Far from a patriot or nationalist, I guess I am interested in the how the local is negotiated in this space in Art History, or if this history is more often than not documented by artists and curators themselves (in PhD and MFA).

 Let me know what you think, or even better, if you would like to discuss.

Best, Lisa [11]

Replies were akin to: not sure I will get back to you.  And yes, Diego, I am still waiting.

But on that note, in 2011 one of the books missing from the surplus archive, Minimal Domination by Justin Clemens was published. A selection of writing on art from the decade prior. In the liner notes, we are made aware that the title is drawn from contemporary mathematics: a minimally dominating set is the smallest set of points that neighbour all other points of a graph. A minimally dominating set is therefore a multiple and a structure which has privileged access to that which it is not. This is the secret of contemporary art: it creates discrete selections from which we can survey the whole. [12]

Somewhere between Foster, Fisher and Clemens (which sounds like an architecture firm), emerged a framework informed by the socio-political events of the time alongside their parallels and precipitations in art and culture. Some I have already mentioned: 9/11 and the deaths of artists Blair Trethowan, and Mutlu Çerkez, but there is also many more: the Tampa Affair, the GFC, the Aceh Tsunami, the Arab Spring, Cronulla Riots, Germaine Greer’s Whitefella Jump Up, a “War on Terror,” the Biennale Protests, the London Riots, drones, Facebook, Twitter, Julian Assange and Collateral Murder; Wikileaks, Woomera and the Kyoto Protocol; the Mumbai Bombings, a Large Hadron Collider, and the Australian political bureaucratic coups: Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott.

The acceleration pf online communications, from mobile roaming to data downloads, blogging and more vlogging, re-brand - social media: Jonathan Nichols STAMM, Kate Smith’s Bethungra blog, ACW’s Speech and What Archive, Ja Ja Sphinx[13]. Considering the demise of Art + Text, we found Discipline, UN Magazine and Surpllus fighting a funding world of rapid “professionalisation,” arts workers, check boxes and validations for art.[14] The explosion of artist run spaces and new dealers (Uplands, Neon Parc and Sarah Scout) mirrored the emergence of arts managerial class, gentrification, grant writing, and “place-making”.[15]

As the city gentrified and rents increased, artist lead spaces vacated for the burbs, or factories for culture.[16] By the end of this decade Gertrude was moving to Preston, ACCAs NEW exhibitions promoted “new” art siphoned into a collection of solo shows housed in a kunsthalle each coming with their own catalogue essays, sans curatorial question, or even an attempt at examining art as its own symptom of something be it decay, dismay or dilemma.

You’ve walked in here under what I call the drunken ceiling, and perhaps many times over the last few months — the office ceiling grid, re-dressed with Perspex filled with bourbon and coke — the banality of commerce avoided by Mad Men and Wolves of Wall Street.[17] Shown at Murray White Room in 2008, and originally titled Low Expectations, this sculptural installation and iteration floods the foyer and presents to the streets a blacked out array of images — protests in Belfast or the  Neo-Nazi from the Netherlands demarcated behind that ‘X”. Elon Musk – any thoughts? A young Pat Foster has said of the work: “When you break a window there’s this really conscious decision and a conscious act. There’s something really nice about this unconscious body and the loss of control forming some kind of response to public space. Forms can come into existence through different means and different influences. The world is shaped through interaction in broad terms.”[18] Making present simultaneously architectural and social structures office aesthetics cum inebriated coping mechanisms,  Foster and Berean’s work re-created and re-staged here as ready-made-in-the-roof materially manifesting a composition of words not yet written by Brett Easton Ellis and all the images of excess relayed through media when wall street crashed in the same year. Sub-prime loans — Foster and Bereans re-collection calls to question our own hand in the making even if in apathy or Lower Expectations.[19]

The peripheral and feeder scene that grew around and helped establish Getrude included— squats and speak-easy’s, temporary holds and pop-ups: Hell Gallery, Open Archive, TCB, Conical, Y3K, Utopian Slumps, Rearview, Bus, Seventh, The Narrows and Techno Park, Joint Hassles, Dudespace.[20] The materiality of history is a density not a destiny. Prefunding, post funding, market lead, institutional frameworks — mentors, mentors, mentors — from abstraction to moral aversion, moral inflection and back again. Seemingly always begging, Please sir, may I have some more?[21]

Danielle Freakley’s iconic Quote Generator a 3-year project, a life-long commitment.[22] Learning hundreds of fragments of responses to respond to, what eventually is revealed, to be the small talk of our daily lives, be it at the exhibition openings on Getrude street at G street or on TV in shared viewing, our ABC and Denton’s enough rope – Yes, Optus 1998.[23] An impenetrability, a rupture in the illusion of intimacy and connection. A durational performance that made present the pleasure of our own cultural consumption, the cannibalism of capital as oral fixation — that’s right, Danny Boy, enjoy your Symptom, Salvoj Zizek, 1992.[24]  

I look at Sharon, Ian, Tracy, Mark and Brigid and think about Alexi, Amita and Emily.[25] I think about the more than 200 images on my collapsed wall thinking of Stephen Brahm.[26] I think about small groups and good intentions, deadlines, disasters and drama. The significance of Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man (2010) shown at Gerty but now at the TATE.[27] History Painters become sculptural installations, Nicholas Mangan’s Colony, Alex Martinis Roe’s Feminist round table, Alexi Glass, Justin Clemens, Helen Johnson and Antony Lowenstein, negating the representation of race, colonies and a history always already unspoken.[28] You at the pool in the party at that collectors house. Artists that exodus and expat, artists that go to and come back, home. The students who are now my peers and friends who could find some of themselves in Holly Childs Danklands, Azza Zein’s audible archive and composition carpet of an Arab Spring, Ezz Monem’s Coca Cola used in Tahir Square, less mute and maudlin than in the that ceiling! Fayen d’Evie’s star signs for dictators, Colleen Ahern’s disco ball at TCB refracting in paint all of us and all of her heroes, our heroes. Kate Just's knitted ovaries, Anna Higgins' Higgs Boson and yesterday’s meme expressing an apology from Switzerland for destroying the world revealing we lived in a parallel time and place was relatively reassuring.

Archives intersect with memory, artworks lost, remade and revoked. Mathew Griffins “Bounty” on Time Magazines Murdoch pre-dating a still yet to happen Royal Commission – to dispatch, is to kill off.

Thomas Ragnar’s review is a far better conjure.

A few months ago, when Ardi Gunawan was here, he handed me the Vincent Namatjira Royal Tour catalogue. A series of works by the Vincent where he inserts himself, a few dingoes and central Australian landscapes into the documented history of Royal visits to Australia. More correctly, he displaces the Royals, re-images them as visitors into his life, dismantling their appearance of power, humbling them. Vincent’s humanist, sloppy, satirical paintings, prints and collages make zombies of the royals, rendering their representation, through the apparatus of photography and its proof-of-purchase, mute in the language of his determined forms.

There is a through line between Namatjira and Gunawan, a critique and question to the images that dominate in a capitalism where excess melts into images enmasse via algorithms in our hands. Mark Fisher said Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker. A visceral image extrapolated by Fisher where flesh is converted into “dead labour” and the “zombies made are us”. (Fisher, 2009). Written in the aftermath of failed wars on terror, global economic collapse, Fishers remarks seem to precipitate also an always-already-never-ending-endism. Ardi’s puppets, are also just that.

Techno-newism masquerades as anecdote at best, revolution at worst, set to fail amidst a jungle of in distinguished and unspoken class realities. Gunawans puppets from this time melt into the realities of this present time —sickly sweet neo-nostalgia’s, looping a future predicted from the past into a past that is seemingly always present. Unattainable images and proposed resurrections, Gunawan’s dance between abstraction, absurdism and representation caught in pigmented plasma or fluffy fabric is a less a moral musing, more gifted observation. Your neo-liberal office as abject jelly roll sourced from stock-pot images, our art friends in a macabre make-over, we can’t seem to find their faces, over and over again, while the mundanity of the water cooler conversations breaks the datafication of our labour. Mike Kelley’s lumpenproletariat meets Beckett. 

Gunawan’s body shares that encounter – our bodies share that encounter, with mass en masse; tired infrastructures alongside a glistening new. A body politic in painting, in performance, in play were the liquid reality of false promises, the despair of pleasure in an excess of consumption. How and what does one speak when faced with the onslaught of livestreamed barbarism? While the immediacy of A.I satire drifts into algorithmic history. Is it Gunawan’s puppets that will sit with us for more than the moment, their empty eyes laughing at us while we cry?

All that is solid, melts in Jakarta. This text I stole from myself.

I probably should have just sat here smoking topless.

Yours, with relentless optimism.