Ex Libris Fisherarium

08/05/2017

An essay which contextualises the recent exhibition and publication 'The Museum of Dissensus' within a wider research context. It's included in RUNWAY Australian Experimental Arts issue #33 - POWER, along with some excellent articles by other writers. Available online at the link below.

The museum itself is increasingly a site of critique, dissent, activism and other artistic responses to social injustice. Beyond the visible hierarchies of state, corporate and institutional structures, artists and exhibition-makers must also engage with the entrenched cultures of the exhibitionary…

01/02/2017

Heres a link to a new book (published by SCA, launch details TBC), an extension of the exhibition 'The Museum of Dissensus' edited/curated by David Corbet (at the Fisher Library for a couple more weeks). It will be launched with a companion volume 'Ex Libris Fisherarium', edited/curated by Michael Goldberg, featuring all the exhibitions/artists who have participated between 1913-1916.

This is a midway PhD project – produced as part of an exhibition (also titled 'The Museum of Dissensus), part of a series ('Ex Libris Fisherarium') exploring intersections between plastic and literary art forms, curated by David Corbet at

17/10/2016

Guest curator/artist: David Corbet
Featured Artists: Shay Mazloom, Dadang Christanto, Clinton Nain, Jumaadi.

12 September - 16 December 2016.

'The Museum of Dissensus' is an itinerant curatorial platform which explores themes of trauma, loss, genocide and cultural erasure, as well as broader notions of protest and dissent, and the affective power of art and literature to challenge societal conventions of the unthinkable and unspeakable. The original impetus for this approach arose from thinking about the ways in which literature and academic discourse, in tandem with the display conventions of the museum, can be a vehicle of epistemicide – the effacement of cultural knowledge and memory.

As an extension of this Fisher Library iteration, 'The Museum of Dissensus' will also manifest as an artist/curator book, published in November/December 2016. This will feature some 40 artists worldwide, whose work engages with these themes in diverse ways. Among these artists are Shay Mazloom, Dadang Christanto, Clinton Nain and Jumaadi, some of whose works, drawn from the curator's personal collection, are contained in the vitrine on library entrance level 3.

The 'Ex Libris Fisherarium' project has been generously funded by The University of Sydney, Chancellor's Committee.

16/08/2016

1 August - 1 September 2016

Andrew Christie (Guest Curator):
'Forgetting Babylon'

This second iteration of Christie’s Babylon project continues with the use of collected library dust as its source of inspiration. Originating as Remembering Babylon at Waverley Library, born from a residency at Waverley Artist Studios, books were moulded and cast using only dust from the library archives and resin. Initially standing in place of the actual missing and stolen books from the collections, Forgetting Babylon expands on this practice and in addition literally takes a closer look at dust sourced from every corner of Fisher Library. From publications on psychology to poetry, business to biology, these dust particles from every level of the Fisher collection were taken to the university’s Sydney Microscopy and Microanalysis (SMM) department. Placed on carbon under a scanning electron microscope (SEM) the images produced provided the subjects to be reproduced as graphite drawings placed among others of everyday items found surrounding Fisher library such as a soda and sweetgum seeds. Commonality between the two sources suggests that beyond dust and detritus being tied to associations of banality and even death, they instead can invoke the vitality of past experience and excess. Where Remembering Babylon used this excess to bring lost knowledge back to life, Forgetting Babylon makes more ambiguous and playful connections with the everyday. In collaboration with Jack Stahel’s Inquisitive Nature these works constitute a collective endeavour which ultimately speaks to the importance of libraries as indispensible community spaces for social engagement critical thinking and creative exploration which should be nurtured in cohabitation with more recently adopted methods of learning and communicating.

Jack Stahel: 'Inquisitive Nature'

Humans often like to talk about what separates them from the rest of nature. Opposable thumbs, significant frontal lobes, mental symbols, abstract thought, the list is long. However there is nothing that separates humans more significantly than their simple tendency to label themselves as such. They use tools to figure these things out, to try and understand their environment and everything in it, and most importantly to understand themselves. In the process of attempting to understand their brains and minds, it is the tools that they use and the ways they use them that shapes the way they understand the information they retrieve in the process. Jack Stahel is a Sydney artist, and colloquially labels himself an ‘imaginary scientist.’ He is primarily interested in the different ways the human mind thinks about itself, and explores these ideas through modular installation and a variety of mediums. He believes the human mind to be both a first and final frontier of human exploration. It must be examined and experienced simultaneously, and answers are found at the intersections of scientific and personal experience, of tools and processes, of analysis and imagination.

21/06/2016

20 June - 20 July 2016

Alex GAWRONSKI
Jelena TELECKI

This exhibition consists of a series of 10 book titles removed from their original contexts. Each title was chosen for its uncanny or humorous connotations once removed from its wider context. Considered collectively, these titles suggest a type of quasi-Dadaist poetry whose combined effect hints at alternative critical, playful and/or possibly even pataphysical, readings. Graphically the original layout of each book title has been retained although now each has been rendered in watercolour as a ‘painting’. These works further reference the importance of text in contemporary art and artists as diverse as Ed Ruscha and Marcel Broodthaers. Accompanying these text works are figurative paintings by Jelena Telecki. These all respond to the book titles. Together the appropriated titles and their figurative interpretations, establish an open dialogue of fairly infinite suggestability. ‘Objects in the Mirror…’ (may be closer than they appear – as the warning goes) speaks of how texts and images continually interpolate one another while remaining fundamentally differentiated. The juxtaposition of text and image in this instance may be considered a type of improvisation that draws out the latent possibilities concealed behind the most ordinary words and the words that underlie the most stubbornly elusive representations.

30/04/2016

“Who needs a garden when you have a book! Your mind is your garden… tend it well”

1 May - 2 June 2016

Artists:
Helen Hyatt-Johnston
Sean Lowry
Kyle Jenkins

The exhibition is literally based on the form and content of the book – and in one case - The Book itself. Hyatt-Johnston, Lowry and Jenkins explore the book as an aesthetic, sculptural object and as a vehicle for exploring our complex relationship with this traditional source of knowledge in the digital era.

The artists have previously worked with books as objects. Kyle Jenkins has made cut out books using geometric shapes that initially appear deceptively simple but closer inspection reveals that they are painstakingly cut by hand. Sean Lowry continues his ongoing project on concealment and in this exhibition has reproduced a famous and influential book with the text barely visible. Helen Hyatt-Johnston works once again with the book’s capacity to harbour difficult and dangerous texts.

Helen Hyatt-Johnston’s "If you leave me can I come too", acknowledges her debt to popular culture, film and commodity culture as playgrounds for diverse identities and desires. She messes with that culture, teasing it and frustrating it with incredulity and insouciance. The work plays with a dark sexuality, cavorting in the space of possibility that self-lampooning humour allows.

Sean Lowry’s, “Jimee BS Balking (2016)”, an Artist Book presented in a series of 5 is typical of Lowry’s conceptually driven practice that employs strategies of concealed quotation, subliminal appropriation, erasure, remediation and intermedial expansion. He explores the outermost limits of recognition and specificity in the world of a creative work. “Jimee BS Balking (2016)” is the first in a series of ghostly versions of iconic books in which he seeks to implicate relationships between the material properties of books-as-objects with invisible functions of thought. Here, seemingly conspicuous absence coupled with the barest of paratextual information invites the viewer to look into and beyond physical materials or expectations of content to (potentially) experience uncertain feelings of familiarity.

Kyle Jenkins’ art practice has been concerned with aspects of conceptual based abstraction, which incorporates hard edge and organic abstraction. His shifting methodologies of mark making and spatial demarcation are situated within paintings, collages, photographs, objects, Maquette’s, books, films, wall paintings and works on paper. "Cut Out # 47, 48 & 49" aims to expand upon these aesthetic possibilities as a personalised structure of examination through simultaneity.

The Artists, Michael Goldberg and acknowledements to Jacqueline Milner for extracts on Helen Hyatt Johnston.

09/03/2016

7 March 2016 - 7 April 2016

Artist: Brad Buckley

Artist's Statement:

My works operate within an overarching schema entitled ‘The Slaughterhouse Project’, which 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 or political injustice.

Artists, irrespective of their art form, are in the main communicating vessels that can intuit the shape of things to come; things that often become established in our mainstream culture. This is not a radical proposition. Artists, thanks to their professional skills, poetic instincts and experimental, intuitive drive to locate an ‘elsewhere’, often function like buffalo scouts, with their ears to the ground so that they can hear which way the herd is heading. In other words, artists are, as the poet Ezra Pound has argued, the antennae of the human race. In keeping with this view of the artist’s role in society, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan also believed that art was an early warning system of sorts to old culture. Perhaps this is also true of today and is one of the key drivers of this project.

The Black Books (Are we not all the children of Abraham?) is the latest incarnation of my multi-dimensional and multi-sited ‘Slaughterhouse Project’, which incorporates twenty individual projects from 1990. Using the current date from the Gregorian calendar of 2016; now widely used for secular purposes across most societies regardless of political or religious persuasions. The date 2016 is then translated into 5776 the year in the Jewish calendar and into 1437, which is the year in the Islamic calendar. Each one of these different dates in these three calendars, signalling a moment of either transition or great change in that religion or belief system.

Each ‘date’ occupies one of the display cases in Fisher Library, standing as an abstract object and simultaneously, as a system that allows us to measure, categorise and identify the world in which we live.

Born in Sydney, Brad Buckley is an artist, activist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. He was educated at St Martin’s School of Art, London, and the Rhode Island School of Design (USA). His work, which operates at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility. His work has been exhibited internationally for over three decades.

He is also the editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas: Republicanism, Culture, Visual Arts (Pluto, 2001), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (NSCADU, 2009) and with Andy D**g and Conomos, Ecologies of Invention (SUP, 2013) and with Conomos, Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Libri, 2015).

04/11/2015

Era of surveillance
Persons of interest / ASIO
Artists: Katherine Moline and Glenn Wallace

ERA OF SURVEILLANCE/PERSONS OF INTEREST

2 November – 2 December 2015

Artists: Katherine Moline and Glenn Wallace

For over 40 years, Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) seized books that were deemed subversive in raids on the homes of people suspected of conspiracy. In recent years ASIO files documenting the activities of certain ‘Persons of Interest’ have been released. For this iteration of Ex Libris Fisherarium, ‘Era of Surveillance’ maps where confiscated texts are located in Fisher Library. Viewers are invited to explore the library as a space where art, architecture, politics, knowledge and power converge.

Each of the Fisherarium display cases addresses aspects of activities resulting from the production and distribution of so-called subversive texts. The display cases present ASIO evidence against a journalist suspected of communistic tendencies since 1935; family detritus and books that survived the raids on his family home; and news reports on Communism in Australia, ASIO surveillance and The Cold War (1947-1991). The display case on level 2, for example, includes the shooting down of passenger plane KAL 007 by the Soviet Union on 1 September 1983. This event that resonates with recent tensions is considered the trigger of heightened militiarization between the United States of America and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The display cases also present artists books (Persons of Interest, Book 1, 2 and 3) dedicated to these themes. In combination with installations in the abandoned phone booths in the library titled ‘Phone Tapping I’ and a series of strategically placed A-frame signs, ‘Era of Surveillance’ explores the institutional partitioning and control of knowledge. Together these works refer to conventions used in the production and distribution of books, including the internal order of books and the ordered collection and design of their display.

The exhibition considers attempts by governments to censor and control both knowledge and history, which contradicts the democratisation of knowledge achieved through the printing press, public libraries and educational institutions. In contrast to the policing of information by government and widening economic imperatives, the exhibition raises questions about the possibility of sustaining an equitable distribution of knowledge with new technologies, processes and practices that interrupt the seemingly natural order of libraries.

Since the 1960s artists have challenged the reduction of art to mere investment by producing inexpensive artists books and multiples that circulate outside the gallery system. Artists working in public spaces in the production of public art similarly challenge forms of subjectivity prescribed by economic rationalism. At the same time data mining and retention laws prompt artists to manipulate media identities and information data ecologies as forms of social and institutional critique.

‘Era of Surveillance’ asks whether artists are necessary agents in these current ecologies.

Is it still possible to envisage a place for artists’ practices and the production of critical texts, objects, spaces and situations within institutions? Can the construction of new knowledge and subjectivities result from pursuing certain lines of enquiry in uncertain times? And further, can the library be considered as a space that supports the interventions of artists when it is often seen as a space that reinforces the prevailing social order?

Through the detours afforded by exploring library space, ‘Era of Surveillance’ suggests that despite the apparent sense of order, the library is a critical space, one that evokes the current impacts of an expanding culture of control and the (im)possibility of its resistance.

Artists' Bios

Dr. Katherine Moline explores the cross-overs between avant-gardism in visual art and contemporary experimental design. Her particular interests are how experimental design reformulates strategies of historic artistic avant-gardes and the social pacts of design. Katherine’s work investigates how design processes and technologies can be diverted to the production of experiential and conceptual interactions. Current projects include curating critical practices of research methodologies in art and design, a series of experimental workshops on social practices with mobile phones, and a number of ongoing systems artworks. Her artwork is represented by Yuill Crowley Gallery.

Glenn Wallace is a public art project manager at the City of Sydney Council. Since 2004 he has played a key role in developing the City's long term Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision and City Art public art strategy. He has delivered a range of projects including the annual Laneway Art program (2008-2012) and is currently working on the Eora Journey with Hetti Perkins. Glenn is a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, and research assistant for the Space, Place and Country research cluster, where his research responds to calls from political philosophy, sociology and urban design for artists working in public space to not only influence the design of cities but to engage in transforming the political and cultural capacities of citizens.

This project has been assisted by funding from The University of Sydney Chancellor's Committee.

03/11/2015

ERA OF SURVEILLANCE/PERSONS OF INTEREST

2 November – 2 December 2015

Artists: Katherine Moline and Glenn Wallace

For over 40 years, Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) seized books that were deemed subversive in raids on the homes of people suspected of conspiracy. In recent years ASIO files documenting the activities of certain ‘Persons of Interest’ have been released. For this iteration of Ex Libris Fisherarium, ‘Era of Surveillance’ maps where confiscated texts are located in Fisher Library. Viewers are invited to explore the library as a space where art, architecture, politics, knowledge and power converge.

Each of the Fisherarium display cases addresses aspects of activities resulting from the production and distribution of so-called subversive texts. The display cases present ASIO evidence against a journalist suspected of communistic tendencies since 1935; family detritus and books that survived the raids on his family home; and news reports on Communism in Australia, ASIO surveillance and The Cold War (1947-1991). The display case on level 2, for example, includes the shooting down of passenger plane KAL 007 by the Soviet Union on 1 September 1983. This event that resonates with recent tensions is considered the trigger of heightened militiarization between the United States of America and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The display cases also present artists books (Persons of Interest, Book 1, 2 and 3) dedicated to these themes. In combination with installations in the abandoned phone booths in the library titled ‘Phone Tapping I’ and a series of strategically placed A-frame signs, ‘Era of Surveillance’ explores the institutional partitioning and control of knowledge. Together these works refer to conventions used in the production and distribution of books, including the internal order of books and the ordered collection and design of their display.

The exhibition considers attempts by governments to censor and control both knowledge and history, which contradicts the democratisation of knowledge achieved through the printing press, public libraries and educational institutions. In contrast to the policing of information by government and widening economic imperatives, the exhibition raises questions about the possibility of sustaining an equitable distribution of knowledge with new technologies, processes and practices that interrupt the seemingly natural order of libraries.

Since the 1960s artists have challenged the reduction of art to mere investment by producing inexpensive artists books and multiples that circulate outside the gallery system. Artists working in public spaces in the production of public art similarly challenge forms of subjectivity prescribed by economic rationalism. At the same time data mining and retention laws prompt artists to manipulate media identities and information data ecologies as forms of social and institutional critique.

‘Era of Surveillance’ asks whether artists are necessary agents in these current ecologies.

Is it still possible to envisage a place for artists’ practices and the production of critical texts, objects, spaces and situations within institutions? Can the construction of new knowledge and subjectivities result from pursuing certain lines of enquiry in uncertain times? And further, can the library be considered as a space that supports the interventions of artists when it is often seen as a space that reinforces the prevailing social order?

Through the detours afforded by exploring library space, ‘Era of Surveillance’ suggests that despite the apparent sense of order, the library is a critical space, one that evokes the current impacts of an expanding culture of control and the (im)possibility of its resistance.

Artists' Bios

Dr. Katherine Moline explores the cross-overs between avant-gardism in visual art and contemporary experimental design. Her particular interests are how experimental design reformulates strategies of historic artistic avant-gardes and the social pacts of design. Katherine’s work investigates how design processes and technologies can be diverted to the production of experiential and conceptual interactions. Current projects include curating critical practices of research methodologies in art and design, a series of experimental workshops on social practices with mobile phones, and a number of ongoing systems artworks. Her artwork is represented by Yuill Crowley Gallery.

Glenn Wallace is a public art project manager at the City of Sydney Council. Since 2004 he has played a key role in developing the City's long term Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision and City Art public art strategy. He has delivered a range of projects including the annual Laneway Art program (2008-2012) and is currently working on the Eora Journey with Hetti Perkins. Glenn is a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, and research assistant for the Space, Place and Country research cluster, where his research responds to calls from political philosophy, sociology and urban design for artists working in public space to not only influence the design of cities but to engage in transforming the political and cultural capacities of citizens.

This project has been assisted by funding from The University of Sydney Chancellor's Committee.

25/09/2015

22 SEPTEMBER – 29 OCTOBER 2015

Artist: David Corbet

This exhibition is inspired by my adventures in the worlds of hispanic literature, poetry, song and art-making. Drawing from diverse sources, it is a personal homage to the vitality and richness of the worldwide cultures expressed and celebrated predominantly in the Spanish language – la lengua española. From the poetry of Octavio Paz to the work of the Catalan printmaker Antoni Tàpies; from fairground stalls to the shrines of rural Mexico; from the writings and drawings of Federico Garcia Lorca to the luminous novels of Isabel Allende; from the installations of Bestabeé Romero to the prints of her Jose Gualalupe Posada; from the songs of the late Celia Cruz to the Cuban Reggaeton rhythms of Eddie K; from memory to found object to archive; from personal mythologies to the museum-without-walls; from the everyday to the sublime.

Such an assemblage constitutes, in a sense, a series of indices or, in a library context, codices. Among the random we seek order and likeness, we may find seriality and continuity of meaning. My studio practice and research into language systems has pursued this notion of seriality, subtitling an earlier exhibition ‘Ontologies for a small planet’. Among these disparate references my own studio work is interspersed, largely on paper, ranging from etchings and drawings to notebooks and notations. They have an oblique, even random, relationship with the objects and texts around them, and they are phenomenological, not logical, in genesis and ex*****on. The exhibition is made up of three parts:

level 1
"Entre irse y quedarse"
(English: "Between going and staying")This display is inspired by the text of a poem by the late Mexican Nobel Laureate Ocavio Paz, and the late Catalan printmaker Antoni Tàpies. It is includes works on paper and board, notebooks, printed books, found objects and ephemera.

level 2
"Las vidas de otros"
(English: "The lives of others")This display is a collection of works, books and objects obliquely exploring our human power relationship with animals, through ontologies of classification, patterning and adornment. Our hair, or ‘pelts’, are one of the attributes we have in common with many other terrestrial mammals, and are a signifier of our wildness. The Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig wrote: “Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalisation binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage. . . . Wildness is the death space of signification.” (in Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man: a study in terror and healing 1986, University of Chicago Press.

level 3
"La lotería de la existencia"
(English: "The lottery of existence")This display celebrates ontologies of chance, of religion and mysticism, and of altar-making. It explores how objects can become imbued with ritualised power through their organisation, and transformations of meaning brought about by context. Notebooks, found objects, drawings and paper flowers are brought together in a kind of Vitrina de curiosidades, interspersed with literary and other references, including the great Mexican printmakers José Guadalupe Posada and Francisco Toledo.

This project has been assisted by funding from The University of Sydney Chancellor's Committee.

14/08/2015

The fool dʌθ bounce, the speculator dʌθ fall and the esopterodactyl?

NICHOLAS DOREY, SHANE HASEMAN, RICHARD KEAN

14 August – 17 September 2015

Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you knew what they were saying was objectively interesting but you couldn't for the life of you figure out what on earth they were talking about?

Art often creates languages which preclude the uninitiated. This could be called Art for it's own sake or even intellectual terrorism if you’re prone to hyperbole. But Art's role is not to polish society’s low hanging fruit. It is to cut down the fruit forest to build a synthetic fruit scent mausoleum for the fruit, which was once everyone’s, and now belongs to a rich old white man in order for him to prove how rich he is through the acquisition of something inherently worthless. Makes sense? No? Good!
All three artists have a tendency to confound, not through their disregard or contempt for a populist audience but simply by the fact that they have very particular interests. This befuddlement will no doubt continue in these small glass cabinets.

In his DIMENSIONAL POETICS, Richard is matter doodling like Pythagoras with the intersections of Fibonacci number theory through the design process of electro magnetic coils and energy recycling gliders.

Nick will cobble together something in POISONS ON THE PEOPLE'S PATH (PPP), which seems vaguely mystical if not a little smug and overly esoteric, and Shane will round it out with something equally perplexing and erudite but in a cheeky and delightful suede patches on the elbows kind of way.

Shane's ET IN ARCADIA ERGO came about through happenstance, or so he says: "I stumbled on a reproduction of Giovanni Barbieri’s original ‘Arcadia’ painting in a book I was about to turf, which in turn started me thinking about the better known Poussin version. (I kept the book, as it turns out). Anyway, as you no doubt know, Arcadia is an actual place in Greece that came to be celebrated in Classical Antiquity (and subsequently idealised throughout art history) for its natural fecundity, which coalesces in a beautiful and unified whole. Arcadia is often evoked, too, as an ideal in Renaissance mythology and painting; a kind of short hand for an Edenic life in harmonious balance with the wild differences in nature. Yet, as Barbieri and Poussin remind us in their memento mori paintings, even in Eden must come death. Poussin evokes this best, counterbalancing his Arcadia with a circle of figures standing around a tomb or grave, pointing at an engraving that reads: et in arcadia ego (even in Arcadia there I am)".

Shane, Richard and Nick are all bona fide artists with real university degrees who do real Art things all the time but more importantly they are good people and isn't that what really matters?

Nicholas Dorey, Shane Haseman, Michael Goldberg
August 2015

This project has been assisted by funding from The University of Sydney Chancellor's Committee.