Specific Gravity at MOANA project space: David and Andrew Wood
Map of the night sky from Marilinga Ground Zero, one second before impact.
by Graham Mathwin
by Graham Mathwin
There are histories that collide with the present in strange
ways. The unpredictability of the world is neatly theorised, but impossible to
overcome, to do anything about. We wander indeterminately through time, each
choice enacting a thorough madness. The image of the world after determinism is
one without the simple happiness of knowing that things will turn out all
right, but it is also a world where we have choice. The irrevocability of these
choices, and their unintended results, are always around us.
The Wood brothers investigate the cosmological
and the grandly historical from a peripatetic and circuitous position in their
work. Histories and anecdotal stories, mythic in their
proportion, often focused on the desert landscape, are bound up with the knowledge of their often-tragic passage. Their
work in this exhibition, ‘Specific Gravity’, consists of a charcoal drawing
with text, and a tower with a wreath of electric lights (a tower that apparently
can be carried on one’s back) in reference to the testing of a nuclear bomb in
Maralinga. In a sad elegy to some of the less savoury choices that inform the
world we live in, it presents a re-presentation, or a recreation, of the
position of the stars one second before the detonation of the bomb that
devastated the environment and sickened and later killed many soldiers (guinea pigs) and
aboriginal people in the vicinity. This reciprocal tower, a small reminder to
devastation, is vast for its imaginary scope. It is an attempt to reclaim
something inside a state of grace. The work is an apt memorial.
It feels totally inadequate to grasp its goal - as it
probably should - a frail, metal structure, and a scratched charcoal drawing,
the wires and insubstantial machinations of its construction, cannot turn back
time. The ‘map back’ to one second before the explosion will only ever be a map.
The slightness of the construction replicates the delicate conceptualization, a
tenuous attempt to recapture a moment before everything went to shit. Its
delicacy is not a problem, but rather like straightening the wings of a crushed
insect, or an attempt to bring a dragonfly back from the dead, is more
effective than any vast, impersonal monument. The nature of memory, especially
such dangerous and culturally important memories as this, is very much like the
collection of fragments that make up this work – constituted into a replica of
the tower and the night sky above it. Its inadequacy, or perhaps its futility,
seems totally appropriate.
There is seemingly always a focus on the performative
quality of the nuclear bomb. Kubrik’s end to Dr. Stangelove is perhaps the most well known, where a montage of
explosions play out to the tune of Vera Lynn’s ‘we’ll meet again’, it is also in
Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Katsuhiro
Otomo’s Akira. The quiet nature of
this assembly stands in contrast to the spectacle of the bomb, to its
theatrical gesture. It is possessed of the same feeling before the movie begins
in cinemas, or the play in theatres, and the lights dim. It feels very much
like an honest attempt to go back, and hold that moment in perpetuity, hold it
against the inevitability that it has already happened. There is a kind of
naïve hope that things will be okay, but also a hopeless acknowledgement that
things are definitely not.
The materials – charcoal; metal; bare, incandescent bulbs –
are not raw, but certainly not overworked. The construction of a frame-like
tower is only practical, and here it is a mimesis of that pragmatism. The
wreath of lights, their wires visible, is no attempt to improve on aesthetics.
The charcoal, perhaps the ‘rawest’ material, does not seem out of place – but
the text and the diagram move beyond this materiality, and explain and express
much more of the work’s poetry. (A digression: The entire exhibition seems
vaguely analogue, strangely romantic in its use of material: charcoal (in two
works), salt, earth, and slide projectors, overhead projectors, and
incandescent bulbs. The artists seem to be searching the ‘outback’ of both
Australia and the solar system, but from a position in time as well – it is as
if they had gone several decades backwards, in order to go forwards [like Daft
Punk]. I’m reluctant to describe it as a ‘return to materiality’ but there is a
significant presence of the analogue here. Why is this the case? There is
acknowledgement of the present, there is also acknowledgement of the digital, (the
media of Hull’s work, but explicitly as subject in Finn, Doherty and
Hamilton’s) but the choice to look at these media is a beguiling move. Why
emphasise the physicality of things in the digital age? Is it a concern for the
past, its materiality? To what might be lost in the translation? I think that
the artists are attempting to understand our relationship to the past, and the
physical environment, by using the very matter of these things. The analogue
media is not a romanticisation of the past so much as an attempt to gain access
to it. Perhaps these works do not express nostalgia for the past as try to
evoke it). The Woods’ use of materials is also happily not ostentatious. It feels
like the meeting of Joseph Beuys and Felix Gonzalez Torres, a strange mixture
of material animism and intelligent, poetic hope.
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