Jitish Kallat and Julie Gough: AGWA and LWAG: Language and death
Jitish Kallat and Julie Gough: Language and death.
There are, among the incredible
things happening around the place, two shows that seem to demand to be written
about. The first, at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, is Julie Gough’s Collisions featuring her two works Observance and Bad language. The second is Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice II at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, as part
of the sacred and profane. The
relationships of both works struck me, while being subsidiary to each of their
qualities and interest, as important. They seem appropriate to be put in
relations through their mutual interest in language, colonialism, death and
memory. The two seemed relevant to each other, while obviously dealing with
vastly different contexts and marginalised and less marginalised voices.
Kallat’s installation is a vast
recasting of Mahatma Ghandi’s ‘salt march’ speech, in characters of bone, on bright
yellow shelves on a bright yellow wall. Julie Gough’s video is a recording of
eco-tourists in her ancestral homeland, recorded without their permission,
overlayed with Anglicisations of the last new words of her ancestral aboriginal
language, and their translations. Her screen-prints relate to the (abusive and
retaliatory) use of English against colonisers by the aboriginal people of
Tasmania – in reference to the 2007 headline of the Australian Newspaper:
‘aborigines must learn English’.
The words deployed in Gough’s video
work range from the mundane to the sinister, there are words such as ‘flour’,
but the video ends with the suggestive ‘gunpowder’ and ‘to hang by rope’. These
words, in their gradually darkening connotations, indicate the physical and
also linguistic violence inflicted upon aboriginal people throughout
Australia’s history – and also in a specific space and place. Meanwhile, the
video of the eco-tourists that plays beneath these words re-performs something
like the initial contact her ancestors had with white settlers – and speaks of
the continued antagonistic presence of white settlers in Australia, who still
travel through the landscape and invariably inflict themselves, through their
very footsteps, on Gough’s ancestral home. Gough speaks of the words that
overlay the video as being ‘the last new words of [her] people’, before
military action effectively killed off aboriginal people and culture in
Tasmania in a localised genocide. Even without the added poignancy of this contextual
knowledge, that many people in the audience – due to curricula and cultural
narratives that prioritise western histories – may not be aware of, the words
remain interpretable as being about the relationship between colonialism and
the production of a living language – with the deadly connotations that each
innovation in the language speaks of. In
this way, the work becomes both a testament to aboriginal cultural development
in the face of extreme colonial circumstances, particularly its ability and
strength to learn and adapt, and also a witness to the violence and aggression
of white invaders. The use of language forms and reforms the world, and Gough
draws attention to the violent destruction of the aboriginal world through the
adaptation of their language through colonialism.
Gough’s works – the video and
screen-prints – are especially interesting for developing a fluid understanding
of the powers of language as both oppression and resistance. The oppression of
language is well known: the classification of Aboriginal people as ‘fauna’ in
Australia allowed vast institutionalised injustice and murder to occur, and it
is the legal mechanisms of such language that allow this to occur (albeit a
definition fuelled by racist sentiment). This operates similarly to how the
reclassification of suicide in Guantanamo bay as ‘self inflicted injury
resulting in death’ led to a complete reduction of suicide rates. Yet Gough
allows us to see language as an adaptive force as well, and takes a position
that exposes the violence as evidenced in the production of new words, but one
that also permits a voice that is often unheard to speak to us from the past
and through the present. Australia is still making the law and language
regarding aboriginal people now – most recently with the ‘recognise’ campaign,
and the follow up, grass-roots support for a treaty instead. This context makes
Gough’s work particularly timely, and very interesting reading, on the
relationship of language to violence, and its relationship to the entitlement
of western tourists to her homeland.
I would also, in relation to this
work, draw attention to Maddie Leach’s work for Spaced 2: future recall, and its relationship to the still-undealt
with legacy of the Pinjarra Massacres here in Western Australia. That project
also looked at the very particular language of the plaque that stood as memorial
to the site, and the project that was politically silenced by local council forces.
New Zealand, from where Leach came from, could perhaps offer us some guidance –
with its own treaty already in place.
The screen-prints outside the video
work relate to the use of language in a colonial context as well – they are
taken from archives that show Aboriginal people using English to insult and
threaten and retaliate to their oppressors. This is presented beside the Australian’s headline ‘Aborigines must
learn English’. Perhaps we are, with NSW offering aboriginal languages as an
option to study, seeing a turn in the tide of sentiment towards aboriginal
languages – but which is, for many of these languages, much too late. Genocide
and forcible removal and relocation have effectively ripped many of languages
out at their roots. Yet against this, Gough presents the parallel history of
innovation and appropriation – having learnt English, aboriginal people
incorporate it with their own syntax and words, creating a hybrid form for
their expression. Language is revealed as something of a double-edged sword. It
can be used for unjust purposes, and often to oppress, but it bears no
allegiance, and can be developed upon, and used to fight this same injustice,
and to insult it. Yet Gough’s work secondarily gives us a vision of a voice
that is silenced not only politically, but also literally, by the necessity to
learn a second language to be heard. To have ‘justice’ in Australia, it seems
you have to speak the language of the powerful invaders. We can see this
sentiment still runs deeply. An example that somehow popped up on my Facebook
feed recently being Pauline Hanson’s somehow continued political career, and an advert that stated that 'you don't have to be white to be Australian... we only ask you learn to read and write english, respect our flag, abide by our laws and constitution and join in with the rest of us'.
Words fighting injustice provides
an appropriate place to move to Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice II. Ghandi’s words are transformed into a monumental
scale, and are cast of letters jointed to appear to be bones. The artificial
materiality is reminiscent of his other works that use the shape of burnt out
vehicles to create skeletal sculptures (the Aquasaurus
series). Like those works, the appearance of the bones here seems kitsch,
somewhat illustrative. The simplicity of its devices, however, leads it to some
success. The political motivations behind his work, coupled with its immensity
and strange honesty, allow them a space beyond looking like the design of a bad
tattoo. It is the particular speech and its context, though, which make these
works at all poignant. Kallat’s recasting of the language, particularly on such
a monumental scale, seems to position us to admire the magnitude of someone as
influential in world history as Ghandi, whilst undermining the idea that we can
live up to their ideals. Like most monuments, Kallat’s work seems to speak of
something that has passed. Having said
this, it is worth our time to read the texts of the past, written and spoken
language is there to allow us access to a cultural memory. Kallat’s gesture in
response to this is a challenging one – a suggestion that we have forgotten the
hopes of the past, and to remind us what they were. In the face of double-speaking
political rhetoric and a 24-hour news cycle, it is extremely helpful to witness
the wisdom of someone like Ghandi. Words coupled with acts can free us from our
present moment – and also free people from oppression.
What do we make of the fact that
it was said in English? That a colonial language was used as the weapon of the
deconstruction of colonialism? Is used for a fight against oppression? It is undoubtedly
part of this that both these works are presented in institutions where the
principle demographic is a Western, English speaking audience. There is also
another issue that I wanted to raise in relationship to Gough’s work, and the
role of video and cinema in colonialism, and its reappropriation by
marginalised groups. It is summarized in a fascinating conversation between Ava
DuVernay and Bradford Young for aperture, wherein Young states:
“[Film] is not like jazz or
hip-hop—art forms that started as expressions of dissonance and resistance.
Filmmaking isn’t part of our organic narrative as black people in America.
We’re asking people who were very much interested in making sure film
communicated white supremacist values, like the founding fathers of the film
experience—D. W. Griffith, Thomas Edison, these people who were very interested
in white supremacy—we’re asking the sort of grandchildren of those people to
allow us into the filmmaking experience with a whole counterpoint to why they
started it. You know what I mean? It didn’t start off as an art form of
resistance. Actually what you said earlier is the real purpose of why we do
this. It’s like trying to etch in real time our mind’s camera, our mind’s
image-making capacity. It generates images so that we can deal with life. So
the way I navigate it, I think, is that I’ve just got to stay focused on the
possibility that one day it could be completely turned over on its head and
transformed.”
This I have quoted at length as it
summarizes much more clearly the ideas that I reflect upon while watching
Gough’s work. This is an attempt to carve back a space – a space of resistance,
a space in the land, and a space in language and discourse. The use of the
particular form, and its representation to a predominantly privileged audience
is part of its mechanism. It is part of a mechanism towards transformation. To
transform law and language and form is something that can be done from outside
or inside, and this work, by operating inside institutional structures,
continues the work of transforming them. It is particularly poignant next to
the Berndt Museum’s Mowaljarlai: vision and voice : legacy of
a bush professor, where a small wall text repeats Mowaljarlai’s statement
that he is no longer the future nor the past, just the present. Gough’s works
could perhaps be seen as attempts to take back some of that time in a different
form.
Kittish’s work also aims at
transformation, yet it feels more retrospective and to compound its death in
its own bone-like form – it is finally a gesture that feels at odds with the
continued power Ghandi’s words can exert over us, though this dissonance is
crucial to the artwork’s eventual success. It does not have the urgency or
conceptually concise finalisation of Gough’s. It is too monumental and
ornamental in appearance. However, this work is important for its bold attempt
to bring the artful and potent language of Ghandi back into the realm of
visibility, and back into the realm of contemporary discourse. It reminds us
that the invoking of language from the past, of using its spectre, can be a
tool in the ongoing fight against injustice and oppression.
Hi Graham: I just went back to PICA to listen and look at your installation A Little More Love and Affection Please! Congratulations on your epic masterpiece. I unwound, relaxed, was lulled, awoken, amused and everything. Topped off with chops at Bivouac in William St (v highly recommend). Everyone from Kojonup should go and have a look. Great blog. Kind regards
ReplyDeleteEmily E-Warburton (last time I saw you was in high chair at Barrule and I was your parents' cleaner! I remember the pastel yellow bathroom tiles). Long live those digital leaves on Casuarina trees telling you their wisdom and stories.
Hi! Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, I'm afraid blogger didn't notify me of any comments - must have that function switched off! It's nice to hear from you, and I'm glad you enjoyed the work in PICA, it was a long time in the making... I hope you are well, and that the Casuarinas smile kindly on you too!
Deletehttp://gew-portfolio.blogspot.com.au/
ReplyDeleteHere is my brother's blog and mine is
http://emfarcise.blogspot.com.au/