Exhibition Catalogue

The published exhibition catalogue includes the following essays:

Ruth Fazakerley, "Confessions" (pages 7-9)
&
Divya Tolia-Kelly "Liquid Emotion & Transcultural Art" (pages 11-16)

The Spill catalogue is now available here (pdf, 1.2 mb)

Exhibition images

Selected images from the exhibition can be seen here.

Invititation: exhibition and events

Spill
Ruth Fazakerley & Agnieszka Golda
9 October - 2 November 2007

SASA Gallery
University of South Australia, City West Campus
Kaurna Building (K), Level 2
Cnr Fenn Place and Hindley Street Adelaide

Exhibition launch: 6pm, Wednesday 10 October 2007

Exhibition floor talk: 5pm, Wednesday 10 October 2007
A public talk in the gallery with the artists and visiting international scholar, Dr Divya Tolia-Kelly, University of Durham; prior to the exhibition launch.

Public seminar: 2pm (time TBC), Friday 12 October 2007
Room H6-12, Hawke Building
University of SA, City West Campus
Dr Divya Tolia-Kelly presents a public seminar in conjunction with the Cultures of the Body Research Group (School of Communication) and the SASA Gallery.

The exhibition invitation is available here.
More information about the SASA gallery can be found here.

Blue

Hope: A Moving Image
8 to 19 August 2007
191 Gouger Street, Adelaide
and Arts SA windows, 110 Hindley St, Adelaide

Hope: A Moving Image is an opportunity to experience the work of several well known emerging artists expressed in the medium of ‘film’. While familiar to the viewer, film is a medium unfamiliar to the practices of most of the exhibiting artists.

The artists selected to explore moving image in Hope: A Moving Image are:
Prathna Biswas \ Susan Bruce \ Reuben Duffy \ Peter Dyson \ Ruth Fazakerley \ Agnieszka Golda \ Anja Jagsch \ Scott James \ Lorelei Siegloff \ Ryan Sims \ Scott Taylor

Hope: A Moving Image is supported by the Helpmann Academy and Rob Ellis of Local Tech Services has provided the projection screens. The exhibition is part of the SALA Festival Moving Image Project.

Our contribution, the 3 minute video Blue, makes use of text, colour and repetition to bring together something of the affectual economies of both Australian and Polish rituals of renewal associated with domestic house painting!

Pictures & Tears

James Elkins 2001, Pictures & Tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings, Routledge, London.

If modernist and postmodernist paintings are about the act of painting or the artist’s own engagement with painting – ironic, circumspect, intellectual – as Elkin’s remarks, they are not subjects calculated to draw tears.

In contrast, Elkins comments upon the eighteenth century fashion for crying; a mode of being in the world that seems to have had its day.

An ‘epidemic’ of crying spread through Europe, he suggests, in parallel with the development of the novel:

readers cried because Rousseau’s characters were simple, because they were pure, and because they were happy. They wept delighted tears, jubilant tears, gentle tears, and rapturous tears … Soon the weeping spread from novels to theater and from theater to daily life … Tears were just part of the full response that any sensitive person should feel. (p 121)

Tears were wept with judgement and tempered passions. This was a regulated economy of emotions – and texts, performances and artworks were expected to yield a measurable quotient of weeping, neither too much nor too little, requiring careful staging on the part of the author or playwright.

‘It is no accident’, Elkins writes:

that the eighteenth century is also the beginning of the theory of acting. Diderot and Voltaire both speculated on whether actresses should cry outright, or feign their emotions. Some might elicit pity, or even disgust. Crying had to be projected, sent out to the audience and not just released. (p 123)

The rhetoric of tears, the codes of emotional communication, have altered drastically since then. Although it’s not hard to find their trace in contemporary film genres, or in the sets of rules given to authors of contemporary mass-produced romance novels, Elkins suggests we are wary of being manipulated and resent trickery. Dry-eyed and well-controlled, ‘stoked with irony’ and ‘banked with lucidity’, we no longer know how to cry moderate tears, permitting ourselves only ‘slim rations of pleasure’ and forbidding‘genuine transport’ or feeling. (p129)

the title - spill?

Agnieszka's thoughts on the Maria Magdalena i Pieta are really helpful in making me think again about the exhibition title Spill. We were initially playing with the imperative embedded in speaking the word - the active injunction to perform - to spill one's guts, to tell, reveal, divulge, leak, ooze... At the same time, involvement in a physical spill (handwept glass onto the floor) generates another kind of involuntary, adrenal response. Both senses of the word evoking liquid, fluid metaphors - something difficult to bind or contain; escaping at the edges.

In Agnieszka's words the Magdalena is linked to 'the generation of collective affective practices of resurrection (of which most notable is absolving) and ascension (of which most significant is the reunion)'. This brings me back to the sense of Spill as confession, which is in part about reconciling an interior, personal experience with an exterior, collective one; a personal and community absolution, bringing experience (and affect) into the realm of the shared and agreed upon...

The context of confession then is a useful one for thinking about what we have been calling 'scale' in relation to affect: the relationship between personal, embodied experience and broader social, political understandings or productions of affect.

Jill Greenberg's images of crying children, referred to by Agnieszka, are another useful example here, in pointing to the artist's mistake of assuming to know the dominant (or seemingly universal) affect to be generated in the viewer by the image of the crying child. The unease caused by Greenberg's photographs point instead to the multiple registers of distress these images provoked, and that knowledges of the 'child' are deeply imbricated with other discourses concerning a fear of being seen to feel - to take pleasure or other benefit - from children (exploited or otherwise). These involve too the well-circulated media anxieties concerning child pornography and the role of technology in allowing disguise or distancing of the realities of (especially child) exploitation. The point then, I think, is to keep thinking about the (inextricable) connections of bodily, perceptual response and other social, cultural and historical layerings of difference.

Sw. Maria Magdalena i Pieta

Fascinating…, the word, a pietà is a statue or other art showing the Virgin Mary, a mother overwhelmed by love and grief at the unjust death of her son. A pietà is an artwork explicitly depicting The Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ. It is a particular form of the devotional affective practices/traditions known as the theme of Our Lady of Sorrows. The use of affective practices within the Polish folklore culture is interesting enough, but this is not the mother in sorrow, is it the lover, devoted disciple, wife, prostitute? It is Mary Magdalene, the controversial identity within the Roman Catholic faith and the subject of ongoing debate. Fascinating…