Currently reading: Gillian Whiteley – JUNK: Art and the Politics of Trash (Part 5)
Chapter 5: Accumulations, Panoplies and le Quotidien
In the chapter section French Practice and the Transfigurations of Everyday Mess (p.104), Whiteley quotes Michael de Certeau from Walking in the City in Practices of Everyday Life (1984): “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris …[…]… Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning. It is slave-order.”
In New Realism and le Quotidien (p.109) Whitely discusses the Nouveau Réalisme movement founded in Paris on 27 October 1960 based on manifesto by French critic and theorist Pierre Restany. Original members were Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse, Jacques de la Villeglé and Daniel Spoerri, led by Yves Klein. The movement later attracted César, Christo, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Gérard Descmps and Mimmo Rotella. Many of these artists were represented in The Art of Assemblage (1961). Restany’s 1960 manifesto focussed the need to engage ‘sociologically’ through artistic practice. (p.112)
“Michael Cone argues that the Nouveaux Réalistes rehabilitates the byproducts, the indigestible leftovers of the sociéte consummation towards aesthetic ends.” (p.110)
“I want to proffer a reading of these works which goes beyond narratives of their enactment of consumerist critique and reaches towards two possibilities: their restoration of a philosophy of praxis through the ‘political charge’ of the everyday and also the potential for their encompassing of everyday things.” (p.111)
In the chapter section Everyday Poubelles, Whiteley comments “The urge to acquire a totality of things, as Baudrillard noted, not only reminds as of our existence in the world, but also highlights the futility of such a task and, ultimately, forces us to reflect on our mortality.” (p.113)
“The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life… Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded on lack.” Jean Baudrillard – The System of Objects (1968) pp.223-4
Chapter 6: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Collisions: The Annandale Imitation Realists and Australian Modernism
This chapter focusses on the Annandale Imitation Realists founded in 1962 in Sydney by Mike Brown, Colin Lanceley and Ross Crothall with an artist practice of dissent. “We have discarded orthodox formulas” – Crothall.
Whiteley notes: Robert Hughes argues that if articulated a common theme of anti consumerism and saw it as being ‘in some kind of continuum’ with neo-Dada and Pop. “All these movements stem from a love-hate relationship with the materials, especially materials of our age. A society symbolises itself as much by what it throws awat as what it keeps; so that the junkster artist assiduously gathers the rubbish a d confronts us with it again, assembled in a new form but relying on the pariah-like associations of its original materials.” – review in The Nation, 16 June 1962. (p.123)
Whiteley notes that few artists were working in the assemblage idiom in Australia before 1906 except Robert Kippel and Barry Humphries. (p.129)
Richard Haese (p.131): “Roped together as a n oxymoron, Imitation Realism embodies a deliberate paradox and was intended, Dad fashion, as a repudiation of normal logic and conventional expectation.” Brought to Light: Australian Art, 1998.
On their choice of shared living accommodation in Annandale; Haese describes as; “somewhat run-down Victorian architectural base overlaid with the disorderliness of light industrial activity and the polygot results of postwar immigration.” The multicultural character appealed as Brown described as a ‘cultural stew’. (p.132)
On their asserted naïve position, Whitely notes: “An AIR statement stressed their isolation from the rest of the art world and guarded their outsider status.” Hughes argue it had more to do with ‘folk art’ than with the high tradition of modernism. (p.135)
“Craft traditions merged with contemporary consumerism.” (p.137). “For Mike Brown, ‘trash’ was both medium and ethos.” (p.142)
Other artists that Whiteley references include: Gikmai Kindun, Benny More, Rosalie Gascogine, Donna Marcus, Elizabeth Gower, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Tim Risley, Loraine Connelly-Northey, Ash Keating.
