Treatment (Fleming Street), marks a shift in my practice. This work was created for the 2022 Cementa Festival. It was the first Expanded Synthesis installation. The first work that I’ve made specifically for a space that is not a gallery. The first time that I’ve shown work that comes from applying the knowledge that I’ve gained building drawing machines to the creation of kinetic sculpture.
The installation included a swing set, a parabolic arc, parabolic mirrors, spotlights, acoustic foam, and sound coming from synthesizer modules, one of which was also driving a servo motor that moved the main sculptural element in the space.
The week before I went to Kandos to install this work I sent out a newsletter (subscribe!) to invite people to the festival.
I’ve been meaning to write something on mysticism and art. I wanted my first email for this newly minted list to be something other than an exhibition invite. I’ve thought quite a lot about it. Even wrote the first sentence
The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths…is the title and text of a neon work by Bruce Nauman. In this essay I will…
Yeah, nah not an essay. But I was gonna write about how we can think of mysticism from the point of view of both practitioner and audience. I was gonna write about how mystical art can be defined as art that creates extraordinary experiences or states of mind, about how mystical art might be a form of contemplative practice that fosters an appreciation of profound mysteries. I was gonna write about synthesizers and psychedelics, Gregorian chants, algorithmic mysticism, and zen painting. Then I thought “this is gonna be a long email, maybe it is an essay, or a book”, then I thought “shit Cementa 22 is nearly here, my first email is gonna have to be an exhibition invite”.
Me, from my freakin’ email invite to the Cementa Festival
This isn’t that essay, or that book, but I have been thinking more about this since I sent out that email.
I recently helped my collaborator Bernie Durnheim create this video on synth mysticism. In the video Bernie talks about how we can use synthesizers to explore unknown sounds, and the unknown in our relationship to the spaces we inhabit, and to the life, entities, and energies around us. The synthesizer is a compelling instrument for mystical art practice because of its modularity and the way that analog voltages allow it to interface directly with different sensors, energies, and outputs.
We can also configure the synthesizer so that it plays itself, configurations in which the patch comes alive and unfolds with its own logic. All that’s left to do is sit back and listen. This is synthesis as a contemplative practice. Contemplation has a lot to do with mysticism.
Mike Nelson
The Fleming Street location with its histories and residues, was a significant part of my work for Cementa 22. Installing work in this space was an opportunity to put in practice what I have learnt from my experiences with the work of Mike Nelson. In October/November 2001 I saw Nelson’s Turner Prize work The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent. Around a year later I saw his work for the 2002 Sydney Biennale. These works made a big impact on me.
Nelson works with recycled materials and the traces left in the non-gallery spaces where he installs his work. The artifice of Nelson’s constructions and interventions in space meet the histories embedded in the materials and spaces themselves in a way that creates confusion between what the artist has done and what was already there in the material or space.
This confusion between the constructed and found, the deliberate and the accidental, creates a kind of true fiction in which we are simultaneously aware of the constructed aspects of our experience and yet we are also somehow required to make sense of the space that is presented to us, to read its traces, to sense its history. There is no simple resolution to our desire to make sense of Nelson’s installations and this lack of resolution is a significant part of their affective force.
As you can see in the video documentation of Treatment (Fleming Street) there was quite a lot in the space before I installed the elements listed above. A new kitchen had been installed relatively recently, but the old kitchen cupboards and sink were still there. Long runners of couch grass from the front lawn were growing under the door and into the space, heading for the light of the front window. Grass clippings, dirt and dust covered the concrete floor. Purple paint was peeling from door door frame.
The install involved figuring out how to treat what was already there and how those elements would sit in relation to what I was bringing into the space. I had four days for the install. Having this amount of time meant that I could place an element then pause to reflect on where the next piece needed to go. The fact that I didn’t feel time pressure allowed me to relax in a way that was more conducive to finding better solutions.
The installation of the work became a contemplative practice. This was true of the way I placed elements in the space, and the way I built the synth patch that you hear throughout the video. Contemplation in this context is a kind of multi-sensory listening. An openness to suggestions that come from the space and everything in and around it. This practice is mystical to the degree that we don’t try to account for all of the decisions we make.
Some decisions are the result of conscious thought, others decided through a process that I can never know completely. Obviously, intuition plays a significant role in art. Intuition combined with contemplation involves noticing how the unknown forces in decision making work. In this way we might feel our intuitions more deeply and notice how solutions to problems that we have grappled with consciously, can come to us effortlessly when our attention is not directed at the problem but is instead part of a larger awareness of what we feel, hear and see.
This contemplation leads us to deeper place where what remains unknowable or uncertain can affect us deeply. The decisions that come out of contemplative practice are connected to this deep affect. Or, to put that another way, deep contemplation can lead us through a series of decisions to art that produces deep contemplation in the viewer.
My ambition in this installation was in the number of elements and moving parts that were in play (parts that were literally moving for the duration of the festival). The rougher edges of what I brought into the space could have been smoothed if I was working with fewer elements. I made a judgment that the elements would add up to something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and that the slightly ad hoc aspects of the install would speak to the rougher edges of the space and what was there before I arrived. I also wanted the installation to feel a bit like a studio, a space where the artist was figuring stuff out.
This brings me back to Mike Nelson’s work. This installation was part fiction. My intentions and actions in the space blurred with the traces left by those who had been there previously. I had people comment on my placement of things that were already there and that I hadn’t touched. I loved these comments because they suggested to me that my own actions and intentions had blended with the actions of others to create a fictional persona, the artist figuring stuff out, the artist who deliberately placed all of the main elements that people experienced in the space.
I love the uncertainties that come with these slightly displaced personas, personas that have a lot in common with the artist but who also have the freedom that comes from being a fictional entity. This is something that I learned from Roberto Bolaño. There is a character in his fiction called Arturo Belano, who is very similar in his life experiences to Bolaño. Some people might ask the degree to which Belano is actually Bolaño. I don’t care for this question. I think it misses both the point and the power of fiction. Fiction is a construct that can deliver the full affective force of uncertainty, the unresolved, the unknown and the unknowable. It is one way of working at the nexus of art, contemplation, mysticism.
This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
