This short exhibition draws together material from a recent project, Flags for a Trades Hall Council, exhibited as a two-part work split between the four roof-top flagpoles on top of the Victorian Trades Hall Council and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.
Flags for a Trades Hall Council was generated through a prolonged drawing process. Three charcoal drawings, based loosely on the face of Marat in David’s painting The Death of Marat, were reworked over several months, and photographed digitally at different stages of their reworking. These “states” provided images for a dozen different flags (of which four were displayed at Trades Hall).
This exhibition at Ocular Lab was conceived largely through what became increasingly central to the project: the parallels between the drawing process – a potentially endless elaboration of a single image – and the motion of the flags – an infinite reformulation of the flag’s image.
The development of the drawings came to focus on the movement of air in David’s painting. One of the titles used in French for David’s painting is Marat à son dernier soupir (“Marat at his last breath”), locating the painting at the very cusp of living and death. The drawing process began to evolve as an attempt to extend the way David’s painting suspends Marat’s last breath in the time of a painting.
The project came to be structured around the proliferation and elaboration of an image: the drawing process, the digital capture of different states of the drawing, the printing of the flags, the endless reformulation of the flag’s image by the wind.
This chain was partly a function of David’ painting. Even as the painting quickly disappeared from public view with the collapse of the French revolution, it was part of the painting’s political meaning that a massive number of variations on the image circulated as lithographs. (At the beginning of the project, I was able to look through the Chèvremont Marat Collection in the British Museum, an exhaustive collection of this largely ephemeral material).
The chain of proliferation in Flags for trades Hall Council also developed partly out of a longstanding interest in Soviet visual culture. Boris Groys’ 2003 exhibition, Dreamworld Communism, documented how hand-made paintings circulated as mass-reproduced large-scale propaganda in the Stalinist era in a way analogous to American advertising of the same period. The shifting between charcoal drawing and digital visual technologies in Flags for a Trades Hall Council was a related system.
The duration of the public work Flags for a Trades Hall Council was punctuated by several events which brought flags to media attention and in some way inflected the meaning of the work. As the flags were first installed at Trades Hall, riots in France prompted discussion about the meaning of the Tricolor, a flag oddly wedged between nationalism and internationalism. Australian flags were distributed through the racist crowd which assembled at Cronulla in January, and the men who committed racist violence were draped in the flag. (John Howard: “I would never condemn people for being proud of the Australian flag”). On November 14, Melbourne’s CBD was taken over by the biggest industrial rally in Australia’s history, the street awash with flags asserting a very different idea of collectivity and agency.
In the spirit of this context, this exhibition sets itself against Invasion Day. It sets itself against the Australian flag, but also the way the nationalist flag is recognised not looked at, its affirmative power.
TN January 2006
The photographs in this exhibition were taken by Christian Capurro and Tom Nicholson. The artist would like to thank: Clare Land, Christian Capurro, Alex Rizkalla, and the Lab, as well as the following people for their support in the realisation of the public project: Bridget Crone, Leigh Hubbard, Peter Marshall, Adam Bandt, Shelley Marshall, Andrew Patience, Daryl Cordell, Nathan Niven, Peter Marshall, Joanna Bosse, the Victorian Trades Hall Council Executive, Jacob Greck, Gary, Chris McAuliffe, Bala Starr.
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