In September last year thirty people gathered in a disused corner milk bar in West Brunswick, a suburb in Melbourne’s inner north. The gathering was a forum, jointly organised by the South Project and Ocular Lab, the collective of artists who use the milk bar building as a gallery space. The forum brought together artist collectives from across the southern hemisphere, including three from around Victoria, as well as perspectives from Chile, South Africa, and Indonesia. A visitor, walking in off that quiet suburban street in West Brunswick and into the gallery space, would have been struck by the curious shape of the gathering. All 30 people were crowded into one end of the room; the centre of the room was occupied by a massive black half cube, leaning against the wall.
That black half cube, built from sheets of mdf and painted with matte black paint, was created by Raafat Ishak, part of his exhibition at Ocular Lab, Apparition of a miserable acquaintance. The exhibition and the forum were only coincidentally related, though each amplified the subject of the other in a curious fashion. The forum centred on the artist collective: Why are collectives necessary? What forms of circulation or economy do they produce? What is the relationship between collectives of the past, their political aims and symbolic structures, and contemporary collectives? Ishak’s half cube loomed over this discussion, suggesting some defunct, or dormant, collective symbol. It evoked that moment of radical secular collectivity, the early years of revolutionary Russia (specifically Kazimir Malevich’s black square), but also that symbol of monotheistic collectivity, the Ka'ba in Mecca. One participant at the forum commented on its resemblance to a giant black box, aviation’s indestructible container of history (and specifically a history constituted by human vocal interaction), the sole purpose of which is to bear, through fatality and into the future, a part of the past.
The black floor-piece which Ishak is exhibiting for this year’s Adelaide Biennial might be described as a sibling-form to the half cube from last year at Ocular Lab. It resembles an unfolded black cube. Anamorphically shaped, it is also the presence of a shadow, cast by an airborne subject we cannot see. We read an echo of Ishak’s long-held preoccupation with creating and flying a black-cube shaped hot air balloon. We are also reminded of the sky as the place where collective symbols are perhaps at their most powerful, a pattern which Federico Fellini articulated memorably in the opening sequence of La Dolce Vita.
Along with this floorpiece, Ishak is showing a suite of five paintings on mdf. Each represents a collaboration with a different artist – the Norwegian artist Ole Jørgen Ness, and Australian artists Sean Loughrey, Alex Rizkalla, Damiano Bertoli, and myself. None of these images represents any direct illustration of these collaborations. Like the variations on the black cube, each is an image of collectivity, elusively encoded, even if in each case the collective is the smallest of possible collectives, and its purpose and course of actions are idiosyncratic rather than instrumental.
In one painting (representing Ishak’s collaboration with the Italo-Australian Bertoli) we read an Italian text: “Send me home”. In the other paintings our reading shifts back and forward between reading patterns across the surface, like some kind of elaborate script, and reading into the picture plane, through illusions of depth and volume, the world we inhabit. This is a familiar shifting in Ishak’s work. This shifting partly constitutes the basic formal appeal of any interesting painting: the interplay between what the painting is and how the painting reads. It also thematises the relationship between the image and its refusal, that relationship which seems to manifest itself so often in major social upheavals, like Reformation and Counter Reformation Europe, revolutionary Russia, or late 20th-century Afghanistan. Great masses of Arabic text have long been a part of Ishak’s pictorial vocabulary, a kind of shorthand for the iconoclastic symbolic systems of Islam. On the other hand, his paintings often draw on the junk image-saturated culture of capitalism: football crowds, stadiums, fast food, spectacles of violence. When we encounter Ishak’s paintings, we find ourselves negotiating divergent attitudes to the image. These attitudes are different ways to picture collectivity, but also different ways to promise the future.
TN 2006
(Published in the catalogue to 21st Century Modern, the 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, curated by Linda Michael).
[ home ][ email ][ cv or download as pdf ][ links ]