Archiving the wall

 "Walter Benjamin's Archive: images, texts, signs--carefully laid out manuscripts, photographs of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys, picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics, meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalog; notebooks in which every single centimetre is covered; a collation of  his son's first words and sentences,; riddle and enigmatic sibyls. Everything here is subtly interconnected with everything else...the concept of 'essence' as the mark of truth." (From my notebook, day five, Tumba '10)

And what types and catalogs of lists could be used to make an archive of Reconfiguring the wall?

• A list of oft-used architectural terms (and their definitions)
• A list of processes: textile, architectural, specific to this project...
• Diagnostic terms/tests used (psychology and psychiatry)
• References used
• Types of cloth used

The list is incomplete (are all lists fated to be incomplete?)

Are they by essence (or in essence) fragments?

In what other ways are lists 'lacking' 

• detail?
• aesthetic appeal?
• intention for longevity?
• completeness in themselves? 

Lists of contents have no identity of their own.

A list of images from the pieced side of the quilt:

(sources not available at this time)

- Hospital ward (beds empty)

- Rock markings from under bridge

- Patient and radiographer with x-ray machine

- Patient (?) sitting in courtyard

- Ward with window

-  Map of Leichhsrt (fragment)

- John Brenan

- 4 nurses, in different uniforms

- child's drawing
- Kirkebride building
- perimeter wall....

A list of words/phrases from the pieced side of the quilt

- 'Sites of difference'

- 'And below is always the accumulated past which vanishes but does not vanish'

- 'Joseph was the wicked Uncle Jo who, a gambler whose debts cost the family the Balmain Estate'

- 'Eysenck Personality Inventory Personality Questionnaire'

- 'See thee shocking truth, learn the heart breaking truth about drug abuse'

- 'Recipe for plant dyeing'

- 'Ambiguous boundaries'

- 'And the resistance of space for inside out art-architecture we are able to situate the asylum in a historical context and so to [ ] the spectral quality the site evokes...'

- 'Sites of otherness'

- 'The being of art itself'

- 'Fuck it'

- 'And below is always'

Journal of a Madman

I first heard of  Anthony Maddix's 'Journal of a Madman' (1995) when Emma showed me some of her research finding for what was to become Reconfiguring The Wall. A few months later I was able to see and handle one for myself when it was included in the exhibition, 'For Matthew and others, Journeys with Schizophrenia' at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery UNSW CoFA (Sydney) in late 2006.  I remember it as substantial: large in format, with rough wooden covers and the pages combining text and drawings. I find his work powerful, poetic, brutally honest and unsettling. His journals (and other works) meld text and image in a way I've still to understand.

Gareth Sion Jenkins writes in the catalog to this exhibition writes:

In his anthropological investigation of the unconscious Anthony Mannix has used creative expression as a compass; a compass of  'Brut' proportions leading to hybrid works, which bring into relation the figurative and the abstracted, the pictographic and textural. The nature of the unconscious as a tactile landscape is evidenced by the inventive materiality of Mannix's work, which incorporates such elements as canvas, wood, rice-aper, solder, resin, vanish, acrylic paint, felt pen, Chinese ink, gouache, found objects, muslin, leather and tea. (p101, catalog to the exhibition)

[Anthony Mannix:  
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nightair/stories/s861423.htm]

Anthony, who suffers from schizophrenia has been an in-patient in Rozelle Hospital, formed when Callan Park and Broughton Hall amalgamated in 1976.

One of the fragments on the pieced side of the quilt references Anthony's work:

Reconfiguring the Wall (2006) detail

Silk dyed with plant material from the Callan Park site, hand embroidered with cotton thread

I find myself troubled by the categories of 'Art Brut' or, 'Outsider Art' which along with other such definitions I suspect of being used to marginalize the art of a specific group, in this case--that of the mentally ill. Perhaps its most positive characteristic is that it, the process of art-making sits outside of the commercial art world. Despite my disquiet about such a groping, however, I find myself drawn to these works again and again.

A chance encounter with a comment by Rex Butler on the: ...framework defined by romanticism (the cult of the original or authentic, the continued viability of an art based on a connection to nature, a universalist and organicist  conception of human knowledge)...Our fascination is not so much directly with these things as with this unconscious, child-like gaze of the other (my emphasis) helps me here. Although Butler is discussing Aboriginal art (and the art of Kathleen Petyarre in particular), it is his reference to the other that I find relevant and connects it to Emma's work on the redevelopment of the Callan Park site.

In the introduction to the catalog for the exhibition 'Art Brut' (also shown at the Ivan Duogherty, but in 1999), the curator, Lucienne Peiry explains:

"Art Brut brings together works of nonconformist beings--patients from psychiatric hospital, prisoners, mediums, elderly people, loners, eccentrics, outcasts--whose lives have been marked by an existentialist break, Art Brut authors seize the right to speak that they have been denied by launching into creation in tottal freedom, in a self-taught way."

Rex Butler, A Secret History of Australian Art (2002), 143

[Post completed July 29]

Reconfiguring the wall

(This post has been copied from the 'Blogbook' page of my associated blog, Quilted Out of Space. I had noted these thoughts in a recent addition to this page but they turned out to be posting relevant to this blog)

Reconfiguring the wall sits somewhere between a wall hanging (in the simplest sense--it is intended to hang vertically) and what Emma intends it to be, a quilt documenting and representing her architectural thesis. It certainly has two-sides: on one are the final plans for re-development of the Callan Park site printed on an old linen bed sheet while the other consisted of a 'pieced' (in quilted terms, fragments stitched one to each other) documenting the history of the site...old photographs, street plans, fliers and newspaper articles gleaned form the Mitchell Library (Sydney),as well as stitched and embroidered fragments dyed with plant material from the site.


The two sides, however, are not 'connected' (or perhaps not 'yet') in the physical sense by stitching, a feature any die hard quiltmaker will tell you is fundamental (see most conditions for entering a work to a quilt exhibition) to something being called 'a quilt'.

But Emma intended this to be a quilt (something I argue is central to such a works definition: the artist's intent) and the two sides are most definitely 'connected' in terms of subject matter...the documentary/pieced side is fundamental to the process of developing the final plans for the site...you need to see both sides. It is thus a quilt that must hang in space.

This aspect connects Emma's work to Judy McDermott's, who regularly pieced both sides of her quilts.

The structure of Reconfiguring is further complicated by having two sections which fold over the side containing the architectural plans for the site, the left hand side contains a list of words, the right alternative arrangements for the rooms (the walls of which can be shifted to allow the internal space to be selected by the individual). The appearance, when the sides are folded over is shown at left (installation shot, Emma Rowden).

While writing this, I sense a link to the folding altars or portable shrines (whether this is at all relevant I'm not sure!).

I now need to return to D&G's theory of smooth space as I have a feeling these points raise some interesting issues for the overall direction of this project.

Architecture and the Body

For two years I have been attempting to track down a copy of the catalogue, "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" (MAD, New York 2008) and finally, today, a copy arrived in the post. The first artist featured is Annet Couwenberg and her work Embroidery Penetrates is described as an architectural intervention: ...an analogy of architecture as a reference point of identity and intentions in the same way as clothing mediates between personal image and social requirements (p12). when I read this, I keep replacing 'clothing' with the word 'cloth', and I think it comes closer to what I am trying to say here.

Only a detail of the work is shown and it appears that the words of the title are stitched in synthetic rope on ultra-light MDF, with the dimensions: 68.6cm x 2.36m--Annet uses text which references 17th Century Dutch samplers--and suddenly the ideology of the feminine (in a 17th C sampler) criss-crosses with the modern (any discussion of this should refer to Rosika Parker's text,'The Subversive Stitch' on samplers, as samplers were not always what they first appeared to be).

There is a link here I think with architecture and Emma's choice of the quilt form to present her honours thesis. The 'reverse' side of this quilt (if it could be called the reverse, perhaps 'other' side is more relevant) pieces (literally and metaphorically) the many narratives associated with the Callan Park site...the many images, documents, plant-dyed with material from the site, embroidered with text and images.

These many narratives are what forms the basis of Emma (architectural) plans printed on linen bed sheets which belonged to Ivo Gertrude Brenan, the great grand daughter of Ryan Brenan who built Garryowen, the first building on the site.

As two sides of the quilt the plans on one side are 'based' on (have an integrity with) the many threads of story on the other side.

Image: The 'other' side of Reconfiguring the Wall prior to the piecing process (courtesy of the artist, 2007).