from zero to  ∞
the work of et al.
by Rudolph Hudsucker

 

It has been a strange year for arts collective et al. Selected in 2004 to represent New Zealand at the 51st Venice Biennale, the group has gone on to create ‘the fundamental practice’, one of its most intriguing and thought-provoking works. Yet while earning praise and recognition from international curators and critics, back home the group has been under constant attack from the media. 

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‘the fundamental practice’ is the latest in a series of installations that have questioned notions of identity, art, religion and truth. Often described as being sites for testing hypotheses, et al.’s installations disrupt the sensory experience of the viewer, causing disorientation as fragments of text, voice, sound and image juxtapose, refute, interrupt and slide for position. Whether disturbing, unexpected, startling or complex, these installations defy rigid or narrow systems of belief.
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After awarding the Walters Prize – New Zealand’s most prestigious art award – to et al. in 2004, presiding judge, Robert Storr, former senior curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and current director of the 2007 Venice Biennale, explained his decision.

“I chose the et al. because it puzzles me the most. It seems to me in a variety of ways that this team of artists has radically addressed the problem of contemporary art. In one installation you have a place to sit – but you’re not sure if you should sit there; you have a whole lot of things to see – but you can’t get to them; you have a series of voices speaking – someone on television in the distance – but you can’t hear them. You also hear a rather steady art historical lecture about the position of the artist, and the dilemma of what the artist intends and what the public receives. From another speaker, you hear a public debate on this kind of art and its relation to this country.”

Storr also described the challenge an et al. installation presents to its audience. One dilemma of contemporary art for its public, according to Storr, is that often it is “art that does not necessarily love the art lover back, it’s not hostile to the art lover, but it basically says: ‘Come to me, but I will not reward you immediately with what you’re looking for. Come to me, I will engage you in a process of figuring out what I am, and who you are’.”

New Zealand’s mainstream media, by in large, hasn’t been so impressed. From the time et al. was first selected to exhibit in Venice, in June 2004, and continuing at present, the media has attacked the artists and their right to represent New Zealand. Wellington newspaper, The Dominion, in particular, has lead the campaign running a continuous string of negative and sensational headlines – “Cash Down the Toilet, Say Critics”, “The Toilet That Speaks For NZ Art”, “A Dunny by any Other Name is Art”, “Toilet Humour”, “Panel Backs ‘Braying Loo’ Artist for Venice Show”, “Dunny Artist’s Agent Expects Powerful Work”, “Long Drop a National Icon” etc. – dragging the media dialogue to its lowest level.  

DU FRESNE Karl, of the Nelson Mail, wrote that et al.’s work is “bereft of any artistic merit or insight”. According to Karl, “one of the great things about the contemporary art world, from the artist’s point of view, is that they don’t have to explain their works because there’s a veritable legion of black-clad, goatee-bearded poseurs willing to make fools of themselves trying to translate the meaning for those of us (let’s call ourselves the Philistines) who are too dull-witted and obtuse to see the merit for ourselves.”

Alan Clarke, also of the Nelson Mail, wrote in his article, ‘The Artifice of Extracting Cash’, that et al. “will be heading overseas with just a suitcase of our cash and a concept in her head.” And “this is [Clarke’s] my preferred approach – wind up the chainsaw, slap around some roof paint and dive into Creative NZ’s $16.7 million funding pool”.

 

 

 

One aspect of et al.’s art practice that seems to have particularly irked the media is its lack of a singular “artist” identity that can lay claim to “ownership” of the work. Though the group is currently steered by a single artist who remains anonymous and whose name has been erased, the artists and other members have long since abandoned the notion of singular identity, instead choosing to represent themselves as a collective entity.

The group became known as et al in 2001 at a point when its membership was rapidly expanding and its work beginning to take on an increasingly technological nature. Dr Marzetti et. al has become one of the key collaborators in the building and conceiving of the et al work. et al.’s spokesperson and philosopher is P-mule, responsible for the now-infamous “braying sound” that was included in a former et al. installation. Com-munications are usually conducted by long-standing member lionel and or p-mule who are prepared for and experienced at dealing with difficult members of the media.            

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Greg Burke has overseen the project as Commissioner to Venice. Having worked as Director of New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery since 1998, Burke is about to start a new job as Director of The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada’s leading public gallery for contemporary art. This is the fifth biennale Burke has attended.  In 2001 he curated Jacqueline Fraser and Peter Robinson’s ‘Bi-polar’, New Zealand’s first exhibition at Venice.

The Venice Biennale began in the late 1800s, shortly before the beginning of the modern Olympics in Athens, a period, Burke says, that embraced principles of democracy.  “What I think is interesting in relation to this,” he says “is that the biennale organisation was formed in 1893 and staged the first biennale in 1895. In 1893 NZ became the first country to give women the vote. It’s all part of the same momentum of change. It wasn’t until about 1910 that we participated in the Olympics as part of Great Britain. Obviously we were part of the Dominion but we had made pushes to obtain some level of independence from Britain. And we participated under the flag of Australia and it wasn’t until 1925 or maybe even later that New Zealand participated as its own country.

“Ironically it took us until 2001 to attend the Venice Biennale. Francis Hodgkins was chosen to represent Britain back in 1940, but never got there because of the war. Rosalie Gascoigne as late as 1980 represented Australia so there are parallels…People in the art world have been wanting to get to Venice for a long time. When I was at the Arts Council [in the 1990s] I organised a research project and employed an economic research consultancy organisation who went in and ran groups and asked the visual arts community what they wanted; if the arts council could do anything, what should it do? And number one was ‘get us to the Venice Biennale’.          
 
“The biennale’s grown into such a phenomenal event. I mean as well as the 73 countries presenting exhibitions, numerous foundations and private organisations are also represented, there are about 20 other major exhibitions, it’s a very complex thing. There is a lot to love about the Venice Biennale, there is a lot to hate about the Venice Biennale, but if you’re in the visual arts and you have any sense of your own production as having any relevance internationally then you can’t afford to not go to the Venice Biennale.”        

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Curator of ‘the fundamental practice’ and working closely with Burke and et al. is Natasha Conland, Curator of Contemporary Art at Museum of Te Papa Tongarewa. Conland, who in 2004 curated the survey of New Zealand artist Judy Darragh, ‘Judy Darragh: So … you made it?’ says that good teamwork and collaboration have been critical to the success of the exhibition.           

“It’s a very pressured environment,” Conland says. “We were juggling five different opportunities to hire buildings, contracts, publications, advertising and ‘the fundamental practice’ was in a state of construction both conceptually and physically. There were a lot of things at play. Location of site was a huge issue. In Venice if your site is even slightly difficult to get access to you’ll almost halve your visitor numbers.

“Venice is a very old trading city and all those negotiations were very drawn out. While we had five sites we were looking at, the landlords also may have had five people that they were also wanting to play with and work out what they could get for the trade.     
  
Eventually the et al. team secured an old orphanage located behind Santa Maria della Pieta Church. 

“The site was under construction right from when we started looking at it but it was very apparent that it was going to have quite a nice ratio of simple clean space to experience of habitation. It just felt simple and non-cluttered. It hadn’t had a do-up or anything that would be unsuitable for the project. The way et al. works is to come in and really neutralise the space, to take full ownership of it…Grey paint is quite often used in their work as a means for naming or owning space. The grey has a sense of neutralising to the extent that it paints-out literally or masks previous signs, details or decoration.    

“[The work is] very sophisticated and extremely ambitious, possibly even the most ambitious work that they’ve undertaken in terms of the soft-ware… It’s a programme that has a huge amount of complexity. Basically et al. wrote the programme for that piece of software and spent time sourcing the material to feed into it.

“What they have done is build five arguments basically out of text. Each of these arguments has a sample of an idea or a piece of music or a sound that is regular, that follows a pattern, like a track of music. And they called them tracks. Each of the units, the physical units in the space, was playing that track from within that unit. But the random element was that the computer itself, the hardware, was shuffling continuously the interaction of those different tracks….in a way like a set of discreet parliamentary voices which are all trying to develop a coherent argument, constantly interrupted by another source.

“There is a screen in which you can read the work but not all of the text is projected out at any one time…It feels like, I guess, as a series of interruptions and more like an unplanned course…

“I think it’s useful to talk about it terms of musical language because I also think it’s probably the most acoustic work et al. has ever completed…not just the voices but also the ambience of the space, the noise that the units make when they roll across the floor, the grind of the winches, the rattle of this quite tinny metal box as it rolls across the floor…it’s a physical track as well as a sound track.

“They [the APUS (Autonomous Purifying Units)] are pulled by a winch, a stationary battery-driven machine used for hauling, having a drum around which a wire-cable is attached to the APU. Each APU moves backwards and forwards and forwards returning periodically to their optimal position. And they move when they’re about to speak so when you’re in the space you’ll sort of be drawn to one unit as it is about to take the stand, if you like, and it speaks and you listen and you try to concentrate because it’s quite muffled, it’s not a clear sound…

“The original shape [of the APU] is from an outdoor facility but why et al. chooses that particular structure is for quite interesting reasons only one of which is its association to the history of 20th century art…It can be utilised as a sound box or as an amplifier. I think the esthetic interest is in its most rudimentary structure. et al.’s often taken things that look quite hopelessly on the point of collapse, points of genius in the development of our culture or points of industry which twenty years or ten years on look ridiculous because of their inadequacy but when recontextualised in the contemporary sense they gain a new and  interesting context and perspective, particularly when put in the context of the most diverse material about the fundaments of human belief.  
 
“A lot of the material has been sourced from the Internet and relevant literature and texts, religious and scientific, and also from artistic theories, and from performative texts, works themselves.”

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Greg Burke – “You can’t necessarily say there’s one thing that motivates et al. Yes they’re very much interested in the field of ideas, they’re also very much interested in ideas of identity, they’re interested in ideas of mind manipulation, but they’re also very much interested in the way in which we respond to objects, they’re very much interested in the way we respond to surfaces, they’re very much interested in the kind of visceral responses that we make to things.”

“In a way,” Conland says, “it’s like it sets people on one or other side of the fence. It either sets you in a position of discomfort through not knowing, or intrigue and enigma. It energises you. It’s like being involved in a research problem; suddenly you get the bug, you know, and think ‘shit I want to work this thing out’… People are going to really know whether they are responding to it or whether they are not responding to it. In some ways a mediocre work of art will appease people generally across the board.”    

et al. present a challenge of what to do in a world full of irreducible meaning but crowded with fundamental beliefs, to be aware of the dangers of language and its relationship to what we come to believe. It is work that does not ask for its audience’s trust but rather asks it to think and stay alert, to consider one’s and other’s beliefs, how they came to be, how much we have invested in them, how much they have determined who we think ourselves to be…

What is neither true nor false is reality…We must conceive of a play in which however loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn.

This concept of ‘play’ keeps itself beyond this opposition announcing unity of chance and necessity of calculations without end.

- Jacques Derrida, ‘Margins Of Philosophy’