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I remember when... The idea of the 'alternative history' is a fascinating and destabilising one. As soon as you start on the 'what if' course of thought the entire world-view becomes contingent, the lines of narrative that constitute our knowledges, our facts, become visible and identifiable as being perhaps, just that: narrative, stories: their weight and authority based seemingly merely on consenuality. Therefore not one narrative but many, as the consensus is determined by the group from within which we happen to define ourselves. A geneticist's reading of things being considerably at odds to that of a creation scientist even when considering the same data. The understanding of events that happened before our birth, or before the start of our individual memories, or outside of our direct experience, [and even then....] is an act of faith. A leap of imagination, an act of belief in a story, be the players in the plot yourself aged one, your grandmother, or Captain Cook. It lies beyond our empirical reach, our touch, and is therefore, essentially and alarmingly, unverifiable. This is not, as they say, an original thought, it has been routinely exploited by administrations both on the right and the left [the aeroplane was invented by a Russian, the Japanese occupation of China was benign, the Holocaust never happened, etcetera] but it is one that we tend to ignore in our quotidian lives: even when we exploit it ourselves over the dinner table, in the pub, with friends and lovers, when we tell the changed and embellished story: "I remember when...." we don't fully recognise the slippery threat of our action. At a social and political level, such fluidities are often pernicious and dangerous. This is claimed in current reactionary dismissals of what they understand to be post-modern [as in dangerous European Post-Marxist probably gay definitely anti-family morally equivalent and definitely not Giles Auty] thought. Such claims are linked to the current attempted erasure of the 'black-armband school of history', an act that perversely shares the understanding of histories as being in a state of flux and construction that lies at the heart of their criticism of the Post-modern. That history is written by a class, a hegemony, a world view. A position that they otherwise deny. In this case though, the re-writing is aimed at a return to, rather than a problematisation of, some idyllic white status-quo of benign colonial improvement. However, the alternative history also offers avenues of hope and imagination as well as mere repression, and The Arcanum Museum and related projects by Alan Cruickshank generate alternatives so that we may look quizzically and differently at the histories we know. It is a difficult area, as the tools used are those of substitution, change, and erasure, so often used by instruments of oppressive ideology: but the works bring to our attention what such tools do, and the project does not claim authority, the immutable weight of fact. Rather it claims the opposite, and in doing so opens cracks in the blank inevitabilites that fact is often felt to presume. Histories are formed of narratives and Museums help provide the vocabulary, as well as the readings. To transform and change these component parts offers not only different histories, but in doing so hypothesises different, future, outcomes: none of which are inevitable. RICHARD GRAYSON October 1997 |
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MUSEUM OF THE COLONIAL POST COLONIAL Six unique digital cibachromes 140cmx100 cm 1997 "...the act of representing (and hence reducing) others, almost always involves some violence of some sort to the subject, as well as a contrast between the violence of the act of representing something and the calm exterior of the representation itself ... The action or process of representing implies control, it implies accumulation, it implies confinement, it implies acertain kind of estrangement or disoreientation on the part of the one representing ... Because, above all, representations involve consumption: representations are put to use in the domestic economy of an imperial society." EDWARD SAID |
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ALAN CRUICKSHANK: CURRICULUM VITAE Born Adelaide 1953: Resident Adelaide, London, Coburg, Darwin, Los Angeles, Sydney, Singapore 1976-90 Adelaide 1990+ Publisher 1979+ Exhibition Curator 1985+ Public Art Project Curator 1994+ Cultural Development+Public Art Consultant 1994+ Major Museum Collections: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide; Art Gallery of WA, Perth; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Polaroid International Collection, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Graham Nash Collection, Los Angeles, USA Solo Exhibitions 1981-96: Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth 1996 CACSA, Adelaide 1995 Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; EAF, Adelaide; Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide 1993 University of Adelaide Union Gallery, Adelaide 1992 Bullring Gallery, Adelaide [Collaboration with Richard Grayson] 1991 DC Art, Sydney 1990 Anima Gallery, Adelaide 1989 City Gallery, Melbourne; CACSA, Adelaide; SA School of Art Gallery, Adelaide 1988 The Developed Image Gallery, Adelaide 1984 The Developed Image Gallery, Adelaide 1983 The Developed Image Gallery, Adelaide 1981 |
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Arcanum:Extracts From The Archive 1992/The Arcanum Museum - Bibliography 1992-96: Robert Rooney "Alan Cruickshank: The Arcanum Museum". THE AUSTRALIAN; Chris Reid "Just what is it that makes today's history so different, so appealing?" SALIENT, Adelaide; Kurt Brereton "Exquisite Corpses", ARTLINK Vol 16 No 1, Adelaide 1996 Ian North "Blurred Boundaries". ["The Arcanum Museum" catalogue], Adelaide; Chris Reid "Just what is it that makes today's history so different, so appealing?" BROADSHEET Vol 24 No 2, Contemporary Art Centre SA, Adelaide 1995 Catharine Lumby "Arcanum". AGENDA 26/27, Melbourne; Catherine Lumby "Reviewing the Archive". PHOTOFILE 37, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Richard Grayson "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" ["Arcanum:Extracts from the Archive" catalogue], Adelaide 1992 Alan Cruickshank acknowledges assistance from Arts South Australia; production assistance from Australian Network for Art+Technology; Philip Jones, Museum SA and Richard Grayson, Director, EAF, for their catalogue essays; Juliana Engberg and Museum of Modern Art at Heide for the original title and Edward Said quote. |