October 1995-January 1996

LITTERARIA

LITTERARIA Robert MacPherson

MODELS OF VIRTUE Simryn Gill

"Litteraria" was a project where two artists were invited to make work for the South Australian Musuem and were given access to the collections of the Museum. Both the artists, Robert MacPherson and Simryn Gill, made works that looked at, and experimented with, ideas of how we structure and make sense of the world. Both artists are concerned with questioning and illuminating the ways that we read meanings into individual objects and how we place them in structures that, in turn, generate meanings. The projects were exploratory and investigative and researched and extended the poetries and structures of our understanding of the world and, by extension, investigated the way that information is arranged, ordered and communicated. Robert MacPherson's project at the Museum focused on the Toas in the collection. These are artefacts from the Lake Eyre region, each one associated with a specific place or location. The artist considers these to be some of the most beautiful objects ever made, and the work was conceived as an act of homage to them. The Toas were displayed in cases at one end of the Museum gallery, allowing the viewer to focus uniquely on them and to appreciate the beauty and presence of each one individually. The facing wall of the space carried long lists of the Latin (scientific) names of plants, animals, birds and foodstuffs, of the localities that the Toas are themselves associated with, researched by MacPherson in conjunction with the staff and curators of the Museum. The fact that Latin was used meant that it largely read as sound and poetry. However, the sensation of meaning remained inherent in this list even if the exact sense was occluded. This worked as a metaphor for our understanding of any set of signs or objects. A parallel complexity of association and reference inherent in the Toas themselves was also suggested. A web of meaning and allusion was spun out, unpacked from these objects, generating links between different ways and models of classifying and understanding the world. Simryn Gill used objects from the collections drawn from the area between the north-western coast of Australia to the south-western tip of Peninsular Malaysia, and the islands in between. Domestic objects were cast and copied in a variety of materials - from glass to wood fibre to gelatin. Each material used for this process of recasting came from within the set of objects, i.e. gelatin comes from bone, a tin cast linking to the tin can. In this way, one object may have taken its 'substance' from another. This generated a separation between the idea of the form and the material and setup an enclosed system in which identities and meanings became hazy. The materials used were: paper, sawdust, latex, gelatin, natural resin (damar batu), coconut shell, coconut bark, soap, tin, silicon rubber, banana skin, banana pulp, plaster, terracotta, and glass. Questions were posed as to where the 'identity' of the object may lie - such concerns echoing long debates in philosophy between, for instance, the 'nominalist' and 'realist' schools of thought where the debate centres on whether the identity of a thing lies in our naming of it or whether there is an inherent substance to the thing. These shifts and changes complicate our ideas of the 'real' and the 'authentic', and some objects may have found a more 'natural' match in their new material. In others, the translation may have been totally bizarre. So, in some cases, an object or meaning became enhanced by this process and, in others, reduced to the ridiculous. The project became a play with the unstable way we read and attach meanings to things. These uncertainties can also be extended to the matrix from which the objects came. Do we see cultures as shifting, evolving and changing, or are they read somehow as the 'real' and the 'authentic', and as such not allowed by us to move or change, such changes being seen as a degradation from a proper or 'natural' state? Reviewed: RealTime #9; Adelaide Review October 95; Adelaide Review November 95; Artlink Vol 14 No 4; Broadsheet Vol 25 No 1.

images top to bottom: Robert MacPherson Simryn Gill

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