an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, July-August 2010, ISSN
1552-5112
Collecting Modernity
‘[…] the utopia that has left its
traces in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing
fashions’[1]
Since the 1990s, the Queensland-based artist, Donna Marcus, has exhibited
large-scale sculptural constructions that reference Modernity in its most
streamlined designs, including enormous grid, dome and sphere structures that have
been placed in galleries and outdoor/public settings.[2] On first
glance, these grand structures evoke the utopian ideals of Modernity in its
quest to perfect efficiency and self-sustainability. Some of the forms reference the utopian
ideals of Minimalism and Constructivism, in which all polluting forms of
pictorial ‘illusionism’ are stripped away to reveal the pu rported purity and synthesis of the object’s form and function (See the series of city-grid works).[3]
Other forms reference the utopian Geodesic principles underpinning
Buckminster Fuller’s revolutionary architectural dome structures (See Marcus’ dome and sphere
works).[4]
Fall (2002)
On closer inspection however, the forms contain components that belie the
strict geometries of modernity, having been composed from hundreds of pieces of
discarded aluminium and plastic kitchenware collected from Marcus’ visits to
op-shops up and down the Eastern seaboard of
The modernity of Marcus’ compositions is therefore buoyed by a whole
series of paradoxes and tensions.
Firstly, the idealism underpinning the modernity of the forms is only
made possible by the content of the pieces – kitchen implements − which
reference the messy histories of women’s domestic labour in
Despite Marcus’ divergent references to Modernism, all of the pieces are
invested in the ongoing potential of modernism as a paradigm. As Robert Nelson has put it in his
introduction to Marcus’ monograph, they are thoroughly “modernist structures”
infused “with a kind of grandiose architectural clout” (2005 7). However they are works interested in the
possibility of modernism – in the complexity and difference of
modernism/modernity − once it is removed from its safe locale in the
early part of the twentieth-century, and from the European metropolis’
specifically. This interest in the
difference and contemporaneity of modernity is in keeping with what Rita Felski
identifies as the “New Cultural Theories of Modernity” (in her chapter of the
same title) in which she traces the emerging interest in modernity as an
unfinished project (2000 55-61).
According to Felski, modernity can no longer be easily dismissed as an
outdated homogenous tranche of European time − the domination of ‘grand
narrative’ or the tyranny of sameness – that has purportedly been surpassed by
postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, eclecticism and difference
(61). Felski identifies an emerging
interest in the way modernity is not the simply the dead and hegemonic ‘Other’
to postmoderism’s equation with difference and diversity, because modernism is
also emerging as a cultural field filled with differences and
contestations. These differences are
partly defined by the inclusion of non-elite groups of people in the formation
of modernity – by the inclusion of people marginalised by racial, gender and
sexual minority status. They’re defined
by the recent analyses of modernity in locales marginalised by European centres
(including
This contemporaneity and difference of modernity is the subject
here. I argue that Marcus’ interest in
modernism evinces much more than the nostalgia for ‘retro’ objects and eclectic
appropriation (symptomatic of postmodern pastiche and fragmentation and the
purported end of history). Rather than
marking the end of modernity to postmodern forms of pastiche, Marcus’ figurations
allude to the unfinished potential of modernity and its differences − the
differences it manifests as it emerges within the post-war Australian
context. This chapter traces the
difference and contemporaneity of modernity as it is taken out of its classic,
European, urban and metropolitan phenomena, and resituated within the parochial
Australian context. Furthermore, the
differences of Modernity emerge in Marcus’ evocation of the irregularities that
gender and memory bring to re-fashioning Modernity’s purported seamlessness,
and the echoes of these irregularities are evident throughout her forms.
The contemporaneity of Marcus’ Modernism has been noted at length in
Brigitta Olubas’ essays on Marcus’ works, particularly in her reading of the
dome and sphere works based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic architectural
design principles in “’That Which is Made in Making It’: Practices of
Efficiency, Waste and Modernity in Recent Work by Donna Marcus” (2003).[5] These series
of works include Tripe (1998-2000 )
and My Millennium Dome I and II (1998-1999), which consist of
aluminium vegetable steamers riveted into enormous sphere structures, the Fullerene series of works comprised of
aluminium and plastic cooking containers (Fullerene
1, Fullerene 2, Fullerene + and Fullerene -); her work titled Glowing
Defiance (1999), which consists of an enormous collection of plastic
microwave cake moulds riveted into an enormous dome structure and the later Dodecahedron series of spheres comprised
from numerous items of aluminium cooking steamers and moulds. Olubas notes the modernity of these forms in
her reading of their invocation of the ongoing potential of Buckminster
Fuller’s modernist design principles.
Fuller is still revered as one of the great visionaries of American
modernism for his revolutionary architectural plans of the 1930’s and 1940’s,
which were designed to economise all facets of modern living as a corrective to
the widespread environmental degradation and global disequilibrium that he
identified as modernity’s failure to properly industrialise.[6] His
revolutionary structures took the form of large spheres (comprised from the
arrangement of seemingly incongruous triangular shapes) based upon the geodesic
principles he uncovered from nature’s most efficient taxonomies – in forms as
various as algae, the bone structure of bird wings, leaves, honeycomb, snake
skin, insect eyes and pineapple (in addition to industrial forms like golf and
soccer balls, umbrellas, tennis racquets, jungle gyms, bridges, silos, bicycle
wheels and baskets) (Lichtenstein 1999 442-5).
These geodesic designs were touted as the first truly modern structures −
strong, light and efficient − enclosing the largest volume of interior
space with the least amount of surface area, economising on materials, cost,
labour-time and natural resources (80).[7] The economy
of the forms was also ensured through their capacity to be recycled. The structures could be dismantled, recycled
and reconstructed with minimal labour time in almost all climates, and their
construction from the most modern materials − aluminium and plastic –
were also celebrated for their capacity to be recycled, in addition to their
durability, their lightness and their affordability (Krausse and Lichtenstein
16, 18-19, 80, 250, 354).[8] Despite the
enormous potential of these prototypes, they failed to undergo mass-production
in
Marcus’ deployment of Fuller’s dome and sphere structures, including
works like Tripe, Growth: Milennium Dome, Glowing Defiance, Fall, the Fullerene
and Dodecahedron series and Marble (1996-2005) re-stage
Fuller’s central preoccupation with questions of urban and domestic waste and
efficiency with a tongue-in-cheek humour.
They do this by literalising his geodesic construction principles with
used obsolescent kitchen refuse.
Her homages to these grandiose, efficient, modernist structures utilise
Fuller’s modern materials of choice (aluminium and plastic), yet they re-stage
his dreams of modern materials in the form of kitchen refuse sourced from
The health risks posed by aluminium cookware (in the hypothesised link
between Alzheimer’s disease and aluminium materials) consigned these implements
to the garbage heap, just as all of the other implements have been deemed
useless over time, “discarded in the constant press of domestic innovation” as
Elizabeth McMahon has put it (2004 29), weathered in the ‘storm of progress’ to
use Walter Benjamin’s phrase (Arendt, 1992 58).
The shifts in culinary fashions saw jelly moulds rejected as markers of
outdated and limited suburban culinary tastes, redolent of a 1950’s
parochialism, just as the future possibilities of microwave cooking were
discarded as a multitude of plastic baking tins after the 1980s.
The irony suturing Marcus’ allusions to Fuller’s modernity – in both his
conception of forms and materials – should not be read as a humorous
acknowledgment of the failure of modernism’s dreams of formalist innovation and
social utopia to the inevitability of waste and trash, evident in Fredric Jameson’s
theory of postmodern renovation, eclecticism or pastiche.[9] It may be
tempting to read these grand, yet wasted modernist structures as an ironic take
on the end of modernism’s dreams of formalist innovation and the various ideals
of social utopia attached to them, nevertheless, Marcus’ humour exceeds the
postmodern irony that attends to the recycling of history’s dead styles and
failed utopian dreams.[10] Rather, what
emerges from this patterning between modern efficiency and waste (in both the
form and content of the works) is a complex and concentrated meditation on the
interstices between the new and the obsolescent.[11]
Her works articulate the contemporary pre-occupation with the potential
‘newness’ of Modernity, via what Fuller identified as one of Modernity’s most
enduring principles: recycling itself.
That is to say, it is recycling
that ensures the Modernity of Marcus’ forms, enabling a new outlook on the
frozen dialectics between new-ness and obsolescence as a problematic. In doing so, the forms resist the
imprisonment with/in the past by staging the dialectical tensions through which
the new is actualised.
The forms therefore recall the ongoing potential of Modernity through
their self-conscious references to recycling, and this recycling, in turn,
evokes the frozen dialectical tensions that Benjamin examines at length in The Arcades Project – the tensions that
surface from within modernity’s own trash and waste. As Benjamin notes in “<Expose of
1935>”, it is from within the failed utopian dreams of modernity − the
discarded and dilapidated forms of modernity − that the new is
resuscitated: “[…] the utopia that has left its traces in a thousand
configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions (4-5).” Modernity emerges from within the
resuscitation of its own failed detritus, in which its ceaseless tensions
between the new and the obsolescent, efficiency and waste, is brought to a
standstill in a frozen dialectical image.
These dialectical images are “genuinely historical” because they are
figural in nature – not “temporal.” They
emerge at the intersection where the “what-has-been” collides with the “Now,”
allowing modernity to become legible to the conditions of the present. Benjamin discusses this ‘Now’ time:
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronous with
it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognisability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point
with time […]. It is not that what is
past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on
what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a
flash with the now to form a constellation.
In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the
past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is
dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural <bildlich>. Only dialectical images are genuinely
historical – that is, not archaic – images.
The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its
recognisability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous
critical moment on which all reading is founded (The Arcades Project N,3,1,
p. 463).[12]
Marcus’ compositions evoke the critical potential of Benjamin’s imagistic
‘Now’ time, brought to fruition in ceaseless dialectical tension – the
inter-patterning between Modernity and its obsolescent forms. Here Modernity is not represented as
‘outdated’, nor yet to come, but emergent in obsolescent forms as the time of
the ‘Now’. Modernity is perpetually
becoming in each of its citations, its recycling, its repetition.
This ‘Now-time’ also bears resonances with what Brigitta Olubas has
otherwise identified as Gertrude Stein’s concept of the time of the composition
in her reading of Marcus’ forms. In
“That Which is Made in Making It: Practices of Efficiency, Waste and Modernity
in Recent Work by Donna Marcus,” Olubas argues that Marcus’ forms epitomise the
tautological temporality of the modern, akin to what Gertrude Stein defined as
the time of the composition. This is an
understanding of modernity as something emergent in each moment, as “that which
is made in the process of making it” (2003 19).
She quotes Stein in support of this reading:
The time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a present thing it has
been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has been at
times an endeavour at parts or at all of these things. In my beginning it was a continuous present a
beginning again and again and again and again, it was a series it was a list it
was a similarity and everything different it was a distribution and an
equilibrium. This is all of the time
some of the time of the composition.[13]
Stein’s ‘time of the composition’, or the becoming-completeness of
modernity, is epitomised in the recyclability of Marcus’ domes – their
self-conscious references to their own incessant process of coming into being
(2003, 19). Recycling is not merely an
aspect of Marcus’ works, it is the very principle that underpins their
compositional structure, allowing their mobility (their movement around the
country) and their transience (their dismantling and reincorporation into other
forms).[14] Olubas notes
that the components of the forms are endlessly dismantled and made into new
forms. Tripe, for example, was
re-used in the construction of My
Millennium Dome I and My Millennium
Dome II, and then later re-incorporated into a later version of Tripe.[15]
My Millennium Dome I (1998)
True to Fuller’s belief in recycling as one of modernity’s most enduring
principles, Marcus’ forms come to be Modern in their act of being
composed. Modernity is made in the act
of instantiation. As Elizabeth McMahon
notes in “The Sculpture of Donna Marcus,” the objects are in a perpetual
process of becoming complete; each kitchen utensil is an object, complete in
its own right, which then becomes garnered in the process of creating another
complete structure (2003-04 30).
This emergence of modernity – anew – in each of its invocations, in turn
accounts for the differences that are at play in Marcus’ forms. In being instantiated within each moment,
Marcus’ forms also frame the way that modernity is made differently each time
it is invoked, and this difference is made manifest across numerous spheres in
Marcus’ forms.
For example, her Modernity is porous to the differences of gender, such
that the feminine domestic sphere, and its association with the ‘everyday’ and
‘prosaic’ worlds of cooking, is imbricated within the public, masculine and
urban spheres associated with modernity and art.[16] These
intersections between the sphere of domestic cooking (and the ephemerality of
its food products) and the masculinist strivings of modernist art (with its striving
for perfection, truth and lasting value) is ironically teased apart in the
title of one of Marcus’ lumpy vegetable steamer dome work titled Tripe (1998) which mocks the
invisibility of women’s labour-time and the capacities of women’s aesthetic composition. Tripe (1998)
(the word and composition) recalls the gendered histories and aesthetics of
re-use whilst also literally mocking the feminine’s association with this
derivative and supposedly parasitic practise.
‘Tripe’ is regarded to be something worthless or rubbish (its more
specific meaning designates a type of food recycled from the ruminants of an
animal’s stomach) and Marcus’ forms tease out the gendered histories of this
labour of re-use across aesthetic and domestic domains.[17]
Marcus’ allusions to the gendered dimensions of creation through re-use −
the ongoing question of how women can create something new from within the
restricted economies of male artistic genius and phallic presence − is
further explored through Marcus’ evocation of Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ tradition,
which is referenced in her own appropriation of factory-made forms. Ironically, the genius aspect of Marcus’
quotation of the readymade tradition resides in the way she frames it, not as
the revolutionary moment in art that challenges the authenticity of the art
object, but as the movement that is now reified in Duchamp’s image as the
Ur-text of male genius, originality and phallic presence. This is cunningly suggested in her copies of readymade
forms – in the sheer oversupply of her found and upturned readymade
implements. The excessive number of
readymade objects – the sheer excess and glut of kitchen waste – comments, with
irony, on the way that Duchamp’s urinal has become co-opted as the singular and
fetishised genius work of ‘Art’ – a signifier of phallic presence within
modernism (despite its initial rejection by the Society of Independent Artists
in 1917 as non-art).
Here, then, Marcus performs the role of feminine ‘mimmick’ as a means to
reconfigure the critical potential of the readymade, in light of contemporary
gender concerns. Her pieces lay claim to
aesthetic innovation by replicating the master mind of reproduction himself,
and in doing so, her forms illuminate how the proliferation of new forms is
produced, rather than eradicated, by replicating the already replicated. This is the irony – this is her art; feminine
mimeticism is no longer testament to a duplicitous and duped nature, destined
to aesthetic (and biological and industrial) replication and reproduction. Feminine mimicry inaugurates the new.[18]
Marcus’ preoccupation with the originality of second-hand images is also
literalised in her code[19] series of works exhibited under the title: Cover
(2002-3), which metaphorically alludes to ‘cover’ versions on pop songs, the
square electric fry-pan lids from which the pieces are composed, in addition to
Marcus’ ongoing investment in creating
something new by re-staging something pre-given and readymade.
Code X (2003)
These dialectics between mimicry and originality are further interwoven
in Marcus’ Fullerene 1 (2001), which humorously mocks the distinction
between phallic masculinity and feminine lack underpinning concepts of artistic
creation. This is played out in Marcus’
series of plastic jelly moulds riveted into a large sphere, in which the
placement of the plastic jelly moulds are alternated so that the spokes and
holes of the moulds are visible intermittently.
The spokes and holes evoke the conventional alignment of phallic
masculinity and feminine lack, and the terms associated with this gender
dichotomy: production and reproduction, originality and repetition, inside and
outside. However, in Marcus’ forms, the
conventional alignment of the phallis with ‘presence’ and the feminine with
‘lack’ is turned inside out in an infinite patterning of mutual interdependence
and inversion, as both the spokes and holes are part of each plastic jelly
mould, and are visible as such. The
placement of the moulds, alternating between their positioning upright and
upside down, reveals the spokes and holes as belonging to the same object,
whilst also revealing how this interdependence between presence and absence
forms the cohesion of the sphere itself.[20]
Fullerene 1 (2001)
In addition to tracing the differences of modernity across the gendered
divisions of labour and creation, Marcus’ works also evoke the differences of
modernity by tracing their tenor in the parochial Australian context −
resituating modernity from its ‘privileged’ locale in the European and American
Metropolitan centres, and exploring the peculiarities it takes on as it is
received by those cultures marginalised by the European centres. The
specificity of the Australian context, and its reconfiguration of European and
American forms of high modernity is played out in Marcus’ early city series of
grid works specifically, which represent numerous Australian cities and towns
alongside European metropolis’s. These
city grids are represented by an explosive array of colourful aluminium
saucepan lids, which are overlaid with other items of kitchen refuse, including
jelly moulds, biscuit cutters, icing nozzles and cream horns, sourced from
post-war kitchens up and down the Eastern seaboard of Australia. The very basis of Marcus’ Modernist grids
are therefore comprised from objects that embody histories of use in actual
Australian homes, and these city works highlight the particularity of
Australian modernity as it was lived out in the ‘everyday’.
The Australian dimensions of modernity are also made explicit by the
names and composition of the grids, named after smaller regional cities and
towns like Weipa, Gladstone, Beaudesert, Brisbane
and Sydney, and then juxtaposed next to grids named after world
metropolis’ - Barcelona, Paris, Florence and London. This placement of Australian towns next to
the large world cities has the effect of highlighting the differences in size
and economic clout between Australian figurations of modernity and European and
North American modernities. These
differences are further flagged in the arrangement and density of the segments,
as the world cities are embellished with excessive amounts of spectacularly
shiny kitchen implements overlaid onto the lids – up to twenty-five saucepan
lids overlaid with additional kitchen pieces including detailed biscuit
cutters, icing nozzles, jelly moulds, cream horns, egg poaches, scone punches
and serviette rings. The sheer
oversupply of objects gesture to the phantasmagorias of the grand metropolis –
the superfluous pleasures and excessive luxuries of unrestrained consumption in
the big cities – such that the cities are personified as consuming bodies that
eat and discard. The excessive, showy
displays of the big consuming metropolis’ are then refracted in the forms and
colours of Marcus’ smaller grids, comprised of up to nine saucepan lids, and
named after devolving regional cities and towns in Australia, such as Weipa,
Gladstone, Beaudesert and Normington (1996-1997) −
towns which have themselves become outdated dumpsites full of bargain basement
shops, symptomatic of the downturn in primary industries in post-industrial
economies.
This juxtaposition between the gluttonous excess on display in the grand
European metropolis’, and Marcus’ regional Australian towns and cities, also
presents an ironic portrait of modernity’s idealisms: efficiency,
standardisation and egalitarianism.
These ideals are further suggested by the aluminium materials used across
all of Marcus’ grids – the aluminium cookware which was once valued for its
affordability. However, in Marcus’
grids, the standardisation of the aluminium forms, and their placement in neat
rows, furnishes greater visibility of the differences between the urban cities,
and the impossibility of Modernism’s utopian ideals of equivalence and
standardisation. The aluminium forms
highlight the inequalities at the heart of modern cities. The grand metropolis’ harbour an excess of
consumption and waste that is off-set by the impoverished colours and forms of
the Australian cities and towns.
Nevertheless, despite Marcus’ allusions to the uneven distribution of
goods between Australia and the European metropolis’, her placement of European
metropolis’ alongside Australian cities and towns also suggests that Australian
modernity is not ‘behind’ Europe, but contemporaneous with European and
American modernity. This is in keeping
with Ann Stephens’, Philip Goad’s and Andrew McNamara’s view of the emergent
character of Australian Modernism, alongside European and American forms,
outlined in their book Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in
Australia (2008). They argue that what it means to
be ‘modern’ and/or ‘modernist’ in Australia certainly means different things
from the European and North American definitions of Modernity and Modernism,
however they argue that it does not necessarily mean that Australian Modernity
and Modernism is ‘behind’ European and American cultures (xvi). While Australian modernism is often dismissed
as having occurred in a ‘time lag’ in relation to European and American
modernism (as Bernard Smith argued in Australian Painting), Modern
Times argues that this history, “narrated through a succession of delayed,
style-based shifts occurring discretely with painting, sculpture, design or
architecture” is “not an adequate explanation of the reception of modernism in
Australia” (xxi). Australian modernism
emerged contemporaneously with European and American modernism, even as it
emerged in a different guise. It was a
modernism that exceeded insular aesthetic definitions of it as formal
experimentation, encompassing a more fluid relationship between the aesthetic
and sociological dimensions of modernity (xx).
Modernity, in other words, not only inhabited the worlds of art and architecture,
but it infiltrated all areas of industrial design, including the design of
suburban kitchens, milk bars, swimming pools and cars, not to mention
furniture, fashions and other areas of everyday life.
This new and broad definition of Australian modernity is certainly
highlighted by Marcus’ forms, all of which evince a greater fluidity between
the realms of industrialisation (understood in sociological terms as the key
condition of modernity) and art (which is conventionally understood as an aesthetic
response to the limitations of modernity – defined as ‘modernism’). Marcus’ aestheticisation of machine-made
objects certainly highlight a stronger awareness of the inter-patterning
between art and industry, at the same time that they seek to expose the
geographical and cultural dislocation between Europe’s quest to perfect and
aestheticise everyday living, and the prosaic drudgery and standardisation of
everyday life in the Australian colonies.
This is humorously dramatised in Marcus’ exquisitely coloured flat
patterned arrangements of triangular aluminium steamer lids titled after grand
nineteenth-century European domestic interiors and dwellings, including Parlour, Spare-room, Lounge, Sun-room, Porch, Observatory, Hall (2006), all of which evoke the
redundancy of such grandeur in the Australian colonies, literalised in
Australia’s suburban kitsch refuse specifically.
The unique dimensions of Australian modernity is also underscored by the
affective/mnemonic dimensions that adhere to the kitchen implements – a
dimension that is otherwise purportedly erased (along with notions of use and
occupation) in the conventional understanding of Modernity as a site of pure
rationality. As McMahon has noted in
“The Sculpture of Donna Marcus,” the forms set up a tension between “an
ironised minimalism of post-efficiency – the re-use and rearrangement of
modernity’s waste and refuse – and the perceptual and affective superabundance
experienced by the viewer” (29). There’s
a paradoxical unravelling of the proliferation of affective reference attached
to each component (the abundance of mnemonic associations that each kitchen
implement is likely to elicit for the baby boomer generation, specifically) and
the conceptual density of each of the modern forms. While each individual item of kitchen refuse
invites the mnemonic associations of Australia’s post-war kitchens, these
memories of everyday living – of touching and handling − are thrown into
relief by the conceptual labour of the aesthetic abstraction of the objects and
their relegation to the visual. Here
modernity is re-cast in relation to the specifics of Australian cultural
memory, such that the purities of utopian formalism are off-set by the
mnemonics associated with use and usefulness.
Marcus’ references to the specificity of
Australian geography and Australian memory is given epic proportions in her
series of gridded works titled From Alice
Springs to Weipa (1999),[21] which records
Marcus’ memories of a childhood trip with her mother and sister from Alice
Springs to Weipa. This series
incorporates numerous city-grid works comprised from aluminium saucepan lids,
each of which is named after small towns Marcus encountered on her road trip
across Australia’s regional North, from the inland town of Alice Springs,
through to Mt. Isa, Cloncurry, Normanton, and finally, Weipa on the coast. This series of works pays homage to the
colour spectrum of the landscape through the shifting colour palate of the
aluminium saucepan lids, beginning with a red grid, them moving on to orange,
yellow, green, and finally, the representation of the blue oceans of
Weipa. As Alison Kubler has noted in “I
Love Metal,” Marcus’ series is “an investigation of the great Australian
landscape tradition through anything but conventional means” (2003 11).
From
One of the cities in this series, titled Wepia, has an ‘elemental’
resonance within Marcus’ broad interest in memory and its relationship to
geography, since Wepia is the town where the material, Bauxite, was
mined for the production of aluminium.[22] Marcus
references this mining history within the work itself, by casting the
blue-green aluminium refuse as an after-image of the regional town. By casting the aluminium refuse as an after-image
of the town itself, Weipa becomes
about Australian national memory generally.
The representation of Weipa as aluminium
refuse becomes metonymic for the rise and fall of Australia’s mining
industries, recalling Australia’s economic development via the once-booming
aluminium mining industry in the post-war era, in addition to the devolution of
many of Australia’s primary industries in the contemporary turn to
post-industrialist information-based economies (Weipa being one of Australia’s original mining towns
still functioning).[23] That is to
say, by referencing the devolution of Australia’s mining history, through the
representation of the town as a ‘waste site’, Marcus replaces the positivist
histories of Australia’s production era with tarnished memories of these
narratives of national development. Weipa references the devolution and
redundancy of these origin myths which celebrate
This shift away from an affirmative Australian identity rooted in notions
of essentialist and foundational concepts of labour, land and primary industry,
is also made explicit in the compositions through their play with the very
concepts of ‘mining’ and ‘labour’. The
concepts of mining and labour are pushed into a hyperbolic excess in Marcus’
pieces, as the physical labour associated with the mining of Bauxite (the ‘hard
work’ associated with masculinity and land that is so revered in the national
consciousness), is transformed into the second-hand aesthetic ‘mining’ of these
aluminium products once they’ve become discarded in op-shops and seconds bins
across Australia. Flagged as the title
of Marcus’ PhD exhibition at Monash University in 2006, Mining is stripped of its associations with physical exertion and
becomes re-cast as a hyperbolic and metaphorical practise evident in ‘shopping’
and ‘aesthetic appropriation’ – the mining of secondary signifiers (in op-shops
and recycling bins) that determine labour in post-industrial economies reliant
upon cultural and aesthetic capital.[24] Marcus’
allusions to the secondary minings in op-shops and recycling bins can therefore
be read as metonymic for the shifting value and meaning of national identity
itself – where primary industry, and its essentialist notion of labour and
land, is given over to secondary revisionings – where place and value is
weighted towards signifiers and signification in post-industrial economies.
The end result of this hyperbolic presentation of labour is a thoroughly
camp presentation of
If aluminium is the perfect metal for Marcus to corrode essentialist
representations of Australian ‘country’, ‘landscape’ and ‘identity’, it’s also
the perfect medium through which to highlight the forgetting at the very core
of Australian national memory, since aluminium has been embroiled in
Australia’s widespread post-war amnesia.
This is demonstrated by Alison Kubler’s claim, in her essay “I Love
Metal,” that aluminium cookware played an instrumental role in the forgetting
of the Second World War, even after it played a critical role in securing the
Allied victory (and we might surmise, the concretisation of the Australian
national unity in the post-war period). Kubler notes that the shortage of aluminium
required for the production of strategic ‘attack’ war planes in Britain during
the 1940s resulted in a national campaign directed toward English citizens to
encourage them to donate their pots and pans “to assist in fighting the ‘good
fight’” (10). The slogan “Saucepans to
Spitfires” was adopted as one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of
WWII, and a number of cartoons were published in newspapers to back the cause. One of the cartoons from Punch, dated
to October 1940 is described by Kubler as “depicting a mechanic working on a
WWII warplane with a pile of aluminium cookware nearby declaring “‘We’re just a
frying pan short on this one’“(10). This
campaign was also accompanied by a war-time poem that Kubler cites:
The Housewife’s Dream
My Saucepans have all been surrendered,
The teapot is gone from the hob,
The colander’s leaving the cabbage
For a very much different job.
So now, when I hear on the wireless
Of Hurricanes showing their mettle,
I see, in a vision before me,
A Dornier being chased by my kettle.
- Elsie Staffordshire
After the victory of the Allied forces (no doubt aided by the generous
donations of aluminium pots and pans) the war planes were once again recycled into
shiny domestic cookware, just as their role in the war effort was also erased
from official history as it was transformed back into domestic products. This recycling of the planes back into
cookware therefore helped to facilitate the forgetting of aluminium’s tarnished
role in the war, not only because it played a literal role in erasing the
tarnished memories of the war, but because it also facilitated the baby
boomer’s attempt to forget the war via a flight into the mass consumption of
domestic bliss. As Kristin Ross notes in
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, the production boom in innovative and ‘modern’ domestic commodities after the
Second World War underpinned the post-war attempt to forget the war and to
bolster a new sense of suburban security.
Discourses surrounding the increased production of domestic technologies
enabled this “flight from history” (108), not only in an attempt to erase the
past, but in the “attempt to make the world futureless and at that price to buy
security” (108).
We might extrapolate from this context to suggest that the boom in the
increased production of aluminium kitchenware in
These ‘tarnished’ histories are explicitly referenced in the title to the
IMA monograph on Marcus’ work: 99% Pure Aluminium, whilst also
connecting aluminium’s history back to the economies of forgetting that suture
the very basis of post-war cultures, based upon perpetual recycling,
malleability and impermanence. This is
also alluded to in the title of one of the gridded displays of aluminium
saucepan lids titled In Flight (1999), which not only draws an explicit
connection to aluminium’s ‘dirty’ history in its involvement in the
construction of war planes and the Allied Victory, but it also references the
recycling of aluminium materials, and the way that recycling is metonymic for
forgetting, amnesia, or the ‘flight from history’ that, according to Kristin
Ross, is part and parcel of the amnesia of post-war consumer culture
generally. In Flight gestures to
the economies of forgetting and recycling that epitomise Australian national
memory, recalling John Frow’s claim that memory is never a self-present or
stable repository of objects and events, but that memory is constituted by the
forgetting that suture all processes of representation (1997 255). Aluminium, then, becomes the basis for an
alternative figuration of Australian cultural memory – a figuration in which
widespread forgetting and littering rests as its very possibility.
The histories of forgetting embodied within aluminium’s history (and in
its capacity to be recycled) are further complicated by the popular science and
health discourses surrounding aluminium since the 1980s and 1990s. These discourses hypothesised a further link
between aluminium cookware and forgetting, suggesting that aluminium cookware
may be the cause for the high proportion of Alzheimer’s disease patients
amongst the baby boomer generation.
Aluminium became the key suspect in the search for the mystery of the
‘forgetful generation’ – the generation of baby-boomers lapsed into a broad
cultural amnesia after the war. This
health scare prompted yet another large-scale national campaign, encouraging
Australian households to once again discard their aluminium cooking implements
– not to save the war, this time, but to save their memories. In a bid to save the nation’s memories,
anodised aluminium objects from the 1950s and 1960s − drink canisters,
cocktail trays, ice-buckets, saucepans and other items − were discarded
in op-shops en-mass across
Marcus’ mining of these aluminium resources therefore become
self-conscious interventions into the repository of Australian national memory,
where the collection and recycling of aluminium objects allude to the histories
of forgetting that comprise the very basis of Australian cultural memory
itself. By casting Australian cultural
memory as the metaphorics of mining –
as the recycling of waste −Marcus is able to highlight the operations of
memory itself, in which Australian national memory is only made possible
through recycling and forgetting. This
allusion to the centrality of waste and recycling in Australian national memory
evokes John Frow’s concept of memory as tekhné or ‘writing’, outlined in his
book Time and Commodity Culture, in which memory is never a self-present
or stable repository, but is actively re-made by the forgettings that suture
all processes of representation (255).[27] Olubas
appropriates Frow’s concept of tekhné or ‘writing’ as a useful model through
which to read Marcus’ forms; indeed Marcus’ collections visualise the active
forgetting which suture the memory process (2006 64). Marcus’ forms represent memory as the
arrangement and re-arrangement of memory fragments at every point in time such
that memory is constituted by the process of discarding and leaving fragments
out (Frow 225, Olubas 64). This explicit display of Australian national
memory AS recycling and forgetting also has an unsettling effect on the
national consciousness, since it erodes the certainty through which we remember
Marcus’ investment in Australian modernity as an ‘after-image’ − as
a wasted, recycled after-image of the land’s mining riches in refuse − is
tracked back to questions of aesthetics and visuality in one of her later
works, Green, which acknowledges the after-image, not only as a central
part of national representations, but as an integral part of all visual
representations. The composition draws
explicit references to Goethe’s theory of the retinal ‘after-image’, which was
first expounded in his Theory of Colours (1810) in order to explain the
inverted impressions that the eye registers long after any external stimulus
has been removed. Green is a
monochromatic grid comprised of round saucepan lids which evokes Goethe’s
theory of the after-image, literally; the composition appears to be a different
colour from that which the title signifies, having been composed from a series
of red anodised saucepan lids. This
disjunction between the title of the image, Green, and the colour of the
actual form, draws explicit references to Goethe’s challenge to conventional
analyses of visual perception, by acknowledging the way visual perception
actively constructs images rather than merely recording an actual reality
(67-74). As Jonathan Crary has noted in Techniques of the Observer (1999),
Goethe’s theory of the ‘after-image’ challenges the notion that vision is pure,
and that the eye captures an untainted referent – an objective or literal truth
that exists before visual perception itself (97-107, 139-141, 138).
This concept of the eye’s active formation in the constitution of images
relates to Marcus’ broader preoccupation with the erasure of ‘objectivity’,
‘origins’ and ‘truth’ in her interest in the second-hand status of found images
and the economies of signification beyond landscape, authenticity and
actuality. The impossibility of
objective truth, before subjectivity, also holds resonance in the context of
her references to minimalism specifically, because the ‘after-image’ challenges
minimalism’s purported capacity to strip the art object of visual illusion, and
to achieve an objective or ‘literal’ art.
Green frustrates this minimalist impulse by recalling Goethe’s
theory of the delusory nature of vision itself.
By situating the after-image within minimalist aesthetics, Green
suggests that minimalism’s ideals of achieving a literal or actual art,
stripped back to avoid visual illusion, is an impossibility The citation of the after-image alludes to
the illusory dimensions of minimalism, evoking what Michael Freid has called
the theatricality of the minimalist object in his 1967 essay “Art and
Objecthood” (125). Marcus’ Green alludes
to the performativity of the minimalist object, its ability to trick the eye
and elude placement, highlighting the tension between the objectivity of the
pieces and their status as a perceptual image.
This theatricality of the minimalist object is further underscored by
Marcus’ allusions to the camp and excessive dimensions of the object, given
that her minimalist forms are comprised from ‘kitschy’ kitchen utensils, laden
with their histories of suburban consumption and use. Here then, the minimalist dictate of an
objective or ‘literal’ art is literally off-set by the performative, camp
rearrangement of modernity’s excess – the excess which exceeds any possibility
of reaching the object in a pure and untainted form.[28]
Marcus’ references to Goethe’s theory of the retinal after-image is also
echoed in her preoccupation with the social and cultural dimensions of
obsolescence – her references to obsolescent aesthetics, cultural practices,
identities and places – which also resonate with Walter Benjamin’s writings on
the obsolescent after-image. In The
Arcades Project, Benjamin notes that the ‘truth’ of modernity comes into
legibility in urban modernity’s detritus, or that which is resuscitated as an
‘after-image’ of modern progress and development (475 [N,10,3]). Cultural phenomena, like commodities and
technologies, only become truly important to the contemporary moment once
they’ve become outmoded. As
after-images, these outmoded goods are able to highlight Modernity’s failed
utopian potential – its muddied and tainted visual illusions – whilst also
showing Modernity’s potential to be regenerated.
Marcus’ preoccupation with the social and perceptual resonance of the
‘after’ image, as both Benjamin and Goethe have defined them, result in her
complex meditation on the perceptual and cultural resonance of modernity
itself. Her ‘after-images’ represent the
ongoing enactments of modernism (and minimalism) in an era that has been
dubbed, by the art critic Rosalind Krauss, as the age of the ‘post-medium
condition’, or the ‘Postmodern’ shift toward eclecticism rather than formal
purity (2000). Marcus’ obsolescent forms
highlight the way modernist/minimalist forms come into legibility as
‘after-images’ – in their outmoded state.
Her grids offer a timely take on the difference of modernism and
minimalism by re-casting the visual purity and simplicity of the grid in light
of the perceptual and affective superabundance of obsolescent objects.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, July-August 2010, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes