Ehmann introduces the Soapbox publication himself, with a treatise that not only outlines the objectives of the Gallery, but somewhat contextualises Ehmann’s own art production. He opens by proclaiming: “I had an impulse of the most pressing concern: is art, and specifically installation, useful or useless (particularly in regard to political and social development/evolution)?”

This concern is certainly valid and underlies much current art discourse. The ongoing problem specific to installation art is that it became legitimised within art discourse as a resistant questioning of sculpture’s received disciplinary boundaries. Installation art was a discursive weapon in a battle that is now three decades gone and therefore this aspect of its ‘use’ is redundant. It is no longer concerned with opening up a space inasmuch as the space has long since been open.

Meanwhile, the gallery as a space of political contention has somewhat diminished, particularly during the 1980s. When the idea of a political artistic avant-garde sank, another problem necessarily arose in its wake—with art retired from any overt socio-political function, was it freed from external obligations or merely bereft it of its purpose? To some extent, Ehmann’s work attempts to reconcile these two positions. Later in his Soapbox introduction he promotes the idea of “a progressive art experience which holds immense transformative potential.” However, as his own practice suggests, there are other ways in which contemporary art can be useful without needing to claim hard-nosed social vanguardism. His notion of the transformative potential of art is more socio-spiritual that socio-political. Ehmann seems intent on evoking a kind of Beuysian shamanism, particularly with his use of wax, which bears a clear resemblance to Joseph Beuys’ use of fat. Whether this correspondence undermines or reinforces the potency of Ehmann’s work depends on the position (or the generosity) of the audience. It is similar to John Nixon’s use of Malevich’s cross, in that it raises the question of whether it is crudely derivative or taps into a rich historical seam.

According to Holubizky, writing in Open Panorama, Ehmann’s work navigates the “symbolic eddies and undercurrents” of the materials he employs Eggshells, for example, appear in many of Ehmann’s installations, including Culture of Forgetfulness (1999), Memory and September Eve (both 1998), as well as Almost There at Artspace where broken eggshells were piled up with stacked wax bricks and fingers. The egg motif is continued in the Soapbox publication, which features a single egg on wooden floorboards as its cover image. Milk also appears frequently in and is of importance to any reading of his work. Particular materials such as these appear over and over again throughout his work, establishing and developing a vocabulary which is played out poetically in order to evoke ‘stories’ in material forms.

Ehmann’s system of coding imbues materials with meaning by drawing on their cultural, material and historical resonances. In their essays in Open Panorama, both Carroli and Holubizky provide glossaries of Ehmann’s objective vocabulary with which to read Ehmann’s installations. Carroli cites each material common to Ehmann’s works as categories of sorts: milk, eggs, honey, potatoes, wax, chairs, blue pigment, lightbulbs and so forth. Both essayists discuss Ehmann’s symbolism in a way that suggests universalism. Holubizky, for example, see eggs as symbolising birth and fertility, as providing “an earth creation symbol” in Ehmann’s work. Carroli, however argues that “[r]ather than ‘universal’ values, they are ‘pluriversal’, striving to create value around difference and passion, striving to counter indifference and dispassion.”

In practice, Ehmann sidesteps the problematic issue of universalism by invoking the particularities of his own émigré condition: Ehmann was born in Austria and moved to Australia. Ehmann’s existential condition, according to Holubizky, is that of a nomad. Again, there is an obvious correspondence to the work of Joseph Beuys in which the artist  sought to ameliorate a spiritually bloodstained people. Ehmann, likewise, seeks to represent the fraught existence of the nomadic—of immigrants. Through his work he attempts to find a homeliness to accommodate those who are displaced, culturally and geographically.

For this reason the intimacy of food is vital to both the symbolism and materiality of Ehmann’s work. He is cited on the Open Panorama duskjacket: “English is not my language. Art is not my language. Writing comes and goes like seasons. Nothing is permanent. My dearest language that I mumble together is that of food, cooking and life.” Food is a banal and everyday necessity, yet it provides an important expression of cultural difference. The foodstuffs that Ehmann uses are European staples. In a sense, they are food in raw form. For example, eggs and milk are not foods that are often presented in their unprepared form at a meal, but rather are used in a preparation process in the more private and homely space of the kitchen. While eating is social, cooking is more often personal. During his performance at Artspace in Sydney, Ehmann soaked his hands in milk, combining cooking with the even more private act of bathing. Such familiar foodstuffs as milk, which we would usually encounter at home, are incongruous with the public space of the gallery. As with many of Ehmann’s performances, this use of milk seemed ritualistic and cleansing, further reinforcing the shamanistic character of his work. This meditative act established a brief fissure in the gallery’s cool façade so opening a discursive space for contemplation of something quite personal.

To a qualified degree, Ehmann’s work does achieve a recuperation of some ‘usefulness’ in art, in much the way that he proposes. He constructs gentle tableaux that play out his material symbolic code. They manage to be intriguing, ‘readable’ and address the healing of his own nomadic condition as an immigrant. However, it becomes problematic insofar as Ehmann’s work evokes a mystical Beuysian crusade. Much of the credibility of Beuys’ social-spiritual vanguardism was underwritten by a faith in avant gardism that still persisted in his time. In turn, Beuys’ mythological legacy persists well beyond the conditions that predicated his mysticism. It is difficult to discern whether Ehmann’s work draws more on the mystical or merely the mythical. Is it homology or homage?

Kit Messham-Muir
2000

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