SLIPPING IN THE STILETTO Linda Williams |
Catherine Brennan's work grapples with some of the central problems of installation art in the nineties by focusing on two major issues. The first pivots on a regionalist's irascibility with the vulnerability of art practices on the peripheries rather than the centres of cultural influence & power. While this is a familiar enough problem to most Australian artists, Brennan joins it with a second and necessarily aligned question raised by her work: the problem of distinguishing a feminist position which is distinct from the apparent melee of objects confronting the limitations of gender in an aggressively open manner. This confrontational approach is common both to women's installation practice of the seventies and the overt provocation of the bad-girl art of the late eighties and early nineties. Brennan seeks to negotiate a place in dominant artistic and institutional discourse by eschewing the full-on oppositional thrusts which seem to be particularly vulnerable to institutional desublimation , yet at the same time she attempts to skirt around the traps of quieter, more discrete significations that elude serious critical reception. Moreover, her formal inclinations are drawn from a minimalist field where references to the body are shaped by a phenomenological approach to the way the senses, and the memory, negotiate space. There is a clear emphasis on materiality in Brennan's work, incorporating material drawn from the dominant cultural agencies which filter, refine and finally select from the less visible currents in contemporary art practice. References to such agencies were apparent in an installation at 200 Gertrude Street, 9 Consecutive Installations, (October 1994) where Brennan installed a series of self-framed panels of medium density fibreboard cut on a modular plan. The work passed a clear- cut comment on the flat surfaces of painting as a dominant aesthetic, and these 2D surfaces were also combined to construct 3D sculptural blanks - a deft thrust at the expense of formalist readings of minimalist sculpture. However, her references to the contemporary idiom of site-specificity in sculpture (an aesthetic on the brink of canonisation) were tricky since Brennan has been exploring the particular demands of site-specific work for years in her long-term project The Museum of Vacant Spaces. In 9 Consecutive Installations the practices of the white cube were articulated in an apparently neutral, even bland material which called attention to the gallery-site as anything but neutral space. Brennan also incorporated basic, cheap blankets into the installations, certainly an allusion to the rapid disappearance of local history in Gertrude Street as the area shifts from a zone of boarding houses and street people, to smart galleries and warehouse lifestyles. Yet the blankets were also an appropriate packaging material for the blanks - which (as with the primary matter of any process of manufacture) become something else. This is not to suggest that these nineties readymades simply interpret the cultural density of such a site as a factory of cultural meaning and market success, but rather they enter into a dialogue with viewer and artist about the broader questions of agency in the production of meaning. Brennan's work seems to me to exhibit an engaging sense of anxiety about these questions of agency, to which Chris Ulbrich, in a succinct catalogue essay for that show also refers:
Brennan's angles on the variable conditions of agency which specify the conditions of viewing or invention intersect with regionalist anxieties about the extent to which cultural margins are interpolated by the centre. And by the "centre" Brennan does not simply isolate New York, Cologne or Paris but the deeper European projects of Enlightenment and Modernity. The trivialisation of female agency within such projects may, in the nineties, be regarded as critically self-evident, yet it is a common enough contemporary form of closure to persist into the most mundane details of the everyday. The blankets stacked up against walls and pillars in the gallery gave the impression of a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a gallery between exhibitions. The blankets could quite feasibly have been removed from precious art objects: the material signs of a need to protect, to cover or cosset such preciousness which when combined with Brennan's three-dimensional semiotic blanks imbued the site with a new sense of poverty. Yet the stark minimalism of the installation was offset by such allusions to covering or revelation in a way which rather than holding this cultural impoverishment in contempt suggested the importance of an immanent critique not outsider art , but a renegotiation of established place and more specifically "a woman's place" within it. This tactic was evident in earlier installations such as Untitled Work (1993), in the Eades Place Children's Centre (previously the West Melbourne Primary School) for the fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial, or in Things, More Things and Some Other Things (1992-1993) installations at the Canberra School of Art Gallery and at the Ninth Biennale of Sydney. In the old school building Brennan worked collaboratively with Mikala Dwyer, Margaret Roberts and Rebecca Turrell in an installation called Purl. Brennan's space in this project was what she defined as The Room of Almost Pathetic Faith a room once used for domestic science where the artist hung a little copperplate plaque in dedication to sweet reason and articulated a series of spatial divisions across the room in masking-tape and a gel medium reminiscent of beaten egg-whites. These masking tape "drawings" mocked the Euclidean conventions of highly abstracted space, dragging attention back to the phenomenological experiences of the viewer and the girls who had received instructions in this place on how to cook, iron and generally keep good spatial order elsewhere. If the school was selected as a site for sardonic diagrams of mathematically correct orthogonal lines and vanishing points,2 the Canberra School of Art Gallery installation Things, More Things and Some Other Things included a number of everyday domestic objects, plaster moulds, tape and poles - a calculatedly messy minimalism placed with exacting formal deliberation and shrewd attention to detail. This familiarly domestic version of a Beuysian spatial semiotic, stripped of Romanticism and organicism, localised the centre with a dead-pan literalism while sustaining a rigorous, constructivist-like spatial poetics. Brennan has constructed a number of such installations where the viewer's attention is drawn to oscillate between focusing on familiar objects made unfamiliar, enigmatic plaster blanks and sculpturally cohesive compositions which appear to balance quite minimally on the edge of a messy, and random number of objects. For an artist who recognises a strict regulation of sculptural form, she is also a surprisingly effective colourist using densely saturated pigments such as the saffron-yellow of powdered turmeric scattered liberally around an installation of metal rods and drums, upturned domestic sinks and timber, or scarlet gloss-paint on certain objects in accordance with other found-objects which happen to be the same colour (such as the odd scarlet plastic milk-crate). Such objects are not amassed like Tony Cragg's quasi-decorative collections of detritus, but participate in a process of tough spatial tension in juxtaposition with other quite unrelated objects. It is a meeting of objects which is disconnected from Surrealist correspondences or the semiotic rhythm and assonance of the language of advertising. In Brennan's work this does not go with that in any other way than that demanded by the spatial tensions of the installation. Brennan's Museum of Vacant Spaces, a museum without walls, has included installations in domestic sites and street installations which are predicated on the theoretical acknowledgment of a general social implosion of the traditional distinctions between public and private spheres. In 1991-1992 Brennan collaborated with the Adelaide-based group Critical City comprising John Barbour, Shaun Kirby, Hewson/Walker and David O'Halloran. Roughly coeval with the much-discussed European work in domestic installations,3 this independent, local practice was situated in a number of domestic sites in Adelaide. Brennan extended Things, more things and some other things into an installation in her own hallway - sealing a number of hidden domestic objects beneath neat rectangles of masking-tape on the wooden floorboards - an installation/obstacle course which Duchamp, the domestic installation artist of 11 Rue Larrey, Paris in 1927, would have much appreciated. Brennan's interest in spaces which are not defined by the specific cultural contours of the gallery was also demonstrated in a more recent work of April/June 1995, Private Works From The Museum Of Vacant Spaces, a series of A4 plastic signs located around the Central Business Section of Melbourne. These signs were placed strategically to make them as transparent as possible in a given context so that seeing them might be almost accidental - and the only concrete evidence of them having been seen was their removal. Near Melbourne Central on a pillar with signs giving directions to various parts of Melbourne, Brennan put up a sign asking "Have you ever yearned for your past?" and "Have you ever been locked out?" Similarly, near Bradman's Handbag Shop on the corner of Swanston and Bourke Street "Have you ever thought you deserve everything you get?" and "Have you ever had it just right?" Or another example placed above the Westpac logo on an A.T.M. on Swanston Street: "Have you ever thought you were the best?" and "Have you ever wanted more? All that remains of this sign is a silicon trace, a displacement which perforates the usual hermetic seals of aesthetic consumption and extends the binary structure of subject and object into a more elastic field of uncertain agencies. Apart from the spatial theories of Lefebvre and de Certeau, and Georges Perec's novel Life, A User's Manual, Brennan cites among her influences Duchamp, Robert Morris (particularly his I Box) and Richard Serra's lists. The lists of questions in The Museum Of Vacant Spaces is described as a list of "Exclusions and Ineluctable Likeness" and it leads logically into Brennan's most recent piece for the Littlejohn Gallery in New York to be shown in 1996 which includes a long list in its title:
But what does Brennan mean by this "partially non-chthonic object" which is so frequently un-(fucking) defined and un-(fucking) re-defined by this list? Chthonicity is a technical term used in the semiotics of sculpture to signify that which is earthbound or grounded. According to Brennan, non- chthonic space is phallic space. And it is this vertical, ontological zone of history and power that her work must (necessarily) address. How material/materialist can an object be in the current construction of space? The non-chthonic is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the contemporary status of the object, and it is in the gap between these two conditions that Brennan curses Serra's list (the first list in the title) and grounds it in the local, the material and the specific. The second list in the title is drawn from a text-based Self-Portrait (1995) - an exhausting list of refusals of the social identifications of subjectivity. The 1996 installation will comprise ninety-six 5"x 7" canvas boards laid out in an incomplete rectangular grid. The boards will be almost covered in individual brushstrokes and an incomplete diagram of a cube will be described in absentia. The grid is to be laid on the floor and kinked in the middle. Cultural space is an international sphere, yet despite the claims of postmodernist orthodoxy that the grids of cultural power have been effectively de-centred, New York remains in a central position where Brennan's practice may well remain marginal. From a chthonic position however, it is surely only a matter of time before marginalisation becomes irrelevant. Linda Williams Endnotes |
 Catherine Brennan, 177/209 (hard) theories, 1994
Catherine Brennan, Purl, West Melbourne Primary School, Melbourne, 1993 |
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 Catherine Brennan, Purl, West Melbourne Primary School, Melbourne, 1993 |
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 Catherine Brennan, 9 Consecutive Installations, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne, 1994 |
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 Catherine Brennan, 9 Consecutive Installations, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne, 1994 |
