Unmapped Anne Marsh |
From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
Unmapped Anne Marsh |
From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
| Peter Kennedy is an artist who developed against the
grain of the 1980s. When other artists were revelling in
their status as 'already written' and celebrating the
deferral of meaning associated with various post
structuralist theories, Kennedy was still interrogating
the analysis of culture developed by the Frankfurt
School. The artist remained committed to the idea of
praxis which for him meant a meeting of experimental
modes of art and radical political critiques of culture. Kennedy was one of the founding members of Inhibodress, an artists' run initiative which occupies a significant place in contemporary Australian art history.1 Artists who can trace their roots either to this space or like enterprises in Sydney or Melbourne (circa 1969/70) are assured 'avant-garde' credibility.2 Kennedy's working relationship with Mike Parr and the efforts of these young artists to link Australian experimental practice to an international, alternative art network have been well documented.3 |
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From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
In the early 1970s Inhobodress was representative of
an experimental edge in contemporary Australian art and
was supported by critics such as Terry Smith and Donald
Brook.4 According to Robert Hughes who
returned to Australia in 1972, the only art of any
interest was that of the 'video freaks' at Inhibodress.5
Between 1970 and 1972 Peter Kennedy was seen to be part
of a newly evolving 'avant-garde'. Since 1972 Kennedy has
continued to exhibit but there has been little serious
critical evaluation of his work beyond the support of a
few dedicated academics and gallery directors 6
In the early 1980s when Australia started to export its
contemporary art, artists who had 'avant-garde'
credentials made up a strong contingent but Kennedy's
work only got overseas twice.7 When one would
have expected the mature works to be receiving some sort
of critical evaluation, Kennedy's work was sent to
critical coventry. This silence can be attributed to the
effect of Western trends in the artworld which, despite
claims to the contrary, still impede the documentation
and critical assessment of Australian art. The centre may
be dead but the margins are still seduced by its force
field: a kind of cultural necrophilia. At Inhibodress
Peter Kennedy started to develop his soundworks and
participatory modes of art. But the Fierce Blackman
(1971) was a sound installation including an electric
fan, a television tuned to static, the interception of
radio signals from passing taxis, and the participation
of the artist. At the time Kennedy was reading and
listening to John Cage and La Monte Young. His Prepared
Tree (1971) 8 borrowed the idea of the
prepared instrument and the significance of duration and
silence central to John Cage's project. For Snare (1972)
he installed drums and two loud speakers into the space.
Kennedy notes that although the installation appeared
innocuous, the ensemble had the capacity to audibly
assault its spectator. It was a work designed to both
attract and repel. These early works laid the foundation for what was to come. The use of TV and radio broadcast were indications of the problematics associated with the use of electronic technology as a communications network. The restricted voice in But the Fierce Blackman operated as a metaphor for the individual's relationship with a technology over which they had little control. The threatening sound of Snare was an aggressive assault on the bourgeois art audience, the drum an invasive force. Components used in these works recur in the most recent installations. The drum has resurfaced as a quasi-military force, TVs and electric fans are manipulated to convey the collapse of master narratives, and the loud speaker has taken on a dramatic role. In Welteislehre (World Ice Learning, 1972) human hair was frozen into a large ice monument as a critique of the totalitarianism of fascism. Refrigeration returns in the later works as a metaphor for immobility, as Kennedy re-enacts the 'end of history' for his audience. Although clearly interested in the chance compositions of La Monte Young, Cornelius Cardew and John Cage, Kennedy was equally as interested in developing a political critique of culture within his work. He cites the political protest actions of Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks of the Guerilla Action Group as influential at the time since they addressed current political issues such as the Vietnam war. On the demise of Inhibodress in 1972 Kennedy went to South America and from there to New York and London where he met like-minded artists about whom he made a film titled Other than Art Sake (1973-4). Kennedy's interviews with Steve Willats, Hans Haacke, Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, Adrian Piper, David Medalla, Charles Simonds and Ian Breakwell document the major concerns of artists drawing on marxist and liberal democratic ideas and the ways in which they attempted to change the social model of art. These artists attacked the hegemony of modernism and attempted to offer alternative models for art practice. In his introduction to the film Kennedy said:
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From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
Today, when we are told by theorists such as Jean
Baudrillard that the future will not take place and/or
that it has already happened,9 positive
approaches to change may appear naive but in the 1970s
many artists who had relinquished the romantic seduction
of their own egos and forsaken self expression in favour
of a more socially responsive and responsible art still
believed that they could effect change by working on the
concept and the role of art. Some, like the
conceptualists, continued to interrogate art from within,
others sought to use art as a political tool. However, as the 1980s dawned, apocalyptic visions started to reassemble for the fin de siecle aria and textual analysis began to replace activism. Although political statements were poignant in and around the Third Biennale of Sydney in 1979, the apocalyptic air was thickening and the curatorial tendency was to herald more personal expressions which appeared to represent the troubles of the individual psyche.10 When Paul Taylor started to celebrate the second degree with a new wave of curatorial practice, Kennedy's work was still out of vogue, whilst his contemporaries Mike Parr, Imants Tillers and John Nixon were acclaimed as Tall Poppies (Melbourne University Art Gallery).11 |
| During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s
Kennedy continued to pursue a political art practice
which in true realist mode persisted with representations
of actual political events. November Eleven
(1979), a collaboration with video makers John Hughes and
Andrew Scollo, dealt with the dismissal of the Whitlam
Labor government by the then Governor General, Sir John
Kerr in 1975. Using the traditional medium of the Trade
Union Movement (the political banner) and introducing the
electronic voice of the video, Kennedy and Hughes
analysed one of the greatest political ruptures to scar
the face of Australian history. In the 1980s Kennedy, like many of his colleagues, started to critically re-assess dominant Left wing paradigms. By the end of the decade his work had became more poetic and less rhetorical.12 Drawing on the ideas of Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, exhibitions such as The Stars Disordered (touring, 1988) and Chorus: From the Breath of Wings (Museum of Modern Art, Heide, 1993) offered a complex meditation on late capitalist consumer culture and the failure of major political and philosophical paradigms. In The Stars Disordered (another collaboration with John Hughes, 1988) Kennedy addressed issues of historical identity in a country celebrating 200 years of white settlement. In Of Maps and Men: From the Secret World of Memory (1992) he turned his critical gaze on the founding fathers of communism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung appeared as portraits in decay; their faces deconstructed erasures of their thought. Mapping the ideological downfall of these individuals was continued in the monumental exhibition Chorus: From the Breath of Wings (5th Australian Sculpture Triennial, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 1993) which was staged as an allegorical salute to the end of history. In Kennedy's assessment it was the political formation and totalitarian enactment of communism which precipitated its failure within history. Like its fascist brothers it used violent and coercive means to mould its ideology onto society. |
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From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
As the title implies Chorus: From the Breath of
Wings was more than just a sculptural installation,
it was a kind of mechanical opera which made consistent
reference to the critique of totalitarianism developed by
Left critics such as Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.
Chorus presented a cast of static actors and allegorical
speakers who stood as indicators of the events in our
recent social past.13 Using an array of
acoustic loud speakers Kennedy created a troupe of 3.5
metre tall characters, all assemblages of different media
and each critiquing various ideological positions. The
loud speakers, which had been used earlier in his
experimental soundscapes, were turned into metaphorical
characters representing various authoritorial positions. Adorno and Horkheimer's famous analysis of the Enlightenment, in which the authors used the example of Odysseus and his sailors resisting the seduction of the Sirens' song, appeared in Kennedy's Chorus as Siren: the North (after Mayakovsky).14 Here the 'dialectic of enlightenment' was played out through a discourse on dominance and representation. The factory siren, used by Mayakovsky in the early 1920s (Concert for Factory Sirens) lost its utopian edge as it screeched through the simulacra of the advertising industry (shown on three stacked TV screens). The factory, aestheticized by Mayakovsky, became a kind of monster in Kennedy's depiction: a military and oppressive force, invisible on the screen but permeating the space. A horrible reminder of the loss of identity experienced as society marches to the beat of progress. Writing in 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer argued, "Just as the capacity of representation is the measure of domination, and domination is the most powerful thing that can be represented in most performances, so the capacity of representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at the same time."15 |
From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
Throughout Chorus Kennedy contemplated this
kind of dialectical problem. The speaker of The South
was inverted, it became a kind of 'begging bowl'
stretched across the body of a rusty car door, complete
with side mirror which reflected the advertising images
from the north. The southern hemisphere and third world
as receptacle for ideas and ideologies constructed
elsewhere. The breath of the north expired in a small room where Chorus: the presence of the past was installed. Here a set of white marching drums were layed out funerary-style. At one end a five inch black and white TV set, its electronic components exposed, replayed the image of the goose-stepping German army. The marching sound resonated through the drums and concluded with the electronically re-configured image of Joseph Stalin's hand waving incessantly. According to Kennedy the 'end of history' instils a kind of social stasis which forecloses on the possibility of opposition. This of course means business as usual in the economic sphere and helps maintain the dominance of Western culture. Wary of the type of apocalyptic vision characteristic of Jean Baudrillard's narratives of implosion and hyperreality, Kennedy turns to critics like Edward Said who argues that because, "the West acquired world dominance, and because it seems to have completed its trajectory by bringing about 'the end of history' as Francis Fukuyama has called it, Westerners have assumed the integrity and the inviolability of their cultural masterpieces, their scholarship, their worlds of discourse; the rest of the world stands petitioning for attention at our windowsill." 16 |
From Chorus: From the Breath of Wings, 1993 |
Kennedy lays Enlightenment ideas to rest in the Grave
of the Enlighteners, a deathly elongated loud
speaker. In Canon he erects a kind of funerary
pyre for Western epistemology, its speaker a burnt out
voice propped up on a 3.5 metre stack of charred books. Kennedy used the 'angel of history', Walter Benjamin's famous allegory of progress, as a leitmotif throughout the installation. The beating of wings was duplicated in the pattern of Stalin's waving hands; the news readers' mouth in Lulu: epilogue and prologue (with newsreader as the angel of history, and the beating heart/sky sequence in ...and the Utopias. They rise into the sky and turn pale... In The End of History one of Marx's more poetic statements on the subject of social transformation - "All that is solid melts into air" - was seen immersed in a trough of icy water. On one end a refrigerated electric fan, mounted high in the air, tried unsuccessfully to blow the winds of change towards the angel of history (a refrigerated music stand). The storm blowing from paradise in Benjamin's allegory had been frozen and immobilised.17 In many ways Chorus relied upon the spectator being present in the time of the installation. The incessant flickering of video monitors and the interception of advertising and media news created a soundscape of voices all participating in their own deconstruction. Chorus: from the breath of wings is Peter Kennedy's most complex statement to date on the state of the postmodern world. The disasters of modernity and the downfall of once utopian ideals are mapped across the surface of the exhibition. The 'speakers' who appeared in unanimated form at Inhibodress have now been cast as characters on the postmodern stage. Footnotes |
