Un-done

Oral Presentation by Kerin Casey

1     Ahi ahi marie everyone and welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Kerin Casey, and today I’m going to talk to you about the key ideas, processes, and research that inform my art practice.

2      Firstly, I will introduce some of the background themes that underpin much of my thinking, mainly revolving around ideas of adaptability, change, and transitional moments, offering some historical context, both global and personal. I’ll discuss the influence of agonistic theory on my studio process, referencing artists such as Judy Millar, Amy Sillman, and Charlotte Posenenske. And I’ll talk about shifting narratives, particularly with reference to feminism.

3      Adaptability and Change

4      The human ability to adapt to our changing environments has seen us survive on this planet since we started walking around on two legs over four million years ago

[1]

5      Yet despite our ability to adapt, many of us don’t like change.

6      Perhaps that’s dependent on the pace at which change can happen, and the way that change can benefit some and disadvantage others.

7      Deviating from the status quo can make us feel vulnerable or threatened. But we have to draw on our ability to adapt because often change needs to happen.

8      We don’t always get it right. Sometimes it doesn’t have the desired effect. So, it’s an ongoing cycle of revision and adaptation.

9      Over the past two hundred years the rate of change in the world has sped up dramatically. The Industrial Revolution radically altered the way we worked, lived, travelled, and interacted. New economic models driven by mass production demanded resources,

10     and countries and cultures were colonized to satiate them.

11      For the first time in human history the world went to war.

12     Twice. Generations on, we’re still suffering the effects of these events both psychologically and physically. It has recently been discovered that

intergenerational trauma may alter our DNA.[2] Our ability to adapt keeps the legacy of past traumas present within us.

13     Adaptability through revision and improvisation is a key motivator of my arts practice. My work considers themes of broken promises, unrealised futures, and the fragility of inherited narratives. They explore the dynamics of navigation in a present that’s very different from the shiny golden version of an earlier time. To be adaptable is to be resilient, and that requires both flexibility and strength.

14    Transitional Moments

15   The world I grew up in, and the future I was told to expect were different from the present I now inhabit. This is New Plymouth in 1968. Population 37,000. 1968 was the year I was born so I have always felt connected to its place in history.

16     It was a tumultuous year. Most notably due to the student protests that occurred around the globe, including…

17     New Zealand. The students were protesting the stifling conservatism that had taken root after the Second World War. The anti-establishment theme of their protests encompassed a wide range of grievances including women’s rights, worker’s rights, and racial discrimination. These riots and demonstrations were so widespread and disruptive that they became catalysts for change.

It was an era of transition. In art history, post-modernism was beginning to evolve from modernism.

18     I think of that transition through Frank Stella’s practice that evolved from his flat minimalist paintings of the early 1960’s

19     to his expansive, chaotic, three-dimensional work of the past fifty years. Or,

20    through the rise of the Feminist Art Movement, that sought to break down gender barriers entrenched in art and society, through works like this installation, The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, that celebrates and commemorates important women from history.  

When big things happen, not just globally but in our individual experiences, we can often stick a pin in that moment in history and say that’s when everything changed. These events cause breaks and fractures that then require us to adjust and reconfigure.

21     I had an art moment like that in1977, when my parents took my sisters and I to Kinetic Works, the Len Lye exhibition at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery. It blew my tiny 9-year-old mind. I didn’t know that art could bang and crash and wobble and bounce. Some of the works,

22    like Trilogy, scared the crap out of me and made some of the really little kids in the gallery cry. That exhibition was so incredible to me, that it made me want to immediately run home and build something huge out of metal. I’ve seen Lye’s kinetic sculptures many times over the years, and I’ve come to realise that as dramatic as they are when they’re in full motion, for me,

23    the real magic happens at the moment that the still object begins to shift, so slightly that you question that it even happened. The moment that you realise that there is more to that object than you originally thought.

24    I have always been drawn to work that can exist in two states simultaneously - like this work by Shaun Waugh, Icon Blue, a two-dimensional photograph that appears to be a three-dimensional relief sculpture, so I try to make work that can somehow hold in that state of transition. But doing so contains an inherent paradox.

25    Capturing a moment of transition prevents the transition from occurring, so is it then no longer a transitional moment? Embracing this paradox has become the key for me because the paradox holds tension and tension is the fundamental core of my work. Can my artwork then be a “space for doing ‘aporetic’ decisions?”[3] That is, an artefact that holds an irresolvable internal contradiction.

26  Agonism Theory

27  The writings of political theorist Professor Chantal Mouffe on agonism have been valuable for me in evolving these ideas and discovering that sustaining contradiction is a useful methodology for making work that holds the tension of potential change. Agonism examines how conflict can be harnessed in a positive, inclusive way by agreeing to make temporary decisions,

28   or de-cisions. Usually, a decision making process is about reaching a conclusion after deliberation and resolving in a fixed end point by suppressing opposition with top-down finality. De-cisions remain in the tension, making conflict productive.

29    Agonistic tension occurs in a space where “differences can confront each other.”[4]  Rather than being dismissed, minority or dissenting voices are necessary to the process remaining open. It’s important to make the distinction that this isn’t a formula for defusing tension, but rather acknowledging the opposing forces that create tension, and then holding them in a state of abeyance.

30  Agonism in Practice - Form

31   As a model for applying this theory to a practice, I looked at Professor Emeritus Dr. John Pløger’s article, “Agonism, decision, power – The art of working unfinished.” Pløger’s article looks at the way agonistic de-cision-making processes can be used in the practice of town planning, where the opinions and needs of many different people need to be taken into consideration. The principles he applies are strategies that I can adopt when, rather than people, I’m working with options and materials.

32 Pløger suggests using the idea of the sketch as an applicable way for working provisionally.

        Working in sketch mode allows me to have more of an open scope for risk taking and what-ifs. If it feels like it doesn’t matter so much because it’s just a sketch, it takes away the pressure that comes with the intent to produce something that’s final.

33 It invites a richer process allowing for multiple iterations that serve the work, rather than striving to find an ending that shuts off further possibilities.

34   Holding the work together with notches and tension rather than permanently with glue and nails gives me the ability to revisit and re-work. The work doesn’t finish – it rests in place for now. This is what I mean by de-cisional thinking.

35    The art of working in an agonistic space is about listening to conflicting ideas as part of the temporary decision-making process. Keeping the work in a sketch state for long enough so that it is open to questioning and risk taking, alterable…

36  in multiple ways, and free to journey into illogical or disjunctive territory. For me, to work unfinished is to avoid stagnant thinking and getting stuck in the well-trodden ground of my own making.

37    As Pløger aptly puts it, “a de-cisional mode of working respects the realisation that a decision gets ‘its rights from the ones to come’.”[5]  

38-42 I apply this generative thinking when I decommission a work by taking it apart, then use one or two pieces from it as seeds to grow a new work.

43   Surface

44    Using the methodology of temporary connections allows me to work de-cisionally in a kind of call and response way when I’m building a form, but how then can my response to surface and paint reflect the same agonistic considerations? I discovered that surface was my way of revealing the previous iterations of each piece. Over time they build up layers of colour that get sanded back and changed so they begin to hold their own history.

45   I noticed that it was the unintentional by-products of this process of removal and renewal that were like dissenting voices that I shouldn’t dismiss. Indirectly, they were of my making but not of my thinking, and they had a lightness of touch that comes when you work in sketch mode, and you want it to hold in that moment.

46  Judy Millar addressed this in her talk accompanying her exhibition Here You Are at Michael Lett in March this year. She spoke about having to suppress the will in order to make art because “the will wants to do what it can do well,”[6] and that can lead an artist to repeat themselves. So, I’ve been trying to get out of my own way, avoiding attempts to achieve any pre-conceived aesthetic and making de-cisions based on what the work needs, rather than relying on my practiced notions of what I know has worked for me in the past.   

47  Painter Amy Sillman adds to this idea saying …

“Part of doing improvisational work is pitting yourself against the materials and the resistance that they offer and trying to figure out how to make something happen where you’re both working with the materials and also very much working against them and questioning them.”[7]

Sillman’s practice unravels art-historical ideas of mastery and power, instead connecting with doubt and unknowability.[8] Her paintings go through complete changes over time, as she looks for one layer to conflict with the next.

48   She says,

“I’m always pretty much looking for something that contradicts the layer that came before, creating a certain kind of tension. And creating something that feels like it sort of holds together and its sort of falling apart at the same time …”[9]

49    I try to extend this thinking about precarity and just-holding-together when I’m creating paint colours. I mix colours that start out as one thing and just when they start to transition to a different hue I stop and let them sit in that space of almost, but not quite. It gives them a quality of being slightly off which feeds into the tension of the work.

50   Agonistic Space

51   Developing that sense of “offness” through to installation is something that I’m continuing to work on. It requires me to take Judy Millar’s advice and “suppress the will,” sidestepping my inbuilt instincts for balance and instead inviting awkwardness. Once the works are installed, they’re finished for now while in the space of public exhibition, but even in this paused state they still contain the potential to change.

52  The de-cisional thinking that happens in the studio, continues to happen in the space of exhibition, then back to the studio, and so on. De-installing isn’t an ending. It sets in motion another cycle of collapse and recovery.

53  Engaging in this process of ongoing reconstitution creates objects that are hybrids of past iterations, containing

54   parts that may be substituted, altered, or removed. They become temporary embodiments of past and present.

55   In their state of collapse, they are individual pieces that lie flat, waiting to be brought to life by being re-connected with one another. It’s the temporarily fixed connections that animate the work and enable reconfiguration.

56   Artist Charlotte Posenenske’s Square Tubes Series, uses re-configuration to question ideas of authorship and ownership.

57  The prefabricated components of these works, made from cardboard, can be connected to one another using removable plastic rivets. They can be cheaply mass-produced and installed to activate a space in multiple ways by anybody. When they connect, the work can expand to potentially huge scales, considerably altering a space, but only temporarily.

Posenenske democratised her art practice by blurring the lines between artist, factory worker, and consumer and hoped that her work could be an agent for change.

58   But in 1968, the year after her Square Tubes Series was conceived, the year of global political activism, Posenenske published a statement saying, “It is painful for me to face the fact that art cannot contribute to the solution of urgent social problems.”[10] She felt that she had reached the limits of art’s ability to make real change, so she quit art making entirely, and studied sociology. Several years after her death in 1985 from cancer, her second husband continued to manage her artwork under a strict set of rules that they were not to be made available for private or sole ownership, but for public display only.[11]

59   Her work was exhibited at Artspace earlier in the year and in that context it continued to ask us to consider the social potential of space and human agency. Posenenske didn’t think she could change anything through her art, but her work continues to ask questions about how systems can change and how we can have the power to change them.

60  Shifting Narratives

61    Remember New Plymouth? It took a while for change to filter through here. In New Plymouth, the question, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” when posed to little girls, was rhetorical. According to my primary school in the 1970’s I didn’t have to worry about a future career because I would be

62   a “housewife”. In my high school in the 1980’s, that idea was already changing as posters started appearing in the corridors claiming that

64 Girls Can Do Anything. But there was an unspoken proviso that girls could do anything as long as it was

64    teaching,

65    nursing,

66    accounting,

67    or secretarial work.

68    My family

69-76 and my ■ favourite ■ female heroes ■ from TV, ■ movies, and ■ music ■told me a different  story, ■ and I was constantly having to ■ navigate between those mixed messages, … hovering

77    between a backward thinking institution and a forward-thinking home life.

The messages were mixed because the game was changing but not everyone was keeping up with the revised rules. I was living through an era of rapid social and cultural transition particularly for women.

78    It’s still changing. Many of the same battles are still being fought and in some places change, along with legislation, is being reversed. Girls Can Do Anything –

79    except receive equal pay for equal work

80    or have control over their own bodies.

81   It makes me tired knowing that we are still having to have these conversations, and my feminist fatigue has been stopping me from acknowledging the feminist thread that runs through my work. Just by way of being a woman making abstract constructions out of plywood, particularly as they’re growing in scale, I’m venturing into a stereotypically male dominated field.

82   It’s only recently, through looking at artists like Arlene Shechet that I’m realising that the kind of work I make is already contributing to a feminist narrative without having to be heavy handed about it, or getting a case of the hopeless Posenenske’s and feeling like I’m just another female artist bashing her head against a brick wall.

83   This year Arlene Shechet installed six monumental outdoor sculptures at Storm King Art Centre, in New Windsor, New York. The series is called Girl Group, with titles like

84   Rapunzel and

85   As April. They’re huge sinuous sculptures made from welded steel, each with its own almost monochromatic colour palette, sometimes with the polished metal remaining unpainted. They look precarious and provisional and play with visual paradoxes.

86   The accompanying exhibition text says that they “announce their feminine presence, proposing a new direction within the tradition of constructed metal sculpture.” [12]

87    I’m assuming that by “tradition of constructed metal sculpture” they’re referring to works like these, also displayed at Storm King, by male artists Antony Caro, Sol leWitt, and Charles Ginnever.

88    So, what makes Shechet’s sculptures “announce their feminine presence”? That phrase seems to invite the use of reductive stereotypes to describe the work. Femininity is a contentious and problematic term, and to adequately address its complexities would require more specific attention beyond the scope of this presentation, but in this instance, I think Shechet is controlling the narrative. She has implanted ideas of the feminine in our minds through her choice of titles for each work and the collective title Girl Group. But at the same time she challenges those reductive stereotypes. The sculptures appear fragile and precarious but their precarity is an illusion as they are highly engineered, welded metal works, built to withstand the elements. They are fixed in space and time.

89  Conclusion

90   The fragility and precarity of my work is very real. They are fixed in space and time but only for a captured moment, reserving the right to change their minds in the future, because the future isn’t fixed in place either. They don’t come to a permanent conclusion for display, rather they continue to evolve over time, like people do.

91   They have a degree of fragility because they are built using tension and without the permanent stability of glue or nails, and this is the reason they are able to continue to be reworked. So, in a way, their formal weaknesses are conceptual strengths. They allow the work to adapt and change, and any claims to monumentality are undercut by their precarious provisionality.

92  Hubris is replaced with agonism. They are reliant on interconnectedness. One piece can’t sustain a curve or appear to hover without the assistance or resistance of another, and a certain degree of negotiation needs to take place in the making.

93   Thinking and working in this way has revealed a deeper level in my studio practice, encouraging a more reciprocal process with the materials and providing me with an ongoing strand of research.

        Precarity and the ability to adapt and evolve speak to my experience of the human condition. The need for all of us to be open to learning new ways of being in the world with each other, relinquishing fixed ideas, and adapting to positive change.

94    Finished

95    Finished – for now

96-97 Bibliography

 Footnotes

 [1] “Introduction to Human Evolution,” What Does It Mean To Be Human? Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, https://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution, accessed 30 July 2024.

[2] Rebecca Kiddle, “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone,” in Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books Ltd. 2020), 89. 

[3] John Pløger, “Agonism, decision, power – The art of working unfinished,” Raumforschung und Raumordnung | Spatial Research and Planning. 81. 10.14512/rur.1668, (2023), 452.

[4] Pløger, “Agonism, decision, power,” 450. 

[5] Pløger, “Agonism, decision, power,” 458.

[6] Judy Millar, Artists Talk at Michael Lett, March 9, 2024.

[7] Art 21: Extended Play, “Amy Sillman: To Abstract,” Art 21 Video, 8:43,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxNIf8bz9Jk, accessed 9 August 2024.

[8] “Amy Sillman,” MoMA,  https://www.moma.org/artists/28808, accessed 8 August 2024.

[9] Art 21: Extended Play, “Amy Sillman: To Abstract.”

 [10] Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 42.

[11] Christine Mehring, “Public Options: the Art of Charlotte Posenenske,” Artforum, https://www.artforum.com/features/public-options-the-art-of-charlotte-posenenske-195269/, accessed 6 August 2024.

[12] “Arlene Shechet: Girl Group,” Storm King Art Centre, https://collections.stormking.org/Detail/occurrences/208, accessed 7 August, 2024.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Art 21: Extended Play. “Amy Sillman: To Abstract.” Art 21 Video, 8:43.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxNIf8bz9Jk. Accessed 9 August, 2024.

Herbert, Martin. Tell Them I Said No. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

Kiddle, Rebecca. “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone.” In Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge, 83-106. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books Ltd, 2020.

Mehring, Christine. “Public Options: the Art of Charlotte Posenenske.” Artforum. https://www.artforum.com/features/public-options-the-art-of-charlotte-posenenske-195269/. Accessed 6 August, 2024.

Millar, Judy. “Artists Talk at Michael Lett.” March 9, 2024.

MoMA. “Amy Sillman.”  https://www.moma.org/artists/28808. Accessed 8 August, 2024.

Pløger, John. “Agonism, decision, power – The art of working unfinished.” Raumforschung und Raumordnung | Spatial Research and Planning. 81. 10.14512/rur.1668, (2023): 449-460.

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “Introduction to Human Evolution,” What Does It Mean To Be Human? https://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution. Accessed 30 July, 2024.

Storm King Art Centre. “Arlene Shechet: Girl Group.” https://collections.stormking.org/Detail/occurrences/208. Accessed 7 August, 2024.