Biography of things: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

A Melbourne exhibition explores the artistic value and meaning of physical objects.

Creation revisited

A lot of artists in the 20th century, from Marcel Duchamp to various less respectable epigones, played with the idea that a work of art means, and ultimately is, whatever the artist declares it to be. The original justification for this was a reaction to the new domination of art by a speculative market and by art museums, each of which had ways of defining and dictating value for their own purposes that deserved to be called into question.

The way markets and museums work today is certainly no less questionable, but the traditional avant-gardist subversions are now fully factored into the ideologies of the institutions and have lost all power to disturb their relentless processing of aesthetic commodities.

A more fertile and more potentially countercultural approach is to look for meanings intrinsic to works of art as cultural expressions but also as physical objects; such meanings are not static but develop over time in the process of subsequent reception, the accumulation of new associations, and material wear and tear.

This is what might be referred to as the biog­raphy of an object, in the title of the exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, an idea perhaps inspired by the British Museum and Neil MacGregor’s very successful exhibition A History of the World in 100 Objects, is coming to Australia: it will be in Perth from next month and later at the National Museum in Canberra.

Applying the term biography to an object is both suggestive and paradoxical, since the term implies life and objects are by definition inanimate. But it also draws our attention to the duplicity of the meaning of biography, which we apply both to the writing of a life, in the strict meaning of the word, and to the life itself. The word history has a similar ambiguity: deriving from a Greek root meaning inquiry, it was first used of a critical account of events — of the origins and course of the Persian Wars, in fact — but then gave us the word story and later, in the romantic period, evolved into a kind of shorthand for underlying forces believed to drive the evolution of human societies over time.

Even the word life, incidentally, can have this ambiguity, since it was the more usual term for a biography in the past; one could cite countless examples, from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) to Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779-81) and beyond. But in any case, we humans can have a life both as the subject and protagonist of our own existence and as the object of a later author’s biographical research, of perception by our contemporaries, changing standing and reputation, and so on. An object, on the other hand, or more precisely an ­artefact, is made by someone else, charged with function and significance; it does not have an active life but it may well be said to have a passive one, as it is used, exchanged, acquires new associations, is forgotten or rediscovered.

The core of the meaning of an object is inseparable from the form and iconography invested in it at its making, but the more subtle aspects are those less intentional, less conscious variations of style and the idiosyncrasies of the hand of the maker, and then subsequently the adventitious marks that it has suffered in the course of its afterlife: Juliana Engberg, curator of the ACCA exhibition, cites an example that also struck me many years ago, the bullet holes that still riddle many buildings in Berlin.

Several of the works in the exhibition are closely focused on a few things, but one attempts nothing less than an account of the creation of the world. Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) — the French is a colloquial and quasi-medical expression meaning deep tiredness or exhaustion — was produced while the artist had a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which gave her access to the immense collections of the Smithsonian, with its 19 museums, mostly in Washington, and especially in the natural history collections whose bird specimens make a prominent appearance.

Henrot doesn’t have six days for her creation narrative, just 13 minutes, so she makes ample use of the internet and our ability not only to call up instant information but to open multiple windows at the same time; they appear, shrink, are replaced by others, against a cosmic screensaver; sometimes there are moments of contrasting stillness, as when a hand scatters marbles, suggesting the random scattering of atoms in Democritean theory, or another hand paints a zen circle with ink and brush; but mostly images succeed images with the irresistible energy of life itself.

As Henrot explains it, the work begins with the void, then the birth of the gods, the emergence of the earth, the appearance of animals and humans, then finally fatigue and death. But all attempts to order and contain the infinite complexity of the universe — to collect, classify, explain — inevitably fall short of the reality. The pace of the work is frenetic, and accompanied by an equally frenetic spoken text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, which weaves together creation stories and myths from ancient sources, world religions and tribal beliefs, as though trying to juggle all of these into synthesis.

Although it could hardly be more different in technological means, the idiosyncratic chateau and tomb of the postman Cheval, built in the late 19th century from found, recycled and adapted materials, have one thing in common with ­Henrot’s work, in that Cheval seemed to be channelling ideas and forms from another age in the strange animal forms that he carved. These details are deliberately isolated, like pieces in a museum, in the photographs of Aurelien Froment. It is all the more interesting, in work which seems so atavistic and, though utterly idiosyncratic, also oddly impersonal, that he should have insisted on his authorship in the inscription: travail d’un seul homme (the work of a single man).

Nature, symbolism and sculpted monsters ­appear again in Nicholas Mangan’s Crocodiles Move Fast Out of Water . Mangan starts with a real crocodile, muses on the crocodile label of a brand of shirts and ponders the fate of four giant bronze (not stone, as in the catalogue) crocodiles or sea monsters, installed in 1908 in the basin at the foot of the Triomphe de la Republique monument at Place de la Nation in Paris and melted down during the Nazi occupation.

The meaning and taxonomy of cultural objects is also the concern of Walid Raad in a work based on the Louvre’s collection of Islamic art. When so many objects from different nations and cultures, produced over some 13 centuries, are assembled in a museum, choices must be made about how they are to be grouped and the sequence of display: geographically, chronologically, by religious sect, by medium, genre or style.

Museum collections cannot be set out without making such choices, and yet any particular order, in revealing some things, will obscure others. Perhaps most importantly, in the context of this exhibition, the placing of an object in a rational narrative can lead us to see it only as an instance of some general phenomenon, such as a style or movement, and can conceal its inherent strangeness and mystery. Raad’s work, in any case, takes items out of context and intelligible sequence and presents photographic images of them in fragmentary and isolated form. In addition he annotates the photographs with irrelevant numbers and nonsense observations in French. Some of these are ostensibly mere parodies of museological presentation, but others are more clearly intended to direct our attention. On a figurine, for example, he notes beside one eye that it is made of ivory: ivoire. The other eye is annotated with the punning a voir, which means worth seeing.

But it is not only the imposition of a given museological or anthropological rationale that can limit our experience of museum displays. One of the greatest obstacles to engagement with single objects is the sheer number of things to be seen: how often do we pass through whole rooms of treasures, each made with care by a craftsman in some distant time or place, with no more than a cursory glance as we note the historical period or regional culture represented?

Precisely this problem is the subject of one of the most absorbing works in the exhibition, ­Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s Flash in the Metropolitan (2006). The film — in 16mm colour — was shot in the Metropolitan Museum in New York by night, and a few individual objects, from different times, places and cultures, are briefly ­illuminated by torchlight between intervals of blackness. In some ways it feels like the ultimate art-historical slide test for a would-be museum ­director. But it is much more than that: the momentary glimpses we are afforded impress an image on our retina that remains momentarily suspended in our consciousness in the darkness that follows. Often we are granted another glimpse, a chance to fill in the first impression. We have the sensation of looking and seeing more attentively than ever before, without the competing demands of all the surrounding exhibits.

There is a sense of watching raw footage that adds to the impression of immediacy, reminding us how much we have become accustomed to digital imagery as highly processed as junk food. The use of a 16mm projector, visibly and audibly projecting a physical film, adds to the impression of authenticity. In fact, as a kind of industrial archeology in itself, the projector seems to contribute to our rediscovery of these incomparably older artefacts.

The projector — now showing 16mm black and white — plays much the same role in the other outstanding work, by Paul Sietsema. There is a whole prior process of selecting images of ancient objects and crafting new versions of them to enhance certain effects, but what we see on the film is an alternation between the whole of an artefact — for example a vase — and a close-up focusing on its surface, the cracks and imperfections that reflect the vicissitudes of its biography, and the discolourations or accretions it has accumulated.

We are thus invited to contemplate the form produced by the human hand, and then, as with ruins, the effects of entropy and, above all, the way the object is reclaimed by the living forces of nature. And as the camera explores these organic forms in close-up, we are absorbed into a world without a clear sense of scale, one in which patches of lichen on an earthenware vase can become pictures of clouds in the sky, even analogues of the starry spaces of the heavens.

The Biography of Things, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Until February 21.