Grab-bag of style over substance

Shape of Knowledge sounds like a promising concept but the reality falls short in this collection of sub-exhibitions.

Our Future Network 2016 by Alex Martinis Roe, part of the Shapes of Knowledge exhibition at Monash University. Picture: Christian Capurro

The title of the exhibition Shapes of Knowledge was an appealing one; the reality of the exhibition is less satisfactory. It is clear from the first ­moment you enter that it is composed of a patchy and rather arbitrary collection of sub-exhibitions, and immediately after that it becomes apparent it has only a loose connection to any concept of the pursuit of knowledge.

The very idea of knowledge implies curiosity about the nature of the world, and a commitment to the idea of truth. This is not to say it is always easy to define the truth — but the idea of truth must be maintained as a principle of orientation, or else we have no recourse against the oppression of falsehood and ideology.

The pursuit of truth begins with the acknowledgment that we are still engaged in a pursuit. Ideology, on the contrary, is the conviction that we already know the truth, which is why ideologues always want to censor contrary views and even suppress the asking of questions.

This exhibition starts from cosy certainties, like those of the media personality who recently declared she was feeling “stable and calm like I’m on the right side of history”.

Kym Maxwell’s Objects of Longing (2018–19) from Shapes of Knowledge. Picture: Christian Capurro

Even the disparate collection of displays can be explained by the need to tick all of the boxes of current good causes, from ecology to Aboriginal culture and feminism. The only surprise is that the organisers didn’t find a way to include some reference to irregular migration. But perhaps that’s because there aren’t any really difficult, morally complex or disturbing problems, like violence in remote Aboriginal communities or the oppression of women in places like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Just the questions we can all feel stable and calm about.

Of all the displays, the most cogent and interesting relates to the connection between companies that mine fossil fuels and the arts.

A huge and deliberately complicated diagram gives an impressionistic rather than actually legible idea of the complex networks involved: for the arts are funded not only by mining companies, but also by other companies like banks, logistics providers, legal and accounting practices that, in turn, derive much of their money from mining activities.

An accompanying video explores the question in more detail, and cites specific examples of companies that are important sponsors, and whose senior executives are on the boards of large arts organisations. It is indeed an important question and one worth pondering, even if some of the visual montages are overly emphatic and unsubtle.

Lucas Ihlein’s Baking Earth: Soil and the Carbon Economy (2019). Picture: Christian Capurro

Art has always been sponsored by the wealthy and powerful, and often too by large corporate entities like the church, although we should not forget that patronage very often came from particular churches, religious orders or individual prelates, rather than from the institution imagined as a monolithic entity. But that does not make sponsorship a bad thing; on the contrary, we are grateful that these people and bodies saw fit to support great artists and fund masterpieces that we still admire today.

The real difference between the art patronage of the past and contemporary sponsorship, however, is that historical patronage usually meant supporting some project of communal meaning and relevance, like the decoration of a chapel in a cathedral, which told the stories of a patron saint and addressed the whole congregation. The patron might gain social prestige, as well as spiritual credits, from this expense, but it was only by doing something for the community and by submitting to beliefs that transcended his own interests.

Today, the sponsorship of contemporary art is usually different in both respects: it neither speaks of shared communal concerns, nor does it address a broad communal audience. What is left is simply the promotion of the prestige of an individual or more generally a corporation.

The content of the art is secondary to its alleged formal qualities of dynamism and innovation, and by supporting this work, the company implies it shares these values and qualities. Sponsorship is brand-building by association.

The video emphasises the corporate sponsorship of the larger performing companies, but the question is less acute in this case, because they are devoted to maintaining as well as renewing cultural traditions, which is more akin to the earlier support of shared communal interests; it is worse in the case of contemporary art, which is more prone to being turned into an empty signifier of prestige.

Annette Krauss’s Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation). Shapes of Knowledge installation view, Monash University.

The Biennale of Sydney is even cited as an example of principled behaviour for having cut off ties with their founding sponsor, Transfield, in 2014 after some participating artists made a fuss about one of the company’s subsidiaries running an offshore detention centre. But this was an opportunistic response that did not stop to consider the complex and no doubt questionable interests of other sponsors, as brought out on the wall diagram.

Many would agree that fossil fuels are harmful, and let us assume that tobacco and armaments are also ruled out, as well as gambling.

But fashion, which galleries have been in love with for years because it brings in female audiences that otherwise would not come to see real art exhibitions, is one of the most ecologically damaging industries in the world today. And what about advertising, which tries to keep people in a constant state of unhappy craving for things they don’t need? Or mass media, promoting harmful images and role models? Or food and beverage companies, doing their best to drive customers to obesity? Or banks, which make their money by funding all these businesses? Where is the unequivocally clean money? In practice we have to accept compromise, but none of us can afford to be complacent.

The second potentially interesting, but poorly explained, exhibit is in effect a device for measuring the carbon content of soil.

The point of this device is to make it possible to measure any increase in that carbon content through plantings that draw carbon from the atmosphere and are then ploughed back into the earth to form humus. This may be a way to remove a vast amount of carbon from the atmosphere, and it is argued that subsidising farmers to take such an approach would increase the fertility of their land while also helping to solve global warming.

Considering that the process has such enormous potential benefits, one would think it would be more clearly laid out, including with some idea of how easy or difficult it would be to achieve the increase in humus production, whether this would have an impact on the amount of agricultural land now in use or would have consequences for crop rotation, and so on. But because the display is assembled by an artist, we are shown the soil testing machine for picturesque effect, but not told properly about what matters most.

In a way this sums up the problem of an exhibition titled Shapes of Knowledge, but which constantly puts shape — including a plethora of pointless diagrams and pseudo-archives — ahead of content and meaning.

A careless reading of this particular exhibit would suggest that the testing machine was the device for improving soil; and since most exhibition viewers are careless, here as elsewhere most viewers will probably leave with little increase to their knowledge.

Nearby is another project whose buzzword is unlearning. It seems this group wants to unlearn all sorts of bad habits of corporate culture, including hierarchical distinctions, lack of sense of community, individual selfishness and competitiveness. And no doubt many of those things are more or less harmful to the individual and to the work community, although some may be inevitable consequences of much more fundamental habits of mind about economic growth, innovation and expansion.

Apart from that, the main trouble is the group seems to seek a solution through community meetings and discussions, and tabulations of principles that alternate between the obvious and the obscure, which they print as posters or broadsheets.

All this is heir to post-Marxist habits of thinking and overthinking, in which extremely simple insights are lost in the leaden habits of group discussion, which merely aggravate participants’ sense of alienation from and smug superiority to others outside the group.

Many of the problems they glimpse but immediately submerge in a bog of verbosity arise from the negative and neurotic habits of the egoistic self. But thinking and discussing will not make these problems go away, any more than thinking can solve the knots of anxiety or depression: as the products of defective thinking in the first place, further thinking only exacerbates them. The only solution to the tangles of neurotic thinking is to find a way to mental stillness, through non-discursive practices such those of Buddhism or Stoicism.

Over-talking and excessive indulgence in ­futile discussion also characterise another installation with a rather sad video projection of a feminist group in which a series of individuals speak either singly to the camera, or in groups or pairs to each other. The tone is subdued, without smiling or laughter, and the dialogues have the painful quality — like talking to someone at a funeral — of people making enormous efforts not to be dominant or to crush the fragile sensibility of the interlocutor.

Most of what they say is forgettable, with the occasional gem, such as when one woman reflects self-flagellatingly on her own “privilege”, which she then cleverly turns into the privilege of patriarchy and capitalism, even managing to throw in expressions that in another context would be classified as hate speech, like “rape culture”, something assumed to exist without either question or need for substantiation or qualification.

Another woman observes sneeringly that when some women think they want a baby, what they really want is a dog. Girls and women of different ages rehearse bland formulas, always permeated with the conviction that they are somehow downtrodden by the patriarchy; there is an almost universal lack of self-criticism or suspicion that perhaps one has to take some responsibility for oneself.

One can’t help wondering how many women really want this: to sit around in a tepid bath of mutual affirmation and commiseration, as though they were all in a kind of Edwardian rest home for ladies suffering from neurasthenia. Surely most would rather engage energetically with the challenges of life — study and learning, work and career, personal and sexual relationships, family and children.

Life entails risks and brings suffering as well as joy but it is preferable to stagnating in a “safe space” of stunted affective development.

Shapes of Knowledge

Monash Museum of Art, until April 13