Mehmet Adil/Reception catalogue essay- Biennial of Australian Art/Art Gallery of South Australia 2004

RECEPTION

Art Gallery of South Australia
Biennial of Australian Art 2004

During a tutorial session in late 2002, art students expressed interest in having an open discussion about the refugees-asylum seekers kept in Australian detention centres, specifically Woomera and Baxter. It was a discussion proposed to ascertain what the artistic responses and reactions might be to the plight of the detainees. Interest in such artistic thought processes was taken up in the context of a tradition of artistic engagement in political, social and cultural matters, which may both reflect and inform general public opinions and sentiments regarding 'issues of the day'.

Generally referred to as 'illegal immigrants' by Ministers and media, men, women and children seeking asylum in Australia are held in captivity until their cases are examined by immigration authorities, or the courts, in order to ascertain whether they are morally and legally fit to be released into Australian society. It can take years. In our tutorial, in response to the publicly televised 'hunger strikes' and subsequent disturbances in detention centres, a young art student was moved to declare agreement in principle with her father's comments that those aliens causing such disturbances '…should be given a bullet each, rather than have tax-payer's dollars spent on them'. On the face of it such a comment ought not to be taken too seriously, but in the young student's state of ignorance her uncritical loyalty to lines of 'authority' regarding the asylum seekers' plight was disturbing. Hearing fellow students' reactions that people seeking asylum deserve to be treated with more compassion and human dignity than what they are experiencing in the hands of authorities, she left my class in disgust never to return. 

Imagery in James Geurts' installation 'Reception' reflects, among other things, his complex processes of thought and action in ascertaining his own frank responses and reactions to this dark nexus of our Australian present, in which we are being offered a normality of definitive inclusion and exclusion through fragmentationary and distortionary communicative mechanisms.

Using photographic and drawing techniques Geurts has created an ever-changing shoreline adorned/littered with discarded, unclaimed or imagined objects; a cigarette butt, a tangled ball of string, the furtive beam of a flashlight caught fleetingly in that inter-tidal zone, as a torso, dead or alive. Maritime incidents. Images and sounds that have no eyes or ears to respond to our gaze, words or gestures, but invite us to contemplate our own sense of reality and the means by which such realities are created and sustained. Imagine an eye, caught in its own reflection, not knowing what it sees. An ear hearing not what is out there but only the sounds of its internal mechanics.

Evocation of challenge to that dark nexus, manufacture of art objects valorised within the institutional frameworks of our guilt (that revenge on the self that only perpetuates what it seeks to free itself from), or invocation of power to mobilize Australia's pragmatic and humanitarian resources beyond a 'good conscience'? 

Should art be subjected to expectations of bearing the burden of maintaining our 'good conscience'? I believe that art as an activity with its expected disciplinary engagements cannot in an outright sense claim self-righteousness without some degree of self-delusion, without contributing to 'collective' manufactured (portable) illusions/delusions. But it can make a considerable contribution, in collaboration with all other social endeavours, towards a better understanding of our sense of being in the world. Towards discovering genuinely mutual modes of interactivity between and among those who are socially, politically and economically more secure and those who are not, rather than exploiting the desire for those securities. James Geurts' allegorical and symbolic works are a contribution towards enriching this process. A process of enriching and activating our imagination, beyond our government's anxiety to protect us from knowing that "…if it were not for the envy of those around us who are deprived, the taste of life would change in our mouths…" 1[1]

Mehmet Adil

December 2003