MICROVIDS ON THE CONTEMPO ART BUS...

Photographs courtesy of Pedro de Almeida

For the uninitiated, Art Bus is a monthly bus tour run by Contempo at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Through back alleys, main streets, studios and pubs it is a three hour introduction to the artist run spaces laying the foundations of Sydney's artistic output. 

In our February instalment we met with Sydney artist Gary Deirmendjian who, for several years, has been channelling his small scale video works online, sublimely capturing ephemeral moments, depositing them on YouTube and referring to them as his MICROVIDS. Accompanying Gary was curator Pedro de Almeida, who earlier this year was invited to select a series of Gary’s videos and respond to them however he saw fit. The result of this was MICROVIDS – an exhibition pamphlet which acts as an intermediary between an online archive and a physical gallery space.

On the day MICROVIDS was to pop up in Prince Alfred Park to feature on Art Bus I woke to bucketing rain and brollies and armed myself with the task of finding a sufficiently rain-proof alternative venue. Serendipitously, the search gave me my first optic of the insides of the Irish (Gaelic) Club where I was launched into a Celtic dance class jam packed with bounding prepubescents in jazz shoes, but was briskly denied afternoon access to their hall. In the end it was the trusty, iconic Shakespeare Hotel at 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills that housed the afternoon's introduction to MICROVIDS. I do enjoy the fact that so much trust is placed in artists, bus drivers and tour guides that no one questioned why we were heading to a Victorian pub to meet Gary and Pedro, rather than a gallery to see some art. Dressed in dark wet weather gear, propped up against the wall of the establishment while waiting for our arrival, one voice on the bus piped up upon our approach saying the pair looked particularly curatorial and with tongue firmly in cheek I am inclined to agree. As someone who had arrived at the afternoon having had contact with MICROVIDS, I was eager to see how others would react, especially as they would be coming into contact with the exhibition in a group setting.

The catalogue is divided into eight textual segments which link to an online video via an accompanying QR code. I wondered how the group viewing exercise would impact on the way the content was absorbed as, despite its tendency to provoke conversation, I do associate the catalogue and the streaming of the videos as being something intensely quiet. Scanning one code rather than another to determine the order of viewing is something I would prefer to chance upon, not to have influenced by a companion pointing me one way or the other. 

Despite my scepticism of the clouding effects of group consciousness the format of the day worked a treat. We clambered up to the top level of the Shakespeare which is always an event, but even more so when you are escorting 20 wide-eyed punters to an air-tight room and asking them to ignore the humidity and listen to artistic banter for a moment or two. Packing ourselves around a table, Gary and Pedro gave enough of an introduction to provide context to the work, but not so much as to lead us to conclusions. When I first saw MICROVIDS a few months back, the coupling of Gary's videos and Pedro's poetic text immediately struck me as capturing the elating, often elusive, feeling of first contact. For me the work is an entry point into that first moment of recognition of a new idea, a new thought, a new emotion. You don't need to read Pedro's text to know it is poetry. The format, the font, the absence of capitals makes you view the composition with inspired eyes and syncopates the flow of your reading. The writing seems nostalgic for a time that hasn't passed. In communion with this sense of preserving the now, Gary's videos launch you into a series of captured moments which draw you to intimately consider what immediately preceded and what is to come. Confusions with QR codes and pesky technological questions aside, the Art Bus-ers seemed thrilled to explore the idea of an unconventional exhibition space alongside the idea of joint artistic endeavours. Our other gallery stops for the day had also addressed collaboration and the two elements of MICROVIDS standing strongly alone and coming together to create something poignant and whole seemed to strongly resonate with each person. Surreptitiously the audience was collaborating as well with each person creating their own version of the artwork via the choose-your-own-adventure nature of viewing and responding to each of the eight segments. For many of these people I think it was the first time they had been asked to participate in the act of bringing something to life. Streaming the work is, by default, fulfilling the work and the text/image interplay in MICROVIDS is particularly pertinent to questions of anticipation and expectation, both of the work and of the viewer.It is a liberating thing to have so much control over your consumption and consideration. The beauty of both Art Bus and MICROVIDS being that by their very nature they promote the artwork as a dialogue, not a static response; an ideas exchange, not a dogma.

Whatever happened in that stuffy room, when the arty mob left the pub and went on their merry way home, I think we can be assured that many were mentally recording the physical passage between their day out and their home comforts. They may not have been editing their journey for snippets worthy of mass observation, but if we all helped people evaluate their world as much as they passively observe it then three cheers for MICROVIDS on Art Bus, I say. 

Amy Prcevich

For more information on the Contempo art bus visit: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/calendar/contempo-art-bus/

ARTIST INTERVIEW / GARY DEIRMENDJIAN TALKS ABOUT MICROVIDS...

Gary Deirmendjian's current exhibition MICROVIDS, curated by Pedro de Almeida, challenges audiences to reconsider their understanding as to what constitutes an 'exhibition'.

Presented as a lone black plinth, positioned within the entry to Artereal Gallery and existing outside of the main gallery, the exhibition consists of a simple A5 catalogue placed on the aforementioned plinth. The catalogue itself contains a selection of eight QR codes* and an accompanying curatorial text. When scanned, each of these QR codes links back to a certain video on youtube.

Referred to by the artist as 'microvids' these video works exist outside of the traditional fixed physical space of the gallery and can be accessed at any time from any place...

This catalogue, available as a PDF on the gallery's website, and widely disseminated over the internet and via email, has the potential to become viral - allowing the 'exhibition' to continue to grow in reach and to live on past the set dates of the exhibition within the gallery proper.

In this way, the exhibition MICROVIDS questions existing definitions of 'the exhibition' suggesting instead that an exhibition can exist simultaneously, in many different forms, spread over time and space.

Below is an interview with Gary Deirmendjian in which he discusses the ideas behind this latest exhibition and body of work… 

Can you tell us about this aspect of your artistic practice? When did you first being making these 'microvids' and how are they made?

I have over several years now been quietly developing an online depository on YouTube of what I call my MICROVIDS. The depository is manumente.

The MICROVIDS are very brief and discrete suggestive ends edited from a growing pool of raw footage, the capture of which are enticed only by the incidentals of real life encounter and experience, without premeditation or orchestration.

By virtue of this the mobile phone in the pocket has often presented itself as a handy footage (as well as still image and audio) capture device.

Here, if the raw footage may be seen as raw media, the MICROVIDS may then be appreciated as being small resolved works made by editing … in fact they’re typically found through the editing. 

As a contemporary artist what is the intent behind these works?

Once made the MICROVIDS are released into the ocean of YouTube, where they drift freely to over time find their own audience, free of any obligation mediation or justification. They exist in the ether of the net as bits - for as long as the net or YouTube may be, unable to be trapped owned or sold in the physical world.

With MICROVIDS their primary intent has always been for direct internet experiencing where the viewer, whether ushered to them or discover incidentally, choose their own available device (desktop, smartphone, tablet or other), place and time of experience. Further each viewing may be regarded as a direct experience of the original artwork, as opposed to experiencing its reproduction communicated via another media – this is akin to the direct experience of a painting vs. a photograph of that painting.

To exhibit them within a gallery context trapped on USB or DVD via screen projection or monitor devices, would entirely defeat their purpose.

Where did the idea for exhibiting these 'MICROVIDS' via the use of QR codes come from? And what is it about presenting the works in this manner which appeals to you?

In the form of QR codes the current MICROVIDS exhibition at Artereal, has I believe, found a unique way of featuring them in a gallery space without compromising their purpose.

Pedro de Almeida, an arts writer and curator, was invited to curate the exhibition. He viewed the MICROVIDS at manumente to select a few as one would select works from an artist’s studio for a considered exhibition, and to provide its curatorial direction and accompanying text.

Here Pedro has excelled with a much appreciated development in which he responded individually to each of his selected MICROVIDS in a poetic, rather than a descriptive sense.

In the real world the exhibition space is a single sheet of A4 paper, printed on both sides and folded in the middle to form an A5 pamphlet. The QR codes serve as ever-ready springboards to the internet where the selection can be immediately summoned for play from and on the viewers own device.

Gary Deirmendjian is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, photography,video, installation and site-specific works. He has exhibited widely and has received numerous new work invitations and commissions for private and public artworks and site-specific projects. He trained as an aeronautical engineer becoming significantly active in defence research and development and then industrial design before commencing full-time artistic practice and undertaking a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the National Art School Sydney.

Pedro de Almeida, guest curator, b.1980 Porto Portugal. Graduated Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours. Former Program Coordinator Campbelltown Arts Centre. Current Program Manager 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Independent Curator and Writer. Contributor to various publications including Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia, and exhibition catalogues.

*QR codes, abbreviated from quick response codes, is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode first designed in Japan by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994 to track vehicles during the manufacturing process. Consisting of information that is encoded in a pattern of black modules arranged in a square on a white background users with a smartphone equipped with a reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text contact information connect to a wireless network or open a web page in a browser. Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/qr_code.

This exhibition exists outside of the traditional gallery space via PDF version of this document which includes individual titles hyperlinked to the respective MICROVIDS. To view the PDF catalogue for this exhibition please click here.

PEDRO DE ALMEIDA ON GARY DEIRMENDJIAN...

Dig your own hole

It began with a body, ended with a burial, and somewhere in between there was an excavation. This goes some way in describing my recent experience of working with Gary Deirmendjian and the shifting dynamic between artist and curator during the transition from the beginning of a conversation through to the realisation of a new work. I had approached Gary in late March with an invitation to participate in an exhibition to be presented at the Newington Armory Gallery at Sydney Olympic Park, a site that represents one of Australia’s largest urban renewal and environmental remediation projects. As an independent curator my brief was to produce an exhibition that would allow—through one’s own desired curatorial rationale and methodology—for the opportunity to showcase work by artists associated with the Armory’s artistic program of which there are over 120 Australian and international artists working in a diverse range of mediums and conceptual concerns. It was immediately apparent in my initial curatorial research that Gary, in particular, is an artist with a significant relationship with Sydney Olympic Park, having created an impressive large-scale outdoor installation work for the Armory in 2009, consumer temple – broken icon, that comprised a monolithic 20 foot shipping container propped up in an imposing vertical position on timber pallets to delineate and define interior and exterior space with reference to places of worship and bodily and spiritual entombment and, more recently, in 2010 having produced arc de triomphe individuel, a commission for a temporary public sculpture to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Sydney Olympic Games. I spent considerable time looking at his online portfolio of work and fired off an email. He promptly responded and we scheduled a meeting.

I had conceived of a curatorial theme of an ‘excavation’ as a means of looking at the intersections between layers of social, cultural and historical contexts in artists’ works alongside the specific history of the Newington and Homebush estates on which the Armory is placed, itself a site redolent with historical context as a former Royal Australian Navy ammunitions depot established in the late nineteenth-century. Of greater interest, however, was the opportunity to approach this theme as a means of interpreting artists’ practices, which can and often do take on the qualities of archaeological discovery and interpretation of material culture. Having no real budget to facilitate and fund the commissioning of new work from artists for the exhibition, my brief was instead to identify and negotiate the loan of existing works and it was in this mode that I expressed my interest in Gary’s sediment series (2004-2007), a suite of enigmatic life-size sculptures of writhing male bodies encrusted in mud and other earthly matter, evocative of the imagined bodies of the entombed souls of Pompeii covered in apocalyptic ash. Over a macchiato in his favourite local café on Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street, Gary considered my request politely, paused, then said “What I’d most like to do is this”, before outlining in succinct yet specific detail an idea for a new work that would respond to the Newington Armory site and my curatorial proposition. Within 48 hours I had received an in-depth proposal from the artist for his direct and quite literal excavation: he wanted to dig his own hole. The proposal impressively included production specifications for the work with detailed diagrams and section views that made it all too apparent that Gary is an artist with remarkable discipline in intellectual rigour coupled with a technical proficiency of the highest order; he knows what he wants to do and how to do it and knows, too, that the most important ingredient in this mix is to leave room for the cultivation of unexpected surprises. Gary is an artist for whom coincidences are casual only in their occurrence, not in their appreciation and certainly not in the way an artist appropriates the sparks created by the collisions of meaning they might throw up. As the Roman Stoic philosopher and dramatist Seneca observed, “luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.” There was no doubt Gary was prepared, but was I?

Two months followed in which Gary refined his conceptual thinking around the work that in turn defined the limits of its physical form and context in the Armory’s landscape. During this time he diligently kept an eagle’s eye for discarded household items and the junk of modern life—electrical appliances, mattresses, children’s toys, clothing, a sofa, a wine rack, etc—which he collected and transported to the site. Engaging with Homebush Bay’s history of being a site for the illegal dumping of waste from the 1950s until its remediation in the 1990s as part of the development for the Sydney Olympic Games, Gary’s work, titled strata – newington armory, was both a literal and symbolic excavation. A perfect 4 x 4 meter trench was dug, not without considerable effort due to the unexpected layer of basalt just beneath the surface, in which the artist filled his assemblage of junk that imposed the affect of acting as a kind of reverse sinkhole, an aperture from which we encountered regurgitated evidence of our consumerist culture’s unsustainable use of resources and exploitation of all the earth yields, whilst 
also being a sculptor’s exercise in the displacement of volume. This work
related to Gary’s previous work strata (2011), an installation that incorporated the heritage-listed Willoughby Incinerator in Sydney’s northern suburbs, originally designed by Walter Burley Griffin in 1930-1938 and like Newington Armory recently converted into an art space, that made use of the opportunities presented by the internal modernist architectural spaces of a structure once dedicated to the incineration of waste. More than simply a critique of the unsustainability of modern life, the work in fact enabled a kind of fetishisation of trash, but one whose gratification remained obtuse to explicit desires; our insatiable desire for ‘stuff’ was in this case frustrated by the counter elemental desire to conform to nature’s indifference to our will. A computer hard drive or plastic tricycle are no longer associated with their inherent qualities of ‘work’ and ‘play’ once we view them as mere objects that, like humans, are destined for relatively minuscule existences on this planet. It was superbly apt that even before the work was completed a storm surge flooded the site leaving a pool of detritus in a waterlogged landscape—nature’s elements would always have the definitive intervention, the artist merely a traveller in his own creation.

With obvious references to the history of the readymade in modernist experiments with form and theory, strata – newington armory represented an artist’s fascination with process and discovery. It was during the installation of the work that Gary and I stumbled upon a serendipitous find. On the door of the discarded refrigerator Gary had salvaged from the streets of Kings Cross were two stickers, the kind of literally throw-away pop cultural references usually of little value or meaning, both of which depicted human skulls, one rather macabrely kitsch with a doll’s arms protruding from the eye sockets. Given that the image chosen to represent the exhibition across marketing and promotional material was that of fellow exhibiting artist Simon Maberley’s Midas (fools gold), a blown glass human skull covered in gold leaf, it was indeed a coincidence to find not one but two concurrent motifs in this hole Gary had dug. But it wasn’t until nine weeks later at the conclusion of the show as a bulldozer backfilled the hole and I stood near its disappearing precipice that I experienced one of those—is there a less pretentious way to describe it?—Proustian  moments of the shadow of a memory . Ten years earlier, during a break from art school, I visited the Musée d’Orsay for the first time—itself, like Newington Armory, a nineteenth-century temple of industry—and standing in expansive wonder in front of Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850) I discovered something I’d never seen in the reproduction thumbnails of art books and the web: a human skull placed at the lower centre portion of the canvas. Of course, in the arrogance of youth I presumed I had a relatively good grasp of the work, having read all the interpretations of note (T.J. Clark, Linda Nochlin, Michael Fried, et al) and mistakenly regarded an in-the-flesh engagement with oil on canvas as a mere formality that would illustrate that which I already held in (second-hand) opinion. But there it was: a skull on the precipice of death’s sink drain crater, a stage trap-door of the human comedy; the incurious, frightened dog seemingly bereft of a master; the morbid parade of provincial townsfolk and clergy; and the seemingly haunted countryside and confining horizon, all pivoted in a panoramic hinge that closed the lid on Romanticism in French painting. I learnt then the valuable lesson that it takes the restraint of self-conceit and not a little discernment and humility to realise that not only is looking and seeing not the same thing, but that you never really learn anything by simply doing either; you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and dig your own hole. Only then can we judge the distance between firm ground and the void and muster the courage to approach the edge and peer in.

Pedro de Almeida

21 September 2012

Gary Deirmendjian’s strata – newington armory was included in EXCAVATION: The Armory Exhibition 2012 presented at the Armory Gallery, Newington Armory, Sydney Olympic Park from 17 June – 19 August 2012.