BENALLA ART GALLERY & ASH KEATING PRESENT

SELECTED WORKS2005-2015

Benalla Art GalleryBridge StreetBenalla, Australia18 April - 28 June, 2015

SELECTED WORKS2005-2015

Art about the environment, as distinct from environmental art, is fraught with contradictions and complications, not only in material and content but also in balancing engagement against provocation. Instead of baiting our outrage, Ash Keating’s practice appeals to our empathy in relation to environmental issues. This effect stands his art apart from the kinds of political activist work that aim to incite emotion rather than instigate thoughtfulness.

From the early beginnings of his career, Keating has carefully used material processes, durational performance, and physical endurance as his methods for shifting the political dialogue away from some sort of naïve or unsophisticated activism to instead demonstrate a deep level of engagement in the aesthetic and transformative potentials of the everyday.

Keating’s practice over the last decade has traversed an always-

shifting line between ecology and economy. From small contemplations in the studio, to repetitive actions captured on time-lapse video, to performances wrapped in industrial waste diverted from landfill, and in his celebrated outdoor works of public spectacle, Keating’s approaches may have varied greatly, but his concerns have remained constant.

Working within an expanded contemporary field — combining painting, sculpture, video, intervention, performance, dance, intervention and collaboration — Keating’s practice departs from the point of the personal to bring our focus towards a greater understanding of our own connections to global issues around industrial production, labour, waste management and environmental degradation.

The first works seen in this exhibition mark both the earliest and the most recent from Keating’s practice. His large-scale spray works are neither street art nor

mural art, but could be more appropriately considered as performance. The difference can be understood in the artist’s choice of tools: not spray cans but buckets and fire extinguishers. These tools of emergency are also chosen not only for the ability to reach great heights and breadths but, significantly, for their simple ability to be refilled and reused. Generating minimal waste in the artistic process, and engaging with sustainable environmental practices, are both key concerns within Keating’s performance and studio practices.

His vast performance paintings, sprayed and splayed across city walls and urban development sites, often reveal the environmental disregard inherent in the built environment. In both Concrete Proposition (2012) and West Park Proposition (2012), Keating’s aesthetic transformation of bland concrete walls in unremarkable locations applies a technique that shifts abstract painting into landscape painting, then

NATURE WAITS FOR NO ONE.Din Heagney

flips between the two with intense physical performance – here the artist becomes endurance athlete.

The performance recorded in these conceptual paintings reveals the choice of aesthetics and placement, as well as the limitations of access and timing, as well as unpredictable factors such as weather and energy. Once complete, these performance paintings belong to the site itself and the community in which they were produced. For Keating, these works are created with the site informing the work and the work becoming the site – a new layer and a new way of seeing the surfaces of our constructed world and its relation or lack thereof to the natural world in which it is embedded. The remnants of the process can then enable us to question why a blank concrete wall was even constructed in the first place.

Comparing these outdoor public works with the most recent paintings in the exhibition,

Gravity System Response #1 (2015), we can see the difference in approach and treatment through studio production. Although the aesthetic remains similar, this diptych is more considered and refined, as the canvases are made with an inversion of the process used the outdoor works. With the outdoor limitations of site access, time and weather absent in the quiet of the studio, Keating explores instead the blurring of vision and works directly with natural processes.

These paintings were made by removing multiple layers of paint, blasting sheets of water with pressure sprays, mimicking the effects of erosion on the environment by eroding the built of layers of paint to reveal a process image. Here the artist is working in tandem with gravity, pulling the paint down, washing it away to erase the semblance of permanence. Unlike the performance works, where the paint is forced to defy gravity, these works on canvas become a representation of

nature via the process of gravity, the artist working with natural forces to explore unpredictable results.

Early in his career, Keating diversified his practice. Although he would return to his spray paintings over the years, he developed new techniques and moved into video, interventions, and collaborations with communities and industries. The works selected for this exhibition show a practice that has evolved with a growing sophistication around process art and collaborative art.

Global concern about environmental issues is interpreted in Deadline for Enlightenment (2011), a work made on a residency in Japan. Keating created a sculptural installation as sports field countdown toward December 2012 – a date that was promoted through popular culture as a doomsday that never actually arrived. Here we can see Keating’s unusual methods of using absurd humour and sporting metaphors to find a new

audience. Leaping hurdles, each step, a month at a time, bringing us closer toward permanent change, yet this deadline was not toward destruction but toward enlightenment.

Painting landscape as a literal process and as an extension of his earlier process paintings, can be seen more directly in Timuran (2009), a collaborative work made with a local community in a part of Jogjakarta, Indonesia, which was severely damaged in the 2006 earthquake that struck the region. Selecting a rubble-strewn building site, one of many that he found in the area, Keating established connections with locals interested in engaging with the site of delayed reconstruction. Preparing the area where a building once stood, Keating purchased locally-made brooms and bright orange paint, working with a number of local families to literally paint the broken landscape, using the labour of the community to engage with the shattered remains of

disaster. The result generated a dramatic visual intervention that represented the transformative process of rebuilding a damaged community.

Significantly, this project also showed an engagement beyond the typical artistic tropes by ensuring that labour in art production was remunerated in the same manner as any other labour process — a distinction that stands Keating’s practice apart from many of his peers. Keating remained aware of his own socio-economic position as a ‘wealthy western’ visitor, and commented at the time that the art project budget was equivalent to building a new house in the community, bringing to light the inherent contradictions of global socioeconomics. But for the artist, the primary purpose was to respect the local community both culturally and financially, and the inclusion of the brooms as relics acts as a reminder of the people who made the work.Another major project from this

prolific period appears here in selected documentation and a video dance piece from Activate 2750 (2009), an ambitious intervention into the waste management systems of Penrith and the surrounding Sydney area. For this project, performers were cloaked in the remains of recyclable waste the artist reclaimed from landfill. Keating sourced tons of reusable clean industrial waste, originally destined for the landfill, and arranged for the trucks to make an early morning diversion to dump the contents on the neat green lawns of the Penrith Performing Arts Centre.

Residents and workers awoke to a colossal pile of refuse on their civic doorstep, which Keating and a team of local artists reassembled into a temple to waste, a fortress of consumption overload. Keating also collaborated with local krump dancers, shown here in The Uprising (2009) photographs, dressed in his costumed advertising remains. In the larger

project, these new waste creatures marched in somber processions through the streets and into the Penrith shopping centre before returning ceremoniously to their junk pile origins.

Keating explained this process as the ‘fetish and aesthetics of waste without context, a materialism that brings to mind works like Rosemary Liang’s desert waste sculptures.’ After the waste rituals, dances, and processions were complete, Keating arranged for the material to be recollected and sent to a recycling centre instead of landfill. While dramatically upscaled, this project again made the point that every city, company and consumer needs to properly recycle and reuse waste or, better still, to not generate waste to first instance.

Keating’s further interest in community engagement with global issues is revealed in the work Eureco Revolution (2009), presented here in the centre

of the gallery. Travelling to Ballarat, Keating reclaimed a pile of hardwood sleepers from the remains of the original railway to Ballarat that once channeled the wealth of the gold rush. Stacking the wood into a coffin-like shape, he then draped them in the Eureka Flag; made famous in the 1856 miner’s rebellion that would later shape Australia’s national political identity. But here the artist intervened not only in the physical remains of history, but also in the symbolism, presenting instead a green version of the working people’s flag. For the artist, this work represented a new rebellion: not only marking the death of the industrial revolution, the Eureco Revolution flag symbolised the rise of the ecological revolution in the first decade of the new millennium.

Of interest is that the inherent symbolism of this work reappeared more recently, and indirectly, through a related situation of environmental protest. A farmer from NSW, who had never seen

Keating’s EurEco project, made an identical green Eureka flag to protest against of coal seam gas mining companies on his property. For Keating, this repeated action highlighted the importance of workers demonstrating collective power by standing up to corporations and governments that would seek to erode our rights and threaten our environmental health for their own economic or political gain.

Intervening and restructuring consumer waste through performance emerged in Keating’s earlier works Press Release (2005) and 250 Hours – Work For One Person (2005-07). Both works focused on media consumption, and centred on Keating’s intervention in the distribution of a daily newspaper in Melbourne. An aggregate free newspaper published by an international media company, its editorial technique used colour photo reproductions mixed with celebrity gossip to insert advertising into the hands of

thousands of public transport commuters.

Within mere hours of its release, repeatedly at the end of every working day, the newspaper wound up littering train carriages and platforms, overflowing in public rubbish bins, with disposed sheets blowing through streets as trash. Drawing attention to this lack of environmental standards used by the publishers and associated advertisers, Keating created a dual performative work by appropriating 30,000 copies of a single day’s edition.

With a nod to Stuart Brisley’s 180 Hours Work For Two People from 1978, Keating documented his performance while sitting in the studio wearing in a secondhand business suit. Shown here on time-lapse video, he separated the thousands of individual newspapers into single sheets and reordered them, reversing the mechanical production of assembly, transforming what would normally become mismanaged waste

into an absurd commentary on automated production. Watching a human perform the machine, or as Keating called it ‘undoing the machine’, the works moved beyond the mundane to become absurd, even perverse, where not only material but labour itself become wasteful.

In the related Press Release performance, Keating used the same pile of papers, and selected a single image of an Australasian Gannet in flight, which he then handcut from the 6000 sheets, carefully stacking the reproduction of the bird into sculptural piles and reordering the remnant sheets back into piles once again. Symbolically acting as a signifier for nature itself, Keating moved the extracted sculptural piles into the gallery for a single performance where he released the printed bird into ‘flight’.

The entire process draws focus to our disconnected relations with the environment, revealing

the ways in which a major media organisation capitalised on an endangered bird species, while irresponsibly managing their own waste practices, themselves systematically connected to the ecological threats being faced by this species. After the completion of these two performance works and their subsequent exhibition, Keating once again documented the recycling of the material; concluding the immediate materiality of the intervention, transforming everyday waste by creating an aesthetic intervention to help us question both the materials and the processes of daily consumption.

These works show Keating’s interest not only in durational performance and generating multiples from a single work, but also demonstrated his ability to successfully resolve some of the philosophical concerns his practice raises by applying closed loop ecological principles within his material process. The intervention, diversion, reapplication and

recycling of waste material are also central methods in Keating’s practice, and appear repeatedly in nearly all his impermanent works. In this regard, he incorporates the mechanisms of ecology into industrial and commercial practices through aesthetic interruptions.

The video Blockbuster (2006) is the first of Keating’s many ‘waste creatures’ created over the years. These material performances would emerge through the artist’s interactions with piles of unrecycled trash, then publicly animated to haunt those corporations, and even a major contemporary art gallery, that demonstrated disregard for material process and environmental responsibility.

In Blockbuster, Keating reused the discarded materials from an advertising campaign from an inner city billboard. From the reclaimed waste, he created a costume and performed a type of exorcism of the site, animating the waste and the site itself —

drawing attention to the bizarre ceremonial nature of media and advertising cycles. In ritualising something as commonplace as monthly rotating billboard campaigns, Keating reflects on the absurdity of unquestioned consumerist waste generated by occupying civic space.

Often using his own body or collaborating with other performers dressed in costumes made from the disposed material byproducts of everyday consumption, the waste creatures appear again in many other works, including Label Land (2008), Activate (2009), and The Uprising (2009). Further developments in practice, such as incorporating dance and directing other performers in his costumes and videos, moved Keating’s work into the realms of entertainment and spectacle, and as reflections of waste in popular culture using the semiotics and even the aesthetics of commercial media.

While in Seoul, Korea on an Asialink Residency, Keating looked

into local industrial production, this time taking on the clothing trade and the waste cutoffs from labels — an overlooked but loaded site of a product brand, one that is literally worn by the consumer every day. Selecting such innocuous consumer waste opened an array of material and performative potentials and, once again, various incarnations of his waste creatures appeared, pushing their overflowing waste shopping trolleys to haunt the streets of Seoul in Label Land (2008).

In the transitional work, A New Lifelong Landscape (2011), Keating visits the site of the car accident that took his mother’s life. In this silent work, he takes stock of the road and surrounding countryside, then carefully digs a hole and plants a Kangaroo Paw, his mother’s favourite red flowers waving gently in the twilight through a long final frame.

Keating’s more recent video works have become scaled up to a new cinematic level. In Continuum

I & II (2013-14), the artist as solo performer has transitioned into the artist as director, with professional dancers now responding to the immediate environment. The feeling of a complex precariousness with the natural world remains, but there is also a quiet hope emerging through these works that highlight the sustainable technologies of the new green industries.

There are two distinct sites chosen for Continuum: a solar farm in the eroded Lake Mungo National Park near Mildura, and a wind farm located northwest of Ballarat. Keating locates the interaction of performance with these vast renewable energy generators and their environments as an engagement of both landscape and narrative. The inclusion of contemporary dancers creates a large-scale meditation on the environment, one that imbues a poetic awareness of time and energy.

Both videos loop seamlessly with the cyclical motion of time

meeting the movements between the energy of the body and these immense objects built for future energy needs. The title also acts as a signifier to remind us that these ancient landscapes have an Aboriginal continuum going back at least 42,000 years, while the content points to the present continuum, with our increasing energy needs and our volatile presence in a fragile land.

In this small selection of work from Ash Keating’s remarkable career to date, we can begin to experience an alternative path to environmental awareness through an art practice that seeks the transformative. It is a practice that is both reactive and proactive, literal and poetic, sympathetic and activated. Ash Keating’s work reminds us of the essential need to question our complacence and our wasteful practices, but perhaps more importantly reminds us challenge the machinations of power that would remove our connection to our land and ourselves.

250 Hours - Work for 1 Person (2005-07) Installation at CACSA, Adelaide, 2015

Press Release (2005) production still

Press Release (2005) production still

Press Release (2005) Installation at Artspace, Sydney, 2007

Blockbuster (2006)Single Channel SD Video, 16:9, PAL, Colour, Sound, 3 minutes 46 secondsCollection of the artist

Label Land #7 (2008)C-type photograph, 90 x 66cmCollection of the artist

Activate 2750 (2009)Single Channel 1080p HD Video, 16:9, PAL, colour, stereo sound, 21 minutes 37 secondsCollection of the artist

Activate 2750 (2009)Single Channel 1080p HD Video, 16:9, PAL, colour, stereo sound, 21 minutes 37 secondsCollection of the artist

The Uprising #5 (2009)C-type photograph, 66 x 100cmCollection of the artist

Eureco Revolution (2009)Installation at University of Ballarat, 2009

Timuran #1, #2 and #3 (2009)C-type photograph, 80 x 53cmCollection of the artist

Deadline for Enlightenment (2011)C-type photograph, 120 x 80cmPrivate collection

A New Lifelong Landscape (2011)Single Channel 1080p HD Video, 1.85, PAL, colour, silent, 8 minutes 38 secondsCollection of the artist

A New Lifelong Landscape (2011)Single Channel 1080p HD Video, 1.85, PAL, colour, silent, 8 minutes 38 secondsCollection of the artist

West Park Proposition (2012) Three channel syncronised 1080P HD Video, 16:9, PAL, colour, stereo sound, 2 minutes 14 secondsCollection of the artist

Painting the West Park Proposition (2012) (jumping figure)C-type photograph, 140 x 100cmCollection of the artist

Concrete Propositions (2012)C-type photograph, 140 x 100cmCollection of the artist

Continuum (2013/14)Dual Channel HD VideoDuration (Part 1) - (16:9 format) 2 minutes 25 seconds loopedDuration (Part 2) - (1.85:1 format) 6 minutes 45 seconds loopedCollection of the artist

Continuum (2013/14)Dual Channel HD VideoDuration (Part 1) - (16:9 format) 2 minutes 25 seconds loopedDuration (Part 2) - (1.85:1 format) 6 minutes 45 seconds loopedCollection of the artist

Continuum (2013/14)Installation at CACSA, Adelaide, 2015

Gravity System Response #1 (2015)synthetic polymer on linen, oak frame, 2 panels, 202 x 564 cmCollection of the artist

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Press Release (2005)3 Channel SD Video4:3, PAL, Colour, Silent 3 minutesnewspaper sculpture, dimensions variable

250 Hours - Work for One Person (2005-07)Dual channel SD Video4:3, PAL, Colour, Silent 3 minutes

Blockbuster (2006)Single Channel SD Video16:9, PAL, Colour, Sound 3 minutes 46 secondsEdition of 5 + 2AP

Label Land #7 (2008)C-type photograph, 90 x 66cm Edition of 5 + 2AP, Photo: Seung Hoon, © Ash KeatingFabric labels dimensions variable

Activate 2750 (2009)Single Channel HD Video16:9, PAL, colour, stereo sound21 minutes 37 secondsEdition of 5 + 2AP

The Uprising #5 (2009)C-type photograph, 66 x 100cmEdition of 5 + 2APPhoto: Alex Kershaw, © Ash Keating

Eureco Revolution (2009)Redesigned Eureka flag on railway sleepers, dimensions variable

Timuran #1, #2 and #3 (2009)C-type photograph, 80 x 53cmEdition of 5 + 2APPhoto: Edwin Roseno, © Ash KeatingGrass and bamboo brooms, dimensions variable

Deadline for Enlightenment (2011)C-type photograph, 120 x 80cmEdition of 5 + 2APPhoto: by and © Ash Keating

A New Lifelong Landscape (2011) Single Channel HD video 8 minutes 38 seconds1.85, PAL, colour, stereo soundEdition of 5 + 2AP

West Park Proposition (2012)Three channel syncronised HD digital video16:9, PAL, colour, stereo sound2 minutes 14 secondsEdition of 5 + 2AP

Painting the West Park Proposition (jumping figure) (2012)C-type photograph, 140 x 100cmEdition of 5 + 1APPhoto: Greta Costello, © Ash Keating

Concrete Propositions (2012)C-type photograph, 140 x 100cmEdition of 5 +1APPhoto: John Collie, © Ash Keating

Continuum (2013/14)Dual Channel HD VideoDuration (Pt.1): 2 min 25 sec, loopedDuration (Pt.2): 6 min 45 sec, looped

Gravity System Response #1 (2015)synthetic polymer on linen, oak frame2 panels, 202 x 564cm

Ash Keating acknowledges the assistance of David Hagger, Co-Director of Blackartprojects, in realising this exhibition.