… These ideas are explored across the thesis but most specifically examined in two works. Humans (China, 2018), and Arbitrary Distinction (Venice, 2019) interpreted other contemporary artist’s works in the performance/radical art canon, Hsieh & Montana’s Rope Piece (1983) and Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000) to question the ethicacy behind using other people’s bodies (ecologies, standpoints, situations) in the creation of artwork. In Humans I was the artist using other bodies to speak of the violence of wage-labour and contemporary slavery, by creating a scenario where art students in Nanjing, China were ‘bought’ by an audience member and tied to them at a distance of 1.3 metres for the duration of the artwork.  For Arbitrary Distinction my body became the vehicle for a tattoo of a line originally drawn by a snail on my back. Referencing Sierra’s project whereby four sex workers had an arbitrary line tattooed across their backs by a privileged white male artist, Arbitrary Distinction made similar commentary on acts of oppression and casual violence by exploiting my own body as the site of articulation and not re-oppressing already exploited others.

These early works were created in an international museum and a gallery; spaces I had no connection to beyond the context of being curated. As such, my engagement with those sites was intense, but fleeting and obscure. This kind of mobility in practice led me to planning for the final exhibition to be held in Athens for examination—at the exact site which formed Maria Eichhorn’s 2017 Documenta work Building as Unowned Property, where the artist attempted to take a building out of capital circulation. However, this idea presented many challenges and was ultimately abandoned pandemic border closures. Eichhorn’s unfinished project, and my disrupted attempt to reanimate it, ultimately led me to the Nicholas Building—a community I had been a part of on and off since 2004 and full time since 2015.

The Nicholas Building became the ideal locus to deconstruct the whole body of research because it is an ecology that I am situated in. It took the pandemic for me to realise that I did have a ‘home-perspective’ after all. Whilst liminal in the eyes of non-artists, this site has been a stable structure to my identity as a practicing artist. Since 2017, I have been running parallel research-practice inside its walls in the form of a collective (the NBA), resisting the constraints of the ‘commercial’ imperative of the owners by nurturing the creative community of over 200 tenants through advocacy and producing building wide art events. In 2021, we launched a campaign for creative-community ownership of this grand art deco Chicago style icon. Our simple demand: to purchase the building through government and philanthropic funds, take it out of capital circulation, and enshrine it with a covenant protecting it as a creative space in perpetuity. Whilst not yet achieved, this process of commoning is ongoing and has gained significant traction in several halls of power. 

In taking the date of the final exhibition, July 1, 2022, as the relevant point from which to unpack the commoning of the Building and the works in The Capital this thesis prefaces the significance of this date and the processes and procedures of the building sale at that time because this context informed many of the choices made in the art show. At that time, the NBA Collective were in the process of negotiating a deal with a ‘social impact investment’ firm to buy the building. The investment firm was given an exclusive due diligence of three months to come up with the capital required to buy the building and satisfy a condition put on the sale by the Vendor (the owners) to guarantee tenancy for the creative community. The process leading to this condition being made was the result of over six months of campaigning and direct negotiations between the creative collective, the Vendor, and various levels of Government. It meant that the collective was in the centre of the deal, and as this period progressed we were able to increasingly inhabit this position, proposing a vision that included setting up a for-purpose foundation that would take a head-lease from levels 2-10. This vision entailed the revamp of the ballroom on level 2, the creation and management of a public space rooftop pavilion, installing cultural organisations becoming homeless from the redevelopment of the Ballet Centre to make way for the new NGV development, and an annual arts and cultural calendar of events working with the tenant community and opening to collaborations from across Australia and internationally. This unique and realisable vision would solve many issues being faced by the independent and small to medium arts sector in Victoria, and most importantly, it would be an artist and community led enterprise.

This practice exemplifies philosopher Marco Checchi’s thesis of resistance as being prior to power (Checchi 2019). Here, the creative community (resistance) were continuing to operate, function and organise. We were not allowing ourselves to be contained by commercial capital or governmental indifference (power), which to take Checchi’s view, was opposing our force of constant becoming. It could be argued a different way of course, that capital was only bending to our will because of the need to work with us so they could eventually make a return, but this does not account for the fact they were already in the race to trade on the culture of the building, which if left to their own devices would have meant the removal (power) of the tenant body (the always-resistance). When they were confronted with a force of becoming that was unwilling to cease in its resistance, power heeled and, in effect, joined the resistance. 

On July 1, the day of examination, whilst I was sitting in the nest behind the mud wall, waiting to receive the examiner for our one-to-one momentary exchange, I received a flurry of text messages congratulating me. I was overjoyed that so many people were happy for my final PhD show and bemused by the ‘fact’ that they were all texting me whilst the show was live. Little did I know that they were actually congratulating me on the ‘building sale’, which they had gleaned from an article published that day and circulated in the online afternoon push by The Age newspaper. As I sat there, contemplating the (yet again) serendipity of this confusion of the building sale and my artwork, I felt both a strange ease and a discomfort—what is real in any of this speculative art intervening in speculative capital? Where does the art truly lie? Will the examiners appreciate this and other meta-metabolic layers in the work?

I asked myself these questions, and then calmed myself for the space required to greet the examiners with my legs. Later, when they sat with me, we listened to an improvised text I had recorded about the conditions required for creativity. I created this whilst walking along a track I used for my regular commute in order to get my head in the right condition to creatively unpack the thesis. This work within a work, spoke directly to the critical creativity that we were currently experiencing as a result of the resistance that paved the way for these conditions to flourish. If this constant work of resistance did not occur, then we would not be sitting in this gallery inside a creative space unpacking these ideas. The community would have been evicted long before. Instead, the struggle of commoning the building resulted in new relational and aesthetic paradigms which took on new form in The Capital through cross-media outputs. Therefore, the presentation of the final exhibition in the building takes on added emphasis in the context of my research in radical cultural practice, creative resistance strategies, and artist-led economies. The building as material actant is equally as integral to understanding the whole body of work as is each artwork presented in The Capital. The potential of the building itself becomes an affective material for consideration in examination through its entwinement within a metabolic and durational art experiment.

However, the building’s influence-in-itself, is not enough to understand the key argument of my thesis. If the primary drive to common the building is to create the conditions in which creativity thrives, then that drive becomes the process through which creativity is currently thriving. This creativity is then manifested in the interrelated material art works presented in the building. This layering of architectural and temporal forms is crucial to understanding the artistic choices made. It is a process that speaks to transformative aesthetics, which, in my definition, is the oscillation of personally-resonant aesthetic objects and subjects, and the political project they are contained within. This nexus is what forms the heart of this thesis.


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References

Checchi, Marco. The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Eichhorn, Maria. Building as Unowned Property, 2017, conversion of a building's legal status, legal studies, documents, building, and lot at Stavropoulou 15, 11252 Athens

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

Hsieh and Montana. Rope Piece. 1983-1984/ printed 2000, durational performance, paper posters, paper statements, witness statements, life photographs, and cassette tapes

Sierra, Santiago. Linea De 160cm Tatuada Sobre 4 Personas (160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People), 2000, video documentation of live performance, projection or monitor, black and white, and sound, 1 h 3’