Of Stadiums and Construction Sites
(Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)
21 June - 10 August 2025
Gertrude Contemporary
The videos that A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva, Geoff Lowe, et al.) made in the mid-00s are considerably more pared down than their earlier and their later ones. There is no speech. The Melbourne-born, Paris-based artist duo is represented in this exhibition by Where there’s smoke there’s a smoker (2005), a thirteen-minute portrait of two female nudes smoking cigarettes. Shot on one stationary camera, the audience watches the two women smoke in real time, just like the artists behind the camera watched them, from lighting to butting. First, alone, one by one, then together. The video is made of only three cuts, there is no contact shown between ACW and their posed subjects. No interaction. One is left only watching. This sense of distantiation is a rare device in their work.
With so little going on, the video's sexuality — its fixation — grows in emphasis and becomes paraphilic. Much as Freud described fetishes, the sexuality in this video is expressed precisely in its avoidance of sex, avoidance of contact, offsetting the libido into something else. The cigarette is, after all, the preeminent signifier of oral fixations. Where there’s smoke there’s a smoker is shown on a box monitor positioned on top of a short wooden platform. If you follow the walking path of this exhibition, it is likely the last work you will see; a post-coital end to an exhibition that has art act like, or through, relationships.
This work was made in 2005 in dialog with (and screened by) a.titolo, then a collective of curators and art historians working in Italy; Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso, Nicoletta Leonardi, Lisa Parola and Luisa Perlo. Over the late 1990s and early 2000s, broad collaboration was a constitutive aspect of ACW and their basic provision to their community. Something which many institutions, be they small or large, may have struggled to facilitate, ACW prioritised the connecting of artists, often of the proceeding generation, with like-minded artists working in other countries. See projects Everybody Knows (1998), Hospitality Dinners (2001), Come Vuoi (2001), Please Contact Mike (2004), A Level of Trust (2004), etc.
The smoking nudes were students of Lowe’s, the artists Amanda Marburg and Lisa Radford. Radford, now a senior lecturer at VCA, is also the guest curator of Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent), the third in a four-part exhibition series, Past Is Prologue, at Gertrude Contemporary, which is tasked with surveying Gertrude and its surrounding artistic culture between 1985 through until 2025. Two past editions covered 1985-1995 (curated by Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon) and 1995-2005 (curated by Spiros Panigirakis and Helen Hughes), while Radford oversees 2005-2015. An exhibition opening in late August surveying 2015-2025, titled Bureaucracy of Feelings,will be curated by Diego Ramírez, and will conclude this year long institutional self-audit.
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Radford’s exhibition is built around the re-staging of a number of exhibitions, none of which were from Gertrude’s own program, but all including former resident artists. The re-staged exhibitions are Low Expectations (2008) at Murray White Room, Luckily there’s no inside, OpenArchive (2011) and Another Yummy Fantasy II at TCB Art Inc. (2011). None are reinstalled exactly, each allowing for additions, retractions, and minor reworkings. In the respective decade, and likely earlier, Gertrude was effectively synonymous with Melbourne art, the same cannot be said now. So, while the shows may not have been from Gertrude proper, they are, somehow, no less representative of it and of its effects.
The title of ACW’s video is a reworking of the adage ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire,’ derived from the Latin, ‘nullus fumus sine igne.’ Versions of this proverb exist across all civilisations, but in Latin it was regularly evoked in mediaeval moral theology and legal argumentation to assert that gossip, hearsay and rumours do, more often than not, have foundations in reality and thus warrant partial merit as ‘evidence’.
The artwork positioned closest to Where there’s smoke… is Joshua Petherick’s Idol (2011), a hand-sized sculpture of a cartoonish bomb, a black-sphere etched with the word ‘bomb’ fit with an only partially burnt fuse. The works are positioned next to each other, the nudes are facing the bomb, lighter in hand, alluding to some latent potential for explosions. This nominal placement, this word play, makes certain the subtle interrelatedness between many of the works on view, particularly in this room of the exhibition.
My thinking of Where there’s smoke… through the valence of desire is coming from the work itself but also from outside, through the heard presence of therapeutic dialoguing emanating from another video installed in the same room. As one watches Where there’s smoke…, one overhears In Therapy (2010), a video document of a platonic couples therapy session between the artists Natalie Thomas and Alexandra Sanderson who, from 1999 until 2005 made art together as nat&ali. The male therapist is out of frame, though not behind the camera.
I am drawn to treat In Therapy more like an oral history document than as a piece of video art. Whether it is an artwork or not is a, maybe predictable, question (it is a question that occasions most when art adopts psychotheraputic formats). Like Where there’s smoke…, it was shot with a stationary camera in one take. There is no staging. A few lines from their own speech confirm my reticence. Toward the beginning the artists explain to the therapist that they are doing ‘this’ (the session) precisely because they want to start to make art together again, meaning they aren’t in that moment, but that they feel a need to work-through whatever went wrong the first time before doing so. As I understand it, they never made another work together. According to their own retelling, the two had a fight at Gertrude while in-residence in 2005 where they were both screaming and crying in hysterics. Very soon after they share this fact, there is a cut in the tape. It is the only cut. The room sheet says In Therapy has a 91-minute runtime. I did not time it but from memory it was closer to 50 minutes. There has clearly been some sort of retraction, or foreclosure, emphasising, for me, the sorts of euphemism which often occasion the social world and oftentimes thwarted interpersonal nature of art practice. There is a lot of absence in this exhibition, practices and artists who were variously marginalised, pressured out or of those who foreclosed their own practices.
Thomas and Sanderson were also students of Lowe’s at VCA in the late 1990s. In the session they briefly recount their participation in his elective class on collaboration, a class which Riva consulted to on occasion. For some years, this class was effectively a funnel through which students would graduate and become members of the semi-autonomous, artist group DAMP (1995-). They do not name DAMP explicitly: Thomas and Sanderson instead refer to it in the session as ‘the big group.’ They characterise their early experience with Lowe, Riva and DAMP as formative, but they realised that they could do all of the things that made that work valuable and interesting as a pair instead, retaining, presumably, a higher degree of autonomy. Much of their discourse in the session was about how they both admired but also sought to undermine the authority of more established artists and institutions. They held a strong investment in the art world and its culture, even aspiring toward it, but it was undergirded by a desire to be able to set the terms of their own inclusion, their own reception. A struggle, an ambivalence, familiar to many artists.
The ACW video is among earliest works in the exhibition, making certain their protogenial role in a string of practices thereafter. Only two other works are from 2005, both by artists who are younger than ACW. First, Deb Kunda’s portrait series of, then in-office, Liberal Party politicians; Amanda Vanstone, Philip Ruddock and Alexander Downer are on view, while her portraits of John Howard and Peter Costello are missing. Second, a reworking of Blair Trethowan’s neon sculpture Change (2005), which he made while in-residence at Gertrude before ending his own life one year later. A photograph of Change is printed onto three skateboard decks. In 2005, while running Uplands Gallery with Jarrod Rawlins (2001-2011), Trethowan similarly printed an essay originally by ACW onto skate decks, specifically Not knowing as a shared space part III, an essay which has been redrafted by a number of authors over a number of years.
I knew that ACW were this exhibition before seeing it. I thought however that I was going to see a reinstallation of a June 2005 performance-sculpture they made at Gertrude, whereon the gallery floor they laid out over a hundred candles arranged to spell out the words ‘unconditional regard’ (a phrase that draws from humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers). This project came together somewhat spontaneously, invitations were hurried out, they read ‘a convivial gathering, bring everyone.’[1] Curator Sue Cramer recounted this in issue five of the short-lived Auckland-based art magazine Natural Selection:
Freedom from censure, of our own or other’s feelings and thoughts, is implicit in an attitude of ‘unconditional regard’. It’s about being allowed to say what you think without fear of judgment or reprimand [...]. Of course, it is easier said than done: something to aspire toward. It’s in exploring new ways of framing the relationship between artists, viewers and artworks that ACW have most typically applied these kinds of ideas. [At one point] a woman walked right through part of the work, scattering the candles and the word they spelt with her skirt. Whilst the incident was minor, it made me reflect on how ACW never edit such inadvertent human foible or awkwardness from their work…. [2]
My assumption was wrong, but I wasn’t disappointed. Having not been in Australia then, I had seen neither of ACW’s two institutional surveys, Increase Your Uncertainty at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2007 and Based on a True Story at the Potter Museum of Art in 2012, so I had never seen When there’s smoke… before. Radford once said to me that when ACW left Melbourne, ‘everything changed’ and that ‘things were never as fun.’ They left Melbourne on New Years Eve in 1999. They were then living and working across Turin, New York, and elsewhere. The two were itinerantly in Melbourne over the 2000s, mostly for exhibitions, before they resettled permanently in Paris in 2008. While they have not spent much time in Melbourne over the last two decades, echoes of their practice live on in the recent history of Melbourne art.
None of the exhibitions in the Gertrude anniversary series have taken on a strongly historicist or museological approach to Gertrude's effects. Each exhibition has, however, made use of the smaller annex gallery for these purposes, showing mostly printed matter from Gertrude’s past exhibitions and magazines, with reviews or other ephemera corresponding to their assigned decades. In her library, Radford has included a noteworthy document that anticipates something of Gertrude’s role after 2015.
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In 2016, citing ‘a culture of flagrant insecurity, empty virtue signalling, institutional racism, and a socio-pathologised inability to reflect,’ the artist Hamishi Farah, in his own words, ‘retired from Australian art’ when he cancelled his own solo exhibition at Gertrude, the conclusion of his 2015 studio residency.[3] Formally of Melbourne, now Berlin-based, Farah stopped showing work in Australia for several years after this (with one exception for Gertrude in 2016). As it so happens, his luminous yellow painting Ghost descending a staircase (2021), is currently on view in the permanent collection gallery at NGV Australia.
As is well known, earlier in 2016, Farah was detained at LAX Airport and denied entry into the United States where he was due for a solo booth presentation at an art fair. Another absence, another block. In 2020, Farah published an autobiographical-graphic novel, Airport Love Theme, recounting this experience. This publication sits prominently in the annex library accompanying Of Stadiums and Construction Sites. As he is not represented in the exhibition proper, his name does not appear on the artist list. Call it an easter egg or a dog whistle, Farah’s marginal but no less distinctive presence here is worth drawing out. As Airport Love Theme is from 2020, recalling 2016, it functions as some kind of future prophecy. A beat inherited from the future that anticipates something of the splits formed over the late 2010s, the inverse maybe of Terry Smith’s ‘faithful echo,’[4] the quintessential metaphor used to diagnose Australia’s art historical time lag. Farah, evidentially, is not behind the times.
In the time since, Farah has come to be among, if not the, most critically recognised and celebrated artist to go through the Gertrude studio program. Owing no debt to them, his ascendancy as an artist has coincided with Gertrude’s diminishing relevance within a particular current of Melbourne art. A current which Of Stadiums attempts to reintegrate. This diminishing relevance is not true only for Gertrude, but also for a string of other formerly authoritative venues across the ARI-to-institution spectrum; West Space, ACCA, Bus Projects, etc.
The position these venues held in 2015 is different to now. At some point in the latter half of the 2010s, maybe acting in their own self-interest, these venues seemingly lost their investment in preserving, safe-guarding or determining artistic genealogies, thereby having this function effectively usurped by a number of offsite, house, and or shed exhibitions. Melbourneoffsiteindex, for example, was established in 2015, in many ways marking this junction, this splitting, this schisming out. In the time since, much of these practices have matured and this current has developed a surprisingly autonomous lineage of exhibitions and network of practices. Whenever Melbourne's contemporary art is examined by those from international art centres, this offsite exhibition history and its artists are considerably more recognised and regarded than anything happening at Gertrude or the like.
2015 marked a closure of some kind at Gertrude, an exodus or an extinction. This, I think, is part of Radford’s exhibition's argument, a point which is made through more than just the inclusion of Airport Love Theme, but also through a worn-out white t-shirt, inscribed with a drawing of the Vaseline logo by Alex Vivian. Vivian was not showing in any formalised institutions over the latter half of the 2010s. Before this, he was an artist in residence at Gertrude. He was also, one year later in a three-person exhibition, alongside Debris Facility and Sanné Mestro at MUMA, Pretty Air and Useful Things, curated by Rosemary Forde. An exhibition of this kind at MUMA now seems, as with Gertrude, so far out of reach.
After some years, Vivian reemerged in public exhibitions in 2019, through his own outer Melbourne suburb shed gallery Guzzler — a gallery which epitomises much of the offsite exhibition trend. Vivian’s formidable and generative presence in the aesthetic vocabulary and aspirations of many younger local artists is now well established.
Both Farah and Vivian were included in an exhibition-project organised by artist Josey Kidd-Crowe at Gertrude in early 2016 (the exception to Farah’s Australian art retirement). Pet-shop Cookie was not a group exhibition proper, but rather an exhibition of a group responding to Kidd-Crowe’s loose instructions, resulting in a collection of quickly-made clay works. The project, through its instruction-based format, straddles the line between group and solo-exhibition, in the vein ofJohn Knight’s Ecoaesthetics (1999) or Karin Schneider’s Project for Ambiences (2001). Showing alongside, Grace Anderson, Hana Earles, Liam Osborne and others, this was likely the last Melbourne exhibition featuring either Farah or Vivian for many years. Both artists represent a field of influence in an alternate string of Melbourne’s exhibition history, held and maintained far outside the purview of Gertrude, even ghettoised by it, over the last decade. Both artists have, one could argue, benefited tremendously from their ostracization, leaving them to engineer considerably more autonomous practices, in contexts more amenable to their language, desire and assertions as artists. Much was the desire, though unachieved, for nat&ali as stated in their therapy session.
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In 2016, seemingly overnight, ‘all the artists turned into politicians’. This insight was expressed to me by the artist Katherine Botten, another artistic voice emblematic of this parallel and disjointed art world. Botten’s observation describes the pernicious, near-ubiquitous, turn by artists toward unequivocal moralising and public-service postures, all of which has been championed by institutions, small and large, over the past decade. Similarly to Farah, in a phantasmatic, hyper-meta-textual way, Botten is also included in this exhibition, in a reference toward a publicly unrealised exhibition from 2013, which is mentioned in a single line of Holly Childs' script-performance Danklands [Swamped] (2014), due to be restaged at Gertrude Contemporary as part of this exhibition on 9 August.
How are the increasingly distinct artistic fields of the institutional and the offsite, to negotiate their shared histories and practices? Though oppositional in many respects, recent years have seen variously successful attempts at refolding. Melbourne is a small ecosystem, naturally many shed artists trickle down and find a place at Gertrude at some point or other. Group exhibitions at Gertrude such as THE FIELD (2023) and And This Time The Well Is Alive (2024), curated by Tamsen Hopkinson and Amelia Winata respectively, drew heavily from these alternative exhibition circuits, though neither made this cross-field dynamic as explicit as Of Stadiums and Construction Sites does.
Artistic genealogies are important. This exhibition knows this, as did Asbestos’s final exhibition Establishments (2024)—another shed gallery which, in many ways picked up the critical slack of more resourced venues in the recent years.
With all the self-historicising that Gertrude is engaging in, it begs the question as to their future. A sentiment oft-expressed is that over the last ten years, many of the more established exhibition venues have, increasingly, become ensnared by their capacity to mirror the strategic goals and interests of sexless and ideologically ossified arts funding bodies at the local, state and federal level. Appealing toward the interests of these bodies over your own establishes a system of support whereby these institutions can’t recognise the considerable value of historically-based artistic criteria.[5]. These systems, structurally, have no way to recognise, for example, Christopher L G Hill’s, indelible influence on the formal vocabulary of a considerable strain of recent Melbourne art — much of which is downstream from, as Radford clarifies, a small sculpture survey at TCB in 2011, curated by Vivian and Kate Smith, Another Yummy Fantasy II, as with Hill’s own gallery Y3K, ran with James Deutsher, from 2009 through 2011.
It is not a lack of knowledge nor a lack of critical capacity at Gertrude that produces this non-recognition, it is rather due to its position within an increasingly predetermined field that is demarcated by external criteria of valuation and support. These concepts are not foreign to Gertrude’s personnel. The current Artistic Director, Mark Feary, for example, curated a sharp-toothed exhibition in 2007 at West Space titled Rules of Engagement, which, in its own words, sought to look ‘between various stakeholders within the arts industry and [at] how positions are negotiated, especially in relation to how artists define their role within an industry that has amassed, and continues to proliferate, around their creative output’.[6] One of, if not the, very last of Azlan McLennan showings in the art world, this exhibition also included car wreckage from a 1999 crash involving art critic Robert Hughes, itself an artwork by Danius Kesminas.
For this text, I was discussing 2005-2015 exhibition history with musician and editor Tim Coster. I asked him what exhibition from this period he’d most like to see restaged. His answer was Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real, curated by psychoanalyst Kate Briggs at Y3K. It was a Lacan forward group-exhibition. Coster’s retelling highlighted the archetypal Melbourne-based absence-forward artist, Elizabeth Newman and her sky blue fabric laid-on-canvas work Untitled (2005-2009), something like a soft handed reworking of Steven Parrino’s draped and re-stretched monochrome canvases from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 2004, largely thanks to Newman’s influence, ACW wrote a short, similarly Lacan-forward, text called Using laws and rules. I have reproduced a large section of it below for its capacity to foretell some of the anxieties around inclusion and authority that would preoccupy a dominant part of the art world's discourse after 2015. The later section on Lacan has been expanded slightly for clarity, and to provide further provision of context attending to ACWs own in-text quotations.
During Perestroika [a late 1980s period of economic and political reform in the Soviet Union], small groups were given a special role to represent what was going on in the wider community […] whose coming together had previously been looked at as a potential threat to the state. These small groups met to talk about what-they-want and represent their collective view of the current situation. As fear of the cruelty and danger was consequently represented in the media in the shape of new mafias, these groups were gradually disbanded and discredited. Or maybe it was the fear of too many people speaking at once.
At about the same time, Lacan was, yet again, disbanding one of his groups in Paris. Catherine Clement [novelist and philosopher who studied under Lacan] said, ‘Just think what any group of human beings would be like if everyone went around free associating out loud. All civility would go to the boards!’ The unconscious is the subject, so how are we free to express it? [In December 1969] Jacques Lacan [in Seminar XVII] had said that those wanting more freedom by revolution were in fact aspiring to the discourse of the master.
[A student in his seminar begins to protest and says] ‘That’s not the whole story because some students still think that by listening to Lacan’s discourse they will find the elements that will enable them to challenge his discourse. I claim that this is to let yourselves get caught in the trap! If we think that it is by listening to Lacan’s discourse [...] that we will have the means to criticise the ideology that they are making us swallow we are blinding ourselves. I claim that it is outside that we have to go to find the means of blowing up the University!’ [In response, Lacan says] ‘...but outside what? Because when you leave here you become aphasic? When you leave here you continue to speak… You continue to be inside…’
Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in the area of language. [You can’t speak.] Lacan appears to be saying you can’t go into the university to get people to leave, or to renounce a way of speaking or thinking because it speaks you. [7]
Gertrude’s outsourced anniversary series has allowed, for a moment, to hear from where their voice, their speech, comes. Stadium is correct to describe itself as a ‘cacophony’ in the exhibition text. In some way a response to this premise, I have chosen to write about only a small number of works, and this review retreats to a fraction of the installation, roughly just one half of one room. This corner of the show is, by some margin, the strongest. Its latent argument is very clear. Outside this corner, the show, at times, reads as an overly selective highlight reel.[8] Not that these other works don’t speak, they just aren’t as direct. There is a lot of work here; Radford’s project extends to include a sizable performance and programming calendar and online-exclusive streaming content. By isolating a small number of threads, I hope to reflect a general interest in speaking without euphemism, countering, perhaps, some of the demands of the decade survey format. This substantial exhibition similarly offsets some of these prescriptions, delivering a survey which is at once far reaching and inclusive. It is a deeply personal art history.
[1] Daine Singer, ‘Sweetness and Light’, Eyeline, issue 58, 2005, p. 57.
[2] Sue Cramer, ‘Unconditional Regard’, Natural Selection, issue 5, 2006, p. 17.
[3] Artist’s statement, ‘Hamishi Farah,’ Gertrude Contemporary, https://gertrude.org.au/artist/hamishi-farah/ (accessed 22 July 2025).
[4] Terry Smith, ‘The Provincialism Problem,’ Artforum, volume 13, number. 1, 1974, p. 55.
[5] To appropriate a phrase from Rhea Anastas’s descriptions of the exhibition program at Orchard (2005-2008), a cooperative gallery in New York.
[6] Mark Feary, ‘Rules of Engagement,’ exhibition text, West Space, https://westspace.org.au/program/rules-of-engagement (accessed 28 July 2025)
[7] A Constructed World, ‘Using laws and rules’ in Idéologie & A Constructed World: Les Écrits / The Complete Writings 2001-2018, Paris, Éditions Mix & Telephone Publishing, 2019, pp. 62—63
[8] This perhaps mirrors some of the online critiques levelled at the Gertrude retrospectives in general by unselected artists, such as Scott Redford, on social media.