Review: Poetics of the Line

This article was commissioned by Kudos Gallery at Arc UNSW as part of the Emerging Critics Award

Poetics of the Line is a jagged form made of metal that creeps across the white walls of the gallery¹; it is a jumble of broken and discarded objects from the gallery’s surrounds neatly arranged in a circular formation on the wall²; it is a graph whose data plummets towards the x-axis³.  Throughout this exhibition, the line acts as a form that orients us towards greater truths about our world. Though what those truths are eludes a resolution in the space. 

Poetics of the Line is curated by Tim Marvin as the recipient of the 2019 Early Career Curator Award at Kudos Gallery. It forms an unconventional survey of ten years of artistic practice that centres on the line as a visual form. The ambitious curatorial rationale sets up a tension within the exhibition between the rigidity of art-about-art, that has historically pursued the art object as an isolable signifier, and the evocative softness with which the works are displayed. It is both refreshing and intriguing that the exhibited artists range from well established to emerging. There is a generosity in bringing artists into dialogue together who would not usually be placed alongside one another. This is one of the strengths of the exhibition, challenging the competition and commercialism of the notional artistic career, and meaningfully privileging the art itself. 

Additionally, this helps to demystify the formal survey of the exhibition, which could otherwise be an impenetrable concept. Conscious of my own background (not in fine arts but in feminist/political philosophy) I was worried I would not understand the line as it is conceptualised in abstract art. My preconceived notion of the line is anchored in politics: picket lines; party lines; the bread line; the implacable location of the line. 

However, the works are made more accessible because Marvin draws them–and the audience– closer to one another by dispersing multiple works from single artists throughout the gallery, intermingling them amongst each other. This creates navigable routes between diverse practices. For examply, Danny Giles’ video work, The Long Line (2018) is installed in an alcove near the gallery entrance. The work depicts a coal train that journeys in and out of the frame. Suggestive of the way that coal pervades Australia’s social and political landscape, lumps of coal are brought into the space, in small piles at the bottom corners of the projection. It is also nestled at the base of a plinth elsewhere in the gallery that carries Robbie Karmel’s 3D Drawing (2013), a nest of 3D printed scribbles that would otherwise feel aesthetically and theoretically distant from Giles’ installation. Marvin’s decision here imbues the gallery with a sense of tenderness that invites us to consider new relationships between works. 

In ways, the line feels at its most poetic in Nolan Ho Wung Murphy’s large scale work, Circle (2019). The work is made with a canvas drop sheet and hung at the far end of the gallery. An open circle of black ink runs around the perimeter of the canvas. At one end where the line seems to begin, it is dense and deep, but tapers off as it rounds to its conclusion. The work remains visibly grounded as it drapes on the gallery floor, and the artist’s role in the act of mark making is made present. We can imagine the artist standing in the centre of the drop sheet and reaching toward the edge with a brush as they turn. The work evokes the artist as an embodied person (whose physical and intellectual labour produce the line). It’s humanity reinforces Marvin’s suggestion in the curatorial statement that a line may reveal something greater than itself. This, however, is perhaps more true of the work itself than of the exhibition at large.

It is not to say that art that centres on a single visual form such as the line cannot convey the complexities of political and social histories. However, I am reminded of one of the pieces of art criticism that I have returned to most frequently in recent months. In an essay called ‘Shades of No’, the curator and critic, Tirdad Zolghadr argues that the art world’s tendency to question without providing an answer holds us back from greater collective organisation⁴. Questioning does little to actually unfold or connect personal and political complexities. Zolghadr’s suggestion is that we ought to be making demands.

On the day of this exhibition’s opening, I attend a student-organised rally on campus calling for the retention of the revered curator, artist, and academic, Tess Allas, whose position as Director of Indigenous Programs is intended to be made redundant by UNSW Art & Design at the end of the 2019 academic year⁵. The protestors demand for her position to be secured. As speakers share personal anecdotes of Allas’ vital presence on campus, the political and the personal seem immediately present and accessible. I am responding to this exhibition as the recipient of UNSW Art & Design’s Emerging Critics Award. I am acutely aware that my receipt of this award—though I am grateful—represents the piecemeal opportunities offered to students on campus. The Emerging Critic responds the Early Career Curator’s show. Each award is a one-off annual event that may have lingering benefits for the recipients, but which does little to feed back into the community. At this moment, the core of a community of Indigenous emerging/early career artists/curators/critics is being pushed out of the institutional environment in which we (Marvin and myself, the artists, and all others at the opening) find ourselves.

Of lines: one speaker at the rally, Andrew Brooks, describes how he first met Allas on a picket line. I am reminded of the proximity within which political struggle and creative practice occur.

In the gallery at the opening, perhaps on account of the events of the day, I found myself trying to follow the lines of the works for narratives that would illuminate the personal and political realities that Marvin’s curatorial statement alludes to. There is a lacuna in the show where these narratives could be. However, a lacuna is as much a gap as it is a space to be filled, and the tender subtleties carried by Poetics of the Linepoint to ways to fill that space. Perhaps more than reality, Marvin’s exhibition deals with possibility, and the ways that we may reimagine our connections through artistic practice. There is work to be done to unveil more about our world through these methods, but what if the warm connectivity that marks this exhibition were to spill out of the gallery doors and into the world? Lines are, after all, frequently a site of connection.