Brian Fuata

As the culture becomes increasingly less embodied, the question we all ask ourselves is: should we remedy this lack in the field of the erotic, a distinct fear of the body, it’s finitude, it’s involuntariness, it’s malleability, and it’s history, by harnessing the spirit of the dramaturge in a time of monsters? That is how one often expects an artist profile to begin, when the answer is of course: no. Obviously not. History tells us that no amount of vivifying artistic performances have enabled us to save face while in the grips of looming fascism. Yet if we were to assign someone to demonstrate the “grandeur of the attempt” (to paraphrase Toni Morrison), to try to speak to whatever violent undertow which currently grips our country that resists a name and demands more than language, Brian Fuata would be it.

To invoke his name is to litmus test an individual’s knowledge of art, performance, and the avant garde within the pricy, somewhat overdone body politic of the city. Describing themself as 'a 38yr old, faggot, Samoan artist based in Sydney (originally from Brisbane)', he moves across museums, biennials, and experimental stages (at the Singapore Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Biennale of Sydney) without wedding himself to them, and thus skirting the possibility of attrition; often performing works that feel intimate and energetic, even inside large, static institutions. 

The writer Fiona Kelly McGregor, a keen anthropologist of Sydney’s sub-altern and performance art scene, has noted that an ecstatic relationship to performance is uniquely abundant here in Sydney, occupying  'twilit, body-based, transgressive worlds' that usher in those who do not fit comfortably into the financial grammar of the city. As such, these artists must work as coalitionists. Watching Fuata, one becomes aware of how performance is always already social — how being together, listening together, is in itself a kind of style. Any other approach could barely be considered appropriate to the times. 

Fuata has spent the last two decades making work that behaves more like a summoning than an event. The performances are often rogueish and full of ideological zest while being technically sublime. His relationships with other artists only accentuate his own idiosyncrasies, and bring us closer to materiality even when we don’t expect to encounter it.

The syntax itself performs the shape, delivering us the idealising moment. Throughout their work, which seems to start from the second they wake up rather than the second a performance starts, Fuata has been devotional as to what “living during performance” might mean. A true artists’s artist, his pieces are usually improvised, a summation of thoughts both living and metabolized - fragments of poetry, texts, invocations, gossip, choreography, theory or song accumulating into something that feels halfway between ceremony and thinking out loud. Clearly each medium is regarded with an equal level of curiosity. Videos circulate but never quite capture the texture of being in the room, that is: a mix of fascination, rapture, attentiveness, nervousness and a touch of the faintly conspiratorial, wherein the outback theatre forms and Fuata begins to move between voices. 

What interests Fuata is not necessarily the voice itself, but the interval around it. The intake of breath might express a compulsion or might become nothing. In ancient rhetoric this would be called the place where persuasion begins. A person stands in a room and speaks. The voice moves outward. It touches the edges of the space and returns, somehow, changed. In some ways, this is the energetic thrust of contemporary performance. 

Fuata has recently begun a role as manager of the Umoona Community Art Centre in Coober Pedy, South Australia. The heat is blunt. The horizon is indifferent. Sculptures of trash in the area make sense. I live-streamed them via video chat with my phone connected to the projector, because it felt right, and also because digital correspondence is very in this season.

Unless otherwise acknowledged, the following conversation was conducted between the author and Brian Fuata via video call.

Jonno Revanche
I am very familiar with this sort of low cost, fluorescent lighting of the South Australian IGA you’re currently in right now. Is Coober Pedy the smallest town you've lived in?

Brian Fuata
No — before this I was in Amata community, it's like smack bang, Central Desert. There’s like 200 people there. It’s about 2 hours south of Uluru, so it’s close to the Northern territory, South Australian border.

JR
And you just got back from Adelaide, Biennale, is that correct? 

BF
Girl, I killed it!

JR
I saw! You tore!

BF
The last two years, I've been making these performances parasitically absorbing the works of my fellow cohort, and essentially driven by a political philosophy of weaponising them to speak about Gaza. And so, to talk about the work is to then talk about the images that we're seeing of the genocide.

JR
And there’s no way to circumvent that -

BF
No! Unless you do some ninja moves and go — now I'm just talking about Helen Johnson's painting about abstraction, or Ren Light Pan’s sleeping figures, and the way she did that to then speak about so-and-so….I’ve been thinking about how amazing the thin veil is between art and it’s relation to the image complex, and now, in relation to the image complex of the broadcasted genocide. But what I find really interesting, and so specific and unique to this moment of the genocide, is how the image complex takes the kind of affect — the resonant affect of what's happening in Palestine — which has now also then imbued an embodiment of the image complex in a profoundly new way. So, especially during the first years of the first years of the genocide, where the call to action was to actually be on Meta, there was this kind of sort of “angelic heralding of reposting” that did something synthetic that I was like — where all of us in our community were like — this is fucking new. This is a new engagement of the image and social media…we’re somehow diving deep into the bowels of Mordor as a political action.

JR
I’m reading The Society of the Spectacle for the very first time and noting there's also this weird, somewhat painful contradiction in which we are constantly being drawn into our phones and away from like the world and to like engage with the spectacle of it, this somewhat imagistic metaphysical overlay of our bodies and material realities, and urged to not to look away, but at the same time sort of being censored. Social media seems to harness these parts of the sympathetic nervous system to make people engage in a very charity, NGO type response. Only certain ways of looking and ways of speaking could get through.

BF
And I think it’s more complex than just us applying binary, oppositional kind of thinking. Anyway, Adelaide was fucking incredible. I really feel that I came through this kind of cathartic epiphany, one in which also has consolidated what, for the last 30 years, has been a really unhinged conception of my improvisational practice.

JR
I appreciate the unhingedness. When I think about your work….well, I should preface this next question by saying my relationship to art has always been very autodidactic, it was not from having parents or grandparents who are, necessarily educated or understanding about art who could pass on those tools, but it was more my grandma, on the days that my mom was working, taking us to the art gallery because it's free and it's accessible — on the North Terrace of Adelaide — and then being encouraged to have this emotional response to things, to not even think about it too much necessarily. To find the art you love before you know the art you’re supposed to love, when that love is necessarily pure, and therefore irrevocable. I guess that is still the foundation from which I’m engaging with your work before I adopt some analytical mindset — and I think what I intuit in your performances is that there has been a lot of energy that has been building up over time that is expressed, but there is not one single moment, or kind of like an ‘aha’ moment, or maybe even just a precipice, and it's more like a constantly ongoing process, this sense of performance and thinking/talking. The moment when the actual performance “begins” is actually just the part that other people are seeing, right?

BF
No absolutely, but girl, we share the same class consciousness! That exact lived experience you have with art, what you were saying about feeling, I have a similar political registration, or a similar kind of concern around being understood by my folks, by my ilk. So my practice of improvisation kind of straddles this real almost didactic thing. I literally will start a performance where I go, this is what’s happening. I’m going to set the buzzer. This is exactly what I did a few days ago. Me and Daniel were fucking around in the gallery…have you seen that video of me waving my arms around? You can literally do an artist talk. It’s skirting the bleed between information, and then information becoming capacious for a kind of poetic rhapsody. So once people are secure about what they’re about to see, then I can invigilate the performance into “what if there’s pure noise and I’m screaming into a microphone?” 

I find this transcendent moment happens where they’re like: “ok cool, he’s explained to us he’s going to be psycho then move into different modalities of communication”, and then the thing happens. This is where art’s objecthood “enters the chat.” This exact strategy of composition comes from our class. I’m not even being romantic here —

JR
You’re explaining the minutiae of the experience.

BF
It’s not like I’m saying 'I want my work to be understood by the proletariat' you know, I’m not Norma Rae.

JR
Those traces do make it into your work. I do think there is some benefit to that, even though what may happen is that you find that you can't quite so easily frame your work in the ways the institution wants you, just because you have adopted this other way of thinking. But it doesn’t mean those ways of thinking are less human or whatever. I’m thinking of Fred Moten particularly here.

BF
But I would answer that by going, that’s also where Black art comes from! That's where queer art comes from. It has these material conditions that inform experimentation and radical new ways of making.

JR
This is kind of an aside, but there’s that quote by Vaginal Davis where she says that to enter the institution is to be institutionalised. I felt like there was a time where, as an early writer, I felt like I had to write in the registers that was demanded of me in order to get stuff published, to get paid, to be seen, etc. The collapse of a lot of those ecosystems, or the changing of them, meant that I had to give up on that and say, okay…what is left really but to get to the heart of things? What do I want to know about myself without hesitation, or respecting my own hesitation, how do I get closer to writing the way my favorite writers express themselves, in that unadulterated way, even if that's not kind of the default mode at the moment? That’s what I’ve noticed, that sometimes you have to ignore the worlds in which you live before you find out what's really going on.

So the performance we're talking about, I've seen these little fragments of them where your face is painted red and you're wearing this almost oversized costume — one of them I saw you performing to Joe Jonas? — and you've performed this in Singapore recently, and then Adelaide. I'm really curious about if you felt any difference in context between these two contexts.

BF
The trajectory of the most recent performances came from thinking about Adelaide Biennale first and foremost, but then all of these things sort of fell into place that allowed me to develop the logic of the work. That began with a live-in studio residency with Temperance Hall in Narrm. And so when I was gifted this studio, literally days later, I was curated into the Singapore Art Fair. I was thinking about how I was going to employ and sculpt my practice of improvisation to speak into a kind of more structured and focused thematic which previously have never really been a concern of mine. 

JR
But in the past you were thinking of it as more improvisational, and being more of a culmination of everything you’ve been thinking about, discoursing about, and corresponding with, then presenting that in a kinetic way — but you’re saying this is markedly different?

BF
Yeah, and different for the first time in that I was consciously thinking about the weaponisation of improvisation as a medium, as a matter, again, keeping the tune of Ellie Buttrose’s curatorial premise of artists responding to material and materiality. And so it was really cool that she put me into this context, which then made me think about the ephemeral practice of performance - period - but then also improvised performance at that, to then thinking about the materiality of it. The three different contexts provided different chapters of development. However, they're all kind of compelled by the same goal of making an improvised performance series speaking to the weaponisation of art, to speak about the genocide without mentioning the key words.

JR
When I think about your work, I do think that there is this like element of the Gothic about it — not in the sense that it's like a particular type of theatrical interpretation of the ailing Brontë women on the Moors or whatever, but I feel like the Gothic is concerning a very explicit relationship to a place. It’s a particular, or peculiar, relationship to place in which you're trying to identify whatever the undercurrent is, whatever the repressed psychic matter of the place is, even if it's uncomfortable to the context or the image of that a place tells itself — and then speaking to it, or trying to metabolize it into this incredibly visible thing that people can no longer look away from. Obviously, having grown up in Adelaide, it's hard to deny it’s a really spooky place, and it does affect people, but they probably couldn't say how or why. I'm interested if that has come up for you working in Coober Pedy or if you've noticed things about yourself or your practice that maybe you hadn't previously been quite so aware of.

BF
I mean, it's amazing that you've just said that, because I find that, in many ways, Cooper Pedy is Adelaide’s shadow other. Whenever we get hoity-toity Adelaideans coming through, the snobbery is so fucked up, it's like dude — these are your cousins, what are you talking about. Cooper Pedy presents the kind of uncanny of the domestic. So your connections to the Gothic sensibility in my practice really applies to a kind of Southern Gothic that's so inherent to the mirror that is Coober Pedy to Adelaide. And Coober Pedy being the flip side to a free settlement. The libertarian, the freedom with which to then kind of also be anti-authoritarian; but it's anti-ness as counterpoint to the oppressive system. Its criminality is so linked to a hegemonic force. Coober Pedy is so fascinating for that reason, because I’m living in the mirror.

There’s that vibe, but there’s also the power of Country, which is so multivarious and multivalent in the way that settler colonial binaries try to assert their sovereignty, but Country always wins in the end. Country’s like — get the fuck out, we don’t believe in parochialism. The reverberant nature of Country, this country, and how it has moments of collision and synchronicity to a settler colonial project. In this case it comes out in the industries of mining, and also tourism, the fucking NGO world. I love living here for that very reason, and there’s an emotional clarity that the Central Desert and regional South Australia represents. I would also add the regional NT and WA, how that is an image of Australia and how it feeds into a certain industrious imaginary, a clarity of capitalism that the southeast coast has NO word for, no language for. There’s an emotional clarity to the gothicness of that area that is so generative.

JR
I’m curious how you feel that is not captured or otherwise obfuscated in the cities, or the art world.

BF
I mean, I work for a commercial Aboriginal art centre, and it’s been an eye-opening experience in understanding everything. So firstly, there are a few things about working in the Aboriginal art centre that need to be understood and need to be contextualised within the history of labor, in mission life. There's a kind of emotional hijinx, an emotional clarity to making money off your artwork. It’s so poo-pooed in the city — artists are like we remain in the world of the artwork, we remain in the world of philosophy, and mob are like…so do we! [laughs] But also we need to eat. So there’s this really beautiful understanding…

JR
It’s all on the table, really. You’re not mystifying the process.

BF
There’s no mystification of the production, but there’s also at the same time understanding the spirituality of making, of being, and of being of it. Whereas I think — us in the cities - don’t understand either of those things.

JR
Totally, we’re sort of adopting wholesale the registers people are putting forth onto our processes that may not actually even apply to our processes or natural thinking.

BF
It's also underscored by a kind of enlightenment thinking. And when I say Indigenous art, I'm also really talking about Richard Bell saying “Aboriginal art, it's a white thing.” There’s also an otherness that is complete commodity, and also a contrivance of a situation that is absolutely artificial. But this ineffable, sort of mystical thing happens, and I think it happens being on Country, where the industrious nature of our production is transformed by the aura of being out here.

JR
You can have a clearer sense of yourself, even your body, where you stand, there's this like internal compass that is more alive because it's not being drawn in a million directions.

BF
But it’s not wishy-washy romantic, it’s also intense. It’s intense. It’s why drugs are so big here, it’s why Christian Zionist Evangelism is massive here. The spirit world is demonic — I mean literally demonic. It's funny. A few months ago, or sometime last year, we had this fashion photographer come up to take fancy photographs with the artists and stuff like that. She stayed with me and she was like, it’s so quiet here! I was like, ahhh it’s not quiet! It’s buzzing! It’s alive. It’s radioactive! There’s a clarity to that, but it’s not calm.

JR
Yes, quiet and calm are not the same thing. It’s your ability to recognise if something more is going on around you.

BF
Exactly, exactly.