Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, is a normally sedate and dignified city of elegant uptown terraces, leafy streets and quiet flat suburbs, bounded to the south by genteel seaside charm; and to the north by rolling hills populated by vineyards. It prides itself on being the only city in Australia that wasn’t settled by convicts. Yet, this is also the explanation some local people will give of the tendency for shocking aberrations, and bizarre crimes to occur there. And perhaps that is what in some perverse breaking-symmetry, explains the manifestations of the most violently creative and radical art scene that Australia has produced emerging from out of this sleepy oasis of good taste and civilized arts centres.
In the 1980s, for a few vivid shocking years Adelaide was the unlikely location of a creatively explosive and radically charged experimental contemporary art scene, influenced by Viennese Actionism, where punk energy met with conceptual art and produced ferociously extraordinary performance art and activism that erupted seemingly at random all over the city. In the form of heckling mirror-performance by young men with strange haircuts in leather jackets jumping up like maniacal jack-in-the- boxes from the theatre seats of the Festival Arts Centre, and hi-jacking the audiences attention with their outlandish critique, affronting the good denizens of the more staid cultural venues, before being ejected by polite but firm ushers.
In the form of performance arts heckling, at openings in art galleries, where groups such as The Arts Vandals would electrify the sedate middle class backdrop with performances of impromptu mayhem and not always simulated madness – that revolved around celebrating at least one notorious red haired vandal excessively and rudely availing of the wine and snacks, as a form of performance art. Holding up a fairground mirror of distortion to “convention” and good manners. I remember one night of broken glass in a party in a squat inhabited by the Vandals where the police arrived, and two young police officers gazing around in bewilderment at the walls of monitors, and glittering floor.
Watch the negative space! The red haired one was screaming as someone placed his large hand over his mouth to save the words escaping, and our friend from arrest.
It was in this milieu and context, or one that existed in a self-same parallel dimension, that another Adelaide born artist and poet Christopher Barnett, first made his name.
I did not ever meet him or know of him in the year and a half that I lived in Adelaide. I was there to study Drama, and art, philosophy and literature, at Flinders University. But I became part of this scene through a housemate’s boyfriend the red haired vandal who came to stay, and stayed. In the end I left abruptly, deferring my studies, to visit my younger sister who was training as an actress in the Focus Theatre, Dublin’s Stanislavski influenced avant-garde theatre company. Thinking I would be away three weeks, I was gone ten years. (Returning, when I did with husband, and two year old son, and daughter soon to be born).
Meanwhile the Adelaide scene erupted, and Christopher Barnett became one of its best-known artists. He founded a performance group All Out Ensemble in collaboration with director Nicholas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach and a group of artists; that was connected in actions and works with Art Unit, founded by Juilee Pryor and Robert McDonald, Adelaide artists who moved to Sydney. "The actions and work in each city though connected were sometimes qualitatively different", Christopher Barnett (Facebook conversation 23.1.2013). Working always in the mode of collaboration, he also worked with Nicolas Lathouris, Margaret Cameron and Alison Davey in Melbourne, also with many other collaborators and collaborators in Sydney with a number of people including the Central, Art Unit and Performance Space.* These groups involved some of the people I had met and mixed with, and some that – many years later- I have recently met through teaching in Sydney and through facebook in the past three years. I have met Christopher Barnett through Facebook and engaged in intellectually challenging and meaningful conversations with him through exchanging texts in social cyber-space.
I came to make contact with him initially through a friend of his whom I had met whilst teaching at the University of Technology Sydney on the subject Language and Discourse. A fellow tutor was performance and sound artist Debra Petrovitch. She had worked with Christopher Barnett in Art Unit in the performances that he directed, when she was studying conceptual art at the Adelaide School of Arts. This was the first art school in Australia to have courses in conceptual art- and what I witnessed was the exuberant efflorescence of that freedom to explore ideas that had energized European art for years. When we talked about our mutual experiences as artist and writer in Adelaide she suggested I make contact with Christopher on Facebook.
Amongst the conversations we have had what I think is most significant are conversations about freedom of artists and the need to transform personal individual trauma into art as a process of society that is deeply healing and imperative to social health, in my interpretation. Christopher moved to Nantes in the 1980s. He said “ I was asked by the town to establish a theatre laboratory here in Nantes in 1992 and I did but I was immediately attracted to what I had always done and that was to work for people who have been disregarded who have been placed on the margins- but I wanted to work with them deeply as if they were artists – so it has meant that I work in communities, in hospitals, in prisons with small groups of people and large ones, I work the same questions of what is creation and I am the only artist who has done it for so long every day of the week – as many as 12 séances a week of 2-3 hours… I train people to live with themselves and that is also a solitary business- to make people use creation as a way of not only to survive our catastrophe but to transform it.”
Since the 1980s Christopher Barnett as been a self exiled artist in Nantes , France, he has not returned to Australia as according to his writing he feels that he cannot work here as an artist, as he will be censored or oppressed in a hostile climate.
Now, Australian film maker Anne Tsoulis and producer Georgia Wallace-Crabbe are making a documentary, These Heathen Dreams, about the life and work of Christopher Barnett, working in collaboration with French co-producer Les Films du Balibari, they have received French funding and regional funding from le Pays del la Loire to travel to France to shoot and edit the documentary, they have started up a fund raising campaign in Australia through social media, on the Pozible site, a site for artist run initiatives to gain funding for projects from crowd funding.
Arts Features International is conducting interviews with Christopher Barnett and Anne Tsoulis about the documentary and their ideas, and will publish these soon on this site.
Copyright ©Ruth Skilbeck 2013
* Updated in consultation with Christopher Barnett and Anne Tsoulis, January 23, 2013.
Also published on Arts Features International
