Our conversation begins a few days shy of astronomy and portent. We’ve been thinking about big things even as we extemporise and get things done. It’s about that time of year.

You and I are here leisurely talking across these words and gestures printed. In actual fact, we are on the cusp of informational and interstellar alignment, forging a better second decade of the second millennium. We know too that some parts of the world are submerging, staking improbable monetary and corporeal transactions, and seriously busy with energetic processes of constructing and dismantling things. These are difficult and interesting times, again.

(I MISSED YOUR PHONE CALL TWICE KATHY. I WAS IN THE GARDEN. THREE TIMES IF YOU COUNT THE OTHER DAY, YESTERDAY.)

Sometimes it is hard to move forward, know how to begin and when to start. Athletes spend a lifetime in the danger zone taking their mark, deciding on what to focus on before the gun goes off.

One option is to focus on your first movement, not the gun. Second, would be a sensory set. This means that you would focus your attention on the starter’s gun. I suggest focusing your first movement.

But can we be disingenuous here? As artists, will you allow us to make imperative? We can be be deft, you know. We would like you to play along.

(I FEEL HASSLED BY OBLIGATIONS BUT ONCE WE GET GOING NOTHING CAN STOP US!)

Moonwalkers are the masters of beginnings. Their steps are heavy, not just because there is zero gravity but because their steps are full of hope and promise of new worlds and great forward leaps into new frontiers and beyond, beyond young boys’ dreams . Their steps say ‘hello universe’ “is there anybody out there?”

Look around you, take a good hard look around you, look at your friends, look at the sky, look at the trees, look at us telling you stories, look at the road stretched out before you.1

(I HAVE LET FOOD AND TIME CLIMB ON TOP OF ME. TODAY I ATTEMPTED, AND SUCCEEDED IN WALKING 10 000 STEPS. TIME BRUSHES FAME AWAY, LIKE A BRUSH TO A DUSTPAN.)

Nothing is wrong with anything.2 A suggestion. We were looking at the wrong time.

You say, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”3

So I’d like to introduce here Dr Carl Kellner, a self-made man of humble origins. A minor star of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was inventive, ambitious, and met a tragic end.

There’s little documentation of Kellner’s career until in 1873, when at 23 years old he accidentally discovered that you can heat wood-pulp in a sulphite-solution, so making cellulose simply and cheaply. Patented as the “Ritter-Kellner” process in 1882, this revolutionised paper manufacture and commenced deforestation as we know it today. Kellner recognised the potential for profit on an international scale, and founded lucrative paper factories in Salzburg and industrial laboratories in Vienna. In 1888 he professed his aims to “rule the world cellulose market”.

However electro-chemistry and paper became an inroad to alchemy and occultism. Apparently, “for a man of such apparent scientific and financial acumen, Dr Kellner had a very unusual set of interests outside the laboratory and boardroom.”4

Linking with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, Kellner began to champion esoteric and exotic spiritualism throughout Europe. He started a sanatorium in the mountains west of Salzburg, introducing yoga and breathing techniques and – according to some sources – sex magic, to improve the health of wealthy patrons. His sphere of influence seemed to be growing. But Kellner died in 1904, following an alchemy experiment which went horribly wrong.

(ALCHEMY. SHAMANISM. MODERNISM. THEOSOPHY. ASTROPHYSICS. SOCIAL SCULPTURE.)

I guess we’ve mostly figured out how to breathe, and remembered –

(Aber vergiss nicht auf das Schweigen, auf die Leerräume, die geschaffen werde müssen, von denen aus wieder gesprochen werden kann.)5

Tomorrow, again the unknown seas.6

Meanwhile in 1904 Roland Wilson was born in Devonport, Tasmania. An exceptional student, he was invited to study commerce and work with the pioneering economists of his day. Sir Wilson became part of a leading contingent of Tasmanian theorists who would inform Australian trade policy and introduce economic planning into the public service. He was sensible, and was also known for his tennis, table tennis, skating and billiards.

Sir Wilson liked to say, “Planning, conceived ideally, may be regarded as the elaboration of methods for securing a wise control… to direct where direction is necessary and to withhold where intrusion would be harmful.7

But in those days, in 1962, the Australian treasury claimed that Australia was too young to plan. That we were in the “frontier stage” of development.

WE ARE NOT YET THINKING OF SUPERANNUANATION, BUT IT LURKS AND LINGERS.

No thinking
(but thinking)

You know, in 1962 Steve Irwin was born. His daughter Bindi continues his jungle global danger enterprise. She says we can make the world a better place.

Oh. Overshooting and underwhelming.

Gimmicks. For instance.

“Nothing is wrong with anything,” said Henry Ford when asked about the possibility of serious competition, “and I don’t see any reason to believe that the present prosperity will not continue.”8

Those were bold words of conviction, from a man well used to playing for profits and forging new systems of manufacture and consumption. But in 1928, Model T Ford automobile sales were flagging and the great depression loomed. So Ford decided to diversify his empire and start a rubber plantation in Brazil. At massive expense he imported Ford workers and systems to the jungles there, and attempted to impose such benefits as wages, square-dancing and prohibition. It’s been said that he had a global vision, a theory of business and industry and manpower “looking towards making the world a better place”.9

I wonder whether a global vision can be sensible even as it is innovative. Ford and his company had poor understanding of the agriculture, botany or local people they relied upon. Problems withworkers, trade and ecology multiplied, and the rubber plantation was never productive. 1945 brought the commercial development of synthetic rubber, and Ford’s jungle enterprise was finally abandoned.

But of course. Has failure become a romanticised feature of making, an excuse -

NO.

Listen. Countless other iterations. In 1854, the world famous magician Ching Ling Foo (originally 朱連魁) was born in Beijing.

– or can it be activated as something that questions normalcy; where does this go?

(THE MOON IS GOING INOT LUNAR ECLIPSE AT 8 TONIGHT. APPARENTLY MAGICALLY TURNING PINK.)

Yet perhaps more famous was the exotic American magician Chung Ling Soo (originally William Robinson). Soo and Foo both described themselves as the ‘Original Chinese Conjurer,’ and dueled across Europe, America and Australia. A very popular controversy.

However Soo exceeded expectations, and died of a magic trick gone horribly wrong. In 1918 he was performing his special bullet-catching trick in London when he was shot in the chest. His last words were his first English utterance in public; “Oh my god. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain.”10

(IT’S HAPPENING IN TWENTY MINUTES)

Great now that you are here you will need to make some decisions.

(TIME IS ALWAYS TICKLING AWAY AT THE BACKS OF OUR NECKS.)

This conversation was contrived by Kathryn Gray with Agatha Gothe-Snape and Brian Fuata (caps), Michael Poetschko (italics) and Sarah Rodigari (bold). It is a variation on a text to be published by Tin Sheds Gallery in 2011. And continues.

1. Panther (Madeleine Hodge & Sarah Rodigari), Playground A new World Order, script excerpt from participatory performance 2009.
2. Henry Ford in 1928, quoted by Greg Grandin in ‘Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”, 2009.
3. Sarah is quoting Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale Of Two Cites’, 1859
4. Peter R Koenig, The Ordo Templi Orientis Phenomenon.
5. Michael interjects, “but don’t forget about silence, about the empty spaces which must be created and from which we can be spoken again.”
6. Cras ingens, interabimus aequor was a favourite Latin phrase of Wilson’s economics mentor Douglas Copland at the University of Tasmania c 1920s. According to William Colema, Giblin’s Platoon: The trials and triumphs of the economist in Australian public life, 2006.
7. Wilson posited these ideas in 1934 and his economic theories were very influential for Australian policy from the 1930-60s. From Peter D. Groenewegen and Bruce J. McFarlane, ‘A History of Australian Economic Thought’, 1990.
8. Grandin, ibid.
9. Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, ‘My Life and Work – An Autobiography of Henry Ford’, 1922.
10. See a full account of Soo’s last Defying the Bullet trick
11. “Can one be in two places at the same time?” asked Michael in the script for ‘Kontaktzone / Contact zone’, 2010.

Images are: Sarah Rodigari’s interview performance at FLAG Bundanon Residency 2010, and Brian Fuata and Agatha Gothe-Snape performing a Cruising workshop at Campbelltown Art Centre in 2010 (images courtesy the artists and Kathryn Gray); So good for so long video still by Kathryn Gray 2010; Bernadette Anzengruber, For Edgar, 18th August 2010; Nina Stuhldreher’s Gimmick 2010; Teik-Kim Pok’s Fair Game, 2010; Michaela Gleave’s Persistent Optimism, presented at Anna Papas Gallery in 2010 (glitter, air compressors, hose, buckets, funnels, fittings, image courtesy Claudia Gleave); and Michael Poetschko’s Kontaktzone / Contact zone, photography, mapping and audio, 2010.

Bernadette Anzengruber
Brian Fuata
Agatha Gothe-Snape
Michaela Gleave
Kathryn Gray
Michael Poetschko
Teik-Kim Pok
Sarah Rodigari
Nina Stuhldreher

With rules of play we are inventing order. There are formal rules that artists and audiences play with. You and I organise information and materials, space and time as coordinates for our actions therein. There are roles to enact and experience. Games are a space for improvisation within shared teleologies and disputed boundaries.

This exhibition and performance project Rules of play draws on conceptual and perfomative processes of negotiating common rules and ludic spaces. The Austrian and Australian artists involved are diverse, and this project extends conversations and collaboration over time and distance. Each has been asked to play by a set of rules, to devise systems for trial and error and enterprise. This is a process of artistic research and performative solutions.

While setting parameters for here and now, the artists refer back to what has already happened and towards a speculative reimagining what may yet be possible. Rules of play engages with the gallery and civic spaces, local and broader systems, and colonial and imperial and utopic histories. With the premise of play you may be implicated within the work.

You can begin here with your own live body and awareness. Look about you, observe everything. Elucidate how and why, and remember what came before. Through the configuration of words, the transposition of affect, with gestures and transactions, try to move meaning. Think about the most incredible thing ever – that moment when you brushed fame and glamour and success – and what’s now missing? Repeat more than necessary. Skip whatever steps are required. Discuss.

Work and play are never finite. And both can be absurd and deeply serious. This project plots parameters of asserting relevance, in terms of local and broader cultural interplay. Or where those rules and we fail, and games can be redrawn.

Rules of play will be staged at Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney, 8 September - 1 October 2011. The first iteration was at Bell Street Project Space in Vienna in September 2010.

Image - Agatha Gothe-Snape, The outcome is certain - part one (above, 2009-10)