Image courtesy of © Josh Raymond
This analysis of Angela Mesiti’s 2019 ‘Assembly’, exhibited in the Australian pavilion in the 58th Venice Biennale, focuses on the exhibit's relationship with space. Specifically determining how the curator, Julia Engberg, presents it to the audience, and how the spaces depicted in the film are similarly intertwined with the premise of the work. Another essential aspect is the role of communication, explored through music and other mediums, consistently symbiotic of the artist’s politically based response to Ralph Rugoff’s Biennale slogan ‘May You Live in Interesting Times.’ Relevant scholars therefore include Brian O’Doherty regarding significance of curated space, Anthony Gardner and Charles Green relating to the role of the curator, and Julia Engberg and her curatorial statement titled “Listen to the Music of the Other.”
Assembly takes the form of a film, sound, and spatial installation, with an extensive combination of participants: poet David Malouf, composer Max Lyandvert, dancer Deborah Brown, and an extensive list of musicians, drummers, and a female choir. The premise on notions of communication, translation, and architectural connotations are ultimately enhanced by the exhibit’s interaction with space.
(Fig.1 Inside the 2019 Australian exhibition, a screen showing the Italian Senate Chamber)
Lasting about twenty-five minutes, the film begins by showing silent and empty parliament rooms in the Italian Senate Chamber in the Palazzo Madama, Rome (fig.1). The empty chairs, slow camera movements and deafening silence anticipate action to come. The curator Julia Engberg, in her essay ‘Listen to the Music of the Other’, argues how one is effectively encouraged to ‘absorb the voided silence’ and to consider the significance of the architecture.1 The furniture on screen is red and coordinates with Engberg’s theatrical curation of the exhibition, for as soon as the viewer enters the building, an attendant gives out the leaflet as if it is a concert programme. Following the red carpet, the viewer enters the room and sits in the central pit designed to resemble an Amphitheatre. When the film begins, one notices how their surroundings resemble the onscreen images. The camera shots of parliamentary seating come to mirror the circular seating of the audience, and the way Mesiti has orientated the three screens to surround the viewers create a sense of involvement (Fig.2).
(Fig.2 showing the audience becoming part of the image on screen)
Similar to what Maria Lind calls ‘the curatorial’, Engberg’s involvement adheres to this notion in how ‘works of art can be building blocks or signs pointing to a clear curatorial statement, a higher concept… or a phenomenological state’, as described by Gardner and Green regarding documenta 5 in 1972.2 After listening to Engberg’s description of the piece in an interview, it is even more so apparent that the audience are intended to become part of the performance themselves. Indeed, through communicating with the piece in this way, the viewer ought to “see yourself practicing assembly… as a collective group who are listening, thinking and evolving together.”3
Not only does the circular shape invite one to feel related to the film, they are encouraged to survey the other spectators doing the same. Thus, demonstrable in how the work communicates to the audience within the space, the exhibition of Assembly emphasises Engberg’s active curatorial role with her instructions to ‘Listen to the Music of the Other’ and practice democracy. Additionally, the immersive exhibition agrees with O'Doherty's statement that “modernist space redefines the observer’s status” into a participatory role.4
After the symbolic parliamentary rooms come the introduction of figures. A poem by David Malouf is typed on a Michela machine (fig.3). As a device for shorthand resembling a piano keyboard, it was adopted into the Italian Senate in the nineteenth century. Its relation to the Senate thus further indicates Assembly’s democratic theme. Additionally, ‘To Be Written in Another Tongue’ is the name of his poem that becomes translated through the machine, beginning the sequence of translations in the film (fig.4). Then transposed into a musical score, the ‘poem’ is played by soloist musicians performing in the otherwise empty meeting rooms, but it is almost unrecognisable with the lack of lyrics and dissonant long tones. Intrinsically, however, the subject remains about the translative journey of what Engberg summarises as “Word to code to note.”5
(Fig.3 the Michela machine). (fig.4 the poem after the Michela machine).
Other transitions follow including the composer Max Lyandevat playing a piano in the place of the Michela machine. A viola and clarinet perform respectively on the other two screens, and the culminating noise is polyphonic. This is symbolic of communication in itself. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russiann Philosopher, writes that “the essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony… the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to the event.”6 Mesiti’s culmination of the arts therefore reinforces the importance of democracy’s communicative feature.
Short following sequences involve politically charged hand signals of the occupy protest movements, and then climax towards a display of drummers, essentially maintaining the sense of evolving communication.
(fig.5 The girls choir)
The last section of translation is a choir, having been given four words scores that instructed the girls to:
“1. Imagine a tone and vocalise it
2. Continue this and now listening to your surrounding participants, tune into someone else’s tone and migrate yours towards theirs
3. Now create a third new tone that’s different to both the preceding tones
4. Now tune into the given note attempting unison.”7
The music indicates the “fallibilities in a continual evolution towards moments of unison and clarity, yet never settled.”8 In other words, how individuals and differing voices, also reflected in the constantly changing camera perspectives, form a representation of democracy.
Contrary to Svetlana Alper’s notions in ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, the immersive nature of Mesiti’s Assembly contrasts the ‘museum effect’ because the viewer is incorporated, momentarily at least, in a way that adds to the premise.9 Ultimately, the amalgamation of video, sound and space formulate how Mesiti has successfully ‘physicalised this desire for togetherness’ through artistic adaptations of communication.10 Additionally, the exhibition space adheres to O’Dohertys statements that “space is not just where things happen; things make space happen.”11 Undoubtedly, the Australian pavilion's interior would have fundamentally different connotations if it wasn’t for Mesiti’s specific piece.
Footnotes
Julia Engberg in her essay Listen to the Music of the Other, p.9 (Mesiti.A, Assembly, Australia Council for the Arts, 2019, pgs9-17)
Gardner.AandGreen.C, The Rise of the Star Curator, p.20 (Charles Green, Anthony Gardner, Biennials, triennials, and documenta: the exhibitions that created contemporary art, Chichester, Blackwell, 2016, pp17-47)
Youtube, Juliana Engberg tells Angelica Mesiti “Assembly” Australian Pavilion Biennale Arte 2019, Bellatrilli Maria laura Bidorini, (2019),
Brian O’Doherty pg38 ‘The Eye and the Spectator,’ in O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986),
J.Engbergin Messiti’s Assembly p13
Mikhail Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p.21
Caleb Kelly, Assembling Music, Assembly, Mesiti p.202 (pp 198-203)
Engberg in p.16 of A. Mesiti’s Assembly(2019)
Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing,’ in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991), p.27
As written on the exhibition leaflet.
O’Doherty.B, pg.39 of ‘The Eye and the Spectator‘, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986)
Bibliography
Mikhail Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984)
Julia Engberg, Listen to the Music of the Other, in Mesiti.A, Assembly, (Australia Council for the Arts, 2019), pp9-17
Caleb Kelly, ‘Assembling Music’, in Angela Mesiti, Assembly, (Australia Council for the Arts, 2019), pp 198-203
Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, ‘1972: The Rise of the Star-Curator,’ in Gardner and Green, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), pp.17-47.
Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing,’ in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991), pp.25-33.
Juliana Engberg tells Angelica Mesiti “Assembly” Australian Pavilion Biennale Arte 2019, Bellatrilli Marialaura Bidorini, (2019), https://youtu.be/DcKKDgu-Xls
Brian O’Doherty, ‘The Eye and the Spectator,’ in O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986), pp.35-64.
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