PLEASE LEAVE THESE WINDOWS OPEN OVERNIGHT TO ENABLE THE FANS TO DRAW IN COOL AIR DURING THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNINGBIANCA HESTER

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PLEASE LEAVE THESE WINDOWS OPEN OVERNIGHT TO ENABLE THE FANS TO DRAW IN COOL AIR DURING THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNINGBIANCA HESTER

The Helen Macpherson Smith Commission 2010Bianca Hester is the sixth recipient of the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission. The partnership between ACCA and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust offers Victorian artists the opportunity to create an ambitious new work of art to be exhibited in the main commission hall at ACCA. This work is then gifted to a regional Victorian gallery.

The ArtistBianca Hester is a Melbourne based artist working across installation, collaboration, performance, video, writing and music. She approaches the gallery space as an open studio space for experimental spatial playfulness. The objects she brings into the gallery function as sculptural props for the staging of actions and events. Improvisation and temporality are the order of the day. Outcomes are not fixed in advance but emerge through a series of encounters between the ob-jects, materials, people and space. An installation will often change over the duration of the exhibi-tion, accommodating additions and alterations, different spatial perspectives and events. Projects are punctuated by groups coming together, alongside individual interventions.

BioBianca Hester has a PhD from RMIT, Melbourne and has a significant exhibition history both in Australia and internationally including at the CCP, Melbourne (2009), the Narrows, Melbourne (2009), Artspace, Sydney (2009), Showroom, London (2008), Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2007), RMIT Project Space (2006). She was one of the founding members of CLUBSproject Inc and is a current member of the collaborative group OSW with Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice at Victorian College of the Arts.

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The ExhibitionIn ACCA’s large commission hall, Hester creates a temporary conflation of disparate elements, both monumental and diminutive, structural and organic, light and heavy, built and found, human and non-human. Adapting the language of construction with scaffolding, platforms, beams, walls and floors, the space is delineated in specific ways, but as in her previous installations, nothing is absolutely fixed. Instead Hester’s self-imposed limitations are tested, and the space opened to possibilities - as forms and materials waver back and forth between functionality and social sculpture.

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A series of spectacular and quieter gestures and actions are planned to take place in the installation over the exhibition. Collaborators will be involved from the start, assisting to build the block walls and arrange elements. Then intermittently kick balls and camp out on the ACCA floor, as well as wheel a car in and out. ACCA’s invigilators will be involved too. Hester has planned a series of actions or tasks to be performed at regular intervals:

Events during the exhibition

A live horse will make its way through the space on a number of occasions – redefin-ing the relation of forms to each other in the space.

All actions are recorded with video footage fed back into the installation as projection and documented in a catalogue.

Turning the lights on and off for indefinite periods of time• Activating the video devices: pushing them through the space, turning them on and off with • remote controls and manuallyRemoving a bucket of dirt from the pile• Sitting in the work• Running a stick along the row of holes in the brick arena• Kicking a ball against the wall• Blowing a whistle• Beeping the horn of a car (if/when it is in the space)• Rolling a spool of tape across the floor•

Proposed layout for horse’s walk.

Bianca Hester, production still, 2010, Digital collage

Bianca Hester, production still, 2010, Digital collage

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Materials & Techniques

project projects involved a combined resi-dency and exhibition spanning an eight-week period. Approached as an expanded studio, the showroom became a site within which to develop structures, furnishings and instruments. These enabled different engagements with others across a number of levels. The project involved a multi-layered clustering of a series of forms and activities – some architectural, some musi-cal, some material, some collaborative, some improvisational, some sculptural. project projects became a situation for hosting and generating a series of one-to-one collaborations with a range of people from Melbourne and London – taking place within the company of, and in response to, a multiplicity of informal structures and transient sculptural constructions. These collaborations involved sound recordings and improvisations, developing sequences of movement, collabora-tive building processes, and the planning and building of a makeshift raft to navigate down the Regents Canal in London’s East End.

A prop-based installation incorporating a series of workshops for the development of choreographies, drawings, constructions and videos through a series of one-to-one collaborationssiteGertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, October-November 2007, Melbourneimagesprocess, development, recording and installation in situprop development and installationBianca Hesterspatial design processeswith Daniel van Cleemputmovement and cheoregraphic workwith Jude Walton

project collaboration

gallery as an artist’s studio space

provisional devices for a propositional living space

Bianca Hester works in such a way that her installations are like experiments she would set up in her studio. Often they are not resolved but rather playful and experimental, launching investiga-tions into art practice that is fluid, unfurling and transformative, that involves the spectator.

Mud, rubber, her dad, a real horse, caravan, big bolder, moving camera.

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putting the art before the horseOne of the founding fathers of the arte povera movement, Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, was one of the first artists to bring the live horse into contemporary art. Perhaps Kounellis’ most famous work, created in 1969, was Untitled (12 horses), an installation in L’Attico Gallery in Rome. Consisted of twelve live horses tethered in the exhibition space for some days, the work was seen as an extreme example of the desire to make art that could not be sold. Kounellis chose horses for their art-historical links to heroic paintings and equestrian statues. By using horses Kounellis also sought to bring the outside into the gal-lery.

arte povera

Art Ancestry

Giovanni AnselmoUntitled 1968 granite, lettuce, copper wire. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris - Musee National d’Art Moderne

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (12 horses) in the Galleria L’Attico, Rome in 1969.

Hester’s practice lives on the edge of historical precedents.

What makes a sculpture? First we understood sculpture as the figure, then we aspired to the equestrian statue, from this came biomorphic shapes, then, in the late 1960’s came the new sculp-ture and truth to materials, spatial relationship, and the demonumentalising of the object – as famously stated by Robert Morris,‘Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?A: I was not making a monument.Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?A: I was not making an object.’

Tony Smith, quoted by Robert Morris in “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” first published in ArtForum: October 1966.

The scale of the work prompted questions about our size and presence in relation to it, the viewer was thereby necessary to complete the work by their negotiation of the voids and spaces. This would in time evolve into installation art in which the notion of ‘dead space’ was contested, with the viewer’s trajectory determined by the distribution of materials and the balancing of objects and their positioning in the exhibition space.

Translated from Italian, arte povera literally means ‘poor art’. It refers to the three-dimensional installations that were constructed from everyday, humble materials, includ-ing mud, gravel, broken glass, scrap metal, foodstuffs, foliage and occasionally live animals. Reaching its height in the 1960’s to early 1970’s, this primarly Italian sculptural movement explored the relation between art and life in which the process of a work’s creation was presented as its subject. This was often acheived through the staging of happenings and sculptures. Typically artists would add or subtract elements in their installations throughout the dura-tion of the exhibition.

Curriculum linksArt

Primary YearsIntroduce students to the idea of the ‘found object’ as art. Look at all sorts of materials found in contemporary art and discuss how this is different from traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture. Create an activity where students play with different objects and discuss what they might mean… eg a battery could represent; light, energy, movement, life etc. Get students to then make an artwork of something simple like a portrait or a picture of somewhere they know well us-ing found objects that might represent something about the image they are creating.

Middle YearsBianca Hester could be considered an artist whose practice is fluid. What does it mean to create artworks that are fluid, without fixed meaning or narrative? Think about artists reasons for making art…do you think it is the role of the artist to answer questions or to ask questions?

Senior YearsBianca Hester is not the first artist to use a live horse in an art gallery. Italian artist Jannis Kounel-lis also exhibited real horses in an exhibition in 1969. Look at how horses have been depicted in art, historically. Some examples of past artists who have depicted horses are Picasso, Gericault, Delacroiz and Leonardo. What other examples in contemporary art do we see the horse?

Studio Art

Middle YearsResearch the Art Povera movement of the 1960’s and explore the radical nature of it with regards to the time in which it began. Compare and contrast it to Bianca Hester’s installation and perfor-mance works at ACCA.

Senior YearsAsk students to think about what some of the issues might be for a gallery in showing a work like Hester’s. What other galleries would this work fit with? How would you classify her work?

Theatre Studies

Primary YearsGet students to create a 30 second performance which is based around everyday actions and everyday objects.

Middle YearsResearch the Arte Povera movement of the 1960’s and explore the radical nature of it with re-gards to the time in which it began. Compare and contrast it to Bianca Hester’s installation and performance works at ACCA.

Senior YearsWhat is the difference between Performance Art and avant-garde theatre? Look at how Bianca has used performance in her piece here at ACCA. What does the use of the performative ele-ments add/detract from the art work and how does the performance element of her work compare to classical theatre?

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Media Studies & Photography

Primary YearsLook at magazine images. Hester has used everyday materials, get students to compare the types of images they see in a magazine compared to the everyday images that Hester uses. Why might Hester use everyday images and materials in her work?

Middle YearsLook at documentary and surveillance style film. Think about the differences (you might like to compare television such as Big Brother compared to David Attenborough). How does documenting Hester’s work add to the piece? Get students to think about what they might like to document in their school and perhaps even make their own documentary.

Senior YearsGet students to consider the differences between avant-garde cinema, and Video Art and compare the two. Is it different experiencing the work in real life or does watching the documented version add something further and if so, what?

English

Primary YearsAsk students to write a creative piece inspired by the objects they see in the gallery. Get them to structure a narrative around the objects Bianca has chosen.

Middle YearsAsk students to write a character piece about Bianca Hester. Get them to consider what all the ele-ments included in her work suggest about her or mean to her. What type of person might she be?

Senior YearsAsk students to create a review about the exhibition, considered what materials were used, what it inspired in them, what it reminded them of, what questions it made them ask, if they thought it was worthwhile or not. Get students to research the construction of art reviews in the paper and get them to review an art exhibition of their choice.

Further reading

www.biancahester.net

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