My joint exhibition with fellow artist Will Cooke, Here/Before, at Alaska in July 2014 began as a conversation between us. Will’s practice is firmly entrenched in painting. The flat geometric shapes of modernism are transferred onto minimally inspired industrial materials, such as brushed aluminum. Will expresses personal narratives, using the term ‘Nostalgia Paintings’ to describe his works, which are visual representations of ‘memories that are on the periphery of my subconscious’.[1] The odours, sounds, tastes, touch and colours that are imprinted in his mind are recycled and reformed in memory chains; one link seemingly unrelated brings to mind another link. He then transforms these sensations into paint, ‘to create abstract paintings that make these recollections become less abstract’.[2]
My work for this show, the soundscape You Were There, became a platform for others to tell their stories. It featured recorded fragments of my conversations with locals, sounds of the night, and the tales of those who work or pass through The Cross. Each monologue, with occasional questions from the interviewer, was played on an individual speaker suspended from the ceiling over a concrete cube. An audience member could take in all of them as a medley of private moments in the public space, or move from one conversation to another, stringing together their own particular narrative. Or indeed, as some did, stand or sit patiently beneath each speaker to hear an entire interview from beginning to end.
The decision to use only audio recordings was a critical one. On one level, the stories were a way to avoid being a ‘tourist’ offering a superficial snapshot of the area. The absence of a video camera meant that the interviewees had quickly forgotten they were being recorded and had engaged in conversation in an open and natural way. Personal history was imparted, confidences shared. On another level, the heterogeneous narratives formed a kind of loose mosaic that audiences could reconfigure, as described above, in an endless variety of ways, to create a picture that might challenge or reinforce their own understanding of Kings Cross. In this way, as Lucy Lippard notes, the stories became part of a new, shared experience.
Where once the stories detailed shared experiences, today it may be mostly the stories themselves that offer common ground. Once you start hearing the stories, you are becoming a member of the community . . . as Terry Tempest Williams says ‘the umbilical cord between past, present and future’.[3]
For the audience to perceive this community in a non-structured way, feeling as if they had stumbled upon an intimate conversation in this very public car park, was key to the success or failure of the work.
Just as an emancipated audience is the opposite of passive spectatorship, only an active audience can be emancipated. You Were There required the audience to fill in many blanks. There were no visual clues; the faces of interviewees had to be imagined for the work to be complete. The participants physically navigated the car park among the speakers, deciding how long they would listen to a tale or if they would move back and let all the voices merge and fade in and out.
Listening without visual access to a sound’s cause, what is known as ‘acousmatic’ listening[4], forces us to disentangle ourselves from auditory habits and prejudices so that we become even more aware of the interaction between sound and meaning in our experience of speech. The timbre of a voice, which is an aural expression of the shape and length of the throat, oral and nasal cavities, can tell the listener much about the life of the speaker. In the same way that life is etched on our faces, our experiences reverberate in our voices. Therefore, the narrative of these recorded stories is only part of what the work conveyed.
What this translates into for artist and then audience is that the work they experience does not feel forced. Many a community-engaged work falls flat as the artist tries to fulfil an expectation of the gallery to ‘engage’, and it becomes a staged form of participatory work that can leave both artist and audience feeling used and false.
With regard to the interviews themselves, in harmony with Sebastian Goldspink’s founding ethos for Alaska, I did not set out with any predetermined story to tell about Kings Cross; to delve into its seedy nightlife, for instance, or to canvas views on the government’s recently enacted lockout laws. Neither in the choice of interview subjects nor in the interviews themselves was there any attempt to steer the conversations in a particular direction. Instead they were seen as a way into individual lives and through them into a community, allowing one, as Lippard suggests, to be momentarily part of that community. It was important, for the authenticity of the interview process, that the destination remain undefined.
A number of interviews were conducted at World Bar, a well-known Kings Cross nightclub, with the owner of the premises, one of his bar staff, and one of the ‘door bitches’ (security personnel who vet patrons on entry). All were happy to talk about their own personal journeys to The Cross and also to comment on the profound changes that were affecting their livelihoods and the way Kings Cross was now operating. I also spoke with a local playwright, an actor, a journalist, and an old-timer.
What emerged was a picture of a place formed out of complex social, political, historical and spatial issues that was, at that moment, at a pivotal juncture in its evolution. The Cross had a long history of strip clubs, nightclubs, pubs, alcohol and drugs, and an entrenched organised crime network, but after the ‘one-punch’ attacks that led to the deaths of Thomas Kelly (2012) and Daniel Christie (2013), the tide of public opinion, underpinned by politicians and the media, led to the introduction in January 2014 of new licensing laws and other penalties. Under the lockout provisions, venues in Kings Cross and the CBD were not permitted to allow any patrons to enter licenced premised after 1:30am, and no alcohol was to be served after 3:00am. The ‘one-punch law’ also introduced an 8-year mandatory minimum sentence for perpetrators of drunken assaults.
It was several months into the operation of these laws that I created the work You Were There. Before the interviews I had an outsider’s awareness of the lockout rulings. However, as the interviews proceeded almost all interviewees, regardless of their role in The Cross, began to describe the social impact on the community and business owners in the area. Two years later, The Cross is radically changed. Many long-time establishments have shut their doors and the area, now deprived of much of its nighttime culture, appears to be a community in flux. That the lockout laws have moved alcohol-fuelled violence elsewhere, to Newtown and Star Casino in Pyrmont, is evident. But Kings Cross’s broader contribution to Sydney is only now being understood.
As the strip clubs, bars and other venues close, property developers are quick to move in and redevelop these sites into high-rise apartment blocks with equally high prices. It is an irreversible gentrification that has been witnessed before. The moneyed classes are drawn by the vibrant diversity of such areas but in a short time the neighbourhood is priced beyond the reach of the very people who created that diversity.
What gentrification makes evident is that financial speculation effects a radical redistribution of space . . . These effects of gentrification—of capitalism spread across space—have a consequential impact on residents of the city at a very personal level. After all, one’s identity is shaped by the way one occupies space, and if space if also a site of confrontation with power, then gentrification is an important battle indeed.[5]
Though Alaska’s founder, Sebastian Goldspink, could be seen by some as one of the gentrifiers, and making art in these kinds of neighbourhoods does in some way open a chink of accessibility to outsiders, alternative spaces such as Alaska have a vital role to play in community resistance to the process. They are able, if they choose as Goldspink does, to use their spaces to raise awareness of the dynamics of power, and by yielding that power over to their audience, empower them to exercise it.
[1] Will Cooke, Interview by author. Kings Cross, May, 2015
[2] Cooke, Interview
[3] Lucy R Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society. (New York: The New Press, 1997), 50.
[4] Brian Kane, Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
[5] Thompson, Seeing Power: Socially Engaged Art in the Age of Cultural Production, 161.
katie louise williams 