Exhibition

Tim Burns - Exploding the Archive

by Huw Hallam

Credence was once given to a peculiar narrative of modern art that saw painting engaged in an annihilatory quest to shed itself of all but its name and its 'essential' flatness. It was argued that the process, lets call it Greenbergian modernism, was rooted in enlightenment philosophy, but in retrospect its dumb conjunction of name and thing seems more like a symptom of cultural reification amid the burgeoning forms of postwar mass-communication. In the 1960s, as painting became one with its name, the communicative power of its sensuous materiality became void under the sign of painting per se; with several notable exceptions, further signifying efforts within the field of modern painting were abandoned.

This is precisely the condition - the 'death of painting' - against which Tim Burns' work rebelled throughout the 1970s. Lets take Burns' A Change of Plans (1973) in which two nude 'models', Ursula Maierl and Barry Prothero, situated in a closed-off room within the Art Gallery of New South Wales were broadcast in real time via twin television monitors to gallery visitors. Through their technological transformation into screen images, Burns' live subjects underwent the flattening then typifying painting - a nullification of communicative power as their status was modulated from the indecency of public nakedness, to painting's most consumable genre: the nude. Unsatisfied by this flattening, Burns' models repeatedly attempted to provoke their audience to engage with them with greater profundity. Finally a still-naked Prothero exited the enclosure and traversed the actual audience space. The police arrived to reports of public indecency; Prothero was arrested.

Television was operating as a metaphor for the flatness of painting, as it also would do in Burns' revealingly titled For the Sake of Art, exhibited at The University of Melbourne's Ewing Gallery (now George Paton) in 1974. In this work, Burns ingeniously programmed televisions to explode at the end of their transmission. Volatility and explosiveness were deployed here to redress the communicative deadening of modernist medium-specificity - and they would be again in Burns' exploding sand dune (Minefield) at the 1973 Mildura sculpture Triennial and as themes of his landmark 1980 film, Against the Grain. Strangely, despite the vivacity of Burns' attempts to recover modernism from self-annihilation, his work has been surprisingly neglected by historians of postwar art - and this was of course one of the many reasons for Uplands Gallery's exhibition of Burns' archive.

The archive comprises a growing collection of texts and images relating to Burns' work, ranging from an exchange between the artist and an amateur critic in the local Alice Springs newspaper, to an extensive Artforum interview and a review of Against the Grain by cultural studies guru Meaghan Morris. The majority of these texts and images are printed on plain A4 paper, with brief, hand-written indications of their relation to Burns' oeuvre.  These pages were exhibited spread across three walls of Uplands Gallery, more-or-less at head height, more-or-less in chronological order. Burns' video and film works were also screened throughout the exhibition on a television and a makeshift, suspended screen. A current installation memorialising Burns' late friend and collaborator, Lindzee Smith, which included a mix of paintings, text, photographs and video, was also displayed.

Despite its magnitude, Burns' archive is not so much a definitive statement of his oeuvre, as a collection of the traces of fragments - some overlapping, some not - from its otherwise obscure history. Many of the texts are elusive, some conflicting; the archive effectively challenges its audience to gather together the threads of the texts and to speculate on their lacunae. It inverts the logic of the historical monument: rather than symbolising complex histories with a singular, immobile form, Burns' archive presents his works' history as shattered, exploded, leaving its complex trajectories, developments and discontinuities unmarked and allowing the criticism and other historical information born out of his work to regain a certain freshness and rawness.

In doing this, Burns also raises crucial questions about our recent history and the narration of the US led 'war on terror'. With its references to the 'revolutionary violence' of the Baader-Meinhof group, Against the Grain is an ample reminder that terrorism has been a persistent feature of industrialized society. What seems to have changed in the current 'war on terror' is the level of complexity of the discourse surrounding it. In Against the Grain, Burns skillfully links the story of a compassionate 'terrorist', distraught that a smoke bomb may have harmed an elderly lady, with quotations from Susan Sonntag's outline of the objectifying violence of photography in her seminal text On Photography (1977). Violence is posited as the double-sided currency of both freedom and subordination; it is the life-blood and the shackles of the difference or otherness residing beyond the surface of the status quo, forcing its subject at one moment into, at another out of, a rigidified state of normalcy. Contemporary conceptions of terrorism seem to lack such reflexivity. We are now witnesses to a much more generalised, asignifying violence, no longer aligned with particular demands or freedom of any kind, in which otherness detonates itself in a final identification with the extreme censure of the hegemonic status quo.

Burns' archive is a warning against a narrative history that would straitjacket its subject, forcing it to confirm to its strictures. It is a reminder of the capriciousness of the historical subject and of the volatility of the production of meaning. And thus it finds itself simultaneously neglected from modern art history and central to it.