BLACKARTPROJECTS AND LUCAS MADDOCK PRESENT

B L A C K

NEWHYPOTHETICALCONTINENTS

Norla Dome717 Flinders StreetDocklands, Melbourne, Australia28 August - 10 September, 2014

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Measuring 4.5 x 1 x 3.4m and constructed of stainless steel and LED light strings, New Hypothetical Continents maps the limits and contours of a fictional landmass.

In 1969 artist Robert Smithton appropriated an illustrated map from Lewis Spence’s History of Atlantis and used it to form the basis for his installation Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis). Smithson’s installation came in the wake of his failed Island of Broken Glass project which would have seen several tonnes of broken glass piled on an Islet in the Georgia Straight. When viewed from afar, and in direct sunlight, the installation was intended to affect a “shimmering collapse of decreased sharpness”. In this light the Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) appears consolatory and captures all the pathos of the ‘unrealised project’.

The Lewis map presented here, once again in sculptural form, draws inspiration from our fascination with the spectacular and the romantic and dissociated wonder prevalent in John Glover’s Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point (1831-33). Exploring how dangerous utopian notions permeate our current ideologies, New Hypothetical Continents presents a contemporary Atlantis - one standing at the height of its glory and boasting a spectacle so great that it can only warn of its own demise.

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Map showing probable relative position ofAtlantis (A) and Antillia (B) as published in ‘The History of Atlantis’ by Lewis Spence (1874-1955)

Robert SmithsonMap of broken clear glass (ATLANTIS)(1969)collage, photostat, map, graphite on paper16 3/4” x 14”

Dia Art Foundation; Gift of Nancy HoltPhotography | © Robert Smithson

John Glover Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point 1831-33 (1834) oil on canvas

Purchased with funds from the Nerissa Johnson Bequest 2001Collection of the National Gallery of Australia and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

New Hypothetical Continentspoint map

New Hypothetical Continentscomputer generated model

New Hypothetical Continents (maquette)bronze, edition of 5 + 1AP26 x 20.5 x 8 cm

The difference engine that is formed when utopia is placed alongside dystopia is frightening in its scope, but appropriately, braced by the vertiginous potential in human communities for rapid change. Of course, equally confronting in memory is the inevitable juxtapoise of these categories. Like any binary opposition, this one is built on transcendence, and in our attempts to capture these orbiting suns we are reminded that they are absent definition: that this possibility is deferred at the event horizon of our capacious imaginal function. When reviewing and imagining the sculptural portrayal of this event in the New Hypothetical Continents of Lucas Maddock, one has this sense of the depth of the network. The condition of contemporeity, or atemporeity. The sixth continent that is emergent from this atemporeity, and generated in cyberspace and based upon informational technologies, is no space at all. How can the centre hold in this apophatic space? Where the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, inside and out, have collapsed with a paradoxical flatness – since this is a vertical emergence – the nonterrain does not anticipate a future, or have the memory of a past. The scene of culture is here challenged, replaced by kairos, or an ongoing presentness. This is the scene of culture, this real-time in which the individual is freed of the constraints of temporality and spatiality, but made to lie about their presence by virtue of these facts. Where the ecological circumstances of the network – it has only emerged on this scale and in this way because there is no “future” in the real human habitat – remind us too, in real-time, of the speed at which the non-future approaches. Thus, we, the networked individuals, are spurred on to greater action, a great sense that this is the time. We are of a false sense of kairos, a neokairos, and so we photograph every moment and stencil it as data across this site of exchange, where sacrality has become diluted by the absence of a centre, and the inability of any single scene to capture the attention of the community. Into this space erupts a new aesthetic, the aporetic non-solution to the loss of ground on which to set the moral compass, and bound the moral sense. In the network, under the conditions of now, those who know are the heroes. Those who know notice that there is a centre, something is still sacred, there are still victims, and they remember what abstraction is. And so we see emerging in the network itself the paradoxical agency associated of this New Aesthetic, realised as presence of memory, of staged and restaged scenes of culture on which the future is indicated, and on which we are reminded of the presence of individual and collective memory. Via the ocularcentric network is re-presented an alterity of the image: the flat death of two dimensionality generated by pictures is rendered, rethought, re-shifted to remind us of its consumption by us, of how this abstraction becomes the imaginal condition of the 3d human agent being-in-the-world. Abstraction itself may have already been host to a singularity after which this flatness became the habitat for a neo-victimary discourse that is beyond us, and in the world of objects, where an alien intelligence may exist, and where possible victims resentfully huddle. But you, meanwhile, corporeal and mobile, share this sensibility as you continue to hack, to contribute to the flat world of data, and as it (the sensibility) directs you to remember that you are not a tourist, irenic and obsessed to map memory against photographic record of your passing through natural and plastic environments, having laid aside armed and threatening violent intrusion in favour of the mediative shoot. No. Not soldier, nor auteur, you are instead, the finally global citizen.

Benjamin MatthewsCultural anthropologist and digital communication strategist

Neokairos and the New Hypothetical Continents

Utopian Exactidudes (2014)print on cartridge paper, tape, steel460 x 350 cm New Hypothetical Continents (Preview) exhibition, Artery Co-op

This project has been supported by the the City of Melbourne 2014 Arts Grant Program and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

New Hypothetical Continents was created with technical assistance from Mishka Beckmann, Jeph Neale, Tess Cullity, Oliver Nicholson, Dominic Hawkins and Josh Bruce. Extended thanks to Tess Cullity, Blackartprojects, Headjam, Mission to Seafarers and the Artery Co-op.

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