Deliverer of Rants
published in Photofile No.85,
Sydney, 2008
(online excerpt)
Having been asked twice now to write a rant for Photofile, I guess I should be honoured to be regarded as a deliverer of rants. Well, better to be a ranter than a numbed curator or drained editor who writes bland over-arching descriptions of grouped artists in a failed attempt to conjure forth a pseudo-zeitgeist logic to explain a curatorial/editorial impulse.
A hysterical example from the 2008 Biennale of Sydney free guide: “Sam Durant’s work takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues, and explores the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art.” Really? I read this sentence – enlarged as break-out text in the layout – laughing and vomiting simultaneously. The claims made, the terms employed, the binaries upheld, the notions conflated – it all reeks of a pathetic belief in art as having currency, relevance, purpose.
Durant’s work for the Biennale – like so much contemporary art which peaked with Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning State Britain – echoes, quotes and paraphrases the stance of the ranter. As historian Richard Cullen Rath uncovers in his fascinating book How Early America Sounded, ranters were complexly imbedded within the oral/vocal nature of the New World wherein voice and the act of declaration took precedence over all other communication, which did not manage precedence until print dissemination codified societal exchange. The original ranters were not simply ‘expressers of free speech’ but acoustic semes within a non-Eurocentric ethos which was rebuilding its societal interconnections from the most meagre (and Puritanical) of means.
