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Thea Costantino 

Ancestor V, 2012, archival print on canvas, 82 x 55 cm

‘Belatedness’ is the word that occurred to me on seeing Thea  Costantino’s recent work, but as an affirmative quality of her  curiously disparate aesthetics. Costantino is an artist who works  across forms – drawing, sculpting, writing, photography and video –  which is obviously not unusual today, although in her case she retains  a respect for – even a fetishizing of – the historicity of the various  genres and media, playing with their interdependence. 

In her series from 2012 ‘Ancestor Headdress’ (mask-like objects made  from wax and synthetic hair) and ‘The Ancestors’ (photographs of  people wearing the headdresses while attired in various ways), there  is an implied relation to ‘Primitive’ art. In a Euro-American context  such a link would evoke the influence of the African mask on certain  early modernist movements, as well as the dialogue initiated by the  Surrealists’ interest in the art of Oceania and elsewhere. The latter  is schematically represented in the anonymous 1929 Surrealist Map of  the World, which shows the size of the world’s land masses  corresponding to their importance to the Surrealists.

In Australia such evocations are not straightforward, and not only  because modernism largely left indigenous Australian culture out of  its process of assimilation of ‘the Primitive’. (The exception is the  modernism exemplified by the work of the artist Margaret Preston.) It  was only much later, in the second half of the 20th century, that  Aboriginal art was taken seriously as a representative of both an  indigenous and a contemporary culture, a conjunction that is usually  not well understood outside Australia.

Costantino’s work derives its power from a questioning of the  disparity between the historical milieus evoked by the technologies of her works and the assumptions made about  what she has chosen to depict: the head-dresses  are eyeless, Dadaesque masks; the audience in her monochrome museums  are headless, and a stuffed animal might have a human face; drawings  of apparently normal, passport-like portraits have a fold across where the  eyes should be. 

These are not uncommon strategies of de-familiarization; some are  easily recognizable as early-modern techniques. They recall one of the  illusions of modernity – apt in this period of hyper-modernity – namely, that the global simultaneity we recognize as the contemporary  is not equally distributed. Certain parts of the world would appear to  remain more contemporary than others. According to this logic, Berlin,  Tokyo and New York are more contemporary than Perth or Yogyakarta.
 
Costantino’s interest in the belatedness of the appropriation of the  implied history of a technique or genre, or, for instance, in the  nostalgia that emanates from a hand-drawn picture of a 19th century  photograph, reveals the pretence that all parts of the world can  participate in the contemporary and its perpetual present. 

Along with her equally interesting local peers, Tarryn Gill and Pilar  Mata Dupont (with whom Costantino collaborates under the name Hold  Your Horses), she has found that what might be seen in Europe or the  US as anachronistic – in her case Victorian-period photography,  primitive funerary masks, the atmosphere of antiquated museums and  their taxidermy – are instances of an historicity that might allow the  viewer to contemplate the nature of the present, its images and what  they represent. (Next year Hold Your Horses will be in residence at  London’s Freud Museum, after participating in ‘Wagner 2013: Kunstler  Positionen’ at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.) 

That such work has emerged from Perth, in the far west of Australia –  a city seldom included even in its nation’s art histories –  makes perfect sense. Every attempt to make serious work there requires  assertion against received chronology and heritage. That in the  Surrealist Map of the World Australia is a tiny island under ‘New  Guinea’, and that the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is now  is the principal lender of Papuan art to that relatively new nation, a  fact usually elided, are two instances of Costantino’s strange,  chronographic world – and both wonderful examples of the temporal irony of  art. 

John Mateer