Tom Nicholson and Tony Birch
Artspace, Sydney, Australia
A new installation at Artspace by collaborators Tom Nicholson and writer Tony Birch is presented in silence from Tuesday until Thursday and then bubbles with an eddy of overlapping and jostling voices from Friday until Sunday. Reticence and annunciation bookend this project, titled Camp Pell Lecture (2010), which delves into the contested history of a piece of land in the heart of Melbourne known as Royal Park.
The seed for this collaboration came four years ago on the occasion of Nicholson’s exhibition at Galería Metropolitana in Santiago, Chile. While attending the exhibition opening, Birch (who was a guest speaker at an accompanying symposium) was one of a group guided to the home of a local resident by Nicholson. Ushered into a bedroom in the sparsely decorated house, he drew the visitors’ attention to the end of a bed, where an old television buzzed with an electrical snowstorm that would clear every few seconds to reveal a scrolling list of dates and place names, detailing the construction of borders around the world. The list on the television, written in both English and Spanish, was Nicholson’s project. It intended to reveal and align disparate histories of conflicts and power struggles to an unwitting audience watching Senal 3 – an illegal television sta-tion transmitted out of La Victoria, an infamous squatter community established in the 1950s and renowned for its collective resilience throughout the Pinochet dictatorship.
While contextually different, the subtle, generous work in Santiago and the installation now on display in Sydney evoke a common point of concern. It is clear that historian, novelist and poet Tony Birch and Nicholson both share an interest in social history, in this instance that of Melbourne where they have identified the Royal Park as a microcosm for the significant social upheaval that marked the city during the 19th and early-20th century. It was the starting point for explorers Burke and Wills’ 1860 transcontinental expedition, before being designated a military camp for Australian soldiers and later for American troops. Following this it became the site of a notorious slum before being rejuvenated for the 1956 Olympic games, which instigated the removal of its tenants into state housing.
The Artspace installation hints at these details through five projections that line the walls. But for those unfamiliar with these events, the slideshow is merely a backdrop while the focal point is five tables set with a Mac laptop, a desk lamp, a glass of water, a script printed on white A4 paper and a seated ‘lecturer’. These five speakers sit for hours on end reading from different scripts drafted by Nicholson and Birch detailing narratives of the aforementioned (and other) moments in the history of the Royal Park. The lectures are largely inaudible because they are read simultaneously, but the babble of sound is comforting, similar as it is to the incessant noise of contemporary life. A rotating roster of speakers means that on any given day, the five voices will be different in tone and level; in one moment a theatrical drawl will dominate, the next day an American accent lilts above the Australian voices. But we never really know what they are saying. It is not until an ‘off-duty’ day that one is provided the opportunity to sit and read the lectures and come to under-stand the gravity of these narratives: the policies responsible for the stolen generation (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families between 1909 to 1969), societal disintegration resulting from enforced state housing, and the psychology of regi-mented military actions, to name but three. Of course, most will not attend to the words being recited, and so the Camp Pell Lecture becomes about the effective (or ineffective) mix-ing of communication channels. The challenging details contained in the scripted narratives and the accompanying images are best understood not as separate entities but as jigsaw pieces within the generous, indecipherable whirl of Australian contemporary information channels. There may be ‘lecturers’ present, but this is no dictatorial speech.
Nicola Harvey
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