218. Elke Wohlfahrt | Piano concerti

Elke was born in Bremen. A German city close to the North Sea where no one knows of her family living elsewhere. She grew up to live the good-life, a business woman translating and selling computer software. And it’s where she met Peter Wohlfahrt.  A man, born in New Guinea who grew up in Townsville to become a dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet who then introduced Elke to dance. 15 years later, in December 1995 they got on a plane headed for Sydney, adventure and the bitter disappointment that awaits many migrants when they discover that their qualifications are not recognised in Australia. 

Life began again for Elke and Peter when they bought a house in Dundas Valley, near Parramatta, found jobs and started renovating. Nesting in a new land in a new century as urban pioneers crafting a life with their own hands. Years flashed by and then came art, born says Elke out of a desire to see the world differently. Studying first in the TAFE system and then at Sydney College of the Arts where she experienced the mild absurdity of carrying a Seniors Card and a Student Card at the same time. In beginning yet again Elke recalled her grandmother who advised, “first you must learn to forget”.

In art making Elke says “I never know what I’m going to do…I respond to the material given to me”, in this case a discarded piano, a gift from a friend. The resulting sculptures delight in the mechanism of the instrument. They succeed for me, like the fragments of sound the instrument once made, poised in air. “I just fiddle until it fits” is how Elke describes her embrace of the accident and its celebration in the reconfiguration of the ancient machine.

The piano was earlier but the machine age, they say began in 1760 with the Industrial Revolution and might have ended with Alan Turing’s mechanical computer in 1937. It was a time of observable consequences. A wheel turns, pushing a leaver that rotates a shuttle that weaves the fabric, is how it started. Ever growing, becoming a labyrinth of actions and reactions housed in mechanisms crafted as things of beauty and reason. Then, just as the machine age was starting to wind down it turned into art. Decommissioned machines repurposed as a dynamic expression of urban modernity, objects that look like bits of machinery and as a mode of thinking that pushed and pulled these abstractions into an alignment of apparent reason, a language of observable consequences. This is the place where Elke finds the world seen differently. An invention, that for this German business woman is much about forgetting.

As an expression Getting away with it describes a pairing - of what isn’t permitted with something that isn’t punished.

That kind of pairing is examined in this pairing of works by two different artists, collaboratively. And in each of their contributions there is another pairing. In Caren Florance’s micro poems presented as banner headlines, re-worded platitudes become the harsh reality of imminent eco-collapse. Peter Lyssiotis offers collages that locate our simple pleasures in life amidst the eco-devastation that our simple pleasures necessitate. Collectively they make the point, again and again that if we are to avoid eco-catastrophe it will require something more than putting solar panels on the roof and buying a Tesla instead of a Ford. Here Getting away with it has a lot to do with making money and avoiding the associated eco-consequences by doing it in someone else’s back yard. Of course the sad truth of eco-change is that someone else’s back yard is also our yard where there is no Getting away with it.

The collaborators are of different generations and from different backgrounds, Caren was born in Australia and lives in the Bega, Peter who lives in Melbourne arrived in Australia as a child from Cyprus.  Caren commented “He and I share political outrage, so we are exploring our intersections via long-distance communication.” What they share is an ethical understanding that is realised in art. They describe it as “art which is transparent, where form never obscures or upstages content or gets in the way of stories which demand to be told clearly and straight-forwardly, even if the story itself is anything but clear…this is the job we signed up for and again we should point to the difference between entertainment and art…entertainment focuses on forgetting about your life while we are engaged with remembering it.”

In a time when there is no-Getting away with it, radical alternatives are called for – options that are hinted at in this piece, ironically titled Getting away with it. But there is no plan for the future, because no one has one, no call to return to a golden age, assuming there once was one because it’s impossible to do. What art can do is what these artists have done – that is sharpen out ethics in the hope that we might start applying them.  

To the question – what’s the work about? Tom Buckland answered “I haven’t really thought about it. I just make and think about it later and haven’t had time to think about it yet”

In an era when the discussion of an artist’s work is generally prefaced by a listing of their racial, gender and sexual identifications, more an autobiographic cocktail than a clear category, Tom’s answer not only avoids the question – it kills it with Andy Warhol style precision.

He throws us back to the mid-20th-century idea that an art work is more about what the audience brings to it than anything left behind by the artist. In Tom’s case the work seems to be a cartoon without a caption – a joke without a punch line. Amiable and charmingly made, this illustration, isolated from its narrative adopts an enigmatic stance. Too wise to bother with the peccadillos of contemporary art yet to devise and alternative to the prescriptive ideologies posited by those who do the feeding. This work celebrates what it isn’t. Enigmatically, the more one looks the more it becomes impossible to say with certainty what that might be. Above all it looks great and it rewards with a chuckle, how dryly we might chuckle though is left entirely up to us. What more could you ask from a work of art?

At the end of our short conversation Tom handed me a wad of his business cards. When I offered to put a couple up in the window he was Ok with it, but asked me to obscure his phone number. Enigmatic for sure – ironic perhaps – or had he just got a new phone number?

Roger Crawford is an artist and a teacher at the National Art School. It is the art school that evolved from the old East Sydney Technical College where he was a student. Central to the institution, then and now is the ethos that art is found through making. That is, art isn’t found in the idea of a painting or sculpture but rather through an engagement with a multitude of experiences and thoughts reflected in the painting or sculpture as it is made.

As this work, Fire, fire men was installed Roger explained that he was tired of spending huge sums of money on art materials. Instead, he wanted to make art from what ever came to hand. He wanted to make art for free. In this case from a pile of discards that he had collected over time from the streets around his studio. A couple of fire buckets and a pile of timber. Items that could simultaneously be dismissed as rubbish and valued as treasure. 

From Roger’s point of view the art work, this art work, already existed in the pile of material collected in his studio. It may have “matured” as it waited to be assembled, but for Roger the art was found through the workman like process of assembling the various elements into a form proposed by the elements themselves. There may be some irony in filling a fire bucket with fire wood. One bucket seems to be a reflection of the other, a paradox underlined by the title – Fire, the fire men. The art here is a record of Roger’s thinking, laid bare in an object that also exposes something of its  life before Roger’s art making.

It's a given that art assembled from used material has a double life.  It carriers a patina fashioned by a previous owner through a use generating a kind of truth that avoids artifice. There are no tricks here or clever manipulations, the object is as it appears to be. Something that for want of a better word we call art.

Joy Lai is a photographer. It is her job and it is her vocation.

As a painting student at the Sydney College of the Arts in the late 1990’s she found that crafting images of light and substance as formal compositions was best done in photography. After art school she took a job as a photographer’s assistant. She became a tourist photographer taking portraits that she described as the job of making people an element of a composition that simultaneously recorded the individual and the individual’s location. In time she gravitated to photographing art, in alternative artists run galleries, later photographing for commercial and public galleries and then came her permanent job at the State Library where she photographs objects from the collection, events, food, the landscape…..a list of subjects she sums up as anything that needs to be recorded.

Joy didn’t mention when her vocation as a photographer began but emphasised her view that the photograph is already there – her job is finding it, not inventing it. This series, Nighthawks began about 5 years ago – during the Covid lockdown when she became a night walker, wandering the streets of Dulwich Hill, Marrickville, Sydenham and Tempe – her 5-kilometre radius. This is how she found her enigmatic photograph of a man ascending a staircase into a blazing concealed light at 85 Beauchamp Street. Along the way she and her companion/subject Peter found the suitcase that seems to be the crucial element in the composition, isolating the individual as a transient element in the poised stillness of night that is Joy’s composition.

Describing her vocation Joy said flatly – “photography is about formal elements coming together, it can’t be orchestrated – essentially, it’s spontaneous”. And in saying that perhaps she separates her vocation from her job, where the craft of the photographer is employed to contrive an insightful record. In her show Joy underlines the fact that art is something that finds the artist. It’s there already, waiting to be observed - through the process of art making and for Joy, the attendant meditation of night walking.