Contemporary Australia: Women

107 The ‘technical apparatus’ for Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano’s work is the video documentation of bodily performance and its traces, particularly as linked to an extended understanding of drawing and sculpture. Their explorations are entirely embodied and sensory, and remember the questions of performance and video first posed 40 years ago. Of particular relevance here are Dennis Oppenheim’s transfer drawing films, and other films from his Aspen Projects, which record the use of his body as a medium to create sculptural forms, such as Rocked hand , Glassed hand and Leafed hand (all 1970). He says of Rocked hand : ‘One hand slowly covers the other with rocks weighing it down. The body splits in two, as the right hand renders the left invisible — blending it into the surroundings.’ 6 He also investigated people drawing together on camera in a series of works including Two Stage Transfer Drawing 1971, where he draws with a marker on his son Eric’s back, and Eric tries to replicate the drawing he feels on his skin. Oppenheim comments, ‘I am, therefore, Drawing Through Him’. 7 Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano similarly draw and make art through each other’s bodies in actions that reinforce artistic media while calling them into question. Kathryn Weir and chairs. In Absence of Evidence 2008, a length of paper seems to move of its own volition, while the artists sit almost still, guiding it gently. Falling Possibilities 2009 similarly stages a performance with a tangle of ribbon that appears to move independently around their hands. The work in ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ extends Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano’s interest in the interplay between body and object, and between body and environment; it also continues an exploration of sculpture as a medium. In 2011 they produced a series of video works responding to the Sicilian landscape, of which three are called ‘monuments’. Monument for Sea shows a single figure from behind, standing on a pedestal-like rock and gesturing precisely to the surrounding sea with one hand, as though performing an arcane rite. Monument for Air frames a black cloth thrown skywards and creating an inky blot against the light. Monument for Monument uses the same black cloth to cover a figure curled in front of a stone arch on a hill. According to Rosalind Krauss’s landmark 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, which has framed discussions of sculpture for the last 30 years, sculpture in the European tradition functioned as monument — that which is not landscape and not architecture — until the late nineteenth century, when it became unhooked from location. In the twentieth century, the category of sculpture becomes ‘almost infinitely malleable’ and its expanded field encompasses landscape and architecture, notably in earth art and installation. 4 In A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999), Krauss discusses contemporary art’s indifference to medium as the ground of artistic significance. She argues that an idea of medium is necessary as a form of remembering in order to work against aesthetic meaninglessness, suggesting that medium should be rethought as a ‘technical apparatus’. 5 If...so...then (production still) 2006 Single‑channel digital video, 4:3, black and white, sound, 7:00 mins, ed. of 5, AP1 and AP2 Images courtesy: The astists and Anna Schwartz Gallery Drawing 1 (production still) 2001 Single-channel digital video, 4:3, colour, sound, 6:00 mins, ed. of 5, AP1 and AP2 Images courtesy: The astists and Anna Schwartz Gallery Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano