Contemporary Australia: Women

73 Agatha Gothe-Snape Australia b.1980 Text Work and Line Work 2011 Vinyl letters Installed dimensions variable Installation view, ‘Social Sculpture’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney, 2011 Image courtesy: Paul Green Movement, both in physical and mental spaces, is a recurring theme in Agatha Gothe-Snape’s art. While not ‘performances’ in the strict sense of the term, her works borrow certain qualities from the discipline of performance — for example, an emphasis on the activity of moving, and a nuanced understanding of bodily and spatial awareness — which she uses to consider questions about aesthetic experiences encountered in art and life. As Gothe-Snape observes in several works, movement is fundamental to our experience of art exhibitions. Where other formats for consuming culture — books, televisions, theatres — ideally require us to remain still, museums and galleries ask us to be in motion. It’s a complex kind of motion, too. Motion that invariably involves negotiating not only the physical parameters of art works, but also those pertaining to a building, to elements of exhibition design and to other bodies inhabiting the space. What’s more, museums and galleries employ lighting, sound, interpretative materials and other tools to moderate our behaviour and make our physical engagement with an exhibition relatively uniform and predictable. Through works developed for a range of different art environments — from artist‑run initiatives, to commercial galleries and public art museums — Gothe-Snape explores the manner in which these mediating structures frame our actions and shift our appreciation for the people and objects we encounter. In Text work 2011, Gothe-Snape painted a yellow stripe on the concrete floor of the Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney, at the threshold of the cavernous space. On the wall opposite, she installed a large sign that instructed: ‘DO NOT APPROACH THIS END OF THE ROOM DO NOT CROSS THE YELLOW LINE’. Immediately, viewers were made conscious of the most essential actions involved in looking at art — how and when to move around and between art works — and also reminded of unspoken anxieties about how to conduct oneself in the for-profit, privately owned setting of a commercial gallery. In the accompanying finely realised, map-like gouache drawings, Gothe‑Snape proposed other possible delineations of the gallery and pathways for moving through the space. In 2010, Gothe-Snape addressed the subject of movement in public art museums in a collaborative project with Brian Fuata. Wrong solo: cruising at Primavera reconfigured the activity of walking through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s ‘Primavera’ exhibition into a quasi-mystical experience. The work involved a twice‑weekly ‘cruising workshop’ conducted by the artists in the exhibition spaces with gallery visitors. Warm‑up exercises — some verbal, some physical — served to create a relaxed and trusting atmosphere among the group, before the artists led the participants on a tour of the exhibition. Unlike a conventional curator tour, wherein viewers would experience a heightened sense of differentiation between themselves, other visitors and the art work, ‘cruising’ created an environment of enhanced awareness and connectedness to the exhibition and to others occupying the space. Hypnotic instructions given by the artists to the ‘cruisers’ had a knowing, new-age quality. For example: Notice the colour of the air. Let that colour come into you. Come out to meet that colour. Name it. Take a step. Take another. Walk. What colour are you? Is it different to the colour you were before? How much space is there between you and the wall? How much space is there between you and your friend? Between you and the stranger? 1 Evoking the atmosphere of a meditation workshop, Wrong solo: cruising at Primavera not only moved bodies through the museum, but exacted a shift in the participants’ perceptual awareness of the exhibition. Importantly, rather than acting as a distraction to the museum’s various structures of mediation, the work drew attention to them, revealing their subtle details and textures. In other works, Gothe-Snape explores and exposes movement as it occurs in mental space. In Every artist remembered 2009, developed for Sydney artist-run initiative First Draft, she revealed the manner in which mobility is inherent in intellectual activity. The exhibition opened with nine blank sheets of paper. The sheets were gradually filled with artists’ names during appointments Agatha Gothe-Snape Agatha Gothe-Snape Aesthetics in motion