The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Kathy Temin's work Indoor monument: Soft dis-play 1996 is a physical composition of a monument to experience-'Something to remember me by when I'm gone'. Temin's work presents a conscious awareness of something not tangible, not present. The word monument can render an object formal– the shrine or obelisk itself. Sociologically, it provides a description of a feeling. The range and level which this feeling describes depends, as always, on one's experience and knowledge. In turn, this description becomes a production of a reality; like having a conversation in which an articulated awareness can become a concrete belief. Memory is a peculiar thing. The practice of memory is via a prompt method, using specific symbols or emblems which represent things or ideas, and the use of action imagery to describe an intellectual activity. 1 To recall memories and sustain beliefs, the traditional form of the monument was derived from a formula of fixed dynamic iconography. One need only think of classical Greece or Rome to conjure up a didactic array of warriors, gods and figures of power, upon which the Renaissance artists modelled their own (monumental) sculptures, providing immortality for the figure or belief described by an unyieldingly conclusive form. However, since Rodin's Balzac, sculpture has slid from its supports and the prosaic logic of commemorative 122 I ART I s T s: PA c I FI c Indoor monument: Soft dis-play 1996 Installation at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne representation collapsed. The slow gestation of art-making is still engaged in contemplating these changed cultural terms for sculptural forms. The iconographical surface of the sculpture has been folded inside out. Temin's art is about the object and its evocation of social practices. Experience, both internal and external, is expressed via simple, but lengthy and labour-intensive processes of art-making. The objects become unique, animated things, attesting to that private, internalised world of the abstract thought-the different dimensions one enters through the duration of creating and experiencing things. The subject of much of Temin's work has been within this field of diachronically attuned art– making, but attends to a different relationship produced over time by the work. Temin's point is other than the evocation of a 'problem' and its 'solution' (at a particular point in time), but at the same time this is one of the implications her work draws attention to. In other words, Temin's work often has a very layered, laborious meaning, as what you see is simply not what you see. Here the forms are deceptively spare. Minimalist austerity is often easier to bear than the objects of sentimental affection. This is a physical rendering of experience, a perception of presence made real by feeling doubly-via the invoked act of mourning, as well as the total satiation of the tactile senses by the formal strategy of the work.The structure of Temin's aesthetic is the sensory experience of insight. Temin's installation in the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial contains objects that synthesise the concerns the artist's work has explored since the late 1980s. These objects are a strategy for describing a particular aspect of Jewish history, but the testimonial is affected by our private vision. 2 The confined space confronts what the viewer chooses to relate to. One cannot step back to take in those aspects he or she recognises. Looking, or experiencing, is usually an act of choice; to situate oneself in relation to something; how we recognise the view. This work addresses the formation of individual history within the social. Like Temin's earlier 'Problems', or even the 'Untitled' series of 1993, 3 the symbolic shapes of squares of plumped fabric work to undo classification-tradition, gender, aesthetics: all of these values are considered as synchronous gestures, their forms 'sown' to the concept of a changing experience. In this way, the silence of the minimalist aesthetic of the strategy of the grid is invested with an ethic, one which demands movement of the perception of things. Felicity Colman, Writer, Melbourne, Australia 1 Frances A. Yates describes the history of mnemonics in The ArtofMemory, London, Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1966,Pimlico edition, 1992, pp.355-9. 2 Kathy Temin, 'KathyTemin speaks to Naomi Cass in her studio, June, 1995', Kathy Temin:Three IndoorMonuments !exhibition catalogue] Melbourne, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1995, p.29. For images of these works see Robyn McKenzie 'KathyTemin. Infantile Terrible. Object Relations & the Problem Child', Artand Text, 45,1993, p.30.