This the completed draft of the first chapter of Fakeology my forthcoming book on the work of Stuart Elliott. Comments are welcome to my email address at - bromfiel@wa1.quik.com.au

Fakeology

It is a comforting commonplace that art negotiates between private and public spaces, both physical and cultural. Public space seems secure in communal memory and institutional consensus leaving the artist (or artists) to cope with the ‘private’ theatre of memories from which their art arises. One feels free to talk before such work without embarassment, knowing the skeletons are happy in their cupboard. It is easy to take it for granted, to avoid the circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the corpse. Suppose, though, that our public space is an oppressive fiction, dominated by a ruthless, neurotic amnesia, impossible to negotiate. What then becomes of the artist and his so called "private world"?

Stuart Elliott has confronted this dilemma for more than twenty years. He is well aware of the peculiar circumstances which have defined his career, the slight break in continuity that repeatedly relocates Perth W.A. and its history in the same "familiar but alien" territory.

This amnesiac dissonance, the sense of all public space as a potential snapshot produces the strange symmetry between the familiar and alien central to his work. One of Elliott’s most frequent metaphors is the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, the no man’s land between contending values, the space between the snapshots, where memories and experience emerge intact and can be restored. This is the territory where he finds his forms and images. The same amnesia dictates, however, that, when his work appears in public, it is destined to appear alien, something from another planet, almost, but not quite, like our own.

For Elliott, who has lived here all his life, this amnesia is real you can almost touch it

It is important to grasp that Elliott’s way of working is neither fantastic nor surreal. If anything it is a visual hermeneutics, an attempt to work directly with an intangible reality, that appears to have no history, no origins and, perhaps, therefore no legitimacy. To do this he invented a forensics of memory and the imagination which he calls Fakeology, a way of producing "fictions made up of accreted facts".

Fakeology first appears in his public statements around 1990 but it was a guiding principle of his work from his student days

As method Fakeology developed slowly beginning with Elliott’s encounters with non western art forms

Fakeology is a series of artistic procedures, "90% R&D", an archaeology which must invent its own subject as a series of physical objects if it is to resist coercion by snapshot city and the rhetorics of power which produced it. This rhetoric already controls every other possible approach, through documentary or narrative, as television news and radio talkback make clear, every hour on the hour. Fakeology aims at objecst and images which appear as the "residue of an unknown but sensed reality. " As an ongoing practice, Fakeology inevitably raises fundamental questions about community, memory, politics and "provincial" culture. It also touches on more fashionable issues, such as the construction of desire and the crisis of creativity in a faceless corporate universe. It raises these, however, only as part of a profound process of resistance and recuperation.

This is, plainly, a humanist project. In order to understand this, it will be important to set aside fashionable embarassment, fear of being thought naive and concentrate on the possibility of an everyday humanism that does not require a grand philosophic setting It may be tempting to account for Elliott’s work from the point of view of a New York magazine, using its hand me down labels to present Fakeology as a symptom of the post-industrial for instance. This, however, would be to accept the amnesiac rhetoric against which Fakeology is directed, to deny it any point whatsoever, in order rediscover a few ideas that one already knew. It would be to ignore the evidence on the ground and most importantly, it would take Elliott’s achievement for granted. Any worthwhile account must take risks to get much closer to the work. It must join the artist in the uncertainties of no-man’s land.

For over two decades Elliott has maintained the critical space necessary to keep up a continuous flow of objects and images. One could imagine his entire output as the product of a single dig, through time and space, an ongoing inventory of everything banished from snapshot city. The challenge is to account for the survival of his practice and the extraordinary critical consistency of his work. He has been repeatedly forced to justify his position in no man’s land. He has done this with great eloquence, at times at considerable professional risk, but where else could his practice have survived? He has never been far from trouble, from the disgusting politics of Claremont School of Art and the TAFE system, to the aggressive bureaucracy that gave birth to the "arts industry ".

Nothing has done more to highlight his position than this duplicitous invention. It is a supreme irony that an artist whose work has always been concerned with the tragic perplexity and heroism of labour, industry and consumption in a community with recurrent amnesia, suddenly finds himself press ganged willy nilly into an ‘industry’, where "the work force has to personally finance their own factories, buy their own tools scrounge or hustle their own materials and then get a second or third job to pay its management". The contradictions which had prompted Elliott to invent Fakeology in the first place, suddenly tried to swallow him and his work whole.

From the outside, the "arts industry" fiasco looked like the perfect way to claim art for the pseudo-public space of snapshot city, while discretely disavowing its "private" or, more accurately, its autonomous and communal intentions. Like all bouts of self serving socio-economic amnesia, it proceeded from a general proposition to particular consequences, bypassing inconvenient details. Once works of art were redefined as products these were irrelevant. Elliott’s "items of fakeology", could be contained within this new identity, reduced to souvenirs with about as much point as a painted emu egg. Their revelatory nature, at once alien and familiar, could be ignored, even commended as amusing, so long as one stuck to the script.

At one level, this book is written against the arts industry and its assumptions, against the procedures and institutions which produced and validated it as an adequate container, a metaphor for the relationship of art to the community and against the supine and corrupt art education system, which took it for a catch cry. It seeks to replace the facile relationship between private and public space, artist and audience, with a more accurate account of the complexities of survival in a provincial no man’s land, where artist and audience often change places and neither is simply a consumer.

More profoundly it celebrates Elliott’s success against the odds, his commitment to the communal, to the value of individual experience and action and his unwavering belief that artmaking is the form of empowerment that reveals more about the way we are and have been than any other. It also celebrates his conviction that art is, first and always, about objects, materials and making. All art is a material practice and Elliott has demonstrated triumphantly that because of this, it remains a means to liberation.

The book’s argument turns on the possibility that this can be shown, in detail, step by step, through a critical account of his career. If so, it is bad news for those who think that modernism was no more than an idea that has had its day. One might start from the observation, that, for more than a century all artistic innovators have been provincials, that it is not necessary to explain art in Perth by searching desperately through international art magazines. That being so, one could look, in traditional marxist fashion, for the social forces which "produced" Elliott and his work, but this too would raise more problems than it answered. The public amnesia, central to Fakeology also makes it difficult if not impossible to trace their action. It would become necessary to review the assumption that artists are in any simple sense producers whose work is defined by a market. One would be forced back to generalisations, to the tautological quagmire of theory uninformed by practice.

It would be bettter to begin with an image, itself a kind of no man’s land. A grey Friday morning in August, regular warm rain turns acres of mud around the Midland Railway Workshops to sloppy mush. It is tracked over by police cars and unmarked heavy haulage vehicles, heading for one or other of the vast brick sheds, stranded solid in the gloom like crashed cargo vehicles from beyond the galaxy or the tombs of an evil dynasty from the forbidden planet, dead milennia ago. Kilometres of new barbed wire fencing, wound round the site, glittering bright silver in the gloom, hint at an abandoned amateur Auschwitz, home of fire breathing dragons, a place of dark and grand purpose, lives lost and won, a struggle to the death, but in a minor, comic book key. The scale is Wagnerian, beyond human necessity. Surely no mere mortal ever dwelt amongst these ruins. No human hand could shift that massive boiler from its place by the wall. Yet there are signs, "Wear safety glasses from here on." "No power beyond this fence line" "Safety boots only " and graffiti " . . . .-

In one shed, at the bottom of an avenue of machines and workspaces piled high with old furniture, Stuart Elliott and his colleague Tony Jones are working with their students The workshops are to be redeveloped several silent years after they were abandoned by the work force. Elliott and Jones have been commissioned to provide sculpture and related works, to reanimate the heritage site as it develops, drawing on the ruined machinery around them for materials and inspiration.

Their students are at work on another project carving a ring of jarrah totems from old power poles a public art work for a children’s playground in Rockingham. Elliott and Jones delight in this hands on manifestation of sculpture as a communal collaboration, a minor re-enactment of the great rituals of labour that once took place here everyday. From the beginning of his career Elliott has understood sculpture, as essentially, a human social practice, deeply engaged with communal memory. His earliest major pieces, The Study and the Waiting Room were essays in social space and interaction marked out by life size figures each inflected with a life history and a social role.

This image of contemporary artists stalking the Midland Workshops evokes every "post industrial" critical cliche, the catastrophic ruin of all metaphor, the collapse of community, de-skilling, the end of art as a liberating practice, the return of the sublime in the guise of loss of memory and identity, indifference to time and place. In case you miss it there are teaching notes scattered among the coffee cups on the students’ bench. They discuss the difference between modernism and postmodernism with the absolute confidence of a car salesman comparing Ford and Toyota.

Modernism they say "privileges the individual’s perception of the truth over some objective truth or some commonly shared truth" while postmodernism argues that "Truth is grounded in everyday life and social relations", acknowledges that "because there is a plurality of perspectives and ways of knowing there are also multiple truths" and distrusts "Master Narratives (Big Stories) meant to explain everything". Time and space, they argue have been "transformed and dislocated through the dual effects of the dissolution of the autonomous centred subject and the collapse." Its not that their clear cut dualism is wrong, even though it demonstrates how good ideas become inconsequential cliches in WA. It is simply that, given the real time scene in the workshops, they are hopelessly irrelevant.

It would be far too easy to bracket Elliott’s work in this way. Out in the DMZ the individual’s perception of truth and the reality of social relations get on very well. His work can be argued to be either, neither or both modern or postmodern. None of it will help much. Midland was never Sheffield or Glasgow. Even at the height of its prestige, industry in Western Australia remained unsettled, alien. The ponderous girders in the workshop roof are stamped Dorman and Long, Sheffield. A massively ornamented weighbridge plate rusting in the corner was made by a firm in Liverpool. The great red brick buildings themselves follow the style of the mills and sheds of the industrial north of England, complete with circular windows and buttresses. Perth never had an authentic industrial era, only odd fragments from the fringes of someone else’s history.

This alone is enough to unsettle the cliches, to require that we think again about what is happening when artists choose to re-engage these same fragments as communal memories. Since all memory here is wedded to a willed amnesia it takes an enormous effort to recover anything at all. Elliott and Jones, true blue collar cultural workers, pick over the motors, cables, castings patterns, furniture and machinery for material that can be reshaped reassembled and recycled as art. As they work, they evoke the grandeur of the original enterprise and simultaneously parody its regimented productive processes through their delight in making. History, it is said, repeats itself twice, as tragedy and as farce. There is something of both in the alien archaeology of their project, an attempt to recover reconstruct or invent a vital memory for this place, where over three thousand people once worked, day in day out, through the objects they left behind.

Elliott discussed the complex figure of the industrial worker in a statement about his sculpture ‘Fabricator ‘

Elliott’s description says little about history, symbolism or narrative but a great deal about the crystallisation of community and the individual, as an icon of the lived reality of the industrial process, alien but familiar. The construction of icons in this way parallels his pursuit of fakeology . In practice they may come down to the same thing. Here the task is to account for the conviction, the astonising presence of Elliott’s work. He catches the aura of objects and materials, the network of reveries and reminiscences that they bring to mind. This is much more than common bricollage, the reuse, in an unrelated creative context, of raw objects stripped of their original purpose. His ambition resembles that of an archaelogist who sets out to deduce the entire life world of a lost civilisation from its rubbish tips and rubble. For an artist however, displays, diagrams and dioramas, the apparatus of a scientific reconstruction, are never enough. He searches beyond banal mechanical reality, for the iconic connection between objects and experience that once made reality itself possible for those who worked here.

Elliott and Jones expect official visitors, clients for both projects. They are nervous. Elliott says that you can never tell how its going, everyone is trained, by profession and habit, never to display weakness. Only artists and students are willing to show their ignorance. They arrive, police, architects and city officials from Rockingham, clearly overawed by the space and the noise. It becomes evident fairly early on that they have never seen anything like it. The artists talk them through a guided tour, proferring a steady flow of explanations, a stream of consciousness commentary on the machinery and its significance. They stare around, fascinated by the weighbridge plate, the wooden patterns, a vast steel bucket for molten ore and a huge cast iron press mould once used to create dome shapes from thick steel plate.

Jones suggests that it might be moved to the open air as a planter/monument. Elliott indicates the locomotive boiler, out in the mud. It weighs 150 tonnes but the artists want to set it up so that it penetrates a glass curtain wall. Jones suggests a glowing fire box and steam coming from the chimney at regular intervals. There is a high art source for this idea Magritte’s " " in which an active steam train emerges into a room from a fireplace. Elliott is unconcerned by such self conscious borrowing. As he says, if it works why not use it? Here in no man’s land, everything operates at the same level. The boiler will join a giant spanner like tool and a glue gun, constructed in steel plate, both entirely original. All the objects will have the same status in new environment.

In preparation for the visit, Elliott has arranged a number of his pieces for inspection. In the background stands the lifesize figure of a welder cut from thick old steel plate in which rivets and rivet holes have been left to punctuate the rust and red paint. It has been assembled in a box like construction, faintly reminiscent of the work of Lipchitz, Leger or Boccioni but its extraordinary presence swamps these modernist associations. It is a direct decendant of the Fabricator. There is no flesh beneath the steel, the figure’s free arm is a circular clamp, an icon of mechanical measurement as human action.

In front of the welder, on a table, is the Satellite, a open metal column, made up of struts reminiscent of the Mir station and other examples of space archictecture familiar from television and popular culture. At one end is a closed cabin holding a bulky old electric motor. This was intended to have motorised elements but the artists explain that they are concerned that it may be difficult to service a sculpture hanging high in the air. A small wooden maquette indicates the Satellite will have large wing panels, like solar cells and a sequence of silver cylinders. In the workshop, down at ground level, it becomes clear that the satellite acts as both a memory of the future, way back when the future seemed important and accessible, and a memorial to a technology that once inspired heroic ambitions. To achieve this, this particular example of Fakeology, shifts between different times and places, emphasising their common aspirations. In their own ways a satellite and a roof girder both defy gravity.

On another table Elliott has arranged a small group of his earlier works, two carefully painted models of industrial structures, a huge hopper, a factory with a smoking chimney and round window like the ones in the workshop. Two other model buildings have been built on miniature desks. A drawer in each desk is open, spewing out beautifully modelled miniature engineering tools, a triangle, hammer, micrometer. Far from minimising their impact, the model making charm of these miniatures amplifies their relationship to the mass of raw material all around. When all making is based round computers even the modeller’s desk itself seems strangely out of time. Elliott confesses that he feels anxious about cutting up the beautifully made public service jarrah desks nearby, in order to make more work, in one sense they are sculpture already.

Finally Elliott unwraps two paintings both on panels, specially made following the model for standard flat doors. One shows a Gordian knot of coloured wiring between fantasy electrical components, a coil and other control gear, the other a vacuum tube, a circuit diagram and cluster of colourfully modelled red and green spheres that might equally be bubbles or objects at some early stage in a manufacturing process. Like the desk sculptures, both panels are allegories of the shaping imagination, the will to material form that creates industries, cultures and all things human. Nothing could be further from the dull prophets of post modernity than Elliott’s joyful game playing. The visitors are delighted. Fakeology gave them confidence to engage no-man’s land land.

To work as a sculptor in this way is far from easy. One must always face the problem of expectations, the unspoken anxieties of the clients and the community that the work will somehow find them out, reveal their private bankruptcy through a public challenge. This profound anxiety is often misunderstood as simple antagonism to art, of the " my five year old kid could do better " kind. In W.A. at least it is the amnesia imposed on all public space that calls forth the compulsory anodyne. If a work asks one to remember, to associate now with then, to be at once a child charmed by the ways shapes fit to one another and an adult for whom forms and images are inescapably about politics and communal memory, as Elliott’s does, then it threatens that amnesia at its source. This registers as reluctance, a soft focus problem, a sense that it is all a little bit too hard and might just get difficult.

This is familiar ground for Elliott. At one level, Fakeology and its ramifications are intended to overcome it by stealth, humour and seduction. In the flesh, he relies on a mixture of technical discussion that takes the work for granted (for the blokes), speculation and anecdote, stories about what once might have happened, to persuade his audience to stay with the work, past the point of no return, where they begin to enjoy it. The business of making sculpture in WA can be very close to social game playing. Often the sculptor himself plays the leading role in the scenario through which his work is brought into being.

It is no accident that Elliott’s work continually refers to motifs and structures relating to game playing in social situations. The ‘archaeological’ reference grids laid down by moves in the memory games that connect the familiar and alien in Fakeology are very close to the social games implicit in works like The Waiting Room, while The Games Room inverts the relationship and generates social realities from board games with elaborate workable rules. There was a strong game playing element in Plot a collaborative sculpture exhibition organised by Elliott on the themes of a gridded suburban development. Elliot’s individual sculptures of figures and buildings can be treated as game tokens, arranged in groups each one of which produces a new insight into the relation between the social and the imagination.

The social potential of sculpture is closely connected to the possibility of playing games with communal experience. Elliott’s sculpted persons are first and foremost assemblages of social characteristics. Fakeology can be made to work in words as well sculpture. Throughout his career he has written down some of his games, occasionally in the form of narratives using an alter ego. These may offer some clues to the ways in which Elliott conducts the 90%R&D that leads to his work. He created one of these Spike Kabana, the 3D specialist with a well grounded fear of "two dimentia", as a way of communicating about the lived in politics of sculpture with his students at Claremont School of Art. Spike’s adventures in the artistic life of snapshot city are certainly alien but familiar