Stephen Zepke.
Sunburnt

I.
Sunburn, perhaps it is always a local condition, and must be explained as such. Sydney sunburn. Reflecting off the harbour so that everything is illuminated like a jewel, the Sydney sun brightens as it fries. Out in the water, burn time is 10 minutes. The sun comes down hard and fast, your skin is red before you know it, and hurts like hell. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about the Sydney sun, it burns everything. There are days so hot you can smell the combustion, even the roads are melting. There are days the bush fire smoke is your only protection from the hole in the ozone layer.

Sunburn is a local condition. It only affects those areas left exposed, those flesh surfaces bared in bravado or by accident. Skin can burn whilst cowering under the scant shelter of a stringy gum, or in the sweaty embrace of a sunbather lying on a beach, arms akimbo. But these isolated exposures still retain some dignity of choice, and don't tell how the heat is unavoidable. How to describe the joyous abandon/the stifling oppression of sitting naked in a chair, indoors, and it's so hot you are sweating. It's Sydney, and ten in the EVENING..

Sunburn the exhibition is a partial exposure, as if the skin of Sydney's art world was burnt in patches, registering the bare bits and leaving others hidden. And yet the heat gets into everything, and so perhaps the show's collected reflections/refractions attain a kind of dislocated coherence. Turned to the sun...the kaleidescope effect. A half-baked crust of dead and peeling skin meets the viscous sludge of an aloe vera after burn salve. Somewhere in this ambiguous and patchy application/disintegration lies Sunburn....

II.
Sunburn is determined by local conditions, and in this way the show provides a snapshot of a process inseperable from its place. The Sydney sun beats down and burns; place and process form a symbiotic and co-determining system. Since Sunburn is inseparably a place and a process we must first re-examine Sydney as a place, and second, we must re-examine its artists' practices. Because finally, out at the further reaches of a certain Sydney idiom used by many of the artists in Sunburn, we may not be able to tell what is process and what is place - after all, perhaps process is just an expression of place, and place a construction of process.

What is this place, Sydney, or this process, Sydney's Sunburn? Typically, answers have subordinated the question of process to that of position, putting Sydney on the other side of the world, the periphery versus the centre, new world versus old, the regional versus the international. All these oppositions are effectively versions of each other, conceptual machines with which to compare Sunburn to Hamburg, or Australia to Europe. Always there is the same aim, to explain Sydney's distance as the simple (and often single) premise of any differences it may produce. As if art in the age of electronic reproduction can still only be interpreted by the quality of the copy... The euro- centric nutshell. Such discussions have already taken place of course, the common story being that Sydney artists re-interpret international concerns through a distance mediated only by the art press. This conception of place and process has been strategically helpful to Australian art in its attempts to occupy a part of the international art market. In the 80's some artists gained international exposure with their illustrations of Australian marginalisation in a global art world. Similarly, there are those who have invested in the local differences of Sydney or Australian art. A kind of regionalism which becomes an art world nationalism, a form of brand identification which has arguable success overseas, but which generally goes down well in local markets. Deliberately or not this is "Australian art", often with a healthy dose of self-depreciation Australian's are proud to call their own. A statement of national identity, art as symptom of Australian difference. This has often, unfortunately, involved the cynical exploitation of indigineous art.

The other current narrative of place is that of globalisation. Telegraphically, we could reduce this story to two sides. Multinational capitalism at the price of an erosion of local traditions, giving rise to a dislocating loss of, and nostalgia for, "old" cultures (an interpretation offered by a paralysed left, unable to think beyond its now moribund place). Or alternatively a post-modern delight in "textuality", which finds freedom from a metaphysics of distance and presence in a world always already mediated by technologies of representation... money flows unhindered (the neoliberal ecstacy of speed). In the global economy Sydney is as central as Shanghai, because the money goes around everywhere with the same result - multinational profit. Local forms are either irrelevant or invisible. Both the crisis of the local, and the triumphant axiomatic expression of global capital, exist only through the conceptual opposition of local and global.

These oppositions produce Sunburn as a curiosity from the margins, or as simply a difference of degree within the global market. We see something which either exists between here and there, between far away (Sydney, Australia) and centre (Hamburg, Germany), or between an international money-go-round and the local cultures it replaces or absorbs (and its possible for Sunburn to be both). These binary models relativise the work in Sunburn, and impose a conceptual structure on it which is not its own. What alternatives exist to this topology, what freedoms exist beyond its oppositions? Can we get out of the sun, perform a post-Copernican revolution, and escape these theories of emanation?

Topologies which binarise local and global make "fighting the power" a Sisyphian task. Within such models resistance is local and as such already part of the space it is attempting to resist. We need alternative geographies in which space is no longer defined through distance, and is replaced by a concept of place defined by its own specific processes of formation. This means opening up a space which is always already a place/process, an open connection, a continual mutation. Place/process means an openess to the future, a committment to its possibility. In other words we're always on the way, in the middle of things.This processual geography resists the homogenising forces of cultural centralisations, as much as those of a capitalist axiomatic. Process/place is everywhere and nowhere, operating at a global level as much as with Sunburn the exhibition, and the work of each artist involved. Place/process is a fractal concept; at each level - infinite detail. As such,Sunburn can only be understood by its local conditions, the place/process in which it is produced, as an open system, a mutational future. I will attempt to sketch some of these conditions below, but whatever the usefulness of my sketches, an absolutely local geography of Sunburn is defined purely by the assemblage of its current connections. Sunburn is defined as an exhibition by its present and real relations (yes, this means YOU too), rather than any conceptual demarcations which are maintained by defining Sunburn relative to its so-called "outside".

III.
This is all to say, in a most un-Australian long-windedness, that the place of Sunburn is always defined through its process, and vica versa. So what are some characteristic processes of Sunburn? The first is an embrace of readymade material in which its "found" nature is inseperable from its consequent construction. In other words, Sunburn takes the found object for granted, even if it comes in the form of the Australian landscape (Marg Roberts), "Ozzie" culture (Simon Barney, Tony Schwensen, Justene Williams), or the exhibition space and environs itself (Kyle Ashpole). Even if it is simply a song (Chris Fortesque), a walk in the street (Stephen Zepke), an old family photo (Emil Goh), a family relation (Regina Walters), an hallucinated identity (Adrian Doig), or a spontaneous inspiration (Sophie Coombs). In true Australian style the emphasis is on immediacy, a larrikan cheekiness, and an enthusiasm for doing it yourself.

These artists are certainly not avant gardists, such high theoretical ambitions seem a long way from contemporary Antipodean life-style and attitude. Although previous generations of Sydney artists invested in serious conceptual abstraction, recent work is more comfortable and relaxed. These artists are unhindered by dogmatic intentions,they simply want a connection to things. This gives the work the down-to-earth feel and openess of "Do it yourself" (DIY).

Why this experimental materialism? First, its a process of affirmation. The sun hits everything just right, and it all starts to shine. The art in Sunburn is the very equation of place and process, an equation which is always happening, before your very eyes. That's part of the DIY aesthetic; it's obvious anybody could do it, and they done it. Its a vital process which is always trying to find ways into and out of the here and now which transform it into something else, a topology of mutation, some call it creation. Anything can be turned into something beautiful, something unexpected, something funny... something good. Sunburn is about added value, and its readymades are never aesthetically disinterested. Duchamp was wrong to claim this in the first place, as one look at the bottle rack or the urinal will tell you; they're beautiful. Another DIY factor is the high rent costs in Sydney - artists can't always afford a studio, and often pay rent in the spaces where they exhibit. Sometimes a studio based practice is impossible and work must be made economically. This means using whatever is closest to hand and cheap, an entirely practical and completely immanent place/process.

Despite some of the work having a casual, throw-away feel, it retains a certain abstract elegance. Sunburn combines old world conceptual concerns with an interest in new world abstraction. Perhaps Sunburn is an abstract materialism. A result of the fat fact of living under a huge sun, in a light born of "the minute brilliance of cloudless days" (to pinch a line from William Carlos Williams). The sun is so bright in Sydney every surface explodes in an infinity of detail. Everything is alive, kissed by the sun...Sunburn is a sensitivity of/to surface.

The list of absolutely local conditions is by definition infinite. The best thing to do is to abandon the task here and leave it to unfold in its countless instances. Because the absolutely local has no outside, it is a pure line of becoming in which you are implicated and necessary. It is not a spectator sport. There is no room for the objective in an unending list of connections, and it is the necessary function of optimising and affirming those connections which increases the power of action.
Politics = Place = Process.