Agatha Gothe-Snape

Agatha Gothe-Snape is one of two artists working across all three venues in the 2017 iteration of The National. She's also the only artist who is making a project over all six years of the initiative. For the Art Gallery of New South Wales, she has created a major text work that's at billboard scale, and essentially frames the other work in the exhibition. You see it as you arrive down into the Level Two galleries, where most of the exhibition is taking place. Agatha's practise is very agile — she comes from a background in improvised performance — but her work tends to be responsive to context, and as a consequence, it takes many different forms.

Over the six years of The National, Agatha will create a film called The Fatal Shore, The National Doubt, which essentially captures and archives the social context for the exhibition. Over each of the three exhibitions, Agatha will be gathering interviews and observational footage, incorporating the experiences and the knowledge and the works of many of the different artists who are part of the project, but also the curators, critics, audiences, and so on. And through this, she'll build a picture of the social context for the exhibition, and a picture that goes behind the highly mediated, constructed, sort of marketing image that is produced for an exhibition such as this.

The starting point for this film is the canonical documentary television series The Shock of the New by the Australian art critic Robert Hughes, which was produced in 1980, that’s the year of Agatha's birth, but it was also a point in time when modernism was in decline, and the series ends with Hughes diagnosing a rather bleak future for art in view of modernism ... That series was made in 1980, which is the year of the artist's birth, but also marks a particular moment in the history of art, in between the decline of modernism and the emergence of postmodern art, which has become the sort of foundation for the contemporary. The text is a direct quote from the closing remarks that Hughes makes in The Shock of the New, and it says, "And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning." Agatha presents this as an open proposition, which asks the audience to consider the transformative potential of art.

Here we have a work by Agatha Gothe-Snape, The Fatal Shore, The National Doubt. Agatha is one of two artists to sort of distributed projects working across all three sites. Agatha is actually also working in a longitudinal sense across the three editions of the exhibition 2017, 2019, and 2021.

Here at Carriageworks, Agatha presents what she calls The Waiting Room at the End of Art History. The artist is reciting from memory the closing address of Robert Hughes' seminal art historical documentary series The Shock of the New. Her female voice, which kind of falters through the delivery because it's being recited from memory is very distinctive and different from Robert Hughes' rather confident bombastic delivery in the original.

Agatha has set the soundtrack to a pastel hued power point presentation whose kind of formalist abstraction expresses affinities with Robert Hughes' belief in arts transformative potential, which is what is being discussed in this closing address. There are pendant projects to this work at the Art Gallery of NSW and the MCA which take other passages from this closing address and translate them into different forms. At the MCA you have a plaque and at the Art Gallery of New South Wales you have a large scale text work.

These three distributed projects are part of a larger project, The Fatal Shore, The National Doubt. In which Agatha is seeking to spend the next six years interviewing artists, curators, the media and the public to create a long form documentary, which would capture the economic, cultural and psychological moods that shape the exhibition. To kind of archive the significance of the project.

So as part of Agatha Gothe-Snape's project You and Everything That is Not You, and her ongoing project that we've commissioned collectively across Carriagework's, Art Gallery and MCA for Agatha to effectively make a film, a documentary about the National, about Australian art through The National over the next five years; or about the way in which artists look at art history perhaps differently from art historians. We have this small plaque which states necessary art of our time sort of embedded in the wall here. It's a quote or a little fragment of a quote from Robert Hughes' Shock of the New, which is one of the sort of templates again that Agatha's using to make her film. Coming up with a plaque form, Agatha and I actually walked around the MCA looking at ... First of all, she had this idea for a plaque or a sign of some sort, so we looked at all the plaques that exist on the building. There are some on the outside of the original MCA building, and then how plaques function when they're attached to a building and what they actually state.

So she's taken the form, slightly abstracted or simplified, but the form of the plaques that actually exist here on the MCA building, with this little fold up corner as if it's like a PowerPoint folding over which is, PowerPoint is one of the kind of key forms that Agatha uses. But then we inserted it into the wall rather than on the wall, because a plaque on the wall sort of as an add on after something's completed, after a building's ended and you want to make a mark on it; and we wanted this sort of sense that you might have a sense about it having been uncovered in the building somehow as this little oblique statement about what you're actually seeing around you and the way in which this building functions.