Schleimgurgeln, I guess the name translates sort of roughly as phlegm gargler. My name is Mark Shorter, I'm an artist that works with performance and installation. Some of the things that I'm interested in working in are, ideas around the body, as a material to work with, landscape and how landscape's constructed.
For The National, I'm bringing those ideas together in a work called Song for von Guerard which critiques the Australian colonial landscape painting tradition. The idea behind Schleimgurgeln was to create a figure or a character that could traverse 2500 years of antipodean imaginings. So, the idea 2500 years ago, Aristotle, the ancient Greek thinker, declared that the world was a sphere and there was a southern component and he sort of based that on a principle of counterbalance.
Well if there's a kinda of livable space in the northern hemisphere, there must be something of equal nature in the South. So from that point on, I suppose, there's always been like an imagining taking place of what might be that opposite. And so Schleimgurgeln was, in a sense, a response to that, like an inversion of that, be like to say what would it mean to imagine that imagining and so Schleimgurgeln is a kind of a construction, that kind of response to that tendency within European thinking and turns it on it's head. So Schleimgurgeln doesn't rationalise, rather it's like a guttural response, so like a croak, like a gargle.
So that's why when Schleimgurgeln traverses 2500 years of antipodean imagining, it's a gargle, it's a kind of bodily response to the problem. Because it is a problem, you know. If you imagine a space and your project your desires onto it as European culture has over a significant period of time, it perverts the space, it makes it fiction and so Schleimgurgeln responds to that, tries to kinda call it to account, but not through a rational lecture but rather through like a body in space announcing itself problematizing that space as it moves through it.
The idea behind the work is to create an alternative platform for understanding these paintings. In these paintings, they still kinda occupy a place of privilege within Australian culture, they're in all the major museums and is in all the major collections across the country and when you go and see these paintings, they sit in often the colonial galleries, they're kinda sequestered and for whatever reason, I wanted to kinda bring those paintings out and to call them to account in a different way, to kind of think about how they might exist in a contemporary way of thinking or contemporary space.
But reinterpreting the painting here for The National, it's creating a more unstable platform for that painting to be read or understood, you don't get to walk in and see it front on, you come in, it's obscured and then illuminated through the figure of Schleimgurgeln through a match struck off the painting itself so it's sort of thinking about the painting in a different way and trying to think about, what is it's context, how do we think about this sort of imagining of the Australian space, can we acknowledge the fact that these are landscapes, they are constructions, they aren't a reality, they are in a sense an imagining.
And as an imagining, they have a complexity and something that's worth questioning. Where does that imagining come from? What's behind the imagination of van Guerard when van Guerard's painting the landscape?