Anathema:

Kicking A Dead Horse

Anathema Kicking A Dead Horse

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Anathema: Kicking A Dead Horse
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our
own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—ju-
diciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how
things will sort out. We’re history’s actors […] and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do.1
T he title for this curated show is Anathema: Kicking A
Dead Horse. The show includes the artists: Yundi Wang,
Madeleine Peters, Sanja Pahoki, Peter Narzisi and Aaron Chris-
topher Rees. Each artist uses images in ways that bypass lin-
ear and explicit narratives; linear constructions of history.
They propose associations, alternative ways to read the
world, their personal relationship with it and the rest of us.
The works exhibited could be called dislocations or
propositions for a dialogue. What type of exchange is
this? It is unclear, but this very question is what lures
us to their work. The word Anathema comes from:
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A Greek root meaning simply “a thing devoted” or “an
offering,” and in the Old Testament it could refer to
either revered objects or objects representing destruction
brought about in the name of the Lord, such as the weapons
of an enemy. Since the enemy’s objects therefore be-
came symbols of what was reviled or unholy, the neu-
tral meaning of “a thing devoted” became “a thing de-
voted to evil” or “curse.2
This show uses the term Anathema in the iconoclastic sense, re-
ferring to a curse in our visual paradigm. Anathema is a game of
transfixing qualities, paradoxes within the images used by these
artists’ works. As art historian Georges Didi-Huberman suggests
(quoting Jean-Luc Goddard) ‘an image is never just one image’.3
The artists in the exhibition use images that are usually discarded
and forgotten in the infinite online data streams or in the history
of Western art. They use low quality family films of absurd mo-
ments and gestures. Through the dynamics of art, these images
are resurrected and come back stronger. Lighting new roads and
creating new associations.
As we know, traditional modes of understanding history and nar-
rative are being undermined (in a progressive way) by the use
of imagery through new technologies and media – in its broad-
er understanding. History devours itself and regurgitates its own
demons. I claim that images today, are far more critical than we
think; being surrounded by pictures daily, creates the illusion of
their harmlessness.
We take them as innocuous mirages. But images play a dou-
ble-bind: on the one hand, they are pictures on surfaces, not to be
taken literately. On the other hand, images can motivate move-
ments, actions; their use can instigate global political events. This
group of works attempts to question and explore this dual aspect
of images.
The expression Kicking A Dead Horse, comes from a short text by
Vilém Flusser called To Scatter. This, in turn, is part of Into the Uni-
verse of Technical Images4 (initially published in German in 1985).
Flusser talks about the central role of images in the development
of our contemporary societies, in some ways, anticipating what
we experience today (especially our means to communicate). His
text contains sharp criticism around cultural studies’ analyses
such as the society of the spectacle, liquid modernity, and post-
modernism.
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Kicking A Dead Horse means – in the everyday jargon – to do some-
thing that has already been done, with no change; or to waste
time doing something that has already been attempted. In a way,
talking about images today feels like kicking a dead horse; non-
sense in a world so saturated by them. In this fashion, Flusser’s
text serves as departure and motivation to problematise the work
of this group of artists.
This exhibition attempts to motivate the use of everyday imagery
and technology to find new ways of understanding and comment-
ing on the world in which we live in. And so trying to sabotage old
fashioned ideological and political stances. Therefore, Anathema:
Kicking a Dead Horse introduces us to a game of shadows and repre-
sentation, familiarity and absurdity, repetition and appropriation,
distance and proximity. Reminding us, that every image has mul-
tiple ways of being read.
Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves.
Melbourne, Australia. August 2019.
Text Reflection by Artists
The motivation to organise this show comes from the admira-
tion I have for the work of this group of artists. They all operate
from a fluctuating idea of the image. A notion that is non-static,
it looks for new ways, often with eyes closed, vulnerable. There
is a phrase by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño that describes
what I mean, or that’s my interpretation, anyway. This phrase has
always frightened me, and at the same time, fills me with intrigue;
it seems to me, as one of the most poetic and abstract sentences I
have ever read. The phrase comes in the book Los detectives salvajes5
and reads:
De espaldas, mirando un punto, pero alejándonos de él, en
línea recta hacia lo desconocido.
[Walking] back, gazing at a point in the distance, but mov-
ing away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.
(My translation from Spanish).
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I proposed to the artists that, to make this exchange/experience
more playful and interesting. And for me to understand a bit more
of their mindsets when creating artworks; that I was to provide a
series of short texts from various authors. This was done
arbitrarily by me, without any connection to their practices or
selves. I wanted to hear what they wanted to say without much
explanation. I wanted to see, for a fragment of a second, their
mental images. The following are those texts followed by their
reflections.
TEXT I
[...] Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian*, of course, but
he could at least see how the books were laid out -in
brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy com-
mented that the clumps might be telegrams.
‘Exactly,’ said the voice.
‘They are telegrams?’
There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re
right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message
-describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamodorians
read them all at once, not one after the other.

There isn’t any particular relationship between all the
messages, except that the author has chosen them care-
fully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an
image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense,
no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our
books are the depths of many marvellous moments
seen all at one time.
*Note from E. Rodriguez-Chaves: Tralfamadorians
are aliens who have abducted Billy and have given him
some of their books, written in Tralfamadorian lan-
guage, of course.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the Children’s Crusade: A
Duty-Dance with Death. London: Cape, 1970. 72.
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Response from Yundi Wang:
Billy interprets the book in Tralfamodorians as clumps of sym-
bols. Like Billy, the video is composed of clumps of video clips.
Similar to each symbol in Tralfamodorians, each video clips de-
scribes a situation, a scene. Tralfamodorians do not read the sym-
bols one after another--they read the images all at once. I thought
I had a similar experience with them. The world is full of images.
Me, surrounded by the world of images, have no choice, but to
read them all at once.
Those video clips I have shown can be easily ignored in daily
life. However, it is because of those details, I feel the connection
among things. To change, to flow, to transform, in the video, I try
to show how everything connects together. The connection was
shown in different ways depends on the context of the video.
Sometimes the connection might even result from the digital ma-
nipulation of an image. Furthermore, I have included the idea
of myself in the video, to look at my relationship with others, the
world in a larger sense. Strangely, I found the character “I” in the
video is like Billy in the text.
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 TEXT II
Images are, as Aristotle noted, and as every ancient cul-
ture has understood, imitations of life that constitute a
‘second nature.’ The foundational creation of stories of
the world religions almost invariably invoke a moment
of image-creation and of the bringing of those images
to life. [...] The questions that need to be asked of im-
ages in our time, and especially during the epoch of the
war on terror and the clone wars, are not just what they
mean and what they do. We must also ask how they
live and move, how they evolve and mutate, and what
sorts of needs, desires, and demands they embody, gen-
erating a field of affect and emotion that animates the
structures of feeling that characterize our age.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the
Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. (Preface: For a
War on Error. xix)
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Response by Madeleine Peters:
Sometimes I feel the images I make are limited by the willing-
ness or inclination of their environment to believe in them. Other
times I feel it is the image that is unwilling to say what I desire it
to. When I look at a picture, I know that I am first informed by
the suspicion I bring to it, my confidence in my own thoughts, my
mood, the expanse of context I am afforded, the images I have
already seen.
In this era, drenched in its own distrust of any observable truth,
images that attempt to communicate a concrete, unchanging
meaning seem unreasonable to me. Though, I suppose this could
be poetic in some miraculous, impotent way. I’m certain that im-
ages have desires and needs – but is it possible to speak to them
from within the context of our own time?
Can an image communicate an understanding of itself ? If so,
how would that appear in comparison to an image that doesn’t?
Often, I think about the abilities of the pictures I make. In the
right context, with a certain viewer, is this image able to commu-
nicate what I would like it to. Maybe I should be asking if it is
willing. I’m not really sure.
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 TEXT III
Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photogra-
phy has kept company with death. Because an image
produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of some-
thing brought before the lens, photographs were supe-
rior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past
and the dear departed.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. 1st ed. New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 21
Response by Peter Narzisi:
For me, a photograph does three things when I look at it;
If I took the photo or am present in the photo; it forces me to
relive the moment of capture. How I was feeling at the time,
where I was in my life at that point.
This first mode of viewing is inherently imbued with nostalgia -
longing, regret and embarrassment. This combination of emo-
tions coalesce and the versions of people present/the vibe that
the photo evokes stands stagnant and dies. The content of the
photograph becomes ‘a trace’ at that point.
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The second mode of viewing/train of thought often follows on
from the first and occurs in similar circumstances - if I am present
in the frame or behind the camera. But not always, it happens
with mode of viewing number three also. None are mutually ex-
clusive, but all can stand alone.
The photograph creates an alternate reality timeline, where at the
moment of capture a fulcrum gets created that different timelines
swing off. Surrounding that instance any number of future real-
ities are possible. And as they all differ from this reality when on
that train, this present reality dies and is replaced by any number
of projections.
The third instance occurs when I have no personal connection
with the photograph - didn’t take it and not in it. It then comes
down to the formal qualities of the photo changing the made-up
narrative (alternate reality) and what other images I associate it
to, informing the reading.
I see an ad for Corona, and even though it’s not me on the beach
sipping beer and watching the sunset, I think of the times I’ve sat
on a beach and drank a beer. Simultaneously, I imagine a future
where I’m sitting on a beach and drinking a beer.
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This is a game of association and imagining and as such, both the
first and second modes of viewing come together. This particular
photograph kills both versions of self - the present and imagined.
The third mode of viewing is most present in advertising and
news. The associations are made on your behalf. The narrative is
fully formed and implanted. Arnie’s back hopes to bring together
these three modes of viewing to highlight an image’s fickleness.
How a simple edit can subvert an image and change the narrative
to being both a memento and evanescence at the same time.
TEXT IV
To know the world, says Nietzsche in those pages, is,
first of all, to try to make it problematical. To do this, it
is necessary to arrange things in such a way as to make
their strangeness appear within their contact with each
other, made possible by the decision to transgress the
pre-existing categorical limits, where things were more
calmly ‘’arranged’’.
Didi-Huberman, Georges, and Shane B. Lillis. Atlas, or the Anxious
Gay Science. [in Translated from the French.]. 91.
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Response by Aaron Christopher Rees:
This text makes me think about some of the video works from my
work for “Speculative Foundations” and some prints works, most
notably an old work of mine called Transient, which to this day I
think still captures the essence of my interests.
These works are all somewhat absurd in nature and very simple,
I like the idea of combining banality and “Technology”, in these
cases, it’s technology as a framing device which shapes percep-
tion, which is really just adding more mediated layers between us
and the world, these mediated layers containing their own history
of discourses.
TEXT V
There is another logic at work here, too, the logic of
attempted role reversal: spectators (English [football]
fans, in this case) turn themselves into actors; usurping
the role of the protagonists (players), under the gaze of
the media, they invent their own spectacle (which - we
may as well admit it - is somewhat more fascinating
than the official one). Now is this not precisely what is
expected of the modern spectator? Is he not supposed
to abandon his spectator-ish inertia and intervene in
the spectacle himself ?
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 [...] Where exactly does participation pass over into too
much participation? The answer to this question - never
acknowledge in the discourse of participation - is that
‘good’ participation ends where signs of participation
begin. Of course, things do not always work out that
way.
Endnotes
1 This is a quote from Karl Rove, senior adviser to the Bush adminis-
tration in conversation with Ron Suskind for the New York Times con-
tained in: Wilson, Eva. “Stepping into the Same River Twice: Mario García
Torres’s The Way They Looked at Each Other.” Mario Garcia Torres—An
Arrival Tale, 2017, Accessed on June 13, 2019.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phe- 2 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anathema, Accessed
on 25 July, 2019.
nomena. London New York: Verso, 1993. 86-87.
3 “Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back?”, created by ZKM
Response by Sanja Pahoki: | Museum für Neue Kunst auf den Grund, Karlsruhe, Germany: 2011,
https://zkm.de/media/video/atlas-interview-mit-georges-didi-huberman.
Accessed 12 June 2019.
This quote reminds me of something that I read in the papers
a while back about tennis spectators coming fully kitted out in
4 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, Electronic
tennis gear to watch tennis matches. I don’t think that happens at Mediations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
tennis matches anymore. People seem to come to the tennis now
like they are dressed for a date. I don’t know if tennis is more like 5 Roberto Bolaño, Los Detectives Salvajes, 1. ed., Compactos (Barce-
entertainment now, something that is watched rather than some- lona: Anagrama, 2000).
thing that the spectator participates in. Anyway, that newspaper
article from the past said that the spectators were dressed in top-
to-toe tennis gear, kind of like they were hoping something would
happen to the tennis player. They were hoping that the tennis
player would get injured and that they would be asked to step in.
To finish off the match.

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A group show at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2019.