Review: 
"The Vorticist" by Jason Maling &
“Triangulation” by Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll

by Barnaby “Teigan” Evans (student no. 6787487)
for Research & Critical Analysis (VPAUO11)
Semester 1, 2010

Jason Maling is an established Melbourne-based artist who trained originally as a painter but now works primarily in the field of "live art", staging performance works in a range of public and private settings that engage in some way with an audience.

This review focusses on two works he has staged or is currently staging at the Abbotsford Convent: "Triangulation" and "The Vorticist".

In one self-penned bio piece, Maling summarizes his practice thus: "He designs systems for shifting locations and social settings where the work becomes a collaboratively mediated tool. Often using the structure of games, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is ‘allowed’. People enter and exit the systems as they choose, some becoming involved with projects over long periods of time."

This approach is strongly demonstrated in both of these works, both of which - in their different ways - place the artist in the role of an investigative agent, interrogating project participants via well-established protocols towards ends which are very unclear. Investigative results are possibly entirely irrelevant to the actual underlying intent of either project - both of which appear to be more about the interactional effects created in the process of pursuing their ostensive goals than any final outcome.

In Triangulation, developed and performed in collaboration with Torie Nimmervoll and mounted over two weeks in February 2010, the two artists took on the role of blandly uniformed 'Colour Auditors', apparently tasked by some unknown authority with conducting a 'Prismatic Audit' of the entire Convent.

Prior to the beginning of the actual performance, all the tenants of the Convent were invited by letter to participate in the audit, which was described in bureaucratic-sounding, but largely obscure terms. Those who agreed were provided with a small handmade ‘auditing kit’, consisting of a tiny miniature flagpole with a suction cup on one end and a selection of 11 interchangable coloured flags. They were instructed to attach their flagpole to the wall outside their room and to change its coloured flag as often as they liked, in accordance with their mood or inclination.

Throughout the two-week audit, Maling & Nimmervoll took up residence in an improvised public office on the second floor of the West Wing of the main Convent building and once every hour throughout each working day did a physical circuit of the premises, noting down the colours displayed on the flagpoles of all participants. The data gleaned from doing this was continually tabulated and prominently displayed at the office in a range of formats including large pie and line graphs, reflecting the trends and idiosyncrasies evident in participants’ colour choices.

Twice daily, at 1pm and 5pm, public ‘briefings’ were held at the office, where these trends and idiosyncrasies were presented to and discussed with whoever showed up. At the 5pm briefing, Maling and Nimmervoll ritualistically hoisted a large flag representing the colour which had emerged as dominant in that day’s auditing data on a rope suspended across the Convent courtyard through the window of the office, whilst playing a preselected popular song corresponding to that colour.

The Vorticist, a durational work which began in October 2007 and which will end in October 2010, is based around the mechanism of discrete appointments made by prospective participants (who have generally been referred to the project via word of mouth by earlier appointees) with the artist, in the guise of The Vorticist - an enigmatic figure with no clear mission or purpose, but a very well-structured and uniform method of operation.

Appointees - referred to as “subjects” - meet with The Vorticist by arrangement at or near his dedicated office (currently a former nun’s cell at the Convent; prior to securing these premises, Maling held appointments at his studio). For an un-prespecified period of time he engages each subject in conversation whilst inviting them to create a drawing by spinning a selection of heavy metal tops on a surface of tissue paper layered over carbon paper. This produces two copies - one of which is kept by the participant, and one of which is kept by The Vorticist.

Maling subsequently writes up one to two pages of appointment notes, recounting from memory in formal language the content of the conversation that took place at the appointment, and any notable or distinctive features of the drawing produced by the “subject”. It appears that these notes are sometimes then sent to the participant, and sometimes not.

The collection of 150 or so appointment notes and accompanying drawings generated in the first year of the project were exhibited at C3 gallery in October 2008, and published in a limited-edition book released in August 2009. A companion volume featuring drawings & notes from the second year is to be released soon.

Both of these works demonstrate numerous features of interest, but for me the most striking qualities of both projects are the contrast and tension between systematic formality and open-ended absurdity inherent in the rigorous 'data gathering' approaches around which they are based, and the experimental and challenging ways in which they engage with their audiences.

Whilst one of the most notable features of The Vorticist is the almost bewilderingly 'open contract' it presents to participants, Triangulation sets up a more clearly established and comprehensible relationship between performer and participant. But in both cases the roles taken on by the artist/s are deliberately confusing and therefore invite - or even require - participants to adopt an experimental approach to their own engagement, which itself becomes a part of the work.

The Prismatic Audit’s mechanics and execution faithfully mimic the systematic, scientific data-gathering approach routinely adopted by numerous public and private institutions for any number of practical purposes. But the Prismatic Audit has no clear practical function, and the significance of the data generated by it is - although recognisable as potentially filled with all kinds of meaning, via the innumerable symbolic associations of colour - ultimately ambiguous, or at best open to infinite interpretation.

Although interesting as an exercise in itself, this situational setup has the additional effect of creating an unusual dynamic in the relationship between the auditors and their ‘auditees’. In their auditing roles, Maling and Nimmervoll used their own names, and acted in an entirely natural and normal way - but at the same time, they appeared at all times to take their clearly absurd ‘job’ entirely seriously, and conducted themselves with a quiet air of confident authority befitting professionals tasked with carrying out an important operation. This appeared to elicit a wide range of approaches to dealing with them from Convent tenants, many of whom were clearly very unsure what the ‘rules of engagement’ were or should be.

As Maling explained to me in an interview I conducted with him and Nimmervoll during the execution of Triangulation: “It's utilizing an understood relationship where somebody comes into an environment, they're given license to access certain information or data, and it's a giving over. We've appropriated that interaction to form a framework for both the community and us to negotiate a kind of.. a space where we meet on some sort of abstract level, with this idea of colour. So what they would kind of expect from it, or what we expect to see, I'm not really sure.”

That said, the ostensive mission of the Prismatic Auditors and the terms of their ‘contract’ with the audience are both relatively clear and straightforward, in comparison with those of The Vorticist.

The appointment notes from one Vorticist encounter (reproduced on Maling's website, and constituting the project's entire textual description there) relate the following exchange with a participant:

"He said 'You don’t need me do you. You don’t need me to be here and I don’t think you want anything from me?’ I said 'No, not really'. And he said, ‘Well I don’t really need anything from you either, and I don’t need to be here either. That creates quite an interesting space. We are both here now, so what could this mean?’"

Although all the ‘furniture’ of The Vorticist - his title; his distinctively besuited appearance, his office; his appointment-making procedure; his attractive, well-produced referral cards; the formality and uniformity of of the drawing-manufacuring process he engages in with participants; the carefully, elegantly written notes he produces, and so on - strongly suggest or evoke a well-established professional role of some kind, of course in practice no one really knows what a Vorticist is or does, and us such how one would normally relate to or interact with one. Why, a participant might ask themselves, are they even going to see him? They most likely don't entirely know.

This confusion seems conducive to The Vorticist's stated hope in his standard pitch to prospective participants (as presented at http://www.thevorticist.com) that "for the time we are together, we can create a small eddy in the flow of the everyday."

However the potentially jarring or disconcerting aspects of this situation are smoothed over by the formality of The Vorticist's setup and his reassuringly friendly, relaxed, but disinterestedly professional style of interaction.

These two elements between them seem ideal for inducing the ‘blank canvas’ effect Maling appears to strive for in Vorticist encounters. As he explained in an October 2008 interview with "The Age": "The Vorticist is not offering anything. He is just offering a space … for stuff to be developed and pulled into the middle."

But despite the above claim, The Vorticist's distinctively formal and uniform appointment notes (and also the themes which emerged in conversation at both of my own two appointments, in late '07 and late '08) do reveal innumerable recurrent ideas and preoccupations, suggesting that there is some kind of enigmatic hidden agenda or unstated investigative purpose behind the Vorticist project.

Whether this is in fact the case, or merely reflective of the human tendency to seek out and create meaning in its absence is ultimately unclear. But the question - like so many elements of both these works - provides any amount of fertile ground for intriguing speculation.

References:

- "Found In Space" by Katherine Kizilos, from The Age October 14, 2008 (http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/found-in-space/2008/10/13/1223749937099.html)

- "Here, Now" website (http://pantherpanther.com/apam/herenow/?page_id=121)

- Interview conducted by Teigan Evans with Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll regarding “Triangulation” in February 2010 (http://blog.trystingfields.com/blog/2010/03/interview-with-the-prismatic-auditors.html)

- Jason Maling official website (http://www.jasonmaling.com)

- The Vorticist official website (http://www.thevorticist.com)

- “The Vorticist Appointments Volume One” by Jason Maling, Field Theory, 2009