Exhibition

DAMP untitled 2007

by Rosemary Forde

Damp meet as a group once a week on Mondays. I'm not sure exactly what goes on at their meetings, but every Monday night I go to beginners singing classes at the CAE. We do little warm-up rituals at the start of each class. Confidence-building exercises seem to be an important part of the teacher's repertoire - stand in a circle and sing your name, the group sings it back, hopefully in a tone that approximates adoration. Body language is also critical to our group singing lessons - it's all about expression, so make sure you sing with your eyes. In week three we were taught to add the knee-bend to get the ultimate emotional manipulation out of those long notes. I can't say my ability to hold a tune has improved, but my friends in the group have been doing well in job interviews with their new techniques of eye contact and unfolded arms etcetera. Maybe that doesn't have a lot to do with Damp, except that it's a group activity and as I have discovered in group activities you don't always get what you thought you signed up for, and you get something else instead. If you're lucky, you might just get what you need.

The last time Damp showed at Uplands Gallery (in the old space in Chinatown) they chained themselves to the wall and invited the audience to hit them with paintballs. It apparently got a bit out of hand. My friend's jacket is still paint stained from that night and she was just a passive observer at the opening. The gallery floor was certainly never the same. In February this year Damp made a giant and monstrous piñata and provided people with oversized comic weapons with which to bash and destroy the suspended creation. This time, no such messy shenanigans have been encouraged. You'd probably be in trouble if you paint-balled the ornate and absurdly scaled plinth that Damp have built to occupy Uplands' new, larger Prahran gallery.

Earlier this year at ACCA, fellow Uplands artists A Constructed World built a kind of pagoda platform and held discussions on it throughout their exhibition. As part of that project, members of Damp participated in the conversation about collectivity in art. There was a lot of questioning from the audience about how artistic collaboration really works in a group situation. With their giant plinth, Damp have built a platform on which to sit and converse. They will hold their weekly meetings there and spend time working on their ongoing drawing projects, so audiences will be able to see and hear exactly how the Damp dynamic operates, in all its simple and familiar banality of human interaction and subtle negotiation. Unlike the ACW conversation platform built to function as a site for easy and democratising inclusiveness, Damp's plinth has been designed with form rather than function in mind. The ten foot high perch is reserved for Damp members who, once they get to the top can't stand up or else they'll bump their heads on the ceiling.

Curious gallery visitors can enter the plinth/room, climb a ladder to the viewing platform and pop their head out a gap at the top. Damp have previously made a lot of performative and transaction based works in their ten-year exhibiting history, but this one is not a performance. The artists have a presence with and in the work, the door is open for audience participation, but there is no act going on, no comic routine or exaggerated drama and no scripted exchange. Maybe they've had enough of relational aesthetics breaking down the boundaries between artist and audience. (Maybe we all have, it can be quite tiring for both parties.) In this work there is proximity but there is also separation. The outlandish untitled art object with its internal access, functions like a gang hut for Damp. We are invited over but not necessarily initiated into the gang. This seems natural, a group by definition both includes and excludes.

They tell me working together as Damp is a bit like living in a share house. The sense of responsibility (e.g. for doing the dishes) is dissipated as it is spread across the whole group. The sense of ownership and pride must similarly be shared. But how many group-flatting situations successfully last for more than ten years, with the original members still friends and the door still open to newcomers? Perhaps a key to Damp's longevity is that it never set out as an ideological collective professing a manifesto. Rather they have remained open to change and external influence, recognising the notion of the group simply 'as a system of meaning'. Not all members of Damp identify as artists, which is interesting but not really important to the group identity, if we agree with minimalist pioneer Dan Flavin's statement on artmaking that, 'individual parts of a system are not in themselves important, but are relevant only in the way they are used in the enclosed logic'.

The cohesion to Damp's practice and its development is remarkable given the number of members who have come and gone over the years. Two ongoing drawing projects may shed some light on this. In one project Damp is filling a book with illustrations of every idea they have ever had, whether it has been followed through or not. Group thought processes and the selection and elimination of ideas that goes on in any art practice are revealed in this growing archive. The other drawing project is Numero Duo - the group has made portraits of their imagined offspring, taking characteristics of individual Damp members and hypothetically 'breeding' amongst themselves to get the ultimate Damp individual. The project is a game, it's funny, but it also reflects on Damp as a familial and changing entity, while exploring science/art notions of mutation and creation. And it requires a group to make it. As a long standing collaboration Damp have been morphing and finding new ways to work together. Climb up the ladder and have a look at what they are up to now.

Also, Damp wanted me to say, this work is better than Bruce Nauman's Floating World piece as seen in the Guggenheim Collection at the NGV. Well, Nauman didn't bother giving his room lovely cornices and a faux marble wash did he?

Rosemary Forde is an art writer, curator and research student at University of Melbourne. She is the editor of un Magazine special issue 08 and the Melbourne coordinator of SPEECH online magazine.

A fete worse than death, Damp solo exhibition, Uplands, Melbourne, 2004.

A world full of hurt, Damp solo exhibition, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2007.

Collectivity 'Change' forum, for A Constructed World's Increase Your Uncertainty, ACCA, Melbourne, 2007.

James Lynch (member of Damp) in conversation, 23 August 2007.

Dan Flavin, quoted in 'Minimal Art' by Daniel Marzona, Taschen, 2004.