Doreen Chapman, VNS Matrix, and Serwah Attafuah at the 24th Sydney Biennale, Ten Thousand Suns.
This year’s Sydney Biennale welcomes its visitors with an ambitious interpretive framework: Ten Thousand Suns. The numerous suns are, first, a metaphor for the cultural diversity that stands resolute against social idleness and ‘colonial and capitalist exploitation’. This is a joyful diversity, say the Biennale organisers—a selection of artistic otherness that carries with it images of radiance, life and resistance. But these suns are also scorching ones, uncomfortable reminders of our destruction of the environment and our indifference, at best, to alternative forms of social existence. As an aid to aesthetic conceptualisation, then, the Ten Thousand Suns scheme allows us to confront works of art in their transgressive particularity as well as in their dependence on a problematic totality. Be they Australian or international, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, the Biennale’s artworks are intended to creatively represent both aspects of our cognition of the world.
But in any rigorous critical encounter, such intent only takes us so far. Artists may aspire to create autonomous subjectivities, but they do so within determined social contexts. The more ambitious an entire exhibition is to escape such determinants, the more we need to ask, without fear or favour, whether the works within have not been wholly drawn back in. To paraphrase Theodor Adorno, the fact that subjects can oppose the status quo by means of artistic labour does not support the possibility of absolute autonomy. Although art ‘negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world’, it nevertheless ‘harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance’.[1] It is precisely in the conflict between these two bright spheres of autonomy and social determination that this enigmatic character of art—what makes it indecipherable and unconquerable—resides.
Are there pieces that could be considered paradigmatic for the interpretive goal of the Biennale? And among the featured artists, are there some who seem to forget about their relations to content, so that their practice comes dangerously close to the commodity form? An obvious candidate for examining these questions is the Manyjilyjarra artist Doreen Chapman. Her series of colourful paintings, strategically placed near the entrance to six of the Biennale venues, portrays nothing but robust ATMs; they appear insistently, with greater or lesser definition, in all of her canvases produced for the occasion (Images 1 to 3). Are these paintings, then, the archetype of the ‘ten thousand suns’? Do they fully comprehend, artistically, the contradictions that have pushed socio-nature to the brink of collapse?
For a moment, let’s walk further in and ask if some celebrated artists have lost control of their abstraction processes, to the point of being almost indistinguishable from the process of commercialisation of life that they denounce. Could that be said about the work of the Australian collective VNS Matrix, scattered in a corner of the White Bay Power Station? The collective’s A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991)—its founding project—may actually be seen as the obverse of a self-reflexive social critique. In the text, VNS Matrix initially defines its identity as ‘positive anti-reason’: that is, as a non-identity which posits male-dominated cyberculture as the repressive identity to be challenged.[2] This feminism as non-identity is thus above all fluid, in the sense that it renounces the strictures of ‘elitist theoretical language’[3] to make room for a grammar of sex, slime, the viscerality of the body and jouissance. But this discourse immediately raises the question of whether the members of VNS Matrix have dwelled sufficiently on the link between the cyberworld and capitalism. For instance, I am especially struck by their relaxed and even friendly attitude towards money,[4] which perhaps explains why, in their manifesto, the image of ‘big daddy mainframe’ has taken the place of words such as profit, production or exploitation. What this means to me is that the collective has been too quick to distance itself from its criticised object (again, cyber-masculine relations that fetishise women’s bodies). As a result, it could be argued that it has ignored the capitalist section of its object’s contour, thereby overlooking the fundamental fetishism operating in the very use of the cybernetic medium it celebrates: the money fetish. It is solely through this type of distracted, ahistorical artistic voice that computer and pornographic networks can appear as potential ‘saboteurs’ of a system that reduces everything to its economic value.
Other ‘suns’ of the Biennale could also be said to be unaware of the abstract modus operandi of capitalism, although not to the level of the VNS Matrix manifesto. In the case of Serwah Attafuah’s Between This World & the Next (2023–24) (Image 4), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, we are once again faced with the deployment of art as digital synthesis, although here the content addressed and formed by the artist is not so much patriarchy (though the piece does refer to female warriors and empowerment) as colonialism and e-waste pollution.
Attafuah’s artwork basically consists of two parts: a centre made up of eight large screens displaying ‘an Afrofuturistic vista contrasting colonial remnants with utopian hope’ and a solid frame made of ‘e-waste and the incorporation of Sakawa, or “internet magic”’. If Attafuah were attempting to shock or provoke the viewer by resorting to her digital 3D rendering, which prominently depicts an armed and stylised female cyborg, then this shock would be hardly different from that generated by, say, contemporary indie video games. In such a scenario, Attafuah would be close to uncritically playing the role of society. Yet there is much more going on in the contradiction between the screens and the e-waste frame. As Alice Armstrong explains, Sakawa is a kind of internet fraud assisted by spiritual powers gained through membership in a cult, and is rumoured to be performed by young Ghanaian men aged 16–30.[5] Considered dangerous and immoral in Ghana, this activity may involve the use of objects such as magic rings or enchanted laptops, which supposedly help the ‘Sakawa boys’ force their foreign victims to transfer money.[6] The Sakawa element in Attafuah’s artwork therefore adds a fresh reference to spirituality and, as Jean Baudrillard would put it, a symbolic exchange with death in an otherwise colourful but highly static composition. The sturdy frame salvages, in a sense, the composition’s dynamism. To be sure, if the discrepancy between the magical and the digital in Attafuah’s proposal constitutes its enigma—its determinate aconceptuality[7]—then we would do well at this point, having reached its ‘core’, as it were, to declare our analytical drive satiated. What is important is to acknowledge the violent techno-futuristic abstractions that this artwork both reproduces and survives, emphasising that it nevertheless explores those other levels of abstraction that only appropriate critiques of the present possess.[8]
I am now in the position to return my attention to Chapman’s ATMs. So far, I have argued that pornographic and cyber production are in the end capitalist production—the form of production behind the current climate crisis. Innovations in the sex and technology industries ultimately aim at greater productivity and efficiency, heightened consumption of natural resources and profit maximisation. Yet other artworks have escaped that gravitational pull, and one of them is Chapman’s ATMs. Writing on the website Aboriginal Art Directory, Jeremy Eccles has already made a connection between the form of this deaf and non-verbal artist’s paintings and the heat that strikes the Pilbara region of Western Australia where she works. Eccles briefly notes the abstract style of the canvases and wonders whether the ‘strange mentions’ of the NAB and ATMs on them are a critique of capitalism. Indeed, these ATMs are puzzling appearances in the art material; they remain there with a certain weight and self-sufficiency, just like the movement of capital. However, considering that Chapman’s explicit concern is to represent everyday objects and animals of contemporary Indigenous life,[9] should we not rather ask how exactly these representations unfold her critique, i.e. her judgement, of such life?
The fact that the Biennale allows us to contemplate different Chapman ATMs, distinct iterations of the same concept, means that there is also the possibility of having a more complex experience of time—that is, a better understanding of the change in the artist’s subjectivity. This at once opens a window to a higher plane of aesthetics. Now Chapman’s paintings turn out to be not only colourful and abstract, but also ambivalent and inconclusive: her technique and use of colour reveal her hesitation to approach an object that cannot be removed—after all, society cannot simply disappear—but that can certainly be modified, disfigured. Are these ATMs then a critique of capitalism? Perhaps, but it could also be the case that Chapman has selected and included this element of reality in the artistic process in a less-than-programmatic process. This mimetic impulse therefore also acts as an anchor that stabilises Chapman’s abstract inclinations, which we could interpret as the place where her non-identity resides. Moving gracefully between imagination and symbolisation, between autonomy and dependence, Chapman reminds us that abstraction and colour cease to be vehicles of oppression when handled in a self-reflexive manner. The power and resonance of Chapman’s art is enhanced by ensuring its presence in almost all Biennale locations. As an ideal incarnation of the Ten Thousand Suns formula, they are particularly powerful in the vestibule of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where they actually compete with the similarly powerful work of Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih. But as one exits, they raise a further question: how will we paint the disappearance of the material objects of capitalism, such as cash and ATMs, when the mania for the digital lifestyle has become total?
[1] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (eds), Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans), London and New York: Continuum, 2002, p. 5.
[2] VNS Matrix and Virginia Barratt, ‘Interviewed by Bernadette Flynn’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 8(1), 1994, p. 426.
[3] Matrix and Barratt, ‘Interviewed’, p. 422.
[4] See Matrix and Barratt, ‘Interviewed’, p. 421.
[5] Alice Armstrong, ‘“Sakawa” Rumours: Occult Internet Fraud and Ghanaian Identity’, in Cosmos, Gods and Madmen: Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine, Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch (eds), New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, p. 68.
[6] Armstrong, ‘“Sakawa” Rumours’, p. 69.
[7] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 164.
[8] Timothy Erik Ström, ‘Los Alamos to Neuralink’, Arena Quarterly, 17, 2024, pp 60–71.
[9] This narrative is written on the labels of Chapman’ paintings included in the Biennale, in a slightly different way for each venue.