I made this super 8 film to submit as my art history thesis at undergrad art college in 1988. For the accompanying end of year graduate exhibition, I framed the conversation fragments seen in the super 8 and arrayed them on the wall.
For the first two years at art college I caught the number 16 tram from St Kilda there and back, dedicating the time on board to practising my drawing. After filling umpteen sketch books and developing a quick and accurate hand, one bleak morning I realised the drawings—often beautiful—didn’t grab me.
The conversations I overheard, however, increasingly did. Not necessarily their content, as the private ins and outs of a stranger’s life delivers little bearing. What instead caught me was the way two people supposedly conversing while sitting crammed next to each other would appear to be in entirely separate rooms, separate spaces, describing different things—all under the guise of discussing the same thing in conversation.
Although the two in conversation shared the same physical space, their thoughts’ separate errands kept them from sharing any space.
Repeatedly, neither participant would be transported into the other’s concerns. Neither would ponder the other’s worries. Neither would follow the other’s ‘he did this then she did that, and, do you believe, well, I told her’, while shoulder to shoulder, staring off into the same distance awaiting their tram journey’s end.
In having invested all my time, money, hope, devotion and dreams learning to make sculpture—an object at the symbolic centre of a 360° spatial viewing circle—how might I learn to combat the simple disregard of the very space we share in which sculpture takes place?
No wonder few were interested in art, I thought, let alone a sculpture that stands shoulder to shoulder with a viewer in the same space replete with egalitarian notions of figuring real, not pictorial, space.
It is with this—the overheard conversations and their manner—that I then began to draw and fill my sketch books that final year before graduating and from which the super 8 film ‘sculpture: a conversation’, 1988, grew.
Gail Hastings
July 2020
“And what I haven’t told you.”
Three stills from the super 8 film by Gail Hastings
Sculpture: A Conversation, mid-1988
Photos in the film: Gail Hastings
Hands: Thanks Kate Daw, Michael Collins and Megan Lee
Voiceover: Thanks Eliza Bram
space Tendency: cups & conversation
A tête-à-tête chair—otherwise known as a conversational—is at the centre of Room for Love, 1990, seen here in a group exhibition The Pool, 1996, at the Centenary Pool by architect James Birrell built in 1959, Spring Hill, Brisbane.
“The door? Well, it’s not been built yet. The rest of ‘house c’ has, but not the door. They forgot, somehow. Without it, we can’ enter to hang this painting as per our plan. They said they hope to finish it before afternoon teas. That’s at four.”
This is the conversation on looped repeat in each of the three watercolours floorplans in plans exhibited at Heide I in 2003.
If a visitor happened to be looking at the work at four o’clock, they would hear cups rattle on an especially made tea trolly, winding its way up the passageway as Heide staff kindly prepared to serve tea in keeping with the Reeds tradition at this hour and in this house as photographed by Albert Tucker in 1945. The photograph is of Sidney Nolan, Sunday Reed and Joy Hester enjoying a cup of tea in the kitchen. It captures a notion of the mutual recognition and exchange within the shared oasis of a conversation.
Albert Tucker
Arvo Tea: Sidney Nolan, Sunday Reed and Joy Hester 1945
gelatin silver photograph
30.4 x 40.3 cm
Heide Museum of Modern Art
Gift of Barbara Tucker 2001
In division between friends, 1991, in the Australian Perspecta 1991, the work begins with an image in the exhibition catalogue of a table with five settings for friends where we see a ‘petit four’ awaiting each. In the real space of the exhibition, however, the same table reappears, but with the petit fours now devoured and thought residues of the five friends left on the wrappers that detail how each spent their time while sharing a conversation with each other.
A table for tea or coffee cups is a common feature in the watercolour floorplans of a sculptural situation. In sides: red versus blue, 2009, the opposing sides the work are painted red and blue. The accompanying floorplan is of the space in-between with tables, chairs and coffee cups. It is ‘Where an ongoing discussion rages between those who drink coffee all day, on whether it is inevitable or not for red to be on the side that is blue, and for blue to be on the side that is red’.
In reference to the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition held at the Buxton Rooms, Swanston Street Melbourne in 1889 in which the seven artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder, C. Douglas Richardson, R.E. Falls and Herbert Daly painted on 9 x 5 inch cedar cigar box lids that McCubbin supplied — over 300 VCA alumni were given a similarly sized substrate to paint on for the exhibition 9 X 5 NOW Exhibition: ART150 in 2017.
In recognition of art’s introduction of ‘real’ space as the main difference between 1889 and now, I routed a channel of real space into the picture’s substrate to divide its surface into two sides of a conversation in Background: material space, 2017. The gulf of space dividing the painting into two channeled the background space of the room into the background of the two sides of the work’s conversation. One half is, therefore, that of ‘an expected conversation’ while the other half, through the introduction of a real background, is an ‘actual conversation’.
