Someone coming fresh to et al.’s work—someone, that is, who is unfamiliar with the artists’ exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and its surrounding chatter, someone unaware of the artist’s various personas such as The Estate of L. Budd—is probably struck first by a couple of things. First, the oddity and the frustration of not being able to fall back on the artist’s biography to make some sense of the art (Where do they live? Who are they?). And second, the strangeness of works that feel so fragmentary and ephemeral, as though the artist (The writer? The student? The philosopher? The politician?) has just stood up for a break and left the door to their lair wide open.

Get comfortable. The artist will not come to save us. Even when they speak, it might just make matters worse.

In Auckland recently, p mule, spokesperson of the putative collective et al., made a rare public appearance at Michael Lett Gallery. Many came to hear p mule speak, and yet when they spoke, they mostly asked questions, turning the artworks continually back upon those who were present. (“Study in reflective mechanisms”, some scrawled text from one of the et al. artist’s works from 1995, repeatedly came to mind). Worse, the spokesperson was a most unreliable source: “You should be aware that anything I say might be misinformation,” they warned listeners at the start. Faced with such unstable meanings and nowhere to turn to for the direct source of truth, what should we do?

Susan Sontag famously wrote against the idea of interpreting a work of art at all. As she put it, we still can’t shake the desire to understand what an artwork “means”: ““What X is saying is...,” “What X is trying to say is...,” “What X said is...” etc., etc.” Interpretation, Sontag wrote, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art”. Instead of interpretation, she suggested that we need a way of living comfortably with what we feel about a work of art rather than what we know of it.

These works could be thought of as anti-interpretation devices. Rheumatism Vol. 15, No. 4, Oct. 1959 (Studies in Pain) suggests this. On the cover of a scientific journal (the traditional home of the rational intellect) someone signing themself as Pascal has crossed out the scientific articles and scrawled, “I can’t forgive Descartes” and “Studies in Pain”. This recalls one of the great philosophical battles, a tradition Sontag was drawing on, between the rational interpreting mind (the side of René “I think therefore I am” Descartes, the side of science) and that of felt human experience (the side of Blaise “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” Pascal, the side of Sontag’s vision of art, the side of pain, the side of faith). The person signing as “Pascal” seems to be suggesting we’ve lost something to interpretation and rationality.

But is the artist agreeing with Pascal, or is this a persona? Other times, after all, the artist has seemed to take the side of Descartes. There is ultimately no answer, and no escape valve: we cannot fall back upon the artist as a source of truth, because the artist in their 1 of 2

collectivity and their anonymity (in their non-existence! this is, after all, a purported artist’s estate) only destabilise things further. The artist could be performing, or wilfully misinforming.

We could look to books for answers and maps for direction, but here in this exhibition those sources of information only pose more questions, as is scrawled on their covers:

Is knowledge possible?

Does it yield to the feelings of the body?

Is the condition of the body separate?

L Budd’s works use objects that are tools in the human impulse towards interpreting and understanding the world: here there are books, maps, graphs, charts, scientific journals, projector blinds, filing drawers. These are all technologies that aid the display, control and interpretation of information. In a variety of ways, these artworks undercut and contradict the ways we have been taught to interpret and to understand; yet they know we will try, and sometimes they even tease us for trying, as with books with their spines glued shut and their titles painted over (and yet vestiges of Keats and the Romantics visible on cut out pages!): Potential Existence, Veiled Thought Form 1. Attempts at interpretation push back against us. Are these “forms” merely school years, the annotations of a precocious student, or are these Platonic forms? Is “Potential Existence” a reference to Aristotle’s metaphysics or merely a stock statement of education's possibilities? We are forced to move back and forth between the lofty, the banal and the humorous. It is discomfiting to have our usual means of interpretation and pattern recognition made fruitless, with only these floating, abstracted thoughts to hold onto.

On the large projector blind there are three graphs. “Cell mean social field” reads the vertical axis; “Active” reads the horizontal, with Low, Low to Medium, Medium to High and High to (Super?) High as the (terrifyingly imprecise, lost-in-bureaucracy) units of measurement. How to interpret such a chart; what information does it give us? In the upper right there is a poem, sincere like an undergraduate’s notebook and ironic like Hera Lindsay Bird (apparently the “poem” was generated using an early online chat with certain inputs by the artist). In the lower right is scrawled: “but such truths / do not talk, / they have no voice, / still loss do they / sing but still / they are / true.” There appears to be more information hidden under the Guston-like fleshy pink paint on the blind, inaccessible. Colour chart cards (“Marshmallow Pink”) are pasted upon it, giving us the most meaningless information. Perhaps we are in a boardroom, a consultant’s office or a government bunker; maybe a student dorm.

I said these artworks are a kind of anti-interpretation device: they are also anti-dogma, anti-certainty, anti-fixity. They demonstrate ways of knowing (books, maps etc.) but force us to question how we know what we know (interpretation or feeling?). Everything is pushed back towards us, ways of knowing continually questioned and certainties challenged. (One work, not here but displayed last year at Hamish McKay, quoted Descartes: “I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.”) This classroom-boardroom-archive-bunker shows us a world beyond binaries, beyond Good and Evil, beyond Either/Or, beyond either interpreting or feeling. It’s a terrifying place to be, and a relief.

Any questions?

Michael Moore-Jones