Set Piece for Any Ideology

An Account

In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. By 1983, the Indonesian military had killed tens of thousands of East Timorese who had resisted the Indonesian occupation.

Early 1983, John Reid conceived of a performance work titled, Set Piece for Any Ideology, as part of a School of Art Staff Exhibition to be held later in the year in the Canberra School of Art Gallery. The work would involve the discharge of a firearm into the gallery wall. This prospect was canvassed with the School of Art Gallery Director who subsequently refused to sanction such an action. John Reid then informed the Gallery Director that he would submit another artwork for the exhibition.

May 1983, Reid submitted Set Piece for Any Ideology to the Canberra School of Art Staff Exhibition ostensibly consisting simply of card glued to a wooden structure bolted to the wall and looking like the back of a stage set. The card and wooden structure was in fact only the back part of Set Piece for Any Ideology. The area of Gallery brick wall delineated by the card was the front part of the work which could be viewed from the Galley Courtyard.

May 6, 3.45 am 1983, (the day the Staff Exhibition opened), John Reid, standing in the courtyard, completed the work by discharging 11 rounds from a rifle into the bricks so prescribed. The sound of gun fire in the night was an essential part of the installation/performance and was intended to wake-up slumbering Canberra residents in the near vicinity.

May 6, 9.00 am 1983, Reid had informed the Gallery Director that he had discharged rounds from a rifle into the gallery wall as a performance component of Set Piece for Any Ideology.

May 6, 9.30 am 1983, the Australian Federal Police, acting on public reports of gunfire, approached the Gallery Director for any information he might have about the incident. Gallery Director told the police that John Reid was responsible of the action and it was undertaken as a part of an artwork for the Staff Exhibition due to open in the Gallery that evening.  

The Special Branch of the Federal Police arrived next. They were everywhere, some in white coats and gloves picking up my spent rounds with tweezers. The scale of this response was related to the fact that the Federal Minister for Education, Senator Susan Ryan, was scheduled to open the Staff Exhibition that evening.

The Director of the School summoned John Reid to his office to announce, in the presence of a lawyer from his tertiary education union, that he was suspended from my academic duties at least until the outcome of the police investigation was known.

Matters were proceeding according to plan. In the 1980s, when your subject matter is too important for the slow grind of gallery discourse, the recourse for artists to summon public attention was to attract the mass media by breaking, or flirting with, the law.

John Reid expected that he would be charged with a breach of the law which would lead to an appearance in a magistrate’s court and the attention of court reporters for newspapers. “Why”, he would argue, “is there a fuss over my shooting-up a brick wall while, out of earshot, thousands of our neighbours in East Timor were being murdered”!

Unfortunately, the Federal Police could not bring a charge against him. He could not be charged for discharging a firearm in a public place as the Gallery courtyard was deemed to be private. He could not be charged for disturbing the peace as no one had complained to the police as distinct from informing them. He could not be charged for damage to Commonwealth property as there was no difference between making holes in a gallery wall to present a work for exhibition be it with a drill or a gun.

Set Piece of Any Ideology was a failure, but it’s not too late – now, all one needs to do is post to teir website.

Performance for 25 Passing Vehicles

Plumwood Mountain. An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.

Volume 1 Number 1 2014. https://plumwoodmountain.com/spotlight-road-kill/

During the university teaching breaks in the winters of 1986-88, I undertook fieldwork in the Strzelecki Desert in South Australia just beyond the corner it shares with New South Wales and Queensland. I potted around in a Volkswagen beetle; its wings clipped to duck under trees and to scurry over sand. It was the means by which I positioned my large format camera and cumbersome tripod. The first trip followed extensive rainfall. The Corner Country had responded with surprising displays of plant and animal life. The other two trips were during successively drier periods and as a consequence kangaroos in particular were drawn to feed from the stock-free strips of land that framed the highways leading to my field location. I noticea significant increase in macropod road kills. It weighed on my mind – a common prerequisite for consideration as subject matter for fine art.

In 1989 I was in the same territory as in the years before, this time with my family travelling in a sixties Valiant Safari station wagon. In its day it was an automotive sensation propelled by a trusty ‘slant-six’ motor. Country mechanics would appear from the dark of their garage pits and pat its bonnet in the sunshine. Fellow Aboriginal travellers would wave from a distance thinking we must be kin. One of my resolutions for this trip was to act artistically on the road kill theme.

My plan was to lie down somewhere in the course of the journey in empathy with, and next to, a kangaroo that had been killed on the road, in all probability, by a heavily loaded truck pushing the speed limit at night. With such momentum (mass x velocity), avoidance procedures at the moment of crisis were out of the question. Time to exercise my intention had all but expired. I had done nothing more than nurture the generic idea and we were heading south with a lust for home.

Last day, 50 kilometres from Dubbo on the Newell Highway, the kangaroo appeared. It was much like any other poor creature that had been knocked to death by a moving vehicle. It was the tableau that struck me. The kangaroo was lying at one end of a road sign that, given my preoccupation, appeared as a crude beam balance – the one used to mete out justice. Although I did not realise it at the time the road sign was mounted upside down. A rare mistake but it was essential for the construction of my concept. Twinning above the fulcrum were more signs to Parkes (‘A well healed town’, I thought, ‘landed gentry’) and to Dubbo (thinking ‘More bare foot; the dispossessed are rallying’). The kangaroo was at the appropriate end of the sign. The inclusion of a privileged, lily-white body like mine at the other end of the beam would complete the pictorial script.

Processing these thoughts took place over a distance of about 4 kilometres. Add a few more to consolidate the work as a performance involving a temporal span to be measured by passing vehicles. The drivers and their passengers would be my primary viewers. I would photographically document the work. A few more kilometres, please, to deal with my reluctance to slow down, stop, step out side into a cold and wet day, take off my clothes and lie down on the side of a highway. This reticence was overcome with the help of a physiological test. It kicks in automatically at the thought of doing a performance artwork. Has my pulse rate quickened? Have I begun to sweat? Are there butterflies in my stomach? Accepting of impromptu variations to travel schedules, my family was easily persuaded that we should turn around and drive back to the sign.

I decided on 25 passing vehicles as the definitive number before I took my position for the work. Had I postponed the decision to some point during its execution it would have been much less. Most of the vehicles were trucks roaring past incapable of responding, I suspect, to a fleeting prospect of crisis. Not one stopped or varied speed - a testament I think to the ease at which we can differentiate between art and life. My body displayed no external signs of trauma. It was aesthetically composed.

For me, the work addresses our high-energy, high-speed careless life style and reasserts the proposition that our fate is bound to the fate of other life around us. The photographic documentation of Performance for 25 Passing Vehicles has had its moment of fame as the hottest selling postcard from the Dubbo Regional Gallery (where the original print resides). Subject to the messages of my own work, each time I see a reproduction of this image I renew my commitment to a night-time curfew for driving in wildlife territory. Despite this I am guilty of killing animals in the course of my personal transportation. I need a new ethical testament on this important matter.

Asian Ice

ANU Open Day 1994

Australian National University School of Art Gallery Courtyard

Below See photo documentation of: ice acquisition; construction of ice wall; performance (duration 20 minutes); and installation (several days).

All photographs are screenshots taken from a VHS video documentation of preparatory processes and the performance

(30 June 2022)