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The Good Earth - Meredith Rogers
Meredith Rogers reviews CoalFace in RealTime 119. here
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Performance Drawing # 1
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Expressing the Unspeakable, after Tan Ping’s A Line.
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For CoalFace we re-peformed Tan Ping’s line, this time with brown coal from the La Trobe Valley.
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A Line was also a performance of endurance and strength as Tan Ping “drew” it without ever allowing his hand to leave the etching surface. 40 metres can be a long distance– a long distance drawing. And in the final inked drawing/etching the sense of his body moving along the line can be clearly seen and experienced.
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Tan Ping was said to bring together in this one expressive line the 1,000 year old history of Chinese Calligraphy with the more recent history of Western Abstract Art. As we followed the line around the gallery it did have a bewitching effect - full of slight hesitations, quirky deviations and a relentless strength of purpose.
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Tan Ping’s A Line, opened in December 2012 at the National Art Museum of China. The “line” was an etching that stretched around the rotunda gallery for 40 metres.
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Dirty brown coal.
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Screenshot. Beijing video December 2012.
During our month-long residency at The Library Artspace in Melbourne we come face-to-face with coal in a slow and meditative process of looking, listening and waiting to see what unfolds.
Coal is a material that we are most familiar with in its transformed state – pollution. Yet coal is a fascinating, porous and diversiform material, itself transformed from ancient rain forests that covered vast areas of the world, particularly the east coast of Australia.
In December 2012, while on a residency in Beijing we experienced very thick and frightening air pollution, a pea-souper. Overlooking our usual attention to daily weather reports, we fixated on the Air Quality Index or AQI. This little app on our smart phones told us what sort of air to expect each day, and this would determine what we would do, in fact if we would venture outside or not. The AQI swung wildly during the 21 days of our residency from 178 to over 400. At the same time the Melbourne AQI was 14. We discovered that the particulate PM2.5 that we experienced in Beijing was more than likely Australian coal, exported to China.
We gratefully acknowledge Red Gate Gallery Artist Residency in Beijing, December 2012. And La Trobe University for support.
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