Runway x BLINDSIDE: Francis Carmody, The Magician’s Apprentice

The third Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from BLINDSIDE, situated on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

BLINDSIDE asked writer Anador Walsh to respond to Francis Carmody’s exhibition Gateway (BLINDSIDE, 17 Mar – 3 Apr 2021).

I compulsively buy books at the best of times, but during the 112 days of Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown I really developed a problem. The perfect storm of social isolation, a sudden increase in expendable income and being oversaturated with algorithmic digital marketing meant that at one stage at least two packages of books were arriving at my apartment every week. Border Thinking, three Mark Fisher books, Funny Weather, Performance Works, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Yvonne Rainer Work 1961–73 and every book Rachel Cusk has ever written. The list goes on and on.

Throughout this period, Australia Post was constantly sending me notifications telling me that they were experiencing significant delays due to their being inundated with mail. I was in such a frenzy to buy and consume knowledge or perhaps, if I’m being more honest, to distract myself from the realities of the pandemic, that I never stopped to think about the broader implications of this. That is, until I read in December that Jeff Bezos’ net worth grew by 90.1 billion US dollars in 2020, as a result of an astronomical increase in Amazon sales. 

In Fish Story, Allan Sekula writes: 

On the other side of Melbourne, also in lockdown, Francis Carmody was seeing reports claiming Australia Post had never experienced this level of busyness before and, being a big Sekula fan, was looking at applying a similar logic to this system of transportation. Carmody began thinking, if the postal service is busier than ever, surely that must mean there’s also been a spike in border seizures of contraband being sent by mail? Gateway, Carmody’s current solo exhibition at BLINDSIDE, Melbourne, is the result of pulling at this thread of inquiry.

There are three distinct deceptions at play in Gateway, each presented in a different degree of formal resolution. On the gallery’s left wall is the exhibition’s most resolved work: A Marked Deck(2021), a framed lithographic print depicting a deck of 52 blue marked cards. Running along the gallery’s right wall and around the corner is the phrase ‘Of course I’m happy with my trade’, rendered in three dimensions in aluminium. This work, Dazzle Camouflage, Of course I’m happy with my Trade (2021), is coated in fabric that is patterned with dazzle camouflage. Dazzle camouflage is the frenetic black and white patterning the British Navy employed during World War One, in their attempt to hide their ships from German U-Boat gunners.

In the centre of the gallery, installed on the floor and ascending in scale, is a series of foundobjects that constitute this exhibition’s least formal but most significant element. These works bear media-inspired, sensational titles: Joint Agency investigation drug haul (2021), Fish smugglers schooled (2021) and Chinese Cigarette & Tobacco smuggling operation snubbed out(2021), and are the detritus of attempts to smuggle contraband into the country by way of Australia Post. Joint Agency investigation drug haul is made up of 24 hollowed out bars of Imperial Leather soap; Fish smugglers schooled is an empty suitcase that at one stage housed a small school of fish, and Chinese Cigarette & Tobacco smuggling operation snubbed out is a car seat with several of its foam components (and presumably many cigarettes) removed. Carmody attained these objects as, due to their being sent alone via post and not in the presence of a human mule, they were unable to be used as evidence in the prosecution of any legal case.

These works and all of their companion pieces (including a very shoddily hollowed out safe), initially present themselves as readymades that point to the third and final of Carmody’s Gateway deceptions — the layered systems of obfuscation employed by people in their attempt to smuggle contraband from point A to point B without detection or ramification. Whilst the gallery may be filled with soap, suitcases, car seats and safes, these items act as stand ins for the processes that have been used to convert these objects into illicit Trojan horses.

I am always somewhat trepidatious of work that falls under the category of ‘readymade’. There is an established tradition of readymade art in Melbourne, that, more often than not, I find to be elitist. It is my position that these readymades tend to constitute and bolster the kind of intellectual privilege that automatically excludes anyone who didn’t go to art school or take more than one subject of art history during their BA. I find myself asking of these works: what is the impetus behind making art that is by its very nature inaccessible? But during a conversation that begins with our mutual love of Lisa Radford and ends with the movie 28 Days Later (a conversation I feel I should note has informed the bulk of this article), I began to realise that in my apprehension, I had nearly missed the brilliance at work in Carmody’s Gateway.

Exhibited within the same context as the more formally resolved A Marked Deck and Dazzle Camouflage, Of course I’m happy with my Trade, the found objects in Joint Agency investigation drug haul, Fish smugglers schooled and Chinese Cigarette & Tobacco smuggling operation snubbed out are less understandable as readymades than they are akin to Joshua Simon’s idea of the ‘unreadymade’. Simon asserts that ‘by focusing on display rather than discourse’, unreadymades are ‘commodities that are actualized through display’[2]. Carmody makes this clear when he tells me that what is exhibited is equally as important as the administrative process involved in acquiring these objects:

At its crux, Gateway is an exhibition about systems: the systems of deception used to disguise objects or distribute contraband by mail, the systems used to detect this misdirection, and the systems employed by artists, in this case Carmody, to create and communicate meaning using the gallery system as a framing device. Gateway goes to show what can happen when you tug hard enough at a thread of inquiry, and that nothing should ever just be taken at face value.   

Gateway ran from 17 Mar - 3 April 2021 at BLINDSIDE, Melbourne.