Photography and sculpture commingle in Hazewinkel’s research-rich practice, through which he characteristically teases out tensions between damaged ancient figurative sculpture and our own ephemeral bodies. More broadly Hazewinkel’s practice investigates relationships between ancient objects and contemporary societies via museums, collections, collecting practices and modes of presentation. The visual narratives that unfold from his works illuminate the contemporary life of ancient objects and the roles played by the very materiality of things in individual and collective remembering. It is tempting to consider Hazewinkel’s pursuit transhistorical; if so, it is important to appreciate that he is less interested in grand sweeping historical narratives,rather more intimate, disruptive, minor histories that, as the historian George Didi-Huberman suggests, can evade capture within dominant recording of the past and be considered forces of resistance that open up new perspectives on history. To accord with the concept of transhistoricism one must first acknowledge and accept limits, boundaries, fixed definitions and, in the context of recorded history – periods. Hazewinkel is less concerned with such states, rather in the generative potentials created by oscillating, rhythmic traversals of the overlaps that exist between them. While frequently turning to the archaeological record for his points of departure, he reminds us that the word period derives from the Greek periodos meaning a circular path.
Sumer is pleased to present selected elements from two of Hazewinkel’s most recent projects: Journeys in the Lifeworld of Stones (Displacements I-X) (2020), and The Ongoing Remains (3 Parts) (2019) – a major work originally commissioned by the Art Gallery Of New South Wales (curator Isobel Parker Philip) for The National 2019: New Australian Art.
The Ongoing Remains (3 Parts)
The Ongoing Remains was an ambitious materially-diverse multi-site installation project comprising sculptural, photographic and video components installed at various locations throughout the AGNSW.
The sculptural component, Part 1: The Emissaries: Keepers of our Stories, comprised of 26 individually cast figures on bespoke fine-steel bases installed at two interconnected sites. A congress of 15 figures was installed in the marble and granite (neo-classical) entry vestibule, which opened onto the glass and concrete (modernist) Grand Court where another 11 figures were installed. The two groups of figures preceded the project’s moving image component, Part 2: Withness: A Haunting, which was installed within the gallery's Old Courts where it was contextualised by the gallery’s 19th century sculpture collection. The photographic component, Part 3: Continuum: The Persistence of Being, a digital Type C photograph in a handcrafted brass frame, was installed on Lower Level Two where it functioned as a kind of conclusive punctuation to the exhibition being the final artwork experienced by visitors to the exhibition.
For Melbourne Art Fair Viewing Rooms we present two of the 26 figures from Part 1: The Emissaries: Keepers of our Stories. Alert to the histories of sculptural production, in creating these figures Hazewinkel employed a deliberately imprecise casting process. Deploying a strategy of intentional misalignment he interchanged the component parts of a number of moulds taken from the same subject. In doing so he produced variant moulds for each pour, which were then subjected to localised external pressures. The intention was not to reproduce identical copies, rather related individuals, characterised by degrees of effect upon shared fault lines and the experience of mutual ruptures. Referencing an earlier history, the original source of these figures is the 1432 sculptural portrait of Niccolò da Uzanno attributed to the Renaissance master Donatello. Their story, however, is more layered. The sculptural typology of the portrait bust (like most forms of portraiture) launches an almost irrepressible desire to know the identity of the sitter. Donatello’s portrait bust however has come to inhabit the world (and history) in a very different way. The original terracotta portrait has been faithfully cast and recast, in blinding white plaster, thousands of times. Casts of the original can be found in cast galleries and traditional drawing schools world over, where generations of art students have spent hour upon hour learning to render yet another faithful likeness. In this way, over time, the identity of the sitter has slowly been bled out. This is where Hazewinkel steps in. In an opportunity-shop in Sydney the artist uncovered a numbered copy (#134) of an earlier copy of the original. Commissioned by the Sydney Board of Technical Education in 1885 it that had been cast, by a Mr. A Murray, for the Bathurst School of Arts. At first Hazewinkel thought he had uncovered a copy of a Roman portrait, and reviewing his mind-files he sought to place the figure. Soon the figure’s true art historical identity was established. There is good reason however for Hazewinkel’s initial misidentification in that a sculptural antecedent to Donatello’s original exists. It is well documented that being active in the antiquity-crazed Renaissance, Donatello maintained a fascination with early Roman portraits, which were among the first to present their subjects to the world warts and all.
The photographic triptych Part 3: Continuum: The Persistence of Being, also presented in this Viewing Room, is an artefact of the creation of the project’s moving image component Part 2: Withness: A Haunting. To create the almost hour-long single channel video work Hazewinkel made a simple mechanism on which he ground away – into swirling white clouds of plaster dust – an earlier edition of the figures. The remnant fragments of that process then became his subject for yet another classical approach to portraiture in which individual identity is not at issue.
In her catalogue essay Black box logic, Parker Philip refers to “delayed devastation and the face-off between resilience and wreckage”, going on to describe Part 1: The Emissaries: Keepers of our Stories in the following.
“Hard and soft, fragile and invulnerable, Hazewinkel’s work treads the same line. A series of identical busts of a Western European male becomes a constellation of patrician authority in the AGNSW’s Entrance Court. As you approach each figure, you realise their faces have been ruptured by fault lines, their aquiline noses out of joint. And then the busts are fractured even further. These stoic masculine statues, we discover, are not impervious to erosion.” [1]
An undercurrent of violence courses through Hazewinkel’s practice, it manifests (sometimes invisibly) as a blend of Mythic, Symbolic, Systemic and Slow forms of violence. This is set against a backdrop of desire, carnality, the sensuous seduction of materialities.
Journeys In The Lifeworld of Stones (Displacements I-X)
The two large photographic works presented here are from a recently completed suite of 10 photographs, Journey’s in the Lifeworld of Stones (Displacements I – X) (2020).[2] Each photograph comprises three photographic images captured in Rome, New York and Greece. In the lower right margin of each work we see a digitised reproduction of an early 20th century glass plate negative sourced from a photographic archive in Rome. The archive consists principally of late 19th and early 20th century photographs of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture generated to support their acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each archival image is paired with a larger central image of the same subject, captured by Hazewinkel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where the objects are currently held. Each historically interwoven coupling is contextualised within an epic landscape, sweeping seascape or atmospheric condition captured at various sites throughout Greece. Each of these large seductive photographic compositions map the market-driven global movement of their ancient material subjects, from find site to display site; highlighting the very human dimension of questions concerning ownership and cultural legitimacy. In doing so they conflate source and destination, they trace desire, not in a linear fashion but though seductive loops and circlings of the senses.
[1] Parker Philip, Isobel. Black Box Logic in The National 2019 New Australian Art. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019.
[2] The artist expresses appreciation to the Australia Council for the Arts for their support during the development of this project through Studio Residencies in Rome and New York.
