How to Build a Universe located itself at the Meat Market — appropriate for an exhibition somewhat reflecting on space. For those unaware, the Meat Market is a stereotypically loveable Melbs venue: grungy, heritage-listed and, as its name suggests, an old centre of the meat trade. It’s all clean now, and based in North Melbourne – a convenient suburb less visited than neighbouring Collingwood, Fitzroy, Brunswick – it hasn’t lost its appeal. It’s cool, voluminous, and peculiar charm fits for a sensorily satisfying exhibition experience. Unfortunately, my visit collided with the first day of lockdown no. 5. Fortunately, curator Eliza Coyle had a virtual tour on file to help me inhabit the space, as the affair between isolation and virtual engagement becomes the Victorian norm.
Street-side, the a-frame with the title How to Build a Universe reads like an existential WikiHow article. After you invite yourself inside, the exhibition introduces itself as anything but instructional. The dark, spacious rooms are eery, with the spaced-out, spotlit, mostly monochrome artworks protruding an ominous non-reality.
Such a feeling isn’t misplaced. How to Build a Universe sits at the borderlands between the assumed and the indefinite. Its premise speaks to deconstructing the museum ‘universe’ model, which emerged from sixteenth-century Europe and perpetually lived on in cultural institutions. The ‘universe’ uses the museum as epitomising and holding under its helm all (or the best of) ‘world culture’ through collecting (often stolen) cultural goods. In her catalogue essay, Coyle celebrates the curators who have challenged this colonist vision in recent years. In her exhibition, however, she circles back to pull it apart.
How to Build a Universe endeavours to investigate the supposed authority (usually of Western perspective) of the ‘universe’ through creative interventions. To collude between the objective (science) and the invented (art), the exhibition presents four artists: Hannah Toohey, Jacqueline Felstead, Daniella Ruffino, and Chaohui Xie. Collectively, they tackle nationhood, citizenship, the underclass, and the climate crisis, but not toward a definite conclusion. Rather, they inch toward an incomplete picture.
Coyle rationalises, “Through their works and experimentation, we can adopt multiple perspectives as if we’re looking in at the world through a microcosm of different, speculative lenses.”
I’ll take a moment here to explore some history for non-museology people and break down some of How to Build a Universe’s theory. Museums have existed since at least classical times, but the form closest to their existence today emerged during the Renaissance. The elite (your princes and landlords et al.) looked across the sea in “quest for dominion over nature and their fellow man” (Peter Vergo, 1989). Dominion was the key to understanding the world and achieved through looting sold as expeditions to amass a considerable amount of objects (from art to bones) housed as Cabinets of Curiosities (google it, some are wacky asf).
Contemporary museums have inherited past habits, including placing value on forensic items to tell a holistic story of nature and humankind. This isn’t a hot take either. A museum as defined even now by Encyclopedia Britannica is an “institution dedicated to preserving and interpreting the primary tangible evidence of humankind and the environment.” Oof, what an absolute notion.
In How to Build a Universe, Chaohui Xie counters this museological self-assuredness, positing that one cannot see the foundation of culture. Using coins collected from the NGV fountain (if you know, you know), she argues toward a “perpetual state of chaos” of cultures lost, devalued, and dislocated. Similarly, in her installation Obliterate Ourselves (2021), she convolutes world borders. They tangle densely on the translucent perspex. She says, “The whole universe is called chaos… mankind fights to the death.”
Yet, cultural institutions still take themselves seriously in presenting the crème le crème of a universe not in shambles. I think of traditional Australian museums with their overtly educational static, permanent displays (I swear I’ve memorised the insides of the Museum of South Australia from school field trips past) or state galleries (the NGVs and MOCAs) convoluting the creativity of art and impartiality of science into a solemn mass that’s just as dictatorially single visioned.
Contrarily, and for the sake of a case study from my perspective, artist-run galleries (in Melbourne, where I live and know the art world a little bit) don’t fixate so much. They’re dynamic, almost emotional and neurotic, with experimental uncollected art responding to our surroundings rather than reinforcing a dominant worldview. These organisations are subject to their problematic past and presents too, but perhaps with less crust to crack off than the traditional museum’s regiment. Maybe the space between the dichotomies How to Build a Universe explores is the intuition of knowing when to let go, and when to hold on.
“I am interested in how we can wind back,” says Danielle Ruffino, as quoted in the exhibition catalogue. The artist sensitively enquires into humankind’s relationships with resources. Rejecting the crudeness of concrete mined from the earth, she labours to reuse by heating discarded oyster shells into a makeshift cement. The resulting Endless/ Column appears as an ancient Grecian ruin yet unabashedly looks forward: the antiquated is revived, the discarded is the future, the universe defies shelf life, betraying the depleting finite to extend forevermore.
Instinctually, I’d turn to an ARI over a museum clinging to the universe model (in its most traditional sense) to intellectually stimulate myself as I seek to relieve my hurting heart beholden to the dying world as Ruffino so melancholically explores in her art. Perhaps, I might walk out more confused with art’s loose ends and abstract messaging compared to the absolution offered by the forthcoming museum exhibit. But, interestingly, I am still reaching out to a cultural institution to reckon with the universe, even if the chosen creative path feels muddled.
Jacqueline Felstead’s Falling Forms (Love without a receiver) nods to such visceral navigations to knowing, and deflects the stoicism of science. The artist uses 3D photogrammetric surveying of BANNF’s mountains to chart the landscape’s “emotional, rather than quantifiable” formations. As hung in How to Build a Universe, the shapes on her prints float as suspended forms rather than conquerable territories. Felstead’s lands are opaque, fleeting, emotional – they cannot be held.
The ‘universe’ model is controlled, almost suffocating, in its imperialist overtones, concerned with straight-speaking empiricism. How to Build a Universe tugs at this impetus, asking how to materialise plural perspectives outside the strict dichotomy between art and science, between the replication and the organic, in cultural spaces.
The work of Hannah Toohey seems to grow and pester outside the categorisable neat. Progeny, the first encountered object in the space, looks like it is growing on the wall like black mould, alive and festering. At the same time, it seems soft and playful; the faux fur has a tactile celebratory quality, like party decor. This wild childlike trait is also present in Toohey’s Scuttle, a collection of over 500 hand-sewn tiny creatures, identical and plentiful, arranged on the ground. It’s like they are about to climb your body en masse. You’re not sure if they will tickle or kill.
Both spirited yet threatening, these two works speak to the world at large: population increase, suburban crawl, environmental crisis, mass consumption. Inherently, too, they reference typical museum objects: Scuttle of taxidermy, Progeny of fauna. But they are not real — they’re replicas — but, maybe, Toohey enables them to speak more movingly (both physically and symbolically) than objective analysis in contemplating the world’s unfolding narrative.
How to Build a Universe, to me, almost looks archaeological: the sprawled objects to be personally discovered and interpreted like bones and fragments, rather than sold to audiences as a proud whole. The exhibition posits: it’s futile to reach for an objective collection of an intricate world and, instead, personal responses, self-aware of their subjective nature even if they draw from scientific method, can build our knowledge of the world. Creativity destabilises information.
“The modern art museum… can be described as a struggle between revolution and preservation, participation and protection, experimentation and isolation.” – Christoph Grunenberg, Contemporary Cultures of Display.
There’s much to say on this topic. A lot has already been said that I am messily parroting. My brain feels foggy and unanalytical after two years of lockdowns. It’s hard to think of global ideas when inside Australia’s isolationist stratagem. But with this imprecise thinking, I can question my way there, I hope.
The way I see it: the museum is an centralised cultural space with an authorial roof, bound by histories and housing vessels meant to speak to all. Where, or whom, did they come from? Should they talk with such demand? Who is speaking through them? In a single locale, you can’t let a single narrative emerge with the clout of omnipresent perspective. You can’t build a universe through one voice.
Can art, and the diverse ideas it forms, diverge from this strictness to view the world through duplexity, with no aim toward a conclusion? Does this exhibition suggest a space in-between, where some science is clung to but reimagined? How to Build a Universe probes at the museum’s idea of knowing, working to re-rectify science as a baseline for knowledge within museology toward a universal framework much more worth contemplating.
How to Build a Universe Catalogue – read here
Meat Market Stables 8 – 17 July 2021
Artists | Hannah Toohey, Jacqueline Felstead, Daniella Ruffino, and Chaohui Xie
How to Build a Universe was supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program
Exhibition reflection written by Tahney Fosdike
Photography by Christian Capurro
Exhibition essay: How to Build a Universe (Meat Market).