Rhonda Lieberman’s 1992 essay ‘The Loser Thing’ identified themes defined by abjection in American art, but Jeff Gibson is credited with first coopting the word grunge from the music world and applying it in an art context. In his article Avant-Grunge Gibson makes this connection early, providing convenient access to a readymade suite of subcultural elementals. From juvenilia to drug use, from punk to grunge. This is how it came to be identified as something new in Australian art. Specifically in Sydney, Grunge was an art practice that leveraged both abjection and formlessness to create a baseline ambiguity from which new ideas can emerge. Using cheap, found, or degraded materials, it represented a very specific mode of working. “Grunge art is a post-taste tangent of post-pop art, rejecting the slick simulations of image based pop with ironic and iconic displacements of social and domestic culture”. The moniker of “grunge” is disputed to this day amongst many of the artists to which it was applied. Ownership of the abject then, in life as in art, renounced and denied, with almost every artist involved distancing themselves from the term.
Rad Scunge, Shirthead, and Monster Field, where exhibitions were heralded as the artist-led strategy against bureaucratic and non-practicing theoreticians. This was a return to the body, away from the mind and the high intellectualism of the 80s “[G]runge, in the context of art, is as much a celebration of disobedience as it is a registration in the master archives of high culture.” This was inner-city arte povera receiving the same art-world propriety as any other before it.
As a new millennium approached, the stakes were high, artists everywhere threshing out some kind of fin de siècle. And while using refuse as a gesture of refusal was certainly not new, using this to explore and encapsulate the demise of modernism, post-modernism, language, and even taste, certainly was. For that matter these powerful reductive concepts of anti-aesthetic seemed to problematise the entire notion of culture, past or present. The anti-aesthetic of grunge was primarily engaging with two previously established ideas: the abject and the formless. Philosopher Georges Bataille’s provides the transgressive notion of the “informe”, formless, and carrying on with this Julia Kristeva with the abject.
The formless is by nature difficult to conceive let alone describe, and this provides an ideal conceptual framework for artists with categorical evasion in mind. Bataille wrote about the l’informe (formless) in the surrealist journal Documents in 1929. Bataille’s l’informe in the context of art practice is reductive in the destruction and degradation of any categories, anything, or any “matter”, that may provide definition or distinction of form. It was to take a thing and raze it to its essence, and it was in this state of debasement that Bataille saw a base materialism for creative potential. Art was potentially a prime candidate for such action in its cultural role as sacrosanct, and by applying formlessness in art we can open up a connection with things we don’t understand and most importantly, things that escape images and representation. To challenge settled meanings, values, structures of thinking and ultimately the question; can it be imaged at all?
Critic Harold Rosenberg attempted to conceptualise some art of the 1960s under the term “de-aestheticisation”, but it was Julia Kristeva who was first to put forward the notion of the abject. “A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing […] On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safe-guards. The primers of my culture.” The abject marks the limit of our subjectivity. The abject is what must be refused for a subject to properly establish a sense of self. Yet in the abject lies a promise, a primordial state where further reduction looses meaning, where one opens up new worlds of possibility and creative potential.
De-aestheticised art allowed the sociology surrounding art to overtly influence the creative act. For Rosenberg, de-aesthetic art was “the latest of the avant-garde movements, and is presently engaged in permeating and taking over leadership in the situation it symbolically denounces.” Jeff Gibson also predicted the eventual acceptance of grunge, writing: “And so, just as museums of Europe must now be littered with Neo-Expressionist ‘monstrosities’, so too might there be in ten years’ time a little patch of Grunge, fouling up the air in the back lots of public collections across Australia.”
Mikala Dwyer’s Untitled (1992–1994) is now part of the MCA collection and is still on display today. The work brings blankets and sheets, adhesive bandages, things that are usually used in close proximity to the body. Also gelatine, and everyday liquids such as Surf wash powder, Pine O Clean, Fluffy, Homebrand Multi Purpose Cleaner, and Windex. “I try to make it as fluid as possible. So that the edges of things get quite porous … you’re not quite sure where you begin and it ends.” if you’ve ever peeled off a bandaid or washed soiled bedding you already have an intimate relationship with what you are seeing. Wooden beams are coddled in blankets. A bed pan bandaged up. The silhouette of Peter Rabbit repeated on the wall. We are not sure if this is a childhood memory or a parental one. If it was the former all the bruises, scrapes, and excrement. If it was the latter, the edges even more porous, our children. Potentially our most abject products of all, also our most vulnerable and precious.
Hany Armanious. The “grunge king” who curated Shirthead and also exhibited across all of the Sydney shows which received the “grunge” label. Armanious went on to represent Australia in the 2011 Venice Biennale. His works often use the process of casting to draw attention to division between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’. Armanious is also known to take banal or worthless objects and replicating them with maddening detail, drawing in notions of transformation and value, both in the materials used and of the artistic labour itself. Take ‘Still Life’ (2013). This seemingly innocuous piece of cheap composite wood complete with pencil lines drawn in for some kind of component that has been cut out. But it is not a piece of MDF. This is a casting in polyurethane resin and finished with corrosion resistant white bronze. To create a truly formless work is of course impossible, but the formless is conjured twice. First, by replacing the original object with exotic materials, the “true” object is rendered beyond form. Secondly, the original piece of scrap wood itself has a piece cut out of it. Finally, as with other works by Armanious, we can imagine that the original piece of wood was found cast off as refuse. An abject off-cut discarded to create a subject that will now always lie beyond our understanding. Hany, like Mikala, join the chorus in the now decade-long rejection of the term “grunge”.
Should this aversion that artists have towards the word “grunge” be respected? An outsider word borrowed from a different cultural category and class, it is easy to understand why this might poorly align with the intentions and lived experience of the artists themselves. To complicate things further, not only is there is a heavy sense of irony in these works but these modes were both born from and seek to make irony of the very structures surrounding art. The problem of criticising any new art during its development is that you are either waiting for it to play out in an equally ironic way, or you are contributing directly to the movement putting your own reputation on the line. The fact that theoreticians continue with their attempts to bundle this particular experience using a word at odds with the artists seems all too neat in its reenactment of the bookending of artistic events that created the opportunity for artists in the first place. In this scenario the pessimism, cynicism, and resignation are legitimised and this is perhaps why these modes of working have never really gone away and are still observed in contemporary art. Abjection and formlessness in particular keep proving themselves valuable in the ongoing play between making art into subject and the extraordinary horror of our ordinary lives.
