Peter Kennedy
Poetics, politics & a silent music
Interviewed by Anne Marsh

(1) Postmodernism and Politics
(2) Poetry and Silent Music
(3) History and The Future

Peter Kennedy, Chorus: The
Presence of the Past from
Chorus: From The Breath of
Wings, Marching drums (with
marching snare drum), 1-9"
black and white television
set and 1-5" black and white
television set (both modified),
with video tape looped
programs of Joseph Stalin's
hands an angels' wings
and marching German army
with two loudspeakers and
tape recorded sounds
intermittently amplified,
1.60 x .80 x 3.60 m, 1993

In a more general sense, I would say I'm drawn in equal measure to Eric Hobsbawm's account of his motivation for writing Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991⁷ and the theorising of history by Walter Benjamin.

Hobsbawm describes his intentions in Age of Extremes as partly autobiographical - he's lived the best part of the century - and partly as a concession to being aware that knowledge of the basic facts of the twentieth century cannot be taken for granted. He cites being asked by an American student whether the phrase 'Second World War' meant that there had been a 'First World War'. However, I'm drawn most particularly to his concern to explain 'why things turned out the way they did and how they hang together'.

I have also been drawn to Walter Benjamin's speculative accounts of history. I have been enchanted, I suspect, by his 'Angel of History'.⁸ The angel's involuntary flight backwards into the future; his gaze fixed firmly on the accumulating piles of debris - what he sees as one single catastrophe, what we see as progress; the storm blowing from Paradise, and so on. This is as compelling a view of the twentieth century as anything that I have encountered, and, although Benjamin had his sights set more on the nineteenth century, there could not be a better vision of the twentieth century.

Then, there is his idea of 'Now - Time', the notion of the past charged with the present. The past as a sudden thought that snaps us awake. The idea that the past coincides with the present, like two asteroids colliding in space, and that this coincidence generates a 'now' state. And Robespierre, whom Benjamin describes as 'blasting' the Now-Time of ancient Rome out of history and inserting it into France's revolutionary moment. There is, for me, a strongly poetic dimension to these 'meditations'. Here, in this cleavage of the simultaneously graspable and elusive, is, perhaps, the 'poetic's' natural residence.

Peter Kennedy, Other than
art's sake, 16 mm,
still shows Adrian Piper
performing Mythic Being, NY
in 1973, 1973-4

Furthermore, acts of transmutational perversity⁹ apply in this latter work. The unspooled, and now reconfigured recording tape, presents visually, as opposed to aurally, ideas of history and death as a musical expression. Confronting us here are the barbed wire convolutions of the one and the smokily sinister inscribed loops of the other, in an operatically loaded silence.

Finally, I have to be convinced that having explored all the identifiable expressive options, I can confidently conclude that the idea or subject has been pushed for all it's worth, and that the final form is superior to all the other options I might have considered. All of this is done in the context of the space in which the work is to be located, with consideration being given to the funds available for the project. An overarching and guiding principle in my work since the late 1970s, is the desire to democratise the work by making it accessible either intellectually or emotionally. To do this I try to consider the work in a way that reveals to the audience my own 'journey' in making it. Much of the archival text used in Requiem for Ghosts first emerged in the research stage of the project, and its inclusion in the installation is consistent with this notion of 'revelation'.

Meriting mention here, is a concern to reconcile this democratising tendency with an 'avant-garde' (for want of a better term), expressive language. Perhaps Requiem for Ghosts is unique it that it combines conceptualism (conceptual art) with material that is clearly historical and demonstrably grounded in lived experience. It might be that the current boundaries of conceptual art are widened somewhat as a consequence.

Peter Kennedy, But the
Fierce Blackman, installation
and performance, Inhibodress,
Sydney, tape loops,
amplifiers, speakers,
electric fan, taxi
cab radio calls,
1972

I was constantly reminded, in constructing the two parts of 'People who have Died the Day I was Born', that those people who have lived through the events of the first part of this century now have a tenuous hold on the present, and that that clasp will soon be broken. At that point the contact we now have with living memory will be cancelled and we will be left to negotiate our own contracts with the past.

My generation is the one born the decade following 1945, and the one that has lived half of its life in the shadow of all that post-1945 signifies, or has come to mean. We, all of us, have lived in the shadow of the Cold War, subjects of the antagonisms of socialism and capitalism; and all of us have been witness to the consequences of ideological meltdown - the disintegration of one partner in that 'cold' binary relationship. We have recently lived through 'the end of history' and seen the re-emergence of nationalism and looked upon in horror at ethnic cleansing with all its recidivistic inclinations. This same generation will, uniquely, have a foot in two centurial camps. It will also have a life half-spent in one millennium and a life half-spent in the next. In this regard I am aware that my three-year old son, Alastair, will, as an adult, rightly conceive of himself as a man of the twenty-first century. In this respect temporal reality forces me to cede a considerable part of my once confident claim on the future.

This said, my own insertion into the work introduces me, together with the aforementioned outline of my own future non-being, as an autobiographical presence and narrator. This setting of the 'self' inscribes a fibrillating line across the shadows; it commences in the shadow of my father's lost memory - he believes I am dead - and weaves its way, almost invisibly, across nearly all of the other works in the exhibition. What flows behind all of this is an impulse that has its origins in the 1995 exhibition 'AJK at the Wall of Ghosts', an exhibition featuring my son and some of the Left's fallen heroes.

Peter Kennedy, Snare, part
of Idea Demonstrations,
installation/performance,
drums, loudspeakers,
amplifiers, tape deck,
recorded sound and chair,
Inhibodress, Sydney 1972

So, how do I feel about that? Angry! I have come to the view that this is not a neglect that can be put down to curatorial oversight but an act of suppression that operates at varying levels of curatorial consciousness. There's a benign indifference at one end of the scale, whilst hostile ideological and aesthetic mind-sets seem to greet the work at the opposite end. It is, also, not just the curatorial mind that determines those artworks that go into public collections, but the curatorial whims that, by and large, inform choices relevant to contemporary survey exhibitions. My view is that the Australian art world, and the Australian public generally, are ill-served by their public art institutions in the context of contemporary art. I believe that these institutions lack any really independent, imaginative and genuinely rigorous, intellectually engaged curatorial participation in contemporary Australian art, or, for that matter, contemporary ideas. A worthy subject for any art history MA or PhD thesis candidate would be the collecting policies of our major institutions in regard to contemporary Australian art and practising Australian artists.

So, to return to the question of impulse: my personal commitment to working as an artist in an effective way over the last thirty years has been enormous and something I cannot discontinue. I remain committed to the project that I began in about 1990 and continue to see ways in which that can be extended.

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artist.

Endnotes
7. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, 1994.
8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1973, p. 249.
9. I use the word perverse here in a constructive sense rather than pejoratively.