SENSE OF TASTE Ken + Julia Yonetani

Psyche Bend, lagoon ravaged by salt, Photograph, 2011

Robert Devcic

Introduction

At the Venice Biennale in 2009, I stumbled upon Sweet Barrier Reef made of sugar with its Zen sugar sea bed. Away from the hustle and bustle of the crowds, I was swept into a meditative underwater world. The work has symbols of colonisation, modernisation and consumerism as well as the relationship between human desires and environmental issues. I had been following the work of artists such as Charlie Franklin and Karla Black and immediately this coral reef spoke to me of materiality and the use of non-traditional materials to make fine art sculptural installations. After four days of pounding the pavements in Venice, this work lingered constantly in my mind long after I had forgotten what else I had seen in the many crumbling buildings of the floating romantic city. Immediately, I began to research their earlier work and, a few months later, I travelled to Sydney to see my family as an excuse to visit Ken and Julia Yonetani in their home/studio in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains - an area I had known well whilst growing up in Australia and feeling connected to nature and the surrounding landscape.  Initially, I wanted to show their work in a group show but once I learned about their forthcoming residency in MiIldurra, part of Australia’s food bowl, I felt compelled to show their sugar and the yet-to-be realised works in salt, using Murray River salt from a region with complex, environmental and ethical challenges.  Their film installation, Imagine Tree - which animates stomatas to explore the notion of trees as living breathing spirits - was a great success in our last exhibition and a brilliant introduction to the contemporary London art scene for Ken and Julia.  Their environmental concerns resonated with GV Art’s concerns around the fragility of the human condition and enabled us to continue a broader aesthetic, environmental, historical and political dialogue that is not only relevant to Australia but to all humanity. It is with great pleasure that we have been able to work with Ken and Julia to present their first UK solo exhibition at GV Art London in October 2011.  Robert Devcic Curator of Sense of Taste and Founder of GV Art

Sean Cubitt

Land and Sea: Ken and Julia Yonetani

Land Colonialism achieved later, elsewhere, and by other means, what had already been accomplished by European feudalism. The feudal aristocracy had succeeded in alienating common land from the common people. Colonialism globalised the process, turning terrain into property. It is a tribute to the indomitable traditions of indigenous peoples that the memory of land remains. It is a ‘tribute’ to the feudal and colonial movements that so much of the landscape is now owned but uninhabitable. Australia is a golden example — the lucky country, the sun-burned land. There is a theory of Australian history that goes like this. The colonists arrived at this place that, to their eyes, seemed empty. They cleared, planted, irrigated, harvested the crops and, when the land was exhausted, they moved on to the next place. Where they cleared, planted, irrigated, harvested and moved on. Until there was nowhere left to move on to. The story is only partway true. The colonists stopped moving on and became city dwellers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, where they have developed a passionate sense of identity and culture. But these cities, famously gathered at the ocean edges of the continent, consume water by the reservoir-full, despite legislated restrictions and a culture of water-saving. Manufacture, energy and sheer survival dictate the depletion of a resource that, along with ancient scrub and old growth forests, has become scarcer. I once went walking in the Brisbane Ranges. As we rambled down an ancient, dried-out watercourse, my companion, who grew up nearby, pointed to a tree growing out of the cliff face, maybe five metres overhead. ‘That’, he said, ‘was where the water came up to when I was a boy’. Water tables everywhere are integral to the land and its use. In the early 1990s, new pumps were installed in the Mersey Tunnels because, with the closure of so many factories, the water table had risen several metres. In contrast, Australia is a land scattered with the bones of many who have died for want of water. In the alluvial plains of the Murray-Darling Basin, water is the most prized commodity of all.

As a result of irrigation and clearing, the highly saline groundwater that slept beneath the surface of top soils has begun to rise, threatening to make the country’s greatest river system too salty to even drink. The world contains a lot of salt water. All along the rivers, Groundwater Interception schemes are being built to remove as much salt as possible from the water table. For some schemes, the power of the sun is enough; for others, energy has to come from hydro or coal-powered plants which, ironically, are being built to supply de-salination plants along the coast, turning salt-water into potable. Still Life: The Food Bowl remakes in salt the produce of the region – the fish is cast in salt from a dead fish found on the banks of the Murray as it meanders through Mildura where the artists were on a residency. The inspiration comes from the genre of Still Life, which depicted another era of unfettered consumption. The picture-less frame, Sense of Taste, is intended to model the Elder Breughel's The Sense of Taste, in the Prado, where it sits among other marvels of Baroque excess. The Baroque of the European Counter-reformation, and of Latin-American colonialism, worked on multiple levels. On the one hand, it produced the model for the infolding and unfolding of a universe endowed with life in every crevice, while also being an instrument of power designed to leave its city dwellers open-mouthed in awe. At the same time, for the aristocracy of the Absolute Monarchy — hanging on against the tide of history to the trappings and ceremonials of the feudal past — the Baroque mirrored their wealth and provided sumptuous images of the old peasant dream of the Land of Cockayne. But, like the mildewed wedding feast presided over by Dickens' jilted tragic queen Miss Haversham, it was inedible — the ghostly double of another age's banquet, the salty remains of the cities' indulgence.

Sea In feudal times, common land became private property. In the Industrial Revolution, tools, reft from the hands of artisans and housewives, were used in the very factories that suppressed their workers. ’Dead labour', as Marx called the skills taken from the people and turned into used against them. In our era, the same process is happening to knowledge which, as data, is taken from those who create it, and placed in an alien terrain. These are the three great ages of environmental history: how land, and tools,

and now knowledge (and very soon our bodies themselves) become alien environments which humans, thus impoverished, perforce inhabit. Of all this planet, only Antarctica and the deep oceans remain aloof from these historic processes. Only in the open sea and on the frozen continent does international law recognise the common human heritage. Only in these environments do human rights mean anything more than the rights of citizens. Only there are we in any way entitled to use the adjective 'pristine'. But then again, no. The Japanese concept of ‘scientific whaling’ forges the way for scientific geological surveys in the extreme South, while the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of marine litter bears witness to the ecological truth that ‘everything connects’. The Great Barrier Reef lies offshore from some of Australia's most prolific farming land, in tropical North Queensland. During World War II, fearing isolation from Japanese expansion (and abandonment by the old Mother Country), Australia rushed to provide itself with key commodities it usually imported from Asia: the thirsty crops of cotton, rice and sugar cane. Sugar cane is a powerful, fast-growing grass, which needs cultivation to increase yields to supply the growing Australian population, and its increasingly sweet-toothed fast-food diet. The World Wildlife Fund reports:

‘The sugar industry in Australia has been a significant player in major infrastructural projects, including damming of the Burdekin, Tully and Barron Rivers, which has altered the pattern of freshwater flow into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Cane growing has shown to increase sediment and nutrient loads, particularly following heavy rainfall, which can carry these materials into the sea, reducing water quality and impacting on inshore reefs’. (WWF, Sugar and the Environment, Encouraging Better Management Practices in Sugar Production, 2005)

Like the engravings in the libraries of the earliest scientists, the colour has gradually leached out, leaving the form — the in-formed structure —the reef as static sample 'like a patient etherised upon a table'. It is the very model of the intense complexity of informatic systems that today increasingly, and with as much or more autonomy as a reef, provide us with our second nature, the environment from which we must seek to squeeze a living.

If the Yonetanis are intensely environmentally-aware, they are also observers of human ecology. There are no bad guys, because we are all culpable. But there is something that no observer of their arts misses. These works are tremendously beautiful. They tell us not only about the lost past, or beg our nostalgia for a world gone awry. Beauty is always a pledge against the brutal ugliness of an era: in this case, a pledge against the wanton consumption and waste that we have done so little to mitigate. But, in beauty, there is always hope. There is the story. The land is salt and the oceans are sweet. The Babylonian creation myths — told in the brackish swamps of the Euphrates delta before writing had begun — relate how the world came into being from the mixing of the sweet and bitter waters. Sean Cubitt 4 October 2011 Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton Sean Cubitt is Professor of Global Media and Communications at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Professorial Fellow in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Digital Aesthetics, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press.’

Sweet Barrier Reef (detail), Sugar, 2009

Sweet Barrier Reef (detail), Sugar, 2009

Sweet Barrier Reef (detail), Sugar, 2009

Dr. Katharina Fabricius

Coral reefs are the most species-rich marine ecosystem on Earth. Tens of thousands of species have evolved to co-exist in coral reefs, each species with its own unique shape and its own role in the ecosystem. Coral reefs have evolved to their present form over millions of years, continuously responding to changes. Nevertheless, these living underwater treasures are easily damaged. Unprecedented pressures from global climate change, agricultural and urban runoff, and over-fishing have severely degraded many coral reefs over the last 20 years. Concerted decisive action is needed to reduce air and water pollution, and to establish and support marine reserves, in order to protect these living underwater treasures into the future. Dr. Katharina Fabricius Reef Ecologist, Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS)

Pillar with Grapes (detail), Mildura River Salt, 2011

Pillar with Grapes, Mildura River Salt, 2011

Still Life : The Food Bowl (detail) , Mildura River Salt, 2011

Still Life : The Food Bowl and Sense of Taste, Mildura River Salt, 2011

Sense of Taste (detail), Mildura River Salt, 2011

Sense of Taste, Mildura River Salt, 2011

Chandelier (detail), Mildura River Salt, 2011

Chandelier, Mildura River Salt, 2011

Pillar with Fruit Bowl (detail), Mildura River Salt, 2011

Dr. Todd Wallace

The difficulties that Ken and Julia had in trying to work with salt as a medium, is extremely symbolic of the issues that salt presents to humans. The environment struggles with salt, particularly when water and salt work together. Irrigators also face challenges with salt, as soon as salinity levels reach critical thresholds they can’t use it to irrigate their crops. So salt is a challenge for the environment, a challenge for the irrigators, and a challenge for artists. But salt is also something we can’t live without, it’s required in our food, we require it in our day to day use, and we use it in things like hospitals and in benign practices that we don’t even think about. A lot of us might like to get salt out of our lives, but our lives would be extremely different if we did actually achieve that. Dr. Todd Wallace Officer in Charge, Murray Darling Freshwater Research Centre In an interview with ABC Radio, Mildura, Australia, 2010

Mildura images 2011

Ken + Julia Yonetani, Mildura Australia, 2011

Biographies

Ken + Julia Yonetani are collaborative artists who work in the field of sculptural installation, video, and performance art. They have exhibited together at Artereal Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Campbelltown Arts Centre, La Trobe University Museum of Art, Object Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, Jan Manton Art, and Sydney College of the Arts. In 2010, they staged a bed-in performance in Federation Square, Melbourne, and conducted a Synapse Residency in Mildura in collaboration with the Murray Darling Freshwater Research Centre and Sunrise 21. Ken was born in Tokyo, Japan. He received a Bachelor of Economics in Japan and worked in the Foreign Exchange Market in Tokyo for three years. Following this, he was an assistant for pottery master, Toshio Kinjo, oldest son of Jiro Kinjo, National Living Treasure of Japan. He completed his M.A. at the Australian National University School of Art in ‘05. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and was selected for the Australian contingent at the 53rd Venice Bienniale in 2009. Julia holds a PhD from the Australian National University. She has held positions lecturing and researching in History, Cultural Studies, and Art at the University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University and the University of the Ryukyus, Japan, and has published work in Cultural Studies Review, Artlink, Art and Perception, Asian Studies Review, Japanese Studies, and Critical Asian Studies. She has been involved in various environmental movements and represented Okinawan environmental groups at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Amman, Jordan in 2000. Ken + Julia live together with their children in the Blue Mountains, Australia.

Curriculum Vitae

Forthcoming Exhibitions and Residencies 2011 Kone Foundation Artist Residency, Finland 2011 Inter-Arts Residency, Navegar Foundation, Portugal 2011 Your Move: Australian Artists Play Chess touring exhibition to McClelland Gallery, Samstag Art Museum, etc 2011 Imagining the Future, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne

Selected group exhibitions 2011 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Woollahra, Sydney 2011 Palimpsest #8, Mildura, Victoria 2011 Art & Science, GV Art, London 2011 Sir John Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of NSW 2011 Precious, Sydney College of the Art, Sydney 2011 2011 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, GCAG 2011 Underfoot. Overhead, Object Gallery, Sydney 2011 genart_sys, Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney 2010 2010 Stan and Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize, GCAG 2010 Your Move: Australian Artists Play Chess, Bendigo Art Gallery 2010 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Campbelltown Arts Centre 2010 Once Removed (the show from the 2009 Venice Biennale), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney 2009 Satellite APT 6 (6th Asia Pacific Triennial), Jan Manton Art, Brisbane 2009 The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize 2009, Sydney 2009 58th Blake Prize, the National Art School Gallery, Sydney 2009 Once Removed, the official representation of Australia in The 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice 2008 Heat: Art and Climate Change at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Handle with Care, Art Gallery of South Australia

Selected solo exhibitions 2011 Sense of Taste, GV Art, London 2011 Ultrabuddha- that is why I want to be saved, Glasshouse, Port Macquarie, Australia 2011 Still Life: The Food Bowl, Artereal Gallery, Sydney 2011 Ultrabuddha- that is why I want to be saved, Artereal Gallery, Sydney 2010 Ultrabuddha- that is why I want to be saved, Jan Manton Art, Brisbane 2010 GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER! (If you want it.), art performance (bed-in), Federation Square, Melbourne 2009 Sweet Barrier Reef in Venice, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne 2009 Sweet Barrier Reef for the 21st Century - Play Strauss's waltz grandly, La Trobe University Museum of Art 2005 Sweet Barrier Reef, Artspace, Sydney 2005 fumie-butterfly mandala West Space, Melbourne 2005 Sugar Project-Underwater Phatspace, Sydney 2003 fumie-tiles at CSIRO Discovery, Canberra

Selected Artist Residencies 2010 Synapse Art/Science residency funded by Australian Network for Arts and Sciences (ANAT) 2005 Gunnery Studio Residency, Sydney

Education (Ken Yonetani) 2003-05 Master of Arts (Visual Arts), School of Art, Australian National University 1992-99 Bachelor of Economics, Chiba University of Commerce, Chiba, Japan

Education (Julia Yonetani) 2003 PhD, History, Australian National University 1999 MA, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan 1994 BA, University of Sydney, 1994

Selected Bibliography 2011 ‘Artists make point with salt sculptures’ ABC National News, 6 June, 2011 2011 ‘Venice Biennale Kicks off this weekend’ ABC Radio Breakfast, 2 June 2011 2011 ‘Salt as Still Life’ Radio New Zealand National, 10 June 2011

2011 ‘Canvas’ by Celia Mortlock, FBI Radio, 12 June 2011 2011 ‘Salt sculptures lay consequences of salinity on the table’ by Steve Meacham, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 June 2011 ‘Chrystal clear intent’ by Elizabeth Fortescue, Daily Telegraph 23 May 2011 2011 ‘Ken and Julia Yonetani/Janet Tavener’, review by Megan Fizell, Arlink, vol 31 no 2, 2011 2010 ‘Ken Yonetani’s Ultrabuddha exhibition displays a strange beauty’ by Suzanna Clarke, The Courier Mail, 16 July 2010 ‘Always idol’ by Phil Brown, Brisbane News, 14 July 2010 2010 ‘Bedtime warmth’ by Kylie Northover, 22 February 2010, The Age 2010 ‘GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER! (If you want it.) by Lou Pardi, Beat Magazine, 17 February 2010 2009 VOGUE (Italian), L’UONO/ ART 53rd Venice Biennale Special Issue, the article by James Fisher No. 401 2009 Ken Yonetani written by Katnerine Harrington, SCULPTURE + the enemies, issue 1 2009 ‘Worlds collide at Venice Biennale’ Suzanna Clarke July 18, 2009, The Courier Mail 2009 ‘Deft in Venice written by Gabriella Coslovich, THE AGE, June 8 2009 2009 ‘Ken Yonetani’ written by Nicholas Tsoutas, Broad Sheet for the Venice Bienniale 2009 special issue 2009 ‘Sweet success’ written by Colin Martin, Craft Australia 2008 Monk practices sweet enchantment, artery, No. 8/ Spring 2008 2008 ‘Sunday Arts’ ABC TV, Heat: Art and Climate change, ABC1, 5:30pm 12 October 2008 2008 ‘Sunday Arts’ ABC TV, featured story of Ken Yonetani, ABC1, 5pm 16 March 2008/ July 7 2009 2007 ‘The nature of art’ written by Felicity Fenner, Art and Australia Autumn issue 2005 ‘Sweet revenge’ written by Julia Yonetani, Artlink Vol 25 No 4 2005 ‘Art competition attracts the cream…and sugar’ by Jenny Rogers, The Gold Coast Weekend Bulletin, Dec 3-4

Collections Private collections, Macquarie Bank Art Collection, Art Bank, The Balnaves Foundation, ANU Grants, Scholarships and Awards Inter-Arts residency, Kone Foundation residency, ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology) SYNAPSE residency, New Work Grant (Australia Council for the Arts), NAVA Marketing Grant, Japan Foundation, ACT Quick Response grant, etc.

Acknowledgments

Ken & Julia are supported by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, Sunrise 21 and Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre in association with the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

GV Art wish to thank the artists Ken and Julia Yonetani. Sean Cubitt and Marius Kwint for contributing to this exhibition with work, ideas and discussion. Sincere thanks also go to Annabel Huxley, Nimrod Hedgedus, Frances Nutt, Frances McGonigle, Dave Gollop, Annabel Huxley and Tommy Rubelj.

GV Art

Is a contemporary art gallery which aims to explore and acknowledge the inter-relationship between art and science, and how the areas cross over and inform one another. The gallery produces exhibitions and events that create a dialogue focused on how modern man interprets and understands the advances in both areas and how an overlap in the technological and the creative, the medical and the historical are paving the way for new aesthetic sensibilities to develop.

SENSE OF TASTE Ken + Julia Yonetani Published in 2011 by GV Art 49 Chiltern Street London W1U 6LY www.gvart.co.uk Designed by Charles Gollop Publication © GV Art, London Essays © the Authors All artworks © Ken & Julia Yonetani, GV Art All images by Julia Yonetani, except page 22 Damian McDermottt All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission of the copyright holders and publishers. ISBN 978-0-9563783-5-4

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