Born
1937 Sydney, Australia
Currently lives and works in Wagga Wagga, NSW
Studies:
1966-7 Hayter's Studio 19 Paris (French Government scholarship)
1958; BSc & Dip Ed (Sydney University)
1964; Bachelor of Arts, (Australian National University)
Awards:
1966; First occupant of the Sydney University Power Institute
Studio at the Cité des Arts, Paris
1976; Study Leave to work and exhibit in New York (Pratt Graphic
Center, Manhattan)
1980; Special project grant from the Australia Council to
participate in video show curated by Pierre Restany (Pompidou,
Paris)
1983; VAB grant & DAAD assistance to work at the
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
1990; Australia Council Fellowship to make a series of works
during 1990
1995; New Media grant to transfer videotapes to digital format
1996; ANAT grant to develop virtual performance in WWW site
1996; Australia Council grant to work on animations &
digitised images
General
Since 1966 ( first solo exhibition at Nundah Galleries), has held over 20
solo exhibitions and actions, and participated in numerous group shows in various
parts of the world.
Actively involved in making graphics during the period 1965 to 1984.
Selected major exhibitions and actions
1983; Solo exhibition of
prints and photos at Donguy Galleries, Paris
Performed work for Hamburg Performance Woche as part of the Art
Week, Hamburg
Performed work for the DAAD Berlin Performance Weekend,
Künstlerhaus, Berlin
Alternativa 3, Almada, Portugal
Frechen International Graphic Exhibition, Germany
1984 Solo exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
1985 Anzart 85, Auckland
Perspecta 85, Sydney
1990 Sydney Biennale
"Peace
Car through Europe", special action
in Hoorn, Amsterdam, (Holland); Potdamer Platz
Brandenburger Tor -Reichstag; Kino Babylon (East Berlin),
1991 "Machina : Persona" Art Gallery of NSW
1996 Action, "Moments of Inertia:Friction" at Brisbane Festival
1997 "A Question of Identity" Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery
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The "Peace Car" of Arthur Wicks in Berlin.
The City was, and is, the centre of German history: Berlin The Place where the event occurred, was the nucleus of this history. On the 18th October, nearly a year after the Wall fell down, the Peace Car of Arthur Wicks rolled from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburger Tor. At that point of time Potsdamer Platz was still devastated land, overtaken by the historic events of the previous months. But still it seemed to belong to a different time Of this period only relics now exist: a hill under which supposedly lies the Fuhrerbunker of Adolf Hitler: roads which are reminders that Berlin was the liveliest place in Europe in the twenties. In this specific location moves a contraption which in its own way is out of time. But it is imprinted with this history.
Arthur Wicks's Peace Car is the third in a series of machines in which the artist reflects on mechanisation. He sees the machine as a moment of expression of this century and in this sense he is connected with the Futurist Movement at the beginning of this century. The machine is nowadays only a reminder of its development, for today, instead of material content, we favour streams of information. The same holds true for the armoured car of Arthur Wicks. It spans different times because it copies the original form of a mechanical apparatus and at the same time confronts us with the possible loss of all machines.
Mechanisation is perceived only as an irony. The functions are maintained solely by fake. Symbols, like a sort of rocket, are moving around without creating any real threat. The armoury is a dummy. The motion always comes to a stop because the machine, the car, seems to be programmed to become non-functioning. The artist moves the machine, but one can guess the exhausting effort needed to do that. He is at the one time the mover and the moved. The interdependence between man and machine cannot be more clearly stated. In the background there are glimpses of Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times", but the Peace Car is like the swan song, the Abgesang. There is, however, an irony in this "sculpture" of Arthur Wicks.
Berlin is the right place for this Abgesang. The present is filled with the past and pregnant with the future. The city was the ending point of travel for the Peace Car through Europe, beginning in Holland and ending in Hamburg via Berlin. Every city is connected to its own special period of time. For example, Hamburg was a dominant harbour in the time of the Hanse. Now it seems that Berlin is the centre of a new, free Europe.
The artist doesn't give an answer, but the question itself is meaningful, because it is stated in a non-verbal form. Maybe it is the distance of this Australian, Arthur Wicks, from the real events, that make it possible for him to react in such an impressive way to the historic upheaval in Berlin and Europe.
Thomas Wulffen Berlin, January, 1991
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PROSTHETICS: The castration complex raised to an art form
BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE: Nerve Gases. The patient and long awaited revenge of the inorganic world against the organic." - J.G. Ballard.
Two Division, Boggo Road, the old Brisbane Gaol, Queensland. Now a site for social, tourist and art voyeurism. A complicated space - haunted as it is with the pain inherent in a history of incarceration and corruption. Arthur Wicks navigates the historic tensions and legacy of misery in one of his infernal machines. In this performance entitled MOMENTS OF INERTIA: FRICTION Wicks puts blood into the machine in an era of two way prosthesis, the machine as prosthetic to the human, the human as prosthetic to the machine. Wicks' work operates within the blurred boundaries of this binary, the arena where self and other collide, pulling and tearing at each other, thwarted attempts at a transcendence while being incarcerated in the functioning and dysfunction of the human’s relationship to the machine, the machine's relationship to the human.
The internal/external conflict is played out as the vehicle spits stasis and motion, never fluid and as inefficient to speed as the goal is to reform. here the Flintsonian meets the draconian. The vehicle creaks and groans, tenuous In its function, precarious in its solidity. A radio-microphone amplifies its straining, crunching movement and the sounds resonate through gaol cells into molecular cells, bouncing against walls and through bodies. The wheels are removed and the machine metamorphoses into a somnambulistic chair. Wicks autistically rocks in the corner. Finally the internal provides the only line of flight.
There is movement but the notion of movement is exposed as problematic of perception. Deleuze and Guattari argue that "movement......is by nature imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception". The imperceptible becomes perceived through the process of "jumping from one plane to the other or from the relative thresholds to the absolute which co-exists with them." 2
Wicks' facial features are concealed and distorted by a mask of latex, anonymous yet familiar, the subject is transformed into the generic. His suited and caged body labours to power the vehicle in a fraught merging of body and machine. Wicks scrutinises the everyday by creating an imaginary space that is real, counteracting alienation through the creation of that alienating space.
My foot descends upon the accelerator, within seconds, fumes of adrenaline hit the back of my throat. A surge of heat starts from the base of my spine Igniting my cerebral cortex, charging every nerve. vein and artery on the way through. A moment of bliss as I fuse with my machine. Past, present and future collapsing into one seductive space.
Unrelentingly, the rider of the infernal machine searches out lines of flight in a pre-defined territory. infinite tangents within this space of confinement. Neither subjective or objective but, as Virilio might say, 'trajective'. Wicks performs that dilemma identified by Virilio who states, "despite various recent studies and debates concerning internment, and the carceral deprivations affecting this or that society denied its freedom of movement…..it seems we are still incapable of grasping seriously the question of trajectory except in mechanical, ballistic or astronomical terms. Objectivity and subjectivity, certainty; but never trajectivity …. It seems there is no place between the objective and the subjective for the ‘trajective’." 3
"A QUESTION OF IDENTITY". Prosthesis exists to forge connection with the other. It builds and is built upon an economy of war: public private, internal / external, molecular/ psychic. "STILL LIFE WITH SUBCONSCIOUS INTRUSION". The periods of stasis are as close as It gets to the notion of peace. Mechanical prosthesis. Technological prosthesis. Pharmacological prosthesis.
Circuit boards and road systems, two of the most sophisticated and logical systems we have to deal with on a daily basis. The moment of the crash, the accident, a glitch in the system. A smashing together of the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the subconscious.
Peripheral shadows come into central vision. Flesh. Focusing. Dragging frame by frame along pixellations of raw bitumen glistening in the headlight beam of the cool, sharp, night. 1 watch my bodily fluids dripping down the windscreen, gleaming against the beads of rain. 1 watch myself watching. In the gleeful space of hallucinatory nightmare, the internal merges with the external, a semblance of a mythical totality. Flesh enters the machine. Blood turns to oil.
Repetition can be defined not only through perception, but through result. A repetition that succeeds perfectly "may be fatal because the space of distance between model and copy has been eliminated, collapsing both terms into one entity and abolishing the singularity of each separate term." 4 The organism/the machine is condemned to perform the same gestures within the same continuum of time and space. This notion of stasis is exemplified by the Buddhist notion of reincarnation - if you fuck up the first time, you'll have to come back and do it again.
The rider and the machine have morphed, transcending a space that never existed yet is always there. The binary of the mechanical and the organic has been eliminated. The essence of the machine and the essence of the rider is distilled through the production of autonomous busts. The busts defy the potential fatality of the repetition through their emerging with distinct human affects, defiance, melancholy, dejection, arrogance.....festering with the potential for human catharsis,
The Rider and the machine have exchanged blood.
"AUTOMOBILE. All the millions of cars on this planet are stationary, and their apparent motion constitutes mankind's greatest collective dream."
J.G. Ballard 5.
CEALLAIGH NORMAN
1. J.G. Ballard, Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century, in Incorporations, Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds) Zone, New York, 1992
2. Gillles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, One Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1987
3. Paul Virilio, Perspectives of Real Time, in Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal (eds), Metropolis, Rizzoli. New York 1991,
4. Elisabeth Bronfen, Death and Representation, Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (eds), John Hopkins University, Press, Baltimore. 1993
5. J.G. Ballard, Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century, in Incorporations Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Zone, New York, 1992
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