Aquae Profundo
NEW11 - Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2011
Display freezer, ice.
Originally commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for NEW11

Text by Raimundas Malašauskas

During my career in contemporary art, I have encountered aliens a number of times. Most manifestations fall into three categories: ‘alien’ employed as a metaphor for the general unknown; alien as an iconic character of modern miracles; and art by aliens, an independent genre often shelved with specimens of creativity by animals and avatars of various kinds. 

Being raised in the Soviet system, where tales of abduction by aliens or UFOs meant that you too may soon be taken by psychiatrists, I was not very keen on discussing my encounters publicly for years. That was, up until Vilnius artist Darius Miksys decided to present a collection of images of extra-terrestrials in an exhibition I curated. 

It was the winter of 2001 — dark and cold, as usual. During the launch of the event we initiated a conversation with the audience about their experience on the subject of aliens. This discussion yielded very unexpected results: in a culture of few words, people picked up the microphone, one after the other, and talked about what they saw and what they thought about it. It was a genuine and warm conversation. It made me realise that aliens are a great subject to engage people, not only in general discussion, but also in discussions about contemporary art. In other words, aliens could open the door to contemporary art for the uninitiated. 

In the beginning I thought this path must belong to art’s populist tricks, like using footage of sexual imagery or domestic violence. Later I figured out that perhaps what was also at play here was a tautology. Contemporary art is as detached from traditional human cultures as aliens are. This is exactly where the value of both lie: the potential of introducing unknown ways of being and thinking to the domains of familiarity. 

From this moment on I became a proponent of ‘alienship’ in art. I claimed that contemporary art is always a matter of collaboration between individuals and an alien, and it should remain so if it wants to stay true to its nature as a reality-bending discipline. I even compared an institution I worked with to a large alien in the middle of a city, producing and distributing realities that were not yet there.

In 2006, I saw Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, curated by Francesco Manacorda in London. This exhibition used alien tropes in its design and informative material to position the audience as Martians experiencing artworks by renowned contemporary artists of the second half of the 20th Century. This great anthropological trick made the audience more aware of their humanness than they would usually be as they walked through the exhibition. They were also left with the impression that contemporary art is a human thing, not foreign or ‘alien’ as it is often perceived to be. 

When I was invited to write a text on Greatest Hits’ work for NEW11
I thought it a bit too-obvious a subject matter for me to get involved in. First, I would be dabbling with a familiar subject. Second, it is in fact a subject I know very little about. I have never studied alien cultures and I never became proficient at distinguishing one species from another. I am much better at distinguishing one artist from another.

I decided to write this text based on my belief that, to humans, aliens represent the limits of the known and, therefore, remain unknowable — such as the concept of God in radical negative theology. God is someone we cannot know anything about, claimed Maimonides in the 12th Century. Similarly, aliens are so far from our conceptual and perceptual instruments of identification that we are unable to grasp them, even if they are part of our very own bodily atoms. Aliens are part of our everyday  

life; they keep it intact like negative gravity keeps our planet from collapsing into itself. This is the ideological stance that allowed me to defend my commitment to alienship, because there was nothing figurative to hold onto. 

In the realm of art by aliens I am not very knowledgeable either. It would be fair to say that I find it much more abstract (if we consider crop circles as an example of mature alien art) than the human way of depicting aliens. Unfortunately, there is much more to say about how we see aliens than how they see us. Just look at that guy in the Greatest Hits’ freezer: a slick domestic cliché of the unknown: 


From the deep bottom of the absolutely transparent layer, magnified by some mysterious optical device to its natural proportions, there looked out at them a strange but an undoubtedly human face. Its dominating feature was its huge prominent eyes, which looked straight ahead. They were like pools reflecting the eternal mystery of creation, glowing with intelligence and an intense will, like two powerful rays directed through the brittle wall of glass into the endless vistas of universal space.1

This quote is taken from a 1950s’ Soviet sci-fi novel. But does it differ much from more recent depictions of aliens? Humans tend to stick to established iconography of the unknown. Not only of the unknown but also, in the case of Greatest Hits, a cliché of the known: traditional sculpture. An ice sculpture, the work is a cliché in terms of both imagery and technique. Alone, cold and frozen, this alien represents our desire to see things fixed to the degree that we have to preserve them. 

When I looked at this work I thought there must be another tautology at play, a double or even triple cliché of familiarity. Together with predictability, here lies the essence of contemporary art: it has to be predictable enough and codified so that it can be consumed in one way or another. Yet the artwork faces a demand for newness, unscripted and unknown. This frozen creature represents a balance of forces (physical and ideological) that makes it possible as an artifice of contemporary art. 

This is indeed brilliant. But does this make me more curious than a discussion about the genealogy of Raelians? I don’t know. I don’t know if it teaches me any new ways of reasoning and perceiving. What it does do is push the status quo, and maybe there is a twist-at-the-end kind of moment when you suddenly realise that everything you took for granted is in fact something completely different. Maybe the fact that this sculpture will melt is enough. It may even encourage one to abolish the structures that preserve it — or to buy a more powerful freezer. If the work melts before we make conclusions about it — perhaps the best thing that could happen — it will allow us to have a continuing conversation, rather than put these ideas back on the shelf. 

It is a complicated thing, this relationship between contemporary art and aliens. In the case of this work by Greatest Hits, the question remains: what do aliens think of this sculpture? As a human, I can say that if Greatest Hits really hit somewhere it is where your comfort zone is, where it overlaps with the dishonesty of accepting things only when they look like something you’ve seen a thousand times before. The work of these artists make you want to find new ways of thinking and being, rather than keeping on reproducing old schemes of imaging and reason; in other words, to invent a set of possibilities beyond uncritical alienship and beyond critical art. This was what I told the artists when explaining why writing about this sculpture should be done by an extraterrestrial of a different family. 

1 Ivan Antonovich Yefremov, ‘Stellar Ships’, in A. I. Yefremov: Stories, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954, pp. 268–69. 

ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) · NEW11: Hannah Mathews In Conversation With Greatest Hits And Tim Coster