Though skilled in social sports and professional language conventions, the senses and intuitions of the creative class have been dulled by overreliance on outsourced expertise and deskilling. Despite being well travelled and cosmopolitan in their sensibilities, theirs is an experience of the world that is typically sanitised, filtered of the antagonisms and angsts faced by the quiet majority and shaped by biases and prejudices that coyly preserve the status quo. Platforming ‘off-road’ experience/s, is a brilliant affront to the rigid safetyism and closely policed ideological conformity that defines our present culture.
In this project, artist Tina Stefanou collaborates with Matthew Cassar. Cassar is a dirt bike enthusiast trained in high-performance contexts. After he lost his eyesight over a decade ago, he began riding, and repairing dirt bikes. These expeditions are assisted by a friend who helps guide Cassar via a headset, while his work on bikes is guided by feeling, and informed by his acute bodily awareness of the bikes, their anatomies and intricacies.
The emphasis on a different set of senses, intimate technical knowledge of a machine and its maintenance, and the willingness to put oneself in danger for higher spiritual or experiential bliss, has broader resonances in a culture stifled by risk management. As Christopher Lasch explained in The Culture of Narcissism, rather than motivated by understanding or empathy, the contemporary subject conforms ‘to social rules more out of fear’, while they struggle to interpret their own emotions, experiencing ‘their needs and appetites ... as deeply dangerous.’ In Stefanou’s artwork, blindness doesn’t operate as an identity to be celebrated or novel way of being (though we might, and it may be) but as a metaphor for intuitive, sensuous engagement with the world.
Rather than mapped or didactically documented, footage of Cassar riding his dirt bike through rural Victoria emerges in flashes of clarity, complimented by the tactile symphony contained in the cavernous gallery space. The de-prioritisation of ocular-centric understanding heralds an eschewal not merely of ableist notions of agency, but an overturning of rigid assumptions about space, access and the dubious tricks and strictures of a culture of visuality.
One excerpt is filmed at a local quarry where ancient volcanic rock is mined to make asphalt for the road. As Stefanou explains, the dirt bike rider knows about asphalt because he avoids it. There’s something poetically modernist about this gesture. In twentieth century contexts, the road was a counterculturally significant non-place, associated with hitchhiking, cruising, motorcycle culture; the setting of experimental works of literature, art and film like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 1957, Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print, 1953, and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, 1969.
Though the road facilitated an escape from suburban stasis and an avenue for discovery, the road is still a built infrastructure. Rather than contained by grids of asphalt that bisect the landscape, Cassar traverses terrain forged incidentally for the extraction of the very resources these systems depend on. Like the action painters of the 1950s who, in their abstract canvases of hastily applied paint, honoured the rawness of the material components of their medium rather than shaping it into mimetic marks or directive lines, there’s a coy acknowledgement of the state of organic material preceding its utilitarian application.
A further acknowledgement of the managerial production art and culture emerges in a sculptural horse bit attached to the screen upon which Cassar’s film plays. A horse bit is part of the bridle that goes into a horse's mouth, allowing the rider to control the horse and direct its movements by applying pressure to its head. Rather than some abstract, garnish prop, this object alludes to the history of image-making, obtusely referencing Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, 1878. Muybridge’s sequence is often credited as the first example of cinematic imagery, though this mapping of the horse’s movement in motion was also influential for efficiency studies of the early twentieth century: practices that were utilised by managers to streamline their workers’ labour and increase productivity. Notably, the term management is borrowed from maneggiare, an Italian word referring to the handling and training of horses. In the installation, the horse bit is a testament to how modes of image-making are, like the horse, far from ‘free’. Rather, from their inception, these processes have been deeply embedded in, and driven by, practices of surveillance, ideological control, and mimetic convention.
As a preoccupation, the dirt bike is also ‘off-centre’, an interest often fostered in masculine rural and regional settings. These men embody marginal identities that are not cherished by the creative managerial class. In fact, the creative class has been emboldened to ignore, or even demonise, them. Indeed, there’s a pronounced lack of common ground between people separated by distances that are not merely geographic, but demarcated by less tangible, though perhaps more pressing, polarities. Ironically, endless HR enforced accessibility protocols and sensitivity training often betray the intolerance of — and inability to deal with — real difference. Like the voyage it depicts, finds an alternative route to bridging distances that are not merely seen, but felt, heard or otherwise sensed.