All that is solid…

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Liquid metaphors abound in modernity. Karl Marx set the scene in the most poetic passage of the Communist Manifesto (1848) where—riffing on Shakespeare—he forecast that class society would soon ‘melt into air’. Early in the 20th century, the ‘melting pot’ became a popular if problematic expression for an emergent multicultural society in the United States. In the 1980s, Marshall Berman revisited Marx’s image to recall the ‘creative destruction’ that epitomised 19thcentury—but not, in Berman’s opinion, 20th century—modernism. By the end of the 20th century, more and more things seemed to be at risk of dissolving, as Zygmunt Bauman argued in an influential series of books beginning with Liquid Modernity (2000). If Bauman’s analysis still maintains a connection with the trajectory first announced by Marx, today we need to recognise that it is not only class relations, but fundamental attributes of human being-in-the-world that are at risk of being swept away: the experience of place and home, the social relations of identity and memory, longstanding traditions for transmitting knowledge—‘nature’ itself—all stand under threat of liquefaction.

The exhibition All that is solid…, curated by Victoria Lynne, makes its nod to Marx, but casts its eye firmly towards this present in which previously solid and stable entities—such as cities and buildings, but also photographs, texts and archives—have become subject to a new mutability. What happens when the built environment changes far faster than a human lifespan? What is the role of the image in the age of Snapchat and WeChat, when photographs are not only ‘pictures’, but also a fund of data and economic value? What can art have to say about this complex nexus between technological transformation, the reshaping of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Patrick Pound, Cancelled Archive, 2017. Detail. Found photographs (from FSA negatives held in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Station, Melbourne,
Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland.

The Children’s Encyclopedia Vol 6, 2017. Installation view, TarraWarra International 2017: All that is solid …, 2017. Cremated book ashes and book covers, 21 x 21 x 29cm. Photograph Christian Capurro