Tower of Babel
When Vivienne Binns' Tower of Babel was exhibited in Sydney the art critic from the Herald described it as "a sort of apologia for a vague pluralism". This reading is an understandable response to a work which quite deliberately mixes high art and community art, however it is a reading which overlooks the way in which this 'mixing' functions as a critical strategy.
The Tower consists of fifty one small wooden boxes, some by Binns and other known artists (such as Narelle Jubelin, Tess Horowitz, Bonita Ely, Ruth Wailer) and others by amateur or unknown artists, some of whom have participated in Binns' past community arts projects. As a result of this wide range of participants, the range of visual styles (or is it visual languages as we are speaking of Babel) stretches from realism to conceptual art and includes some art/craft boundary smudging. However, reading this range as a vague pluralism, ignores the way in which the work deliberately brings together supposedly separate types of art production in order to attempt to displace or deconstruct the opposition between them.
The tower could be called a hingework, to borrow and transform a term from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as it breaks the opposition between high art and community art by joining them together. (In French the word for hinge, brisure, means both to join and to break). The work becomes unclassifiable (in the 'old terms' of, either high art or community art) as it is between community art and high art and equally could be described as both and/or neither. This hinge position is best illustrated by an examination of the work in question. First, what enables the work to