They Came, They Saw
cowgrrls.com
Cooloola Regional Gallery and national tour

In 1999, three Brisbane-based artists, Di Ball, Tracey Benson and Jo Cruickshanks ventured into territory that few city-based contemporary artists would dare go. These out-of-towners found themselves in the midst of one of the biggest country and western music events in the nation, undertaking artist residencies at the National Country Music Muster. An initiative of the Cooloola Shire Public Gallery, the purpose of the artist residencies was to produce artwork which engaged the Muster as both a cultural and a community event, adding another layer of experience to it.

The artists were in an interesting position and each one has stories to tell about the experience reflecting on their sense of place, or on the most part, their sense of 'out of place'. Caught in the throng of the crowd, the melancholy of a ballad and the scoot of the boot, here, they were exposed to things that they had never or rarely experienced previously. Nevertheless, Ball, Benson and Cruickshanks had found within the Muster resonances with their own artistic practices. Ball's work interrogates identity through the performance of several alter egos including the tragic country and western 'superstar', Fleur Ball. Through her ongoing project, Big Banana Time Inc, Benson scrutinises the tourist landscape producing souvenirs and merchandise which manipulate historic, colonial and iconic landscapes. Cruickshank's work is concerned with the formation of patterns, the topographic repetitions and discontinuities produced through human habitation and changing land forms. The Muster provided them with an opportunity to pursue their aesthetic interests and ongoing projects in a context removed from their ordinary.

The Muster is a far cry from the gallery-based, web-based and community-based practices of these artists. However, they quickly saddled up and adopted the mantle of cowgrrls. Whistling a tune and strumming a guitar, it was apparent they were just passing through, perhaps as 'cultural tourists'. The works resulting from their residencies have qualities reminiscent of mapping, anthropology and tourism. Ulmer describes the ancient Greek 'theoros' who were designated 'witnesses' and who, on special occasions, where summoned to attest to the happenstance of events. Walter states, "the first theorists were 'tourists' - the wise men who travelled to inspect the obvious world ... [this theoria] did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight. The term implied a complex but organised mode of active observation - a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing." In this more contemporary context, instead of 'theoria', Ball, Benson and Cruickshanks were making art which both responded to and probed the Muster. As the artists will attest the Muster really did happen. Theirs was a phenomenological exercise of sensory engagement, witnessing and curiosity.

Though not 'theoria' in that classical sense, there is more than a hint in this situation of the artists acting as 'anthropologists', 'cultural tourists' or 'cartographers', inquiring into, documenting, interpreting and mapping cultural and social phenomenon. For Foster, such a practice, in keeping with an 'ethnographic turn in contemporary art', means that artists "draw indirectly on basic principles of the participant-observer tradition." In this respect, the artists approached their residencies as 'fieldwork', as stepping into the community and the event, experiencing, documenting and reflecting. However, in anthropological terms, the objective of successful fieldwork is for the observer to 'fit in', seamlessly participating in the daily life of the community they are observing, maintaining their presence for years. The cowgrrls artists' residencies were for three weeks and while this provided a focussed and immersive environment, the delineation of time resulted in a more reflexive approach to the event.

The artworks in cowgrrls.com are intended to extrapolate and extend the experience of the Muster through a type of mapping exercise: 'you are here'. Foster states that "mapping in recent art has tended toward the sociological and the anthropological." Ball's online diary and installation, Benson's cybertour and souvenirs of the Muster and Cruickshank's installation of patterns made from scavenged local materials all emerge from the artists' participation-observation and manifest as maps or readings of place, event and community. In so doing, they established their points of view - no one is ever wholly detached, even when from out of town. Clearly, they came. They saw. Perhaps more to the point, they saw themselves seeing. Produced collaboratively by the three artists, a series of slides at the entrance of the gallery show the landscape on the drive from town to the Muster site in the moody Amamoor State Forest where a tent/caravan city emerges out of the bush. In a gathering of 70,000 people it's all too easy to be just another face in the crowd.

This reflexivity is most apparent in Di Ball's work focussing on her alter ego, Fleur Ball, a tragic, country and western singing superstar. As Fleur, Ball could be a participant-observer. She could participate in the event as well as see herself seeing. Her performance based work has a documentary quality with her experiences and impressions noted and recorded in Fleur's online travel journal and video installation. During the Muster, Fleur performed on the streets of Gympie, drawing the pity of passing crowds and the ire of local shop keepers. Apparently, she was moved on while busking. In her online diary documenting this adventure, Fleur shares her lunch at the Hotel Royal and her guest spot on the evening news. We journey with her on the Mary Valley Rattler. She meets up with the stars and musters up the courage to perform in the 'traditional' section of the Muster Talent Search. Her bold and brazen rendition of Bucking Bronco Queen (Ride, Ride Me Cowboy) seemed to capture the imagination of some of the women in the audience. Sadly, she did not win that day, though her heart skipped a beat when she heard the announcer asking for 'the girl with blond hair'.

As Fleur Ball, resplendent in purple suede fringed coat, red hat and long blond plaits, Di Ball seemed to experience all that the Muster had to offer a 'star'. Not only are her [mis]adventures noted in her diary, but documented on video. The travel diary is an historical literary genre, and Ball seems to be appropriating it for this work. Numerous women travellers and writers have kept their diaries as intrepidly as they have journeyed, noting not only the places they have visited but also the details of their lives. Ball's work is repeatedly autobiographical and in revealing her transgressions and confessions, she is 'making a spectacle of herself'. The installation presented for the exhibition features Fleur Ball's music videoclip of the song that made her notorious, Bucking Bronco Queen. With the maze of cords and posters on the wall, the gallery is set up as if awaiting the imminent arrival of a star. Visitors are invited to join the queue for an autograph or rare sighting of this reclusive star and thus confer her iconic celebrity status.

Different kinds of icons attracted Jo Cruickshanks' attention. The centrepiece of her installation is a mannequin wearing a Drizabone coat and Akubra hat fashioned from flattened and riveted beer cans collected from the Muster site. Drawing on her impressions and experience of the Muster, Cruickshanks' work engages the 'patterns' that emerge and are formed as the result of the event. She has created a series of screens which each highlight the Muster's human landscape and the interaction of people with the natural environment. Cruickshanks' installation seems to document the points of contact where Muster meets Nature.

Using locally available and found materials, her screens have mapped those intricate patterns of habitation, movement and interaction. According to Barrow, pattern and exploration are intimately connected: "if we can identify patterns in a landscape, then we are more likely to explore it." Clearly, there is an aspect of recognising pattern which is about making sense of a place, or reading a place. The artist has distilled motifs and patterns which repeat within the site, reiterating them within the artwork and providing a series of impressions about 'things' that caught her attention as a visitor. Quite self-consciously, she is witnessing. She has identified the patterns and repetitions of trees, bush, dirt, clay, woodchip, parked cars, barriers and building materials such as corrugated iron. By arranging the screens like a labyrinth, Cruickshanks is directing the flow of people traffic within the gallery, drawing closer attention to the materials and drawing attention to the way in which the Muster site is intensely occupied for two weeks a year. As a cultural event, the Muster evokes a psychogeography which influences, and sometimes produces, people's behaviour. It is designed to attract visitors and Cruickshanks is directing our attention to how this event temporarily rewrites the landscape.

For Benson, the lure of the souvenir is always too hard to resist. As an object, the souvenir has bearing on perceptions and experiences of place. A significant cultural event, such as the Muster, is simply not complete without them and definitely, no one should leave without one. The souvenir is a sign of having 'been there' and for Benson, these souvenirs, featuring photographic and computer images of the cowgrrls, are reminders that she was there too. Her installation suggests 'a culture of tourism' in the form of a tourist shop featuring her trademark kitsch, image-transfer souvenirs such as ashtrays, stubbie coolers, coasters and t-shirts. There is a twist in the tourist narrative in this work. Ordinarily, we buy souvenirs to recall having visited a place. It is not standard practice to make souvenirs, beyond the odd snapshot, to commemorate or document our own visit.

As a 'cultural tourist', Benson knows she is just visiting and her souvenirs are objects made of a reflexive impulse: she is seeing herself visiting. Such an impulse is necessary to the relationship which binds tourism and photography. The photographic image (whether a photo or part of a souvenir) is evidence that you have travelled. As practices of desire and pleasure, photography and tourism are "part of the process by which subjectivities are formed; [they] interconnect in many ways with people's hopes, fears, memories, activities, likes, loves, and so on." In keeping with this interrogation of tourism, Benson has also developed a 'cyber tour' of the Muster as website and cd-rom. In her digital animation she examines the site and plots its transformation from still and silent bushland to bustling hub of country music activity. As with Ball's online presence, there is an appeal to the 'post-tourist' as someone who need not leave their home or community to experience the event, realising that the 'authentic' tourist experience does not exist. With a regional tour of cowgrrls.com, the event is coming to them.

In the language of 'cultural development', the inclusion of artists in an event like the Muster, while adding another layer of cultural work, also creates 'cultural capital'. cowgrrls.com is intended to operate within an economy of signs and as part of the myriad exchanges and flows that form the Muster. To a certain extent, the presence of the artists is a kind of 'value-adding' especially considering that this exhibition will tour through regional Queensland. Craik discusses a type of art called 'tourist art' which incorporates "elements of ethnological arts, commercial arts, souvenirs and fine art." Through cowgrrls.com, Ball, Benson and Cruickshanks have generated hybrid works which address questions about 'cultural production' and impinge on discourses about 'tourism'. Strictly speaking, this work is not 'tourist art' but it is drawn from seemingly touristic experiences.

Quite often, when we say tourist, we often assume the worst. However, for Ulmer, there is potential for a more responsible and responsive practice of tourism which he describes with the neologism, 'solonism'. Accordingly, tourism is integral to the creation of representations of identity within nations and within localities. Ulmer suggests that as a solonist, the tourist "will travel to see what is to be seen in order to reinvent our ... identity." Perhaps this is the role that visiting artists can play in communities or localities, engaging with the complexity of identity as it is manufactured and made possible by an event such as the Muster. For those two weeks, as Benson's animation observes, a burgeoning populace explodes into a tent city in the middle of the bush. That population, including Fleur Ball, is drawn here for a range of reasons and desires. Nearly everyone is an outsider and a 'community of strangers' forms. The strangeness is tempered by regular sightings of the signs of cultural connectivity such as the Akubra and Drizabone and the emergence of patterns that Cruickshanks references. There is ample scope within this crowd for misunderstanding because the artists cannot purport to observe and know everything, especially the nuances of identity.

There is a history, perhaps even a tradition, of the 'artist traveller'. Artists have consistently travelled and explored the world. Their sketchbooks and journals have been integral to the imagery and constructions of history, culture and geography. Such works have also been integral to bringing the world closer to home. In addressing these artworks as 'another layer' of the Muster, the artists have used methods akin to anthropology, cartography and tourism. Instead of sketchbooks and journals, these artist travellers have used more recent technologies. Perhaps it is also the technology that adds another layer to this event. Seemingly, through a practice and definition of 'cultural tourism' the methods of anthropology and cartography have been intersected and absorbed. It is apparent that the discourse about 'tourism' is complex indicating that the tourist is not caught in a static position or set of practices. In the work presented in cowgrrls.com, the practice of tourism is consciously split. The artists are tourists, yet they are also participants. They are cultural tourists (implying cultural consumers), yet they are also cultural producers (possibly producing 'tourist art'). They are appealing to the 'post-tourist' by producing work which will exist online or tour to regional venues thus delivering the event to incidental tourists rather than luring the tourist to the event.

The artists have produced work through reflexive motivations by documenting their own experiences and observations through a range of technologies and media. This subjective positioning of self imprints a phenomenological encounter which cannot be objective or scientific nor purely aesthetic or autobiographical. As Carter argues, "the observer does not gaze on the world as through a window, but rather inhabits it. His perception of the world's appeal is inseperable from his own interest in it."14 These artists, unwittingly drawing on a history of artist travellers, have put themselves in the picture and identified their own points of view, positioning themselves spatially and contextually. They can be both participants and observers in ways that only tourists or 'solonists' can be. They came. They saw. They saw themselves seeing.

NOTES
1. Jennifer Craik, 'The Culture of Tourism', Chris Rojek + John Urry (eds), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, Routledge, London, 1997, p 121. Craik defines 'cultural tourism' as "consisting of customised excursions into other cultures and places to learn about their people, lifestyle, heritage and arts in an informed way that genuinely represents those cultures and their historical contexts." The use of the term in the context of this essay is a pun, the artists are both 'cultural tourists' visiting the Muster and tourists undertaking cultural/artistic production.
2. Gregory Ulmer, 'Metaphoric Rocks: A psychogeography of tourism and monumentality', 1992, <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/CLAS/Departments/Rewired/ulmer.html>
3. E.V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, cited in ibid
4. Hal Foster, Return of the Real, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1996, p 181
5. ibid., p 185
6. Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990, p 3
7. John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe: The cosmic source of human creativity, Penguin, London, 1995, p 105
8. Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, 'Tourism and the Photographic Eye' in Rojeck + Urry, op.cit., p 195
9. George Ritzer and Allan Liska, ''McDisneyization' and 'Post-Tourism': Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism', Rojek + 10. Urry, op.cit., p 102
11. Craik, op.cit., p 122
12. Ulmer, op.cit., referencing the classical story of Solon and thus 'theoria'.
13. ibid.
14. Paul Carter, 'An Essay in Spatial History', Gillian Whitlock + Gail Reekis (eds), Uncertain Beginnings, UQP, Brisbane, 1993, p 151