ephemeral geometries

Natalie King

Reproduced courtesy of Art & Australia, Vol. 37, No 4, p.566-571, 2000

"Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rocks." Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory(1)

The notion that landscape is a repository of memory permeates the sensitive and beautifully executed site-specific installations of Melbourne artist Lauren Berkowitz. Her most recent endeavour, Strata, 1999, was commissioned for McClelland Gallery in regional Victoria on the occasion of its redevelopment by architects Williams and Boag. As the new curator, Simeon Kronenberg injected a contemporary and challenging dimension to McClelland's exhibition program by inviting Berkowitz to respond to one of the gallery spaces, thus instigating the first indoor installation at a gallery renowned as one of Australia's premier sculpture parks. Berkowitz's installation continued McClelland's ongoing investigation of sculptural works sited in and connected to the landscape.

Made from local sands sourced from the adjacent quarry, Strata comprised ten concentric rectangles in different shades of sand which covered the gallery floor like a precious carpet. The rural landscape, visible from a large window at the rear of the gallery, created a distinct relationship between exterior and interior spaces. At the opening, viewers were asked to remove their shoes and take time to walk around the work, feeling the crushed pebbles beneath their bare feet while also being aware of the outside vista and the natural light within the gallery. For some it was similar to being in a Japanese Zen garden.

Berkowitz produced a geometric, abstract floor-piece as a conscious response to the hard-edged architectural origins of the building, which first opened in 1971. Formally, Strata is derived from Frank Stella's concentric abstract paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s.(2) Stella was interested in referencing the edge of the canvas and removing any sense of three-dimensional space from the picture plane. While his paintings do not evoke the presence of the artist through touch, Berkowitz deployed his rigid compositional device indoors with delicate materials. She combined his formal concerns with the sensuality of sand. Packed, shaped and laid out along the gallery floor, the work created an optical effect of pulsating stripes.

Berkowitz's adopted format also recalls Josef Albers's 'Homage to the Square' series of paintings, initiated in 1949, which she saw recently at Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Albers opted for a kind of geometric abstraction that is both anti-gestural and rigorously precise. He used contrasting colours to demonstrate how illusions of hue, space and form may be produced.(3) Berkowitz, however, deployed sand like paint, discovering a palette of ochres from pale yellow to deep brown. Her canvas was the gallery floor, compacted with tiny granules of sand that marked out striated bands of polychromatic colour. The result was a richly textured geometric pattern that subtly referenced historical abstraction while suggesting an exquisitely ephemeral realm.

We were also reminded of Nikolaus Lang's earth samples of varying colours displayed on paper in the site-specific work Ochre and sand: Dedicated to the vanished tribes of the Flinders Ranges and Adelaide area, 1987. Featured in the Australian Biennale 1988, 'From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940-1988',(4) Lang's natural 'painting' of pigments in cone-shaped mounds or 'dots' was connected with Aboriginal sand and desert paintings. Lang graduated from an art academy in Munich in 1966 at a time when land art, ecology art and earthworks were coming to prominence. At that time, Robert Smithson called for an 'abstract geology': 'I've always been interested in different sites and different kinds of relationships, you know, like the relationship in a white room as opposed to a quarry.(5) Smithson's interest in working with raw materials in conjunction with abstract form is apparent not only in his famous earthworks but in the geometrical stacks, Leaning strata, 1968, and Glass stratum, 1967.(6) Berkowitz paid homage to Smithson by subtly referencing his title in Strata, while also acknowledging his enterprise of' abstract geology'.

Berkowitz's installations are labour intensive and involve thorough research into site and materials. She investigates the buried history of materials and context in order to realise poetic installations with layered meanings. Materials are gathered, collated and placed in an obsessive, ritualistic way. Her fascination with objets trouves or recycled detritus obtained from unusual sources permeates each particular work.(7) Like Lang, Berkowitz often collects and utilises materials from her designated site, reworking them into elegant sculptural forms.

In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama meditates on the history of landscape 'as an excavation, beginning with the familiar, digging down through the layers of memories and representations toward the primary bedrock, laid down centuries or even millennia ago, and then working up again toward the light of contemporary recognition.(8) Landscaped parks and gardens are artificially constructed spaces designed for entertainment or pleasure. They are places of delight where topography is arranged to feast the eye. Schama's chapter on 'Rudeness and Confusion' traces landscape gardening books from 1700 that extol the virtues of a 'rude wilderness'. Such gardens featured statuary of monstrous birds and dragons, with trees carved to appear as if they had been blasted by lightning.

Berkowitz acknowledges the manner in which gardens and landscaped forms echo aspects of human occupation, preservation, artifice, sentimentality and sensuality. She considers the sedative role of gardens as well as their capacity to provide enclaves of fantasy and recollection. When commissioned by the Sydney Festival in 1999 to create an installation for the city's Queen Victoria Building (QVB), Berkowitz revisited the topiary and hedges of the formal eighteenth-century European garden. Topiary involves the trimming of growth and artificial shaping of vegetation. Berkowitz adopted a version of topiary by cutting and arranging eucalyptus into mathematical proportions. She then constructed an organic membrane which was suspended below the interior dome of the QVB. Gathered, arranged and clipped like a hedge into a large cylindrical form, Cupola, 1999, assumed immense proportions as it levitated within the voids of the building.

At the time of constructing Cupola, Berkowitz was eight months pregnant with her first child, symbolically reflected in the abundance of materials and uterine shape of her sculpture. Its fragrance filled the tiered shopping arcades with the sharp tang of the Australian bush. As shoppers rode the escalators, they were able to appreciate the work from different perspectives, with hues of green revealing changing plant varieties and textures.

Cupola was a technically challenging work. A circular armature was fabricated according to the artist's specifications, and clumps of leaves seamlessly attached to it by a team of assistants. Berkowitz then orchestrated the hoisting of the six metre high structure into position below the dome. Covered in light depending on the time of day, the work hung like a Chinese lantern - both aromatic and astonishing. A companion piece consisting of a thin blanket of eucalyptus was suspended above the patterned Victorian tiles, as if it were knitted into the architectural structure of the building.

For Australian Perspecta 1997, 'Between Art and Nature',(9) Berkowitz combined architectural references with the heightened sensory experience of plants. She accumulated significant quantities of fresh and preserved chillies, lavender and banksias to construct three large-scale woven suspensions collectively entitled Follies, 1997. This title recalls the eighteenth-century notion of an absurd structure or chamber suggesting rudeness and delight, terror and ecstasy. Each plant represented a continent: chillies (the Americas), lavender (England and Europe) and banksias (Australia). All invoked the sense of smell while stimulating personal and historical memory.

Lavender - associated with women's beauty rituals, scenting the body and healing - was transformed into an undulating baroque form redolent of nostalgia and romance, while the glistening chilli spiral evoked pleasant connotations of cooking, taste, smell and touch. The burning properties of chillies also signalled danger and a dystopic vision of the landscape; the sculptural form itself recalled Robert Smithson's Spiral jetty, 1970, taken indoors and infused with aroma. Just as Smithson's mammoth earthwork sank into the sea, having transformed over time, so Berkowitz's fresh chillies shrivelled up and decayed. Native banksias were suspended to form a muted green curtain, a sensuous wall of indigenous plants named after Joseph Banks, the botanist who travelled to Australia with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour. The nectar and fragrance of the banksias suggested earthly paradise and an Arcadian landscape. Laden with meaning, Follies also related to cultural institutions that collect, categorise, display, archive and preserve plant materials, including Sydney's Royal Botanical Gardens, situated near the Art Gallery of New South Wales where the work was displayed.

Heartsease, 1995, was another ephemeral plant installation modelled on an abstract form. A sculptural garden bed comprising nine concentric circles of pansies and the indigenous plant melaleuca, it was sited in the rear garden of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art(10) in Melbourne. In this work Berkowitz alluded to Jasper Johns's flat target-paintings of the mid-1950s, inflecting his circular configuration with the natural. Situated between the Shrine of Remembrance and the Botanical Gardens, Berkowitz chose Victorian colours of purple and gold combined with indigenous plants in an attempt to reconcile European history with colonisation. Concentric circles and dots also referred to the motifs in Aboriginal paintings designating camp sites or sacred sites.

The title of the work was derived from The Language of Flowers,(11) which lists the symbolic meaning of plants - heartsease corresponds to the Victorian sentiment 'you occupy my thoughts'. Moreover, Berkowitz recalls her mother collecting old postcards and cards with greetings such as 'thinking of you'. Personal memories and the history of place surrounded Heartsease in a public commemorative gesture. Through sculpting the landscape, Berkowitz has unpacked the 'strata of memory' buried deep within natural materials to unveil personal, art historical and social memories with exquisite beauty.

1. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Fontana Press, London, 1996, pp. 6-7.

2. For a discussion of Strata and geometrical abstraction see Simeon Kronenberg, 'Strata: Between geometry and gesture', exhibition catalogue, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, 1999. Exhibition 24 October- 16 December 1999.

3. See Abstraction, Geometry, Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America Since 1945, exhibition catalogue, USA, 1989-90, pp. 31-4, as well as Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University, New Haven, rev. edn., 1975.

4. See Daniel Thomas on Nikolaus Lang in Australian Biennale 1988: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940-1988, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1988, pp. 174-5; also Thomas's reference in the same publication (pp. 20-1) to Lang's Earth colour and paintings, 1979, shown in the Third Biennale of Sydney and held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

5. Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1996, p. 262.

6. ibid., pp. 97-8.

7. Natalie King, 'Bag lady', in Bags, Bottles, Newspapers, exhibition catalogue, Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Melbourne, 1994.

8. Schama, op. cit, pp. 16-17.

9. Australian Perspecta 1997, 'Between Art and Nature', curated by Victoria Lynn, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, August - September 1997.

10. 'Seven Histories of Australia', curated by Clare Williamson, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, October 1995.

11. Margaret Pickston, The Language of Flowers, Michael Joseph, London, 1974.

I am grateful to Lauren Berkowitz for her valuable insights and contribution to this article.

Natalie King is a writer and curator based in Melbourne

Naming and Belonging

Berkowitz began a series of five works in 1991 nominally entitled 'Installation', with Buffalo Dateline, 1995, as the final piece. Installation 2, an earlier version of Buffalo Dateline, was first shown at Yoshii Gallery in New York City in 1993. It comprised a cylindrical room of four walled sections, with an interior made from thousands of rolled-up pages from the local New York telephone book. The exterior incorporated telephone bills and rubbish retrieved from the bin that was then attached to a grid-like frame, while the second and third sections were woven from property and personal advertisements, such as lonely-hearts columns.(3) In building these monumental structures, Berkowitz read off the pages until she herself was finally enclosed and silenced by the surrounding walls. The idea of personal advertisements, house acquisition and telephone calls providing a comfort zone of security and human contact was threatened by containment and isolation within this space. Berkowitz has remarked: 'Many of my room and wall constructions initially promise comfort and protection, yet once occupying the space or encountering the objects one becomes aware of their precarious fragility, and sometimes claustrophobic qualities inducing anxiety.(4)

In Installation 4, 1993, the telephone book again functioned as a double-gesture towards formal anonymity and personal information about individuals, families and the community.(5) Berkowitz built columns containing all the listings under her own and her husband's family names. By so doing, she performed a ritual of naming, of identifying herself and others as sharing a common history, as belonging to one another. That the telephone books were made from recycled paper invested the idea with a redemptive power, insofar as it represented an act of retrieving and constituting the bare signs of a family history.

Berkowitz's piece attests to a desire to recover a family - if not construct one for herself while living away from home - which had been scattered either through migration or exile from pre-revolutionary Russia or the Nazi occupation of Europe. The columns became the roll call of names, the register that serves as a form of ledger in which accounting is done. These are the names of family members who emigrated and therefore survived. The telephone book as a disposable object suggests the tenuous nature of recovering evidence of a family history. Berkowitz has said that the experience of looking at the columns of names from the telephone book was 'similar to looking at the listing of names on a war memorial'. She continued: 'I recall my Aunty Minn telling me all records and information were destroyed when the Nazis marched into Minsk, making it impossible now to trace any information on our relatives.(6) What remained was the family album containing pre-war photographs of their Russian relatives. Like the correspondence, the album ends with the war. The telephone books become commemorative monuments, yet by virtue of their being recycled and presented as free-standing columns, the artist gives them new life as a living engagement with a dispersed family history.(7) The work of art becomes a way of filling the silence of the ensuing years and of making a bridge between Berkowitz's generation and that of her family.(8)

The idea of retrieval is further elaborated in two subsequent installations of 1995, Collected Histories and Reclaiming Memory. While these installations continued the idea of an embedded memory and history within the discarded or expendable consumer object, the objects chosen addressed more directly the vagaries and aporias of memory, erased histories, the forgotten, and the transience of life. The idea of collecting evolves as an archival practice that intertwines public records and documents with personal histories and memories.(9) Following a commission from the Prahran City Council in Melbourne, Berkowitz spent six months of 1994-95 searching through the council archives for information on family histories, including that of her own family, who had established a successful furniture business in the area. Presented at the Toorak-South Yarra branch of the Stonnington Library, Collected Histories, 1995, was a construction of vertical columns of archival photographs and texts on aluminium plates, representing undocumented photographs of 'past lives and unmarked events' - the public and private histories of Prahran. In particular, the work became a homage to the mundane and ordinary labour of women. Photographs of the war effort show women standing in front of vast rows of empty glass jars ready to be filled with jam. Following the historiographic practice of telling history through ordinary people rather than leaders and heroes, the work corresponds to what Christian Boltanski has referred to as 'small memory', that which differentiates us from one another.

Shortly afterwards, Berkowitz produced Reclaiming Memory, 1995, for an exhibition on 'The Wandering Jew: Myth and Metaphor' at Melbourne's Jewish Museum. Even in the naming of each work, a critical temporal shift can be seen in the conceptualisation and orientation of her work. The move is from the more passive concept of 'collected histories' as a process of recovery to a performative notion of memory as something that is living, belonging as much to the present as to the past. The inspiration for Reclaiming Memory came from the stories of the artist's Polish mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz. The number on her arm is a constant reminder of past suffering and the fate of her family. Every Friday night at dinner, stories of the past would emerge in one form or another. Berkowitz's mother-in-law had lost all her family, except for one relative who had emigrated to the United States before the war. Berkowitz gathered these stories, together with those from her own family, as one might a collection of objects. The artist then began to gather the stories of other survivors who gave testimony of their experiences, often for the first time.

Reclaiming Memory may be viewed as a tribute to and commemoration of the artist's family and other families who either survived or perished during the Holocaust. Structured as thin walls, this archival work bears a trace of the past. The walls function as monuments, exposing a tension between memory and history, suggesting that their relationship can never be resolved: each is dependent upon the other; each offers what the other cannot. Memory claims an authenticity in its ability to represent the dimension of the past as experienced, while history claims an objective representation of the past as it occurred. Memory questions the 'self-sufficiency' of history, it opens the door to the stream of remembrance after the fact. Yet the reverse may equally be true. For while history often overlooks the texture and detail of individual memories, of lived everyday life, memory and remembrance suffer from forgetfulness, erasure and distortion.

What then of the collector whose purpose in collecting is to restore to history the forgotten or discarded? One is reminded of Walter Benjamin's observation that the 'deepest desire' of the collector is to 'renew the Old World'. Through collecting one performs an act of nostalgia, the longing to return, and the feeling of exile and estrangement that produces a desire to return. Yet Benjamin warns us that 'Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories'. Collecting for Benjamin is characterised by a 'dialectical tension' between order and disorder, a 'balancing act of extreme precariousness'.(10) It is not so much the 'chaos of memories', but ordering the residual material trace of memories, and one's own memories, which are often about loss and dispersal. The precariousness of Berkowitz's installations is that they expose irresolution within their very structure. If neither memory nor remembrance can be trusted, then identity finds itself in an odd place. The 'order' that she brings to each work fails to overcome the traumatic reliving of the past as it occupies the body and memory of her family. There is no safe haven between memory and history. The 'chaos of memories', as Benjamin remarks, can only be overcome through a process of ordering that is forgetting. Yet this, too, creates anxiety about the precariousness of living between disorder and order, between too much memory and too much forgetting.

Illumination of the body

During 1994 Berkowitz developed another strand of work, exemplified in the sculptural installation Bags, Bottles, Newspapers. The three-part installation consisted of a corridor of plastic bags suspended from the ceiling, a hanging web of shredded newspapers, and a long rectangular floor-piece of standing bottles and jars. In each piece the artist gestured towards recovering ephemeral debris through a serial grouping of the same object.

This and other works produced over the following three years - using onion sacks, bottles and jars, rubber gloves, soap (glycerine), test tubes, plastic and paper bags - suggest a late modernist interest in transforming consumer waste and excess into objects of aesthetic contemplation. However, the gesture of retrieval and recycling of discarded material also denotes a re-elaboration of subjects associated with feminist art of the 1970s, and the work of such artists as Eva Hesse.(11) As in a later work, Translucent, 1998, where Berkowitz used glycerine soap to create a crescent-shaped wall, these pieces echo the repetitive processes of women's labour in production and the rituals of everyday life: shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning, washing. Nonetheless, the repetition in Berkowitz's work also generates difference, and the offering of a counter narrative. Infused with and refracted by light, the coarse materiality and utilitarian function of the object is invested with a surplus memory. The work becomes the repository of the body's labour, and our perception of the work is of that residual trace, a memory that we recognise as something shared, a latent and Utopian commensal history.

In Building 40 Project, 1995, the artist sealed the gallery space by stacking white polystyrene fruit boxes to create a cave-like interior, an anti-monument of emptied-out vessels that trans-formed a sculpture of readymades into a minimalist object. Although filled with light, the interior space also created a powerful sensation of claustrophobic containment, as if one was surrounded by the debris or vestigial traces of one's own labour. This tension between transparency and enclosure also characterised Onion Sac Wall, 1996. Constructed from orange onion bags, the woven work retained the sense of its function as a container while the refraction of light through it suggested membrane-like tissue or skin.(12) The sacks acquired the texture of the body in a way that recalls Luce Irigaray's idea that the texture of light may be linked to tactility and the maternal. The artist is thus able to revitalise and transform the banal and the everyday. Furthermore, through the elaboration of discarded objects and materials she opens up their associative power, as if unpacking the symbolic energy condensed within each object. This is articulated in Berkowitz's reflections on the work: 'Wall, monument, symbolic, celebration, commemoration, sacred, Wailing Wall, onion tears, mourning, emotion, memory, passion, red, orange, danger, fire, flames, blood, life, death, ethereal, endless, repetition, archive.'(13) Objects carry not only the 'chaos of memories' but also a disruptive chain of associations. The work itself becomes a way of both releasing and controlling this vertiginous multiplicity of meaning.

A comparable associative way of generating meaning functions in other work produced over the period 1995-96. In Polystyrene Room, Glass Room, Green Room, Vessels, and Clear Glass Cluster, all 1996, the artist induced a sense of anxiety by creating structures from fragile materials. Rather than the chaos and fragility of memories and their traces evoked in earlier works, this was anxiety associated with precariousness, impermanence and collapse.

Wall Red Yellow Blue and Celestial, sculptural installations from 1997, mark a significant shift in Berkowitz's work towards a more highly charged, abstract form of symbolism. Wall Red Yellow Blue evoked the symbolic through hanging assemblages of test tubes and water dye. Celestial, produced for a group exhibition at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, comprised four hundred tall, cylindrical, chemical bottles from a country town serendipitously called 'Arcadia'. The bottles were filled to varying degrees with golden-coloured water and placed in front of an altar. Gold is associated with the purest and most precious of metals, but the artist also commented in her catalogue statement on the association of glass, light and water with purity: glass with clarity and transparency; light with the manifestation of God, and water with cleanliness and purification.(14) Similarly, while Berkowitz used light to illuminate colour as in stained-glass windows, she also related her work to modern abstraction and the sublime. She notes: the 'work of Jewish artists like Rothko and Newman, who used biblical narratives and exhibited in sacred places. They sought a purity in their work, in quest of the sublime.(15) By linking Jewishness to abstraction and the sublime, the artist provides an important clue to the metaphysical dimension of her work and the desire to transform the mundane materiality of objects through light. In Celestial the light no longer reveals the trace of a past long gone, but illuminates the transparency of the material world and the transcendence of the present illuminated within the sphere of the sacred.

The metaphor of light enables us to understand better how the strands in Berkowitz's work not only intersect but also inform one another. For instance, in pieces such as Reclaiming Memory, 1995, light becomes an essential property of meaning - in the illumination within the photographic process of reproduction. Quite simply, without light the work could not be presented. While the previous work captured its subject as a form of trace on light-sensitive photographic paper, in pieces such as Celestial empty material is given form and life through light. The serial character of the object-based pieces, unified and diffused by light, heightens their auratic power. They gather presence through light. Yet what is it that the light illuminates more than a presence that fills the space of absence? Is light a material force that reveals the essence of the object, or something that is otherwise invisible? What has been driven from the world and what reveals itself under its brilliance? Pure emanation? Or does light shed light on the fact that there is nothing behind the light, nothing to be revealed? There is no divine body to be seen. Nothing appears. Take the light away, and there is nothing but the void of night. It is an absolutely unavoidable 'there is' (il y a), as Levinas remarks, an anonymous being, undifferentiated consciousness, nothing to see, anonymity.(16)

And we are left with what remains: the columns of photographs of those no longer alive, the humble materiality of bags and bottles, and the empty form of the discarded container. To ask more, perhaps, is to ask too much. It is the idea of 'discarded' - referring to refuse and expenditure, the excess and waste of the commodity, and also to the impure - that implies the idea of exile and extermination. Expenditure becomes the ground on which the work is founded. Seen in relation to one another, the works reveal sacrifice or rejection rather than assimilation as the essential locus of contemporary life.

Savage Arcadia

The third strand in Berkowitz's work refers to some of her earliest pieces, in which she worked with natural elements in the landscape. Perhaps the most telling example is Tarook, Taarak, produced for Realities Gallery in 1992. The artist gathered eucalyptus leaves of various species from the nearby native-bush areas of the Yarra River in Kew and scattered them over the ground of a small courtyard garden of the gallery. The crushing of leaves underfoot as one crossed the courtyard created a strong fragrance that recalled the Australian bush and acted as a counter-point to the English ivy that had been planted in the surrounding garden. Stepping onto the leaves also symbolically recalled English colonial settlers stepping onto Australian shores. Then as now, Berkowitz's use of native plants suggests a displacement of the colonial landscape. Tarook, Taarak, 1992, was also the first work of this kind concerned with a re-articulation of memory and association through a conscious collecting and re-presentation of material.

Berkowitz continued to develop these ideas, in subsequent installations such as Heartsease, 1995, for 'Seven Histories of Australia' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, and Follies for Australian Perspecta 1997: 'Between Art and Nature' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Heartsease was a layered garden-bed formed into concentric circles. Each layer was made from distinct indigenous and imported plants, symbolising a division within the landscape. While appearing to be little more than an ornamental display, the concentric circles recalled the circles and dots of Aboriginal desert art that represent campsites or sacred sites, and a historical dateline (similar to rings on a tree) that marks the indigenous, colonial and modern occupations of the land.

Follies comprised three floor-to-ceiling woven walls of aromatic plants representing three continents: chillies (the Americas), lavender (England and Europe) and the Australian indigenous banksia. Chillies with their pungent and overpowering smell symbolised the 'New World' and its European exploration. Columbus, Humboldt, Darwin and others explored and set about recording and classifying the Americas with a view to discovering land and natural products that could be of benefit to Europe. Chillies became a natural resource to be expropriated. Banksias were named after Joseph Banks, the botanist who travelled with James Cook on his voyage of 'discovery' to Australia. Banks spent his time collecting, classifying and naming indigenous plants that he took back to England. By virtue of their nectar, banksias were part of the traditional diet of the Aboriginal people, but they also symbolised white middle-class modernity. This symbolic meaning was codified in the modernist paintings and prints of Australian artist Margaret Preston. For a transplanted English culture, banksias represented the possibility of Arcadia, lush and unlimited growth beneath the harsh sun of a foreign land. Lavender's fragrance and medicinal properties are associated with scenting and healing the body, but lavender is also associated with Victorian England and its legacy within contemporary white Australian culture.(17)

By relocating botanical material in an art-museum space, Berkowitz was able to break down the division between museums of art and natural history. Her Perspecta installation represented the museum practice of displaying, collecting and preserving specimens, and gestured towards the Botanical Gardens - also founded in the colonial period - that lie adjacent to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Art became, like plants, the object of sensory pleasure in this work, entailing an education and aesthetic heightening of the senses. Installed like large monochrome or colour field paintings, Follies preserved for a brief time the beauty of nature. It evoked the relation between preservation, mortality/immortality and transience while also alluding to architectural follies set in eighteenth-century gardens and, through them, to an Arcadian dream world infused with the aromatic presence of plants. Yet, as in her earlier work, Berkowitz disturbed this Arcadian retreat through her choice and interplay of materials, reminding her audiences of the historical links between the landscape, plants and a history of trade, science and colonial occupation. Utopia for one became dystopia for the other. Collecting preserves life, or forestalls death in preserving life as an object of observation and science.

The contradiction inherent in collecting and preservation continues to pervade Berkowitz's work. From the comforting and claustrophobic labyrinth of newspapers to the colonial history of the botanical garden to her video titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1998, her work reveals a persistent disturbance that lies at the heart of her subject. The video depicts a fragmented sequence of images, nocturnal animals in zoos and sea-life in aquariums. Here, animals can be admired and protected from extinction, but they are also 'living museum displays' held in captivity. So held, they often lose the ability to survive outside of captivity.(18) The practice of collecting and archiving saves animals, objects and memories from disappearing, but at the cost of turning them into objects of the past, as if preservation itself was an acknowledgment of their transience rather than their renewal and continuation. Through the materials she salvages or the environments she creates, Berkowitz exposes us to the fullness of experience that these things provide and the order of fragility or danger to which they belong.

Anxiety of the sign

For Berkowitz the practice of art, like collecting, is about fate and living on, a way of moving back and forward, about the past and future, memory and remembrance, which constitutes the sensory experience of the world. As Walter Benjamin observed, collectors as 'physiognomists of the world of objects' are 'interpreters of fate'. 19 Collecting and art, for Berkowitz, coalesce in an everyday practice of retrieval and preservation, of making order out of the 'chaos of memories', and the fear that those memories will disappear unless seized. She explores what Benjamin identified in the desire to collect as an impulse to turn back fate and 'renew the Old World'.

What is important in this process is the image becoming legible, and having a residue of historical memory and value. Yet within the new order that Berkowitz creates we are also exposed to the gap between language and experience. There is no continuity, neither the aura nor trace is adequate, although they remain the necessary condition of recollection.

Berkowitz produces art that seeks to recover a sensory memory of the past, a form of historical practice that reanimates shared experience across time and space. Her work captures the present time, its passage and suspension between past and future, its coming and going. And while this is an art that exposes us to the anxiety of such revelation and the evanescent, fragile beauty that resides in shared memory of what has passed, it continues to renew a consciousness of being in the world as if for the first time.

1. Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking my library', in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), Schocken Books, New York, 1968, p. 61.

2. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. v, 1982, p. 560. Cited in Sigrid Weigel, Body and Image-Space, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. 120.

3. In Installation 5, 1992, Berkowitz used rolled-up pages from women's fashion magazines that exuded fragrance from sachet advertisements for perfume. The work of art is linked to the body, displacing the primacy of the visual by an olfactory experience. It becomes the shared site and repository of the body in which tactility, materiality and corporeality can be experienced as a surplus value and Utopian moment of pure expenditure.

4. Cited by Gareth Sansom in Up the Road: Contemporary Artists Out of the Victorian College of the Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, 1998, p. 36.

5. The artist also produced a sound piece, originally accompanying video footage of these two installations, in which listings of her family name found in the New York telephone book are read aloud. We may imagine that latent within such a performance is not only the idea of naming but also the experience of immigrant arrival, when the names of families are called out at the point of entry, and permit papers are reviewed.

6. Correspondence with artist, 8 June 1998.

7. Berkowitz followed this series with a similar installation entitled Buffalo Dateline, 1995, in which she used local telephone books and lonely-hearts columns from Buffalo newspapers. This installation was made for the exhibition 'Essence and Persuasion' at Anderson Gallery, Buffalo.

8. Berkowitz relates how her aunt has spent recent years trying to find out what became of her family. Correspondence with artist, 13 May 1998.

9. The autobiographical is also woven into a larger story in Miscellaneous, 1996, an undulating wall of old receipts from cookery, needlework and life-modelling classes held at Prahran Mechanics Institute. In making this work, Berkowitz discovered that the woman who taught cooking classes had been her grandmother's cook. Correspondence with artist, 5 September 1998.

10. Benjamin, 'Unpacking my library', op. cit. pp. 60-1.

11. In such work from 1996 as White Bag Wall (frieze of white bags), Rubber Band Columns (woven rubber bands), Clear Glass Cluster (glass beer bottles), Cobwebs (packaging tape), Green Room (green fruit trays) and from 1997, Envelope Construction (used, addressed, stamped envelopes), the function of the objects is displaced by an apparently content-less sculptural form. Throughout this period, Berkowitz's art is marked by a strong connection to the work of the 1960s, especially Pop art and nouveau realistes and their critical elaboration of commodity culture as 'infecting' all spheres of everyday life. In these terms, the work of Berkowitz can also be connected to a generation of Australian artists and the journal Art + Text, which sought to rearticulate the legacy of Pop art within the context of Australian culture.

12. See Lisa Yallamas, 'Lauren's prized work is in the bag', Courier-Mail, 12 February 1997.

13. Artist's statement, Moet & Chandon Contemporary Art Award, 1997.

14. See Margaret Woodward (ed.), World Without End, exhibition catalogue, St Patrick's Cathedral, Archdiocese of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1997, p. 19.

15 ibid.

16. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1969.

17. The link between scent, the work of art and women recalls Installation 5 (see fn. 3). However, there is a departure from the association with consumer culture to an exploration of an embedded memory of the senses.

18. See Spiderbox, an exhibition with Rozalind Drummond, exhibition catalogue, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 1998.

19. Benjamin, 'Unpacking my library', op. cit., p. 61.