Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art

ISSN: 1443-4318 (Print) 2203-1871 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raja20

History in Ruin: The Reconstructed Aesthetics of

Michael Stevenson

Wes Hill

To cite this article: Wes Hill (2018) History in Ruin: The Reconstructed Aesthetics of
Michael Stevenson, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 18:2, 163-178, DOI:
10.1080/14434318.2018.1510803

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2018.1510803

Published online: 09 Nov 2018.

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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2018, vol. 18, no. 2, 163–178
https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2018.1510803

History in Ruin: The Reconstructed

Aesthetics of Michael Stevenson
Wes Hill*

Since the late 1990s, the work of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has
centred on reconstructed historical objects that resemble artefacts from archae-
ology, anthropology and material culture disciplines. As part of a broader sensibil-
ity of twenty-first-century ‘archival,’ ‘archaeological’ and ‘historiographic’ art,
Stevenson and his peers have prompted much discussion about the legacy of
1970s institutional critique on post-1990s practice-based treatments of history and
museology. What makes Stevenson so interesting within this lineage is his inclin-
ation to research relatively overlooked past events in order to problematise a clear
line between historical perspective and aesthetic experience. Although Stevenson's
work conjures the empiricism of the social sciences and the reflexivity of institu-
tional critique, its nostalgic, fragmented, and multi-temporal characteristics hint at
a contemporary treatment of the romantic ruin. Fascinated with the intersections
of cultural and economic histories yet sceptical of periodisation, his locating of
nostalgia within critical practice reveals the struggle to grasp one's present,
endowing viewers with the capacity to reconstruct for themselves the significance
of his own reconstructions.
Stevenson’s works are invariably borne from historical research, yet they gen-
erate a palpable sense of uncertainty about their veracity. Over the last 20 years,
Stevenson has addressed issues such as apocalyptic predictions (PreMillennial,
1997), the manufacture of a utility vehicle in New Zealand (This is the Trekka,
2003), art’s relationship to political revolution (Persepolis 2530, 2007), mathemat-
ical theories of probability (Introduccion a la Teoria de la Probabilidad, 2009) and the
evangelical missionary work of Pentecostal Christians in Papua New Guinea
(Signs and Wonders, 2016). Connecting these otherwise diverse installations is the
artist’s staging of the intersections of culture and economics as an eccentric form
of museological bricolage. Stevenson’s simulated objects are based on real arte-
facts; however, they tend to be treated so speculatively that what at first looks

*Email: Wes.Hill@scu.edu.au

# 2018 The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, Inc [163]
W. Hill

like serious historical critique on further inspection can seem a whimsical

distortion.
Stevenson began his career as an appropriation-based painter in Auckland in
the 1980s, depicting, in quasi-realistic style, subjects such as churches, caravans
and memorial wreaths, often addressing New Zealand provincialism. His embrace
of more overt archaeological and archival tropes in the late-1990s coincided with
his relocation to Berlin, Germany, connecting his practice to a plethora of other
artists employing similar methodologies on the world stage of contemporary art.
Along with Simon Starling, Zoe Leonard, Mike Nelson, Carol Bove, Mark Dion,
Roy Arden, Naeem Mohaiemen and Jeremy Deller, Stevenson has helped shape an
understanding of art in the digital era as an anachronistic form of cultural archae-
ology. This has largely been understood as evolving from the institutional critique
artists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Mierle
Laderman Ukeles and Robert Smithson. As pioneers of conceptual art, these artists
promoted the idea that the physical and socio-political structures tacitly support-
ing art could be examined within artistic practice itself, utilising a range of critical
methodologies traditionally regarded as curatorial, art-historical or sociological in
nature. However, whereas an artist such as Haacke thematises the intertextuality
of art and power by focussing on ‘the economic manipulation of the art object –
its circulation and consumption as a commodity-sign’, Stevenson appears more
interested in leveraging capitalism’s invisible hand as a caution against didactic
analysis, suggesting how cultural value is miraculous at times, and can escape
coherent explanation.1
The principle of uncertainty in Stevenson’s work – its oscillations between fact
and fiction, narrative and form, analysis and autonomy – underpinned his first
career retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011. In the
rationale for the exhibition, curated by Glenn Barkley, Stevenson’s adoption of
social science methodologies was front and centre, but so too was his embrace of
aesthetic ambiguity, economic uncertainty and governmental conspiracy.2
Reflecting this indeterminacy, in the exhibition catalogue the Australian anthro-
pologist Michael Taussig was reluctant to define Stevenson as either an artist or a
social scientist, claiming instead that he was ‘a poet and exquisite ironist’, as well
as an ‘old-fashioned storyteller for a new age’ who ‘blends a lyrical voice with
searing pathos, combining painstaking precision with an acute sense of the chaos
that is history’.3 Here, the contradictions of Stevenson’s practice can be seen in full
flight: he is a conceptualist whose practice centres on formal techniques, an histor-
ian who is more concerned with the chaos of history, and a poet who conflates
irony and sincerity.
Stevenson is regularly touted in exhibition publicity material as an
‘anthropologist of the avant-garde’; however, the artist himself has claimed that
archaeology is a more appropriate point of comparison for his practice.4 He
unconventionally refers to the discipline as a byword for the study of material cul-
ture that at the same time infers the epistemological gaps that appear on excava-
tion sites. He states:

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

Figure 1. Michael Stevenson, The Gift, 2005–2008, dimensions variable, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany,
installation view. # and courtesy the artist.

The way I like to think of my work is in terms of archaeology. Some of it

actually looks archaeological but I mean in terms of the viewer’s experience.
At a real archaeological site there are obvious gaps, sometimes there is very
little information as to the precise significance of the site, but this does not
necessarily intrude on the viewer’s enjoyment. Intrigue can be very
powerful and I would hope to set up a similar relationship with the viewer;
making use of the gaps to suggest that something happened here.5

Archaeology is thus conceived not as the study of material evidence in order to

better understand past human cultures, but as a metaphor for the viewer’s
encounter with his work, in which simulated socio-historical objects thwart subor-
dination to their contextual frameworks.
Stevenson’s The Gift (2005–08, Figure 1) has become iconic of the artist’s pecu-
liar brand of counterfeit museology. The installation centres on a battered life-
sized raft based on a sketch of a vessel that the Scottish Australian artist Ian
Fairweather built for a 1952 journey from Darwin over the Timor Sea, which saw
him construct a sail made from a found parachute to a base of aircraft fuel tanks
and assorted pieces of timber and bamboo. After almost perishing on his 16-day
journey, Fairweather collapsed on the beach at Roti, Indonesia, and, after being
helped by locals, was transported by authorities to Timor, Bali, Singapore and,
finally, to England, where he was placed in a home for derelicts. Fairweather’s
journey was inspired by the Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki
expedition made in 1947, which was itself an eccentric attempt to prove, through

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W. Hill

‘re-enactment’, how the Incas of South America reached the Polynesian islands
before Asians migrated there. Despite these ethnographic underpinnings, it is
Stevenson’s interest in ‘doubling’ that is perhaps most resonant in the work,
employing re-enactment, reconstruction and appropriation as methods and
as themes.
Stevenson’s sculptural centrepiece, which was initially constructed with the
help of a group of Sea Scouts in the south of England, has been variously dis-
played alongside meticulous handmade copies of a 1952 newspaper article from
The Times briefly reporting on Fairweather’s adventure, a frontispiece to an
Indonesian edition of Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki book, kitsch-looking maps of the Timor
Sea, and a bamboo cage designed to hold fighting roosters. The enigmatic qualities
of these objects suggest the work is more than a critical account of Fairweather’s
heroic journey and his entanglement in a series of international adventures that
are evocative of French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s gift economy. Brian Dillon has
described Stevenson’s portrayal of Fairweather as that of a ‘penniless artist who
trusts his fate to the flimsiest of objects, [and] expends astonishing energy (if,
apparently, little forethought) to achieve nothing beyond a set of encounters and
exchanges where no money changes hands’.6 Yet such a Don Quixote-esque alle-
gory of the contemporary artist (perhaps even Stevenson himself) adrift in the glo-
bal economy also underscores how the facts of Fairweather’s journey are of minor
importance in this work. If there is an uncanny quality to Stevenson’s practice, it
is the result of this propensity to allow his critical narratives to be overshadowed
by his handling of materials, which focus attention on the minute details, happy
accidents and coincidences that enchant the artist throughout the process of
research and reconstruction. Given the sketchy historical record of Fairweather’s
adventure, The Gift amplifies the aesthetic decisions involved in historical inter-
pretation, with Stevenson utilising the gaps between object and narrative to cast
his fable-like aesthetic spells.

The Actualisations of Critical Art

Rex Butler argued in a 2002 essay that Stevenson should be categorised as a defini-
tively post-modern artist because of his perceived ambition to ‘destabilise the pre-
tensions of a modernist avant-garde … in the name of an even more radical
avant-garde’.7 Butler claims that Stevenson’s work – ‘being at once inside and out-
side, complicit and transgressive’ – is directed to evoke a radicality that no longer
challenges the status quo but actually serves to mask a conservative stance.8 The
paranoid yet ambiguous character of Stevenson’s work, described by Butler as
‘possessing no inherent value in itself but endlessly rewritable in its meaning’,
was criticised for its capacity to include everyone and everything as part of its
conspiratorial plots, only to position the artist as above it all.9 As a projection of
‘outsiderness in insiderness’, Stevenson’s ‘complex in-jokes’ about art history
appeal to art-world insiders, while his critiques of ‘the pretensions and follies of
modern art’ appeal to outsiders who would welcome his apparent undermining of
art’s elitism.10 Butler’s essay essentially considers the repercussions of what he

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

sees as the artist’s ‘camp’ logic, which strategically conveys conformity ‘as the
most transgressive gesture of all’.11 In doing so, Butler concocts an image of
Stevenson’s work as a form of neo-avant-garde critique that ostensibly masks its
post-modern pastiche, suggesting that the artist’s historical forms are really blank
parodies lacking in critical substance.12
In taking Stevenson to task for the ways in which his practice might appeal to
conservative critics (such as John McDonald) who see themselves as rebellious out-
siders, Butler renders the uncertainties and nuances of Stevenson’s work as signs
of insincerity in disguise.13 The problem with such assessments is that they are
largely self-fulfilling prophecies, transforming any serious artistic motivation into
the ‘purely strategical’.14 Consequently, there is a sense of the paranoiac underly-
ing Butler’s own interpretation of Stevenson’s paranoia, as if over the course of
the essay he neurotically tries to unify the artist’s motivations in order to reveal
something Stevenson cannot possibly see. Butler states that Stevenson’s ‘merit as
an artist’ is that he ‘offers himself up as a symptom’ for analysis – a backhanded
compliment used to signal a deficiency in Stevenson’s practice that only a demysti-
fying critic can diagnose.15 A similar view was integral to the ‘critique or
complicit’ debates of 1980s art, particularly in America, where critical reflexivity
was under threat to what Fredric Jameson called the ‘perpetual present’ of post-
modernism and its ‘multiple historical amnesias’.16 Implicit in such arguments is
the assumption that artists who treat history aesthetically are victims of the
amnesiac-inducing conditions of late capitalism. At the time, Butler’s essay pro-
vided much-needed attention to Stevenson’s curious wavering between insider
and outsider status – his capacity to make authoritative museum pieces and eccen-
tric, irresolvable aesthetic puzzles – however, it is less convincing that such work
must be read as an elaborate cover for the artist’s political conservatism.
In contemplating the ‘correct’ artistic disposition for historicisation, the ques-
tion arises: what precisely constitutes critical art after post-modernism, particularly
in the domain of post-conceptual practice? In James Meyer’s 1993 catalogue text
‘What Happened to the Institutional Critique’, he claims that the most effective
projects of this type – which blur traditional artistic techniques with museo-
logical/curatorial practice, historical research, activism and pedagogy – are those
that do not merely metaphorise political content, nor displace ‘the political into a
thematic expression’, but, instead, ‘demystify’ the structures that shape meaning.17
Written for a group show at American Fine Arts gallery in New York, months
after the opening of the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennale, Meyer paraphrases
Robert Smithson’s 1972 statement about his artistic approach – ‘I just want to be
conscious of where I am, in relationship to all these different parameters’ – to
claim that art in this critical tradition upends standard art-historical, cultural and
political lineages in order to render the viewer ‘conscious’ of where they stand in
the present.18 Front and centre here is the notion of history as a structuring of con-
sciousness, with artists revitalising the ‘forgotten’ narratives of the past in order to
convey present-day conditions.

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W. Hill

Given that institutional critique itself became institutionalised in the 1980s,

Meyer argues that a generation of artists subsequently ‘began to interrogate an
expanded site: other institutions (natural history museums, historical societies,
zoos, parks), other sites, were explored’.19 Artists such as Ren
ee Green sought to
de-hierarchise art in the 1990s, taking institutional critique beyond the art world to
highlight the intersections of different communities and paradigms. However, for
all of Meyer’s distinguishing between old and new forms of institutional critique,
he nonetheless considers the critical language of ‘interrogation’, ‘pedagogy’,
‘activism’ and ‘consciousness’ as integral to its lineage. While noting right at the
end of his essay how the ‘instrumentalizing of practice (including critical practice)
for commodification has only accelerated’, he fails to examine the ‘beyond
commodification’ assumptions driving Smithson’s appeal to consciousness in the
first place, and its role in perpetuating the hyperbolic parameter-obliterating lan-
guage of post-modern critical art.20
Meyer’s emphasis on critical consciousness in 1990s art would, in the early
twenty-first century, evolve into a critical ‘unearthing’ of history and cultural
memory, marked by the prevalence of archaeological, museological and historio-
graphic tropes. High-profile exhibitions such as Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever:
Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008), Sabine Folie’s Modernism as a
Ruin: An Archaeology of the Present (2009), Dieter Roelstraete’s Way of the Shovel
(2014), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13 (2012) and Massimiliano
Gioni’s Gwangju (2010) and Venice (2013) Biennales have all underscored how
artists and curators alike have embraced the hands-on connotations of
‘archaeology’ and ‘archiving’ to convey art as a form of DIY museology.
Stevenson’s use of similar reference points in his work increased throughout the
2000s, after which time his practice was viewed less in terms of a critique of art-
world provincialism and more in the realm of artists such as Mike Nelson, who,
although less polemical, similarly combines the historical, the archaeological and
the fantastical.
In Hal Foster’s 2004 essay, An Archival Impulse, he alludes to such tendencies
as part of an anachronistic turn in digital-era art, where art performs ‘an idiosyn-
cratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philoso-
phy, and history’.21 Foster examines the British artist Tacita Dean, the Swiss artist
Thomas Hirschhorn and the American artist Sam Durant to argue that all three
artists are representative of ‘an archival impulse at work internationally in contem-
porary art’.22
Central to Foster’s essay is the idea that archival artists do not merely romanti-
cise the past. Although staging projects that are ‘incomplete’ and ‘fragmentary’,23
they nonetheless provide ‘points of departure’; they ‘recoup’24 failed visions, and
they ‘turn belatedness into becomingness’.25 Responding in part to Nicolas
Bourriaud’s concept of postproduction, which was coined in 2001, Foster empha-
sises how the ‘archival impulse’ seeks to offset the ‘virtual’ forms of information
found online: ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically
present’.26 In the case of Dean, who explores the poetic sensibilities of analogue

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

media, Foster describes how her archival objects ‘serve as found arks of lost
moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal
between an unfinished past and a reopened future’.27 Archival art is thus pre-
sented by Foster as ameliorative in its ambition, entailing artists who mine the
past in order to provide critical commentary on the present, and to foreground
‘new orders of affective association’ for the future.28
Foster is so committed to emphasising the contemporary political significance
of his selected artists that he downplays any relation to nostalgia in his essay,
employing, instead, the adjective ‘utopian’ for its inferences of a future, alternative
ideological vision. As critical practices that do not merely wallow in nostalgia or
fetishise the outmoded, Dean, Hirschhorn and Durant convey the ‘partial recovery
of the utopian demand’ in modernism by turning ‘excavation sites into construc-
tion sites’.29
Stevenson’s treatment of historical subjects is at odds with Foster’s claim that
archival art’s disturbance of the symbolic order of history is motivated by a for-
ward-looking ‘political use-value driven by artistic-love value’.30 Whereas
Hirschorn’s ‘purpose is pragmatic’ and his work displays a ‘will to connect what
cannot be connected’,31 it is often difficult to know exactly what to do with the his-
tories raised in Stevenson’s work, and it is unclear what it offers in terms of a
commentary on the present, let alone the future. Foster asserts that ‘the purpose of
any archaeology is to ascertain what one can of the difference of the present and
the potential of the past’.32 He therefore insists on the discerning, ‘counter-memo-
ry’ qualities of archival art, advocating for art that makes its contemporary rele-
vance clear, even if through divergent means.33 In his 2015 publication Bad New
Days, Foster revisits his 2004 essay only to reiterate its critical imperative, this time
in a discussion of contemporary performance art. While noting that ‘diverse tem-
poralities’ are integral to ‘any artwork’, ‘a superior work’ must ‘actualize’ the
diverse temporalities of its production and reception – superior art ‘cannot be
fixed on a traumatic view of the past; that is, even as it calls up past art, it must
also open onto future work’.34
In 2009, the Belgian curator Dieter Roelstraete noted the prescience of Foster’s
2004 essay in relation to his own examination of the ‘historiographic turn’ in
twenty-first-century art. However, he also questioned the supposed critical integ-
rity of Foster’s selected artists. Roelstraete claims that although artists working in
archival, archaeological or historiographic modes might at first appear to have ‘an
impressive critical pedigree’, this is sometimes only a superficial appearance, func-
tioning as compensation for the inability ‘to grasp or even look at the present,
much less to excavate the future’.35
Like Foster, Roelstraete observes how artists employing archival and archaeo-
logical methodologies promote a ‘bodily bondage’ to the world that reveals the
‘primacy of the material in all culture’.36 However, unlike Foster, he is wary of the
fact that contemporary artists who work in the tradition of institutional critique
also tend to be nostalgic for the ‘ideological clarity, among other things, of the

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W. Hill

Cold War era’, suggesting the ‘archival impulse’ could just as easily stem from a
fetish for the legitimising role of the museum itself.37 Roelstraete continues:

Many of the artists working in this field of a critical museology have a

complicated relationship with the habitus of institutional critique, to which
it is obviously indebted; they certainly long for the museum much more
strongly and directly than the first generation of institutional critics would
ever allow themselves to. In the speleological imaginary of ‘mining the
museum’ – note the sexual undertones of this metaphor – the museum has
become an object of desire as much as an object of critique, a cavity as much
as an excavation site.38

Roelstraete highlights a tension at the heart of the ‘archival impulse’ – between cri-
tique and nostalgia. Although going much further than Foster in this regard, he,
too, shies away from examining the very implications of ‘critical’ in ‘critical
practice’, treating it as a value metaphysically bestowed by an artist onto a work
for viewers to discern, rather than arising from one’s interaction with a text, image
or object. As such, both Roelstraete and Foster rely on temporality as a key factor
in determining critical from nostalgic art, separating those history-artists who are
‘in the business of shaping the future’ from those museum fetishists who, in
appearing stuck in the past, are content to maintain the dominant symbolic order
of the museum.39 Rather than indulging in escapist fantasy, Roelstraete wants his-
tory-based works to generate the ‘bigger picture’ and to keep ‘an eye on the pos-
sible production of the theory of the present and recovery (“excavation”) of
the future’.40
In The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too (2013), Christine Ross focusses
explicitly on this relationship between history and temporality to argue that so
many contemporary artists are looking to the past in order to ‘presentify’ the mod-
ernist regime of historicity. Ross builds on the work of the French historian
Francois Hartog, but ultimately goes against his thesis that the prevailing regime
of historicity today is ‘presentist’, in which the present takes on the appearance of
an absolute value, disconnected from both past and future. Ross argues instead
that although artists today are not overtly future-driven, and appear to conflate
past, present and future, such treatments could be understood as countering the
ideals of modernist futurity that devalued the present and the past.41 She exam-
ines the work of Stan Douglas and Craigie Horsfield, amongst others, to highlight
a tendency for contemporary artists to depict the past in the manner of the longue
dur
ee. These artists offer ‘broader temporal horizons’ that do not return to history,
but instead suspend the ‘forwardness’ of historical narrative, potentialising
‘modernist quasi-remnants’ by inscribing the past with the lived experience of
temporal passing.42 Aligning contemporary history-based art practices with the
critique of modernist historicity, Ross claims that Douglas and Horsfield
‘potentialize’ the past with the interminable temporality of the present, revealing
the future as conditioned by this very process.43

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

Figure 2. Michael Stevenson, Persepolis 2530, 2007–08, 1130  1040 504 cm, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, installation
view. # and courtesy the artist.

Here, we can see how concepts of ‘actualising’, ‘presenting’ and ‘potentialising’

have been central to twenty-first-century discourse on ‘archival’, ‘archaeological’
and ‘historiographic’ art. In these models, artists are tasked with the job of making
the past appear less remote and more useful, informed by the vantage point of
contemporary life. Such emphasis conveys ‘critical practice’ as a process of ‘being
shown’, alluding to the interpretive process as one in which works actualise their
own meanings. To be nostalgic in this context is to take a virtual step out of the
present, to fashion distance over presentness, and to make oneself vulnerable to
charges of ignoring or obscuring present-day political realities.

Reflective Ruins
Although discourse on archival, archaeological and historiographic work has pro-
gressively acknowledged more nuanced notions of critical practice in light of ear-
lier post-modern polemics, an aversion to nostalgia arguably still persists, often
equated with ‘a resigned inability to face the future’.44 Coined in 1688 by the
Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, nostalgia has two Greek roots: nostos, meaning
‘return home’, and algia, meaning ‘longing’, which Hofer drew from to describe a
pathological state of mind.45 In the late eighteenth century, nostalgia suggested a
sentimental longing for the past, similar to melancholy except the sufferer was
more severely gripped by longing specific to an object or place. Although its original
meaning has evolved, ‘nostalgia’ has not lost its negative, or maladjusted, connota-
tions, and, much like ‘fetishism’, it is still primarily regarded as an inappropriate or
unhealthy fixation. Against the temporal and critical uncertainties invoked by nostal-
gia, critical art is that which appears at hand for the viewer – an art that, in the words

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W. Hill

of Roelstraete, does not resign itself to the many good reasons to indulge in the
‘escapist fantasy’.46 However, to only ascribe reflexive value to those historiographic
works deemed useful to present-day realities would be to overlook the affective force
of nostalgia as a positive form of invested human recollection.
In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym distinguishes between restora-
tive and reflective nostalgia to argue that restorative nostalgia emphasises nostos
(the return home), whereas reflective nostalgia accentuates algia (the longing).47
Focussing predominantly on the post-communist experience, Boym claims that
reflective nostalgia can be ‘ironic and humorous’, entailing meditation not on the
ethical recovery of a specific past (in the manner of restorative nostalgia) but on a
more general sense of history and the passage of time itself.48 Boym states:

Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of
inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves
details, not symbols. At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and
creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias.49

Boym finds in reflective nostalgia the scrutinising of personal memory to delay

the ‘return home’ of nostos – an approach that reveals how ‘longing and critical
thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve
one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection’.50
In Ruins of the Avant-Garde (2010), Boym further argues that the temporal com-
plexity of reflective nostalgia is fundamental to the concept of the ruin. Since the
time of romanticism, the aesthetic motif of the ruin has blurred sentiment and
archaeological remnant to conjure a type of nowhere zone, where a vague notion
of pastness is given weight by virtue of appearing radically out of step with the
demands of the present. Boym states: ‘A tour of “ruin” leads you into a labyrinth
of ambivalent temporal adverbs – “no longer” and “not yet”, “nevertheless” and
“albeit” – that play tricks with causality.’51 Stemming from the Latin ruina, which
means ‘a collapse’, the ruin is antithetical to the more constructive temporal inflec-
tions of ‘critique’. The ruin is suggestive of decay but also, after romanticism, with
fragmentation, ambiguity and what sociologist Georg Simmel (1911) formulates as
a mode of collaboration between human and natural creation, with ‘natural’ here
echoing romantic promethean ideas about the limitations of human knowledge.52
Stevenson’s work has been widely praised for its linking of appropriation meth-
odologies and historical revisionism; however, it is often overlooked as to how
many of his works convey the logic of the ruin. In Persepolis 2530 (2007–08, Figure
2), Stevenson presents a fabricated ruin in the form of an enormous 12-metre-long
cardboard pavilion made to resemble a rusted steel structure in a state of disrepair,
replete with sand, strewn fabric and the bones of a peacock. The work, which was
exhibited at the Swiss art fair, Art Basel, in 2007 and staged the following year at
Bristol’s Arnolfini gallery, is a 1:1 model of the pavilions that were used by
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (the last Shah of Iran) in his celebrations of the
2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire in 1971 – a festival marking the history

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

Figure 3. Michael Stevenson, Art of the Eighties and Seventies, 2005, 1370  1370  580 cm, Museum Abteiberg,
Mo€nchengladbach, Germany, installation view. # and courtesy the artist.

of the Iranian monarchy in Persepolis that subsequently became symbolic of the

monarchy’s extravagance and collapse. The Pahlavi’s were significant patrons of the
arts, so Stevenson’s presentation of this melancholic-looking ruin at an art fair in
Switzerland at first suggests a visual allegory about the contemporary art world’s
reliance on wealth, power, privilege and exploitation. However, given that
Stevenson was visibly benefitting from the finances of the art-world elite – actively
participating in global art-market dynamics – the work’s critical position appears
similarly dilapidated, its revisionist warning compromised.
The provocative uncertainty of Persepolis 2530 at Art Basel was extended when
the work was exhibited the following year at Arnolfini, Bristol, where it was
accompanied by an original Andy Warhol portrait of Shah Pahlavi painted in
1978, just before the overthrow that sent the Shah into exile (remarkably, Warhol
was the official court artist for the Iranian monarchy). Stevenson’s fabricated ruin
and actual Warhol portrait were given equal status in the exhibition, suggesting
how ruins themselves are often a blend of the artefactual and the faked. As Brian
Dillon has noted, despite its connection with mysteriousness and sublimity, as an
artistic trope the ruin also ‘totters on the edge of a certain species of kitsch’.53
He continues:

The pleasure of the ruin – the frisson of decay, distance, destruction – is

both absolutely unique to the individual wreckage, and endlessly repeatable,

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W. Hill

like the postcard that is so often its tangible memento … Ruins show us
again – just like the kitsch object – a world in which beauty (or sublimity) is
sealed off, its derangement safely framed and endlessly repeatable.54

It is in this sense that Persepolis 2530 portrays its historical subject

through the paradoxical language of the ruin, as a union of opposites and a
labyrinth of conceptual and aesthetic threads that, in prolonging the journey
(valuing details over symbols), leads us back to itself in all of its
incompleteness.
Like Persepolis 2530, Stevenson’s 2005 installation Art of the Eighties and
Seventies (Figure 3) also centres on a ruin, comprising a site-specific installation
of dirt, bricks, rubble, foliage and steel cabling created for the Museum
Abteiberg, in the German city of M€ onchengladbach. Stevenson conceived the
installation in response to the museum’s involvement with the Italian art col-
lector Giuseppe Panza, who in the 1980s offered the institution a long-term loan
of his significant collection of minimal and conceptual art on the proviso that a
private viewing space be built on the upper floor of the building. Panza’s loan to
the museum never came to fruition and the private viewing space was never
built; however, upon learning of these events, Stevenson constructed Panza’s
requested viewing space as if it had been built and later discovered by archaeol-
ogists in the future. In the museum space the viewer was confronted not with
the narrative I have just recounted but with the spectacle of a site in the process
of excavation.
Art of the Eighties and Seventies makes explicit Stevenson’s conjunction of art-
historical facts and fantasies, reinforcing Roelstraete’s pejorative claim that art after
the ‘archival turn’ might also mean the museum is turned into an object of desire,
a symptom of art-world navel gazing. That said, Stevenson is also no Jeff Koons.
The accompanying catalogue – which, like many of his projects (as well as his
website), emulates a period look – connects the work to a host of historical obser-
vations, from Museum Abteiberg architect Hans Hollein’s fondness for ruins, to
the birth of art tourism in the early 1980s. When Stevenson does present his narra-
tives within the exhibition space itself, these typically take the form of drawings
based on information-heavy phenomena such as museum plaques, catalogue
essays and archival newspaper cuttings. As such, his histories often appear bound
by the materials through which they are conveyed, signalling to viewers that,
although based on real things, they lack the credibility of actual historical records.
Whereas Michel Foucault’s ‘critical archaeology’ examined discursive fields and
archive systems to reveal the ‘rules that characterize a discursive practice’55 and to
show how ‘these orders are not the only possible ones or the best ones’,56
Stevenson seems intent to leave his unearthed histories in ruin, focussing on the
aesthetic processes involved in their re-staging, and suggesting that historical
reflexivity can come to us in fragments – in details, disruptions, and dis-
orderly models.

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

Figure 4. Michael Stevenson, The Fountain of Prosperity (Answers to Some Questions about Bananas), 2006,
245  157  111 cm, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, United States, installation view. # and
courtesy the artist.

Conclusion
Stevenson’s coupling of temporal complexity and critical uncertainty should be
read against what Terry Smith has described as the dominant multi-temporal

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W. Hill

Figure 5. Michael Stevenson, The Smiles are not Smiles, 2005, dimensions variable, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney, Australia, installation view. # and courtesy the artist.

condition of contemporary art, in which ‘we struggle to grasp our present, to find
even a temporary place in it’.57 Stevenson’s practice is an apt point of comparison
for Smith’s account of contemporaneity because it connotes a breakdown of histor-
ical continuity and critical criteria. Juggling kitsch, historical reflection, nostalgia
and economic analysis, these tropes appear in Stevenson’s work as neither deep
nor superficial, but as multiple points of entry for viewers who are driven less by
the artist’s conceptual directives than by their own navigations of the exhib-
ition space.
Following the notion that contemporary art ‘can no longer be adequately char-
acterized by terms such as “modernity” and “postmodernity”’,58 Smith, in What is
Contemporary Art, claims that contemporary currents in art are not symptoms of
the conditions of our time, but are, rather, ‘the actual kinds of art that these condi-
tions have generated’, whose ‘friction in relation to each other is of their
essence’.59 Suggestive of Stevenson’s fragmented yet largely object-centric
‘histories’, Smith claims that the multifarious directions of history today appear to
us in the form of ‘concrete particulars’ and ‘frictional encounters’, transforming
modernity’s forward-looking ideological divisions between ‘modern’ (progressive)
and ‘non-contemporaneous’ (nostalgic) subjects into a ‘contemporaneity for all’.60
Here, ‘contemporary’ is distinct from Christine Ross’s ‘presentifying’, which entails
the creative activation of the present ‘as an organizing principle of the past and
the future’.61 Rather, for Smith, the experience of contemporaneity in art is one in
which the logic of historical continuity has diminished along with stable notions

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 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 2

of critical perspective, with Smith rhetorically asking, in paraphrase of Tim Griffin:

what happens to ‘art-critical discourse’ when ‘the critical models of previous eras
do not, and cannot, be asked to function as they once did?’.62
Given his recurring interest in historical subjects in crisis and in past systems
on the brink of economic collapse, Stevenson’s work fuels expectations of unam-
biguous capitalist critique. However, to evaluate his works solely as critical state-
ments about the nature of art’s relationship to the global economy would be to
instrumentalise them to their detriment, as if exemplary of, in the words of
Jacques Ranciere, ‘a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms
of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world trans-
formation’.63 What Stevenson offers instead is not ‘critical efficiency’ but ‘the possi-
bility of … the viewer constructing or reconstructing that efficiency himself or
herself’.64 Stevenson’s practice invokes a Rancierean appeal to the agency of the
viewer, posing uncertainty not as evidence of egoistic duplicity or revisionist
ineptitude, but as an outcome of his belief in the capacity of viewers to reconstruct
the significance of his own reconstructions for themselves. The artist’s reluctance
to provide clarity around the terms of his histories can give the appearance of fall-
ing short of expectations, as if Stevenson wants the intellectual credence that
comes with being recognised as a critical artist but chooses to shirk his demystifi-
cation duties.
For the romantics, the damaged and fragmentary nature of a ruin is what
struck at the senses, the imagination and the emotions, serving as physical mani-
festations of time-as-concept. Stevenson’s dilapidated-looking work – ranging
from a hydro-mechanical analogue computer (The Fountain of Prosperity (Answers
to Some Questions About Bananas), 2006, Figure 4), to a pile of gold bricks (The
Smiles are not Smiles, 2005, Figure 5), to a battered 1980s-era flight simulator
(Signs and Wonders, 2016) – conjures, like the romantic ruin, both historical recon-
struction and withdrawal, with the artist placing too much attention on the chain
of associations underpinning his objects for viewers to be certain about their
denotative function.
In combining fabricated historical objects with actual historical narratives –
accompanied by publications underscoring the anachronistic basis of each installa-
tion – Stevenson presents the viewer with real and virtual sites in which historical
reflection and romantic embellishment converge and diverge. The pasts conveyed
in his work are not those in which dominant temporal and ideological perspec-
tives are embraced or critiqued, but are those that suggest how works of art can
handle multiple times and multiple paradigms without authorial assurances that
actualise them according to specific present-day demands. Meaning, for Stevenson,
is therefore conceived more in terms of collaboration than assertion. Although he
manipulates historical events into poetic affects, his work does not linger on the
self-referentiality of his language. Instead it affirms how aesthetic considerations
are demanded in all extrapolations of empirical evidence, finding in the ruin a
way to resist subordinating to disciplinary convention the sensible intensities and
fractures involved in historical assemblage.

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W. Hill

Notes
1. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural
Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 103–4.
2. Glenn Barkley, ‘About the Exhibition’, Museum
of Contemporary Art, 2011, http://www.mca.com.
au/collection/exhibition/553-michael-stevenson/
(accessed March 1, 2016).
3. Michael Taussig, ‘Between Land and Sea’, Das
Weltall (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art,
2011), 5.
4. ‘Michael Stevenson: Persepolis 2530’, Arnolfini,
2008, https://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/
michael-stevenson-persepolis-2530 (accessed March
10, 2016).
5. Original emphasis, in Wes Hill, ‘Double fantasy
– The artful practice of Michael Stevenson’, Art &
Australia 46, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 464.
6. Brian Dillon, ‘Michel Stevenson’, Frieze 89
(March, 2005): 107.
7. Rex Butler, A Secret History of Australian Art
(Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 27.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 28.
10. Ibid., 23.
11. Ibid., 24.
12. Ibid., 29.
13. Ibid., 28.
14. Ibid., 26.
15. Ibid.
16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 125.
17. James Meyer, What Happened to the Institutional
Critique?, ed. Peter Weibel (New York: American
Fine Arts, Co., and Paula Cooper Gallery, Cologne:
Dumont, 1993): 239.
18. Ibid., 240
19. Ibid., 242.
20. Ibid., 246.
21. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110
(Fall 2004), 3.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Ibid., 12.
25. Ibid., 22.
26. Ibid., 4.
27. Ibid., 15.
28. Ibid., 21.
29. Ibid., 22.
30. Ibid., 21.
31. Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism,
Emergency (London: Verso, 2015), 140.
32. Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, 20.
33. Ibid., 4.
34. Foster, Bad New Days, 140.
35. Dieter Roelstraete, ‘The Way of the Shovel: On
the Archaeological Imaginary in Art’, eflux journal 4
(March 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-
way-of-the-shovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-
in-art/ (accessed August 5, 2015).
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Dieter Roelstraete, ‘After the Historiographic
Turn: Current Findings’, eflux journal 6 (May 2009),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/06/61402/after-
the-historiographic-turn-current-findings/ (accessed
August 5, 2015).
41. Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; it's the
Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary
Art (New York: Continuum, 2012), 144.
42. Ibid., 158.
43. Ibid., 6.
44. Claire Bishop, Radical Museology (Cologne:
Walther Konig, 2014), 76.
45. Johannes Hofer, ‘Medical Dissertation on
Nostalgia’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2
([1688] 1934): 386.
46. Roelstraete, ‘After the Historiographic Turn’.
47. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New
York: Basic Books, 2001), xvii.
48. Ibid., xv.
49. Ibid., xvii.
50. Ibid.
51. Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruins of the Avant-Garde’, in
Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 58.
52. Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Essays on
Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H.
Wolff (NY: Harper and Row, 1965), 262.
53. Brian Dillon, ‘Fragments from a History of
Ruin’, Cabinet 20 (Winter 2005/06): 11.
54. Ibid., 11.
55. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1969 [1972]), 127
56. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New
York: Routledge, 1968 [1989]), xxii.
57. Terry Smith, ‘Questionnaire on the
Contemporary’, October 130 (Fall 2009), 47.
58. Ibid., 48.
59. Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 269.
60. Terry Smith. ‘Contemporary Art and
Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 706.
61. Ross, The Past is the Present, 14.
62. Smith, ‘Questionnaire on the
Contemporary’, 48.
63. Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents,
trans. Steven Cochran (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2009), 45.
64. Jacques Ranciere, ‘Aesthetics against
Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver’,
Critical Inquiry, Autumn (2008): 181.

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