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The Dugong Sublime

Sam George & Lisa Radford

The Dugong Sublime 2021

2 channel video installation and accompanying performance with ‘Veronica Franco v Instagram’ (bronze nipples). Sound by Felicity Mangan, performance development with Evelyn Pohl and Yundi Wang. Video adaptation of ‘On the beach’ (1959), script adaption from ‘Hotel Sorrento’ (1990) .

The Dugong Sublime (Hotel Sorrento) is polyphonic vocal performance that used extracts from Hannie Rayson’s script for Hotel Sorrento (1989) as means for giving a part voice to artworks by Stuart Ringholt and Mutlu Cerkez held in the collection of  Buxton Contemporary. The performance was been developed by Sam George and Lisa Radford, with Evelyn Pohl and Yundi Wang. It was performed by Freyja Black, Ivy Crago, Sophia Derkenne, Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta and Iris Simpson

Thanks to Jane E. German and Danny Lacy from Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery and Mark Friedlander. Performance documentation by Ezz Monem

Commissioned for This is a Poem, curated by Melissa Keys for Buxton Contemporary.

Sam George and Lisa Radford’s The dugong sublime is an epic absurdist poem with multiple interconnecting and intertwined cultural and historical references, narratives and ideas. George and Radford’s episodic project began with the selection of two self-portraits – a painted self-portrait by Mutlu Çerkez Untitled: 17 April 2023 and Stuart Ringholt’s Everything I own, a bound book containing an inventory list of everything that the artist owned in the year 2002.

While discussing the approach that they would take to creating their ekphrastic poem as part of this exhibition, George posed the question to Radford ‘what is the purpose of poetry’ – however, a slip of the tongue turned this question into ‘what is the porpoise of poetry’ at which point their investigation took an oceanic turn. Responding to their selected artworks through processes of association, intuition, emotion and sensation, the porpoise was soon replaced by the dugong, a gentle, highly social, sea creature that is of significance in numerous cultures and vulnerable to over-exploitation – vulnerability and social care being qualities that George and Radford identify in Çerkez and Ringholt’s approaches to art practice.

The score of The dugong sublime is, in part, based on the echo sounding language of chirps, whistles and barks that dugong’s use underwater in order to communicate. After numerous attempts to swim with a dugong, each thwarted by rolling travel restrictions, an experience the artists had anticipated would be an encounter with the sublime, they turned their attention locally to Port Phillip bay – to look for a Dugong, in a place that they knew the animals cannot be found.

While undertaking an artist’s residency at the Police Point, Quarantine Station, in the Point Nepean National Park, George recorded a sequence of video of the sea floor, that now forms part of this presentation. This recording is as much of the marine environment, as it is of an absence. During their stay in Point Nepean the artists came upon a number of old film reels held in the Queenscliff Gallery each of which was shot in the area. Among the reels is a copy of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film On the Beach (1959) and the film version of the well-known play Hotel Sorrento (1995) by Hannie Rayson that engages with Australia’s place in the world and the enduring impact of cultural cringe.

Paired with the footage of the sea floor, scenes of Gregory Peck’s character in On the Beach, Commander Dwight Lionel Towers, is seen peering through a submarine periscope looking for signs of humanity. It is a sequence that ironically underscores the artists’ and their collaborators open-ended exploration and search with its multiple diversions and ellipses and no particular destination in mind but instead a series of natural phenomena, fragments of histories, and ideas alive with possibility.

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