Steven Bellosguardo Texts

What goes down, must come up, 2024

Stockroom Kyneton, VIC

Steven Bellosguardo's What goes down, must come up, 2024

Essay by Sebastian Henry-Jones

The title for Steven’s show is curious for the way it inverts the truism ‘what goes up must come down.’ Whereas this original phrase ends in a negative (to be ‘down’, interpreted here to mean ‘down and out’), Steven’s re-work ends on a figurative high. The change is not only linguistic but metaphysical, a reversal of gravity and the laws of nature.

At the conceptual heart of the installation is the video work Master of none, re-presented for this show at the end of an elongated metallic arm. It looks and sounds like a game you might play on your phone, in which one’s objective is to successfully repeat particular movements quickly against the clock, almost like a training exercise. McKenzie Wark in her Gamer Theory: video games provide an allegory for life today, which we engage as a ‘gamespace’, and whose ludic features feel predetermined (Sisyphaenely so) by the rigid physics that sustain a popular idea of progress (the accumulation of capital), and the well-worn narratives that communicate the value of this attitude towards metropolitan life today (the institution of marriage, the property market, career advancement etc.). ‘Ever feel like you’re playing a game’, she wrote in 2007. ‘Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be?’1 These words will ring true particularly to cultural workers who see Steven’s show – even while university degrees today prioritise learning as it leads specifically to job outcomes instead of intellectual nourishment, in Australia, Creative Arts degrees rank the highest in unemployability rates at 57 percent. Lol. The title for Steven’s show quite evocatively brings to mind the phrase ‘it’s only up from here.’

Master of none is counterbalanced by a large rock, like the one Sisyphus pushes up the hill along his eternal grind. The balancing of these two forms implies their proportionality, creating a long, horizontal vector between the two that informs the way one reads the gallery space.2 Balance becomes an outcome of an equation between the two, and an important framework for understanding the thematic of the show: that the way our lives and their contents are organised under the current order isn’t necessarily good for our mind or body. The line between rock and video reveals many others in the space – the line of the floor, of brick trophies (Bronze still gets you on the podium) and the carefully measured spaces between them, invisible vectors that nonetheless inform an appearance and real experience of the room. What might seem ludic has in fact been carefully conceived. At my most cynical and dramatic I might say that life is a pyramid scheme, structured in a way that might appear ‘natural’, but on careful inspection is so obviously the consequence of the decisions of people other than You, who have the power to decide. Very quickly, ‘balance’ feels rigid rather than harmonious. What might we do to tip the scales? In an art installation it would require one to flout aesthetic convention, even to the point where whoever has autonomy over the space might cancel the show. In both content and form, Steven’s What goes down, must come up gives an allegory and a framework for seeing our lives as they are informed by the vectors of superstructure.

Sebastian Henry-Jones, Steven Bellosguardo’s What goes down, must come up

1. McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007. P.1.
2. I have been deliberate in my use of the word ‘vector’, which in geometry is a line of fixed length but no fixed position: Most prominently in her Hacker Manifesto, published in 2004, Wark writes often of vectors – a technology that moves something from somewhere to somewhere else, a line of economic activity between two points. Vectors have been important routes for the transportation of raw materials from colony to empire, or the lines of communication that sustain globalisation. They move material and information all over the world, and are usually owned privately by a member of what Wark calls the ‘Vectoralist class.’ Someone’s vector is always someone else’s horizon line.

Sometimes making nothing leads to something, 2023

TCB Gallery, Melbourne

Throwing mud at a wall to see if it sticks

Essay by Anador Walsh

“Rise and grind”.
“Hit the ground running”.
“Don’t plan, just do”.
“Stop pissing money up a wall”.

“Efficiency is everything”.

“Give it 110%”.

“Expend less, accomplish more”.

“We’re not saving lives here”.

“Your outputs are the measure of your success”.

“You want a hot body? You want a Bugatti?

You want a Maserati? You better work, bitch”.

“Optimise your productivity”.

“Work, work, work, work, work, work”.

I wish someone would explain to late-stage capitalism that it’s insane to do the same thing over and over expecting different results. The demands of modern life, exacerbated by digital technology, social media, the Covid-19 pandemic and the bleed between waged and unwaged labour and our personal and private lives, mean that we now effectively work all the time.

In the context of this constant work, high levels of output are valued over critical thinking, and productivity is lauded in place of craftmanship. It is anxiety inducing and defeating. Perpetually understaffed, the need always outweighs our ability to meet this demand and so we’re always chasing our tails. To work harder, faster and longer, we set impossible goals. To try and meet them, we pump our bodies full of stimulants – nicotine, caffeine and dexamphetamine if you’re lucky – but still we can’t keep up. The only thing that increases, really, is our anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.

Ours is a tragic Sisyphean tripartite of action, failure and repetition. The only changing variable in our plight is that as our ‘productivity’ increases, the quality our workmanship decreases. This experience is the same across occupations. Doctors, sportspeople, administrators, content producers, artists, tradespeople and scientists all feel the same. The more we push ourselves to output, the more exhausted we become and the less expert and exacting our ‘specialised’ skills are. Paul Preciado writes “The object of work is not to satisfy but to excite”. However, this mode of working is unrewarding. The only thing, arguably, that is excited by this work is our ever-increasing heart rates.

This practice of compromising the integrity of our work, for the sake of doing more of it, is widely praised and bolstered by hollow words of affirmation that borrow from wellness culture and have been co-opted by the corporate world, sports, popular culture and the hospitality and manual labour sectors equally. It is universal. The quotes that open this piece are drawn from a combination of pop songs and things that have been said to me in my personal and professional life to motivate me to discard my perfectionism in favour of increased results. This approach emulates artist Steven Bellosguardo’s experience of working under capitalism and points to this exhibition’s conceptual underpinning.

Influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s critique of the industrial revolution in Walden (1854), in which he adopts traditional practices to highlight societal flaws, the three works that compose Bellosguardo’s Sometimes making nothing leads to something borrow from the vernaculars of construction and basketball to highlight our contemporary prioritisation of productivity over craft. Bellosguardo trained as a stonemason before working as a bricklayer and plays basketball recreationally. Bellosguardo writes “stonemasons prioritise aesthetics, while bricklayers focus on output” and in basketball “a player who constantly misses shots is labelled a bricklayer”.

Standing inside of this multi-media installation, watching him frantically make and throw mud bricks through a basketball hoop to the tune and increasing tempo of the beep test in video Master of none, how does Bellosguardo’s critique make you feel? Beep. Has your heart rate increased? Beep. Is there a notification that you need to check? Beep. Is there a deadline you’ve neglected? Beep. Do you want a coffee, to go outside and vape maybe? Beep. Will that help you be better, work harder? Most likely not. It’s 2023 and we’re all just throwing mud at the wall to see if it sticks.

Real Memories, 2022

Woollahra Gallery, Sydney

Catalogue Excerpt

Essay by Andrew Purvis

Steven tells me about his grandfather’s house, built by hand in the rainforest. He tells me about twilight rambles in locked-down suburban streets, reading Walden and thinking about solitude and self-sufficiency. With timber pallets and tarpaulins, he builds his own studio in the backyard. Domestic detritus accumulates, dragged back from verge-side scavenging. He envelops it in plaster and cement, smoothing and sponge-finishing, until hard rubbish gains soft edges. The product of his father’s father’s craft, these odd unmonuments embed history. As alien amalgams, they possess an uncanny familiarity; domestic clutter returning like a repressed memory.

Of Freighted Specs, of Bio Dwellings, 2021

VCA Artspace, Melbourne

Catalogue Excerpt

Essay by Abbra Kotlarczyk

Steven Bellosguardo, a third-generation stonemason whose sculpture and installation practice questions cycles and modes of im/permanence within the urban built environment, has collected and reworked found materials during a daily walking practice that culminates along the Merri Merri Creek. Idiosyncratically stamped with the coordinates of where the various material components, from organic matter to a hub cap and road reflector, have been gathered, Steven’s bricolage of a bird basin is complete with the sprouting of new life in the form of rouge plant shoots. Eloquently constructed to resemble a precarious pylon, Birdbath in Space (2021) is reminiscent of so much high-density urban infrastructure going up around us, whilst being a humble call to arms for the need for communion amongst the wreckage.

CULTCHAFUKER, 2019

Praxis Artspace, Adelaide

Poorer than our parents

Essay by Saskia Scott

As a country, we fetishise the quarter-acre block and the Hills Hoist. Ours is a nation divided into ‘homeowners’ and ‘people desperate to become homeowners. In a culture defined by economic crisis, most of the homes built are designed for a standardized citizen: box apartments; project homes.

In Seeing Like A State, James Scott describes ‘high modernism’, a system of beliefs that arose in the nineteenth century which saw urban development and social planning as governable according to scientific laws. Scott describes the ways in which “officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices...and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored” (2). The effect of this development program was the massive destruction of the multifaceted, multicultural, and multigenerational complexity of real human lives. To make cities and their inhabitants easier to quantify and govern, developers posited “standardized citizens” that, “for the purposes of the planning exercise,” had “no gender, no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions or original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities” (346).

It is within this context that Steven Bellosguardo’s CULTCHAFUKER emerges. Here in the Western suburbs — a historically industrial, affordable, and proudly working-class region — the city is changing. First the artists and the poor students, then the developers. We are poorer than our parents. This drives the demand for cheap housing and feeds the developers levelling the western suburbs to make way for the new.

Here on Kaurna land — land that was stolen but never ceded — James Scott’s critique is apt. When we think of Adelaide, with its parklands and city square, we think of Colonel Light standing at Monte ore Hill. The statue, Light’s Vision (1906) by Birnie Rhind, is the quintessential image we hold in our minds. Light looks down towards the River Torrens and lays out the grid that will become the city of Adelaide. He takes a multilayered landscape of history, tradition, and cultural complexity; renders it ‘structured’, ‘simple’, ‘quantifiable’. Erasure, first, and then the drawing of lines. This pattern for a city was later transplanted to Aotearoa and used to build the city of Christchurch. There, as in Adelaide, the First Nations Peoples, and their relationships to country and culture, were displaced.

Bellosguardo develops a visual language of construction, development, and gentrification. Presenting two large-scale works, Median Strip and Crane, CULTCHAFUKER invites you to reflect on your relationship to ongoing colonisation and environmental destruction. Born in Adelaide in 1988, his own history is tied up in this complex legacy of construction. Trained as a Stonemason, Bellosguardo was the third generation of his family to apprentice in the trade. He brings an intimate experience of the construction industry to this critique of rapid, disposable development.

Bellosguardo completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Sculpture) at the University of South Australia in 2016, and this new body of work is a departure from the steel public artworks for which he is best known. The aesthetic shift reflects the artist’s growing concern for the state of the planet in the face of the climate crisis, as well as deep concerns for people left behind in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. In CULTCHAFUKER, we confront the issues directly. We nd ourselves in a crisis. Bellosguardo’s language — both symbolic and actual — is necessarily candid.

Median Strip is an assembly of waste, tetris-ed together to form a half a metre-high plinth from which dead ornamental plum and pear trees ‘grow’. The introduced plants were chosen for their widespread use as decorative green space in the development projects Bellosguardo worked on across Adelaide. Median Strip draws attention to the cost and residue of our perpetual pursuit of newness, upgrades, and development.

In Crane, Bellosguardo tackles the cultural concerns tied up with fast-paced construction and development in Adelaide’s West. A black steel crane arcs up from the Gallery floor, bursting forth from the mound of soil it excavates. A circular reference to our reciprocal relationship with the natural world, as well as the cycles of construction and destruction in an industry unconcerned with longevity, sustainability, or quality, governed only by a legal minimum standard.

Both works blur the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘constructed’. Bellosguardo demands that we recognise the extent to which the logic of cookie-cutter planning and development extends across all domains: colonising, transforming, and destroying natural and cultural worlds.

Saskia Scott

I acknowledge the Kaurna people as the traditional owners and custodians of the Adelaide Plains. This land was, and always will be, Kaurna Land. I pay my respects to Kaurna Elders past, present and emerging.

all my friends are dead, 2019

Fontanelle, Adelaide

Essay by eDuard Helmbold

Look in the mirror and say:

Candy man

Horror films have warned us time and time again that the summoning of ghosts should not be taken lightly.

When we summon the ghosts of our pasts their haunted histories are summoned too.

Summoning ghosts means risking being possessed by (as in: to belong to) their histories; the heralded AND the haunted. Consider for instance the work of Constantin Brancusi; he revolutionised figurative and modern sculpture, but also appropriated art and aesthetics from non-European cultures.

Contemporary art is all too aware of this. Many contemporary artists tend to be paranoid about the rather-not- known, so they slap their historical influences with a dash of irony as a spell to keep the ghosts and their haunted histories at arms length.

Bellosguardo’s work is not that.

In Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art Jan Verwoert writes: “The one who seeks to appropriate... must be prepared to relinquish the claim of full possession, loosen the grip on the object and call it forth, invoke it rather than seize it.”

Over the past three years Steven has invoked the ghosts of Brancusi, Calder, Hepworth, Noguchi and Flugelman, not in

an attempt to claim their work but instead being open to being possessed by their spirit and their histories.

Instead of paranoid, Steven Bellosguardo’s work materialises hope for a people that does not disavow a less than promising past, instead they succumb to a moment of courage and vulnerability.

all my friends are dead invokes the ghosts of modernists and formalists, people of privilege and oppression and presents work about that awkward state of being a human with histories.

Is not to possess a spectre to be possessed by it? To capture is, is that not to be captivated by it?

Brancusi. Dead.

Calder. Dead.

Hepworth. Dead.

Noguchi. Dead.

Flugelman. Dead.

Throughout human cultures, rites of passage have played an important role in celebrating community members manifest changes of identity. French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep framed these rites around regeneration as law of life. Central to this law is death.

It is in his studio that Bellosguardo wrestled and danced with the ghosts of Brancusi, Calder, Hepworth, Noguchi and Flugelman.

There has to be death for there to be regeneration.

In his text The Rites of Passage Van Gennep goes further and connects this process into an ongoing cycle consisting of three stages:

Separation: Ties between the (old)-self, previous community and ways of being is ruptured leading to a loss of identity. Also known as pre-liminal stage.

Segregation: The In-between stage where the old identity has been lost but new identity not yet formed. Marked as a time of confusion, education and testing. Also, known as the liminal-stage.

Integration: Person moves out of isolation into the community where “new” identity is celebrated and recognised. Also known as the post-liminal.

all my friends are dead can be read as Steven Bellosguardo’s experience in the liminal space of his studio. These sculptures materialises moments of isolation, connection and the awkward spaces in-between. It is in this studio-as-liminal-space where Steven honed his skills of bending, welding and grinding. But the liminal space is more than a mere space of refining skills and disciplines; it is also a space where one is visited by the ghosts of those who came before.

It is in his studio that Bellosguardo wrestled and danced with the ghosts of Brancusi, Calder, Hepworth, Noguchi and Flugelman.

We have to agree with Derrida, Steven now belongs to them.