Curatorial booklet, 28 pages, designed by Narelle Brewer, perfect bound, 2025.
(Steps in wearing a political hoodie to signal belonging to the audience’s consensus, which bears a slogan that reads ‘values aligned’. Once buoyant millennials, most attendees are now confronting the shutdown of a promising future, tormented by unmovable facts that once lived as endless possibilities, left behind in a withering past. They have matured into older adults, even though they still dress in low-rise jeans and polyester matter. Ugh, they look so haggard—eye contact is like staring at a solar eclipse. The state of Victoria is clearly in a recession, and the art world is in a depression, amidst growing international chaos. It shows.)
Welcome (smiles).
Opens with a quote signalling an upbeat generational engagement, recontextualised for comical effect, strategically (mumbles) avoiding outdated terms. Wait (clears throat), I wasn’t meant to say that out loud… I mean,
(Opens with a quote signalling an upbeat generational engagement, recontextualised for comical effect, strategically avoiding outdated terms.)
‘When I put on a show, I feel the adrenaline moving through my veins, spotlight on me, and I’m ready to break, I’m like a performer, the dance floor is my stage, better be ready, hope that you feel the same.’
– Britney Spears
Recently, I fell on the concrete, flat on my face (slaps microphone). As soon as I got up on my feet, a man asked me if I was okay. He immediately suggested I sue the council, offering to act as my witness in court. I had a similar experience a month ago, when I fell into a hole at night and twisted my foot. ‘You should sue council,’ people told me. I successfully avoided the discomfort of an intimate conversation by explaining that I fell into a real hole, not a metaphorical one.
Imagine spending the next ten years navigating the regulations of local government to get compensation for bruises, a concussion, and a pair of broken glasses. I must confess every time these mangled glasses slip off my face, I think of John Elcatsha’s glass sculpture Observer / Al-Manazir 1 & 2 (2024), in which two round glasses erupt from the gallery wall—curved to John’s prescription of -0.75—to gaze at this exhibition. Playing with the notion of the observer, John’s work speaks to bureaucracy’s propensity to surveil, measure, and review.
This is a reminder for Gertrude to watch out for tripping hazards, and a chance to thank them greatly for giving me the opportunity to curate a decade of art. In times of prescribed sincerity and performative earnestness, it is important to speak from the heart (taps chest three times). As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber said ten years ago in his book Utopia of Rules (2015)—which offers an account of grassroots’ bureaucratisation—we are living in an age of total bureaucracy.
(Intentionally uses foul yet inoffensive language.) No shit.
After falling on the concrete floor, I went to the doctor to check my head and realised I couldn’t pay for parking because someone, somewhere out there, stole my credit card details. The parking bay required payment with a card or to download an app—even though the app requires a card to complete the payment. I explained to the doctor that I had to stay sharp because I’m curating an art show at Gertrude.
The doctor asked me what Gertrude is, and what a show is, and do you make a living doing shows?
(Gets progressively worked up with a juvenile tone.) I said no, contemporary art is like a cultish hobby for most, where everyone is pointing fingers at each other, posting screenshots, and typing long emails that conflate labour, politics, and feelings—to fill empty rooms that cost a volunteer committee $50–$80K per annum plus rates to lease. And the government is placing increasing obligations on not-for-profit organisations, which are barely catching up with the whims of cultural policy. At this point, I may be able to report a show that I don’t like to Safe Work Australia for exposing audiences to psychosocial hazards and they might shut it down. Art critics with a social good angle think they’re smart. But most of their lukewarm critiques about governance and institutions strengthen corporate culture by making demands to pre-existing structures, instead of working towards new frameworks. (Defensively.) I’m not advocating for the kind of impunity and eurocentrism that make public and private spaces genuinely unsafe for historically marginalised peoples. Rather, I’m questioning how bureaucracy becomes a default approach to managing social unrest. And one day, paperwork might lead to an equitable redistribution of resources that indiscriminately allocates salaries to artists, who then will be able to employ assistants to manage their inbox in a market of uncompromising ideas. But right now we are stuck in a paranoid system of false equivalences that is always eager to (whispers) strike… everyone… down…
I could tell the doctor was finding me a bit intense because they asked me if I’ve considered medication. But I still explained Bureaucracy of Feelings in detail, some of which I will attempt to summarise for this occasion.
After writing a list of artists I wanted to work with, I realised we converged at an incorporated artist-run initiative (ARI) called Registered Charity, which shared the same street as Gertrude for almost two decades, until gentrification forced both spaces to relocate. Observing how some of these artists went on to work with Gertrude, the idea of an anthology of Registered Charity within Gertrude’s retrospective came to mind. Naarm Melbourne is often accused of extreme insularity and self-obsession, so I figured staying in one neighbourhood was so local that it became disruptive. It was also evident that these artists had parallel roles as volunteers, board members, advisory panelists, and arts administrators. Therefore, gathering them in Bureaucracy of Feelings was a unique opportunity to explore how artists with administrative knowledge of the sector responded to notions of ‘office rule’ within their practices. Given the sophistication of their work and imaginative approaches to institutional critique and creative expression more broadly, audiences can appreciate how much of a privilege it has been to learn from their processes and facilitate their ideas.
On that note, I’d like to thank all the artists in the show for their grace, dedication, casual demeanour, and natural ability to create a positive atmosphere of mutual support. Please give applause to Moorina Bonini, Sarah Brasier, Daisy Collier, John Elcatsha, Jemi Gale, Thea Jones, Michael Kennedy, Katie Paine, Sophie Penkethman-Young, Steven Rhall, Lucreccia Quintanilla and a ridiculously long list of collaborators that make Bureaucracy of Feelings look like a biennale on social media, including Leonie Brialey, Sia Cox, Gabriel Curtin, Jonathan Daw, Jorgen Doyle, Charlie Freedman, Russell Goldflam, Tam Hanson, Harry Hayes, Vito Lucarelli, Meret McDonald, Dan Murphy, Seraphina Newberry, Garden Reflexxx, Beth Sometimes and Betty Sweetlove (applause).
The title Bureaucracy of Feelings is an oxymoron because office administration is meant to be an impersonal force that obeys paperwork rather than human emotions. The naturalness with which this contradiction slips into a legible title indicates how Graeber’s era of total bureaucracy has further penetrated unstructured areas of life. The art world arguably enforces this schema in the not-for-profit sector, professionalising casual notions like ‘friendship’ or ‘hanging out’—through mega biennale events like ruangrupa’s documenta fifteen—into careerism. Bureaucracy of Feelings approaches these things with a sense of wonder, play, and mysticism, given that bureaucracy is arguably the spiritualism behind the secular process of organising state, corporate, and not-for-profit entities. And let’s be honest, it takes blind faith to believe in guidelines, meetings, and procedures. Thus, the works in Bureaucracy of Feelings collectively tell us something about the beliefs we hold in contemporary art and the inner life of the individuals who carry on these creeds.
(Employs professional terms from the past decade, like cultural load, activate, community, inclusion, hope, collaboration, equity, intergenerational, decentralised, knowledge transfer, diversity, non-extractive, love, reciprocity, non-appropriative, empathy, peer-to-peer, care, and systemic.)
One of the ideas behind staging an anthology of Registered Charity within a retrospective was to approach Gertrude through a neighbouring entity. Like Registered Charity, there’s a myriad of established ARIs in Naarm Melbourne that are virtually indistinguishable from each other, structured with boards of directors that hire staff to manage exhibition programs in offices. These organisations apply for the same grants, to stage the same shows, and obey similar notions of reputation, procedures, rules, and hierarchy. (Makes optimistic remark.) On the other hand, ARIs are a labour of love that bind communities with volunteerism, hope, and care. (Panders to DIY scenes with social capital.) I must acknowledge Naarm Melbourne is also home to a myriad of unincorporated grassroots initiatives that have made work in sheds, parking lots, tin cans, and supermarket aisles over the past decade.
One of my fascinations with incorporated ARIs is that they attract social justice cliques, which have the propensity to turn meetings over bin night into a complex spectacle of moral and theoretical dilemmas. The puppet show Animating Principles (2023) by former members of Watch This Space in Mparntwe Alice Springs parodies the intricacy of these discussions, showing the board engaging in difficult conversations around the agency and cultural load of termites in relationship to the lease—hilariously proposing a risograph publication to explore the problematics of an interspecies collaboration. ARIs love riso, even though it’s ugly. Koorie artist Daisy Collier strikes a similar punch with Bleeding Heart (2024), a brick with a painted black heart dripping on the wall. The melancholic work mocks the performative or ‘bleeding heart’ approach to identity politics, which privileges hurt feelings over political issues at hand, or instrumentalises feelings to shut down political issues, asking others to hold space for narcissistic self-soothing. Inevitably unfolding in the context of stolen land, Collier draws attention to the role of galleries in perpetuating systemic issues—including not-for-profits that turn pain into currency in a virtue economy.
(Acknowledges the audience’s distraction.) I understand it’s hard to sit through formalities or bureaucratic rituals. This is why I commissioned artist, poet, and singer Jemi Gale to paint a spontaneous mural on one of the gallery walls, evoking the image of a Kafkian clerk trying to escape the oppressive tediousness of managerial reality, by scribbling everywhere with frantic emotion. For it is in these unstructured spaces of automatic speech that some of the most enduring messages find form. Indeed, Gale has resisted much of the art world’s administrative pressures—despite volunteering and sitting for committees—privileging instinctive, playful, emotional, and inward states of being in relation to pop culture. Her commission for Bureaucracy of Feelings acknowledges a deeper force at play, which elevates cultural expression above the mundanity of institutional preoccupations. Federico García Lorca articulates the mystical appeal of works like Jemi’s in his duende theory: a seductive pull that drags audiences into a magical realm of secrecy and mischief. Lorca’s duende lasts forever, while office rule fades in murmurs. Jemi, you’re famous.
(Gertrude team signals the speech is going overtime.)
I’m wrapping this up shortly. But considering Bureaucracy of Feelings is collapsing two types of art organisations, which are closely related yet distinct from each other, I must outline their boundaries. In essence, Gertrude is a Contemporary Art Organisation (CAO) in the small to medium sector of contemporary art that operates with public operational funding, epitomised by the network Contemporary Art Organisations Australia (CAOA). While Registered Charity is an ARI supporting artists at the earliest stages of their career within a sector of micro-organisations All Conference represents: a network mirroring CAOA.
My impression is that most incorporated ARIs are either trying to mimic the CAO model or resist its influence, serving as a standard of professionalism, success or prestige. The most important reason to replicate a CAO structure is that it facilitates access to organisational funding, meeting certain set criteria and communicating that the recipient organisation is capable of administering public funds. By contrast, less structured organisations or grassroots initiatives may only be able to access project funding, which is unable to finance core operations. However, considering funding is never a certain outcome, grant applications are like a dangling carrot that keeps organisations in line with bureaucracy—regardless of their operational complexity.
These ideas congealed in the late 1980s, when the Visual Arts Board of Australia’s national funding body established a distinction between ARIs (then ARS) and CAOs (then CAS) in arts policy. The transcriptions of the forum Hindsight: The Changing Nature of Artist-Run Spaces and Contemporary Art Spaces (1987) document resistance to this approach, calling it a contract of dependency with the state. Indeed, Hindsight was disputing a series of professional requirements to receive funding—including a board of directors, organisational procedures and an experienced management team—that were considered an overreach of government. Manufacturing the idea that credentialed professionals are more qualified to oversee cultural management, while removing arts administration from the hands of creatives. The most important aspect of Hindsight is that speakers were critiquing how funding bodies were creating lines of dependency with the state, by forcing hierarchical structures and standards of excellence upon grassroots organisations seeking funding. Reading these complaints is a formative experience, for they were resisting impositions that one may take for granted as natural preconditions today.
(Carefully picks a theoretical lens that absolves audiences of personal responsibility.)
Prisoner abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore uses the catchy term ‘non-profit industrial complex’ in her 2017 paper In the Shadow of the Shadow State, to describe this set of relations between state, incorporated not-for-profits, and grassroots initiatives. In Gilmore’s framework, the government funds not-for-profits to deliver social services, as a neoliberal strategy to shrink government, forcing incorporation upon social movements that wish to enter a financial relationship with the state—
(Audience member whispers, ‘everyone at this opening is like, over 35’.)
(Clears throat, acknowledging the interruption–) …State. Financial proximity with the state professionalises not-for-profits and limits their activities with laws and regulations, shifting their priority from delivering social services to maintaining the flow of public money. A cycle of fundraising turns management into the most important skill within a not-for-profit, rather than the ability to fulfil the organisation’s core objectives. In Gilmore’s schema, the state strategically envelops artists and arts workers with administrative burdens—governance, procedures, and compliance—to structure dissent into a homogenous landscape of fatigued professionals. Offering a partial account of why everyone and everything feels the same. And I swear, at this stage, we should be wearing name tags to differentiate each other.
Sophie Penkethman-Young’s In Progress: The Wait of Expectation (2022) presents a video portrait of an optimised professional navigating the structured universe of art organisations through clerical wormholes. Crossing a myriad of portals that evoke the oppressive ambitions of Silicon Valley for hyper-productive futurism, and analysing the dopamine hit of task completion that keeps the creative sector’s workforce in a state of moderate addiction, Sophie delivers a strangely hypnotic video essay on office fetishisms, such as loading bars and spinning wheels on computer screens. From unceded Gadigal Lands, Sydney, Sophie has previously worked at large arts organisations and smaller ARIs, like First Draft and Runway Journal, making her video a hilarious analysis of the technology that organises the workload, the psychic and emotional regulation of arts administrators across the sector. Sarah Brasier’s painting I dream it, I work hard, I grind ‘til I own it (2023), depicts a similar condition of extreme professionalism, with a tableau of flowers using leaves as desks to support computers in an open office space, equipped with a water fountain and a rainbow. In an era of Grae—
(Accidentally drops a glass, shatters on the floor.) Ugh, sorry, my karma is off from everything that is not in the show. I wake up to a psychic field of bad energy every single day (fiddles broken glass with his feet, signalling the intention to clean up the mess, yet without doing so) …Everyone has their version of what this exhibition should be about. What was I saying? In an era of Graeber’s total bureaucracy, even flowers are desk-bound.
In her commissioned work, Lucreccia Quintanilla tackles the skilled language usage that circulates in administrative spaces, employing sound and text to look at corporate aphorisms. Lucreccia has worked with a hilarious list of sayings that include: Let’s blue sky this, In the pipeline, and We need to pivot this. Gazing at her working list, I noticed she used a bold font for The elephant in the room, which immediately made me anxious. What is the elephant in the room, and why did you write it in bold font, Lucreccia? Should we have a meeting about this? The phrase ‘elephant in the room’ typifies how corporate language identifies and contains threats with extreme diplomacy. Remediating corporate aphorisms with sound and text, this work activates a state of apprehension that speaks to the embodied experience of traversing professionalised spaces, where polite anxiety is the status quo. Indeed, corporate language allows speakers to communicate in the most sanitised manner, seeking to eradicate any sense of uncontrolled humanity that may cause an HR crisis. Therefore, it is an important instrument in the making of a consensus that inhibits conflict or dissent, in the knowledge that one is always under review. In Lucreccia’s hands, the circulation of these aphorisms becomes an upbeat provocation that playfully bounces from wall to wall.
Also interested in the role of language, Thea Jones explores how speech organises social identities with an installation comprised of Autoprogettazione chairs (2021), Wagga blanket (celtic knot) (2021), and Good country girl (2025). Her work places a circle of chairs surrounding a heavy blanket, staged with a nostalgic spoken word on headphones, in which Thea meditates on notions of home and the figure of the ‘good country girl’. Sitting in a circuit of pathos that resembles a meeting, the audience listens to an intimate poem observing the social and political mechanisms that constitute the good country girl trope, finishing with a line that says, ‘We each have our own language, and this marks the limits of hers.’
(Audience chatter escalates.)
Using terms like ‘professionalism’, ‘contract of dependency’, and ‘corporate culture’ may suggest I’m presuming an abundance of resources in not-for-profit organisations, when the reality is public funding is volatile and scarce, forcing extreme volunteerism upon the art world. Taungurung artist Steven Rhall’s video work Financial Disclosure (2020), in which he discloses his income statement, offers a point of discussion. Evidencing the gross income for a successful artist with a teaching salary is $52,464, with a net profit of $10,000 after business expenses, with ‘studio and gallery rent’ being the highest expense. Like most of Rhall’s practice, Financial Disclosure is sharp and funny in equal measure, immediately drawing attention to the finances of the white cube. As the 2024 report Artists as Workers: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia tells us, only 15 percent of all artists earned more than $50,000 from their creative practice in 2021–22. In some ways, Rhall echoes the mandated transparency of art organisations that register as charities to access a range of benefits, which requires them to upload financial statements to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC). Making one ponder the shifting role of the artist, as a figure that is increasingly considered a social good entity accountable to the public, can artists ever renounce their charity registration?
Moorina Bonini’s commissioned work for Bureaucracy of Feelings sketches out the relationship between the artist and the institution, for it comments on the passing of Aboriginal bodies in white spaces. Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, and Wiradjuri Briggs/McCrae family. In our earliest conversations, we discussed addressing the ceiling, which is the highest vantage point in the architecture of the space, to engulf the exhibition with her First Nations viewpoint. For her commissioned work, Bonini marks a line that traverses the gallery’s ceiling, flipping tiles and staining them with ochre and ironbark dye. Her markings—oddly resembling Rothko’s abstract compositions—critique how some cultural practices enter the white cube as fleeting exhibitions, while others become intrinsic to the canon. Removing the rest of the ceiling tiles draws attention to her methodology. It exposes the architecture of the white cube, echoing Moorina’s structural critique: First Nations perspectives often come and go as spectacles rather than ingrained organisational shifts. To tackle this issue, Bonini will flip the tiles at the end of the show to disguise their markings behind a veneer of normalcy, transforming her commission into a permanent fixture of the space.
Also thinking about the flow of art in galleries, painter and musician Michael Kennedy’s commissioned work looks at how artworks move around as files in art organisations, reducing paintings to their titles. Michael’s obscure titles are notoriously complicated to type without copy and paste, given that he references internet speech, with letters that turn into numbers and keyboard symbols that adorn long sentences. A recent example of how Michael’s titles challenge fact-checking is his 2024 show at Caves, Despair Spring, in which he used one title for all the works in the gallery:
//m3111___1111_110/;;;;;;;;_dr4m4444t11111c././././p”o”p”///u11114r’”””””””;;;;;;;;555550n9;]:;
Even though this may be an innocuous title for Michael, the number of symbols and idiosyncratic spaces has the power to hyper-fixate whoever has to quote them in a room sheet, catalogue, essay, or review. More hilarious is the fact that others may not be engaged in the subcultures that inform Michael’s titling practice, making one wonder why the artist uses such bleak language in the first place. Expanding upon scrunched paper text works he exhibited in 2019 titled Why does the sun go on shining?なぜ朝日は輝く なぜ朝日は なぜ朝日は輝くの? at DÔ-SÔ, Fujiyoshida, Japan, Michael is printing the entirety of his practice on crumpled paper for Bureaucracy of Feelings, by way of an audit.
(Takes an elongated pause.) Apologies, since I fell on the pavement, I experience brief onsets of dizziness that interrupt my flow. However, I’m lucky I didn’t have to go to the hospital and queue in the emergency department for hours. We can look to Katie Paine for insights on the hospital system, whose practice reflects on the emotional turmoil of institutionalisation in A Patient’s Lament 1 & 2 (2024). These are a couple of photographs that juxtapose a cinematic poem—printed in a yellow font that resembles subtitles—over an assortment of archival imagery. Using morose language, the work evokes the image of a captive patient gazing at the window, to escape the increasingly horrific charge of sheets and the passing of time. Affixed to steel furniture designed as office pin-up boards, Paine foregrounds the emotional experience medical administrations tend to suppress or ignore. Since discourses of institutional care seem to conflate white cubes with hospital systems and artists with patients, I often situate Paine’s work as a critical response to the paradoxical disenfranchisement of this equation.
Developing the curatorial framework for Bureaucracy of Feelings involved rejecting a series of first instincts—taking wrong turns and detours to find a destination. For getting lost is a wonderful way to re-encounter the familiar. Now that I’m here, it feels like I went in circles, only to arrive at my place of departure. In The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012), (closes eyes to remember author) Ben Kafka describes paperwork as (presses eyelids more tightly to recall quote) ‘a refractive medium in that power and knowledge inevitably change their speed and shape when they enter it.’ Kafka also refers to it as the medium of bureaucracy, remarking that it has unpredictable effects. It’s worthwhile noting that all the commissions required a level of site-responsiveness, which means that no one saw them realised until the show’s installation, making them an unpredictable encounter. Echoing Kafka’s take on paperwork, the artists in Bureaucracy of Feelings certainly can transform what we think we know, altering the chronological rhythm of Gertrude’s past decade to create an enchanting syncopation.
Please raise your glasses to congratulate these artists! And (improvises quip about bureaucracy), don’t forget to fill in your visitor survey forms.