Rural Utopias Residency: Bennett Miller in Pwakkenbak / Mount Barker, Update 5
Bennett Miller is currently working with the community of Pwakkenbak / Mount Barker. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.
Bennett Miller works across sculpture, installation, video and performance. In more recent years Miller's work has moved out of the gallery and into the public realm, through a series of live art performances for festivals and outdoor contexts.
Here, Bennett shares an update on his Rural Utopias residency.
I spent much of the last two weeks in Mt Barker, the Porongorups, and surrounding areas, dressed as a Goose.
The Goose costume, imported at great cost from the US College Mascot marketplace, had finally arrived and it was time to trial shooting photos and videos of it as some sort of broad emblem for being ‘alien’ within a natural environment. I had managed to convince myself it would be a great metaphor for the history of French and English colonisation and misunderstanding in the Great Southern. It also seemed like it might be pretty fun. I had a plan to show up to choir rehearsal wearing it, so that I could perform the body percussion for ‘Bring me a little water, Sylvie’ without anyone hearing me sing1
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that much fun inside it, and I realised more or less instantly that it would never see the light of day as an artwork. I didn’t really want to tell the videographer that had come down with me this though, because before we left I had sold him on the idea that we would spend two weeks shooting a film about a Goose, and that probably seemed pretty fun to him too. Plus, having not yet seen the results, I could be wrong about it. Usually if I think something I am making is great — it is actually terrible, so whilst far less common there always remains the possibility that the reverse could be true.
The photographer was pretty thorough, so when we took our water craft out onto the King and Kalgan Rivers — me, the Goose, within a little motorised tender; he, the photographer on a paddle-board — he would often want to shoot and re-shoot from multiple angles in multiple lights. So, it was for many hours — driving the boat in little circles, and making another pass of the camera. During these times I battled a completely ridiculous internal rage. Not sure whether to be angry at myself for thinking this a good strategy for art making, or angry at him for not getting the shot the first time. Things came to a head when I ran the motor right over some rocks. but in a Goose mascot2 no one can hear you scream.
When we showed up for the last day of filming on the Kalgan, there was someone else filming there. And his set up was much better than ours. Because I hadn’t put the Goose costume on yet, I decided to go and talk to him and find out what he was doing. Much to my surprise he was actually shooting an audition for the SBS reality show ‘Alone’. He had been there for several hours, demonstrating to the camera how to source enough bait from the soil to catch a fish, and how to turn leaves into antiseptic.
As he left, we wished him well in getting onto the show, to which he replied ‘I hope so, I really need the 250k’.
Thinking about what it takes to wind up running into someone on a stretch of ancient river in this way, each of you shooting a speculative video for some obscure future cultural production, well, it really took the edge off my anxiety about the appropriateness of the suit.
For the next hour or so I happily drove the boat in circles to pose badly, and once I could take the head part off and just drift around, I could get back to observing how beautiful this area really is.
1Never did this
2As in space, or Digbeth, UK
3'Alone' on SBS is not as obscure
Image credit: River, 2023, Photography by Zev Weinstein; Phone Booth, 2023, Photography by Zev Weinstein.
