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Allegory of the Cave Painting is indeed an ampler presentation than our regular output and its scale is the result of a process of internal calibration: an attempt to articulate the exhibition as a conversation between participants, as a polyphonic response to the many narratives and speculative trajectories that ramify out of the exhibition’s pretext. The allegorical ring of this extended conversation stems from the different nuances those interlocutors bring, from a sense of polemic or rhetorical friction in how those arguments unfold in the exhibition.

I found the ideas that emanate from the Pettigrew research on the prehistoric Bradshaw paintings – his team has found that these paintings are ‘alive’, colonized by red bacteria and black fungi that maintain the chromatic vividness and integrity of the figures – both intriguing, in their critical impact on art-historical notions and historiographic positions, and deeply affecting. For this second point, there is a particular intimacy they create, poised between the habits of ‘looking at art’ and, on the other hand, inspecting an organism fully invested in its own preservation, in echoing, through millennia, a coded message. In the context of previous projects, I have been preoccupied with particular pictures that indicate that we have arrived to them either too soon, before they have fully demonstrated their effect, or too late – that we have barely missed the event whose effect they register: images that in various ways destabilize the ‘here and now’ of how we encounter art. I gradually become aware that the idiosyncratic ‘now’ of the Bradshaw paintings (together with the ‘there’ of their antipodean distance) could be speculatively situated between these temporal extremities, between the divergent timelines those other works inhabit. Colonized symbiotically by bacteria and fungi, repainting themselves continuously and etching what they paint deeper into the rock wall, the biofilm of these images preserves for us, intact, an original artistic intention, although each of these three words should be bracketed by inverted commas. The only – and somewhat unsettling – thing we know about them is that they been made in an inscrutable past, somewhere between 40 and 70000 years ago, to the same extent that they are being made today, in a strange, radical contemporaneity. A whole range of other stories – some of them fabricated by Australian archaeology and some of them carrying problematic political connotations, others, Aboriginal, telling of a bird that permanently redraws the contours of the Bradshaws with its blood, – overlap partially with this striking chemical and aesthetic metabolism. So do a set of notions that are in various ways crucial to art-historical discourse: Pliny’s myth of the origin of painting, Ovid’s Pygmalion and a desire for palpable life, for embodiment, that haunts the history of art and functions as a psychoanalytic outlet for tensions this discipline cannot quite resolve, questions of contamination and conservation. Finally, and perhaps crucially, the Bradshaw paintings, devouring and birthing themselves through the ages, interrogate our relation to prehistory, our narratives of origin, more or less indebted to Plato, and the inauguration of modernity: the primordial scene they depict reproduces itself, in both senses of the word, into the present. The exhibition and the reader attempt to both disentangle these different threads, but also weave them back into knots that punctuate a different timeline, one that does not lead – propelled by the sense of its own inevitability – from Altamira to Jackson Pollock. A timeline that includes detours, accidents, forgotten technologies for making pictures and making sense of the world.

The final stage in putting this project together was seeing who its interlocutors could be. I will only give one example: the wonderfully productive contradiction, within the practice of Gustav Metzger, between his ‘Liquid Crystal Environments’ and ‘Drop on a Hot Plate’. In a sense, ‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’ is bookended by the dialectic of ‘history without transformation’ and ‘transformation without history’ that disunites, poetically, those two works.

The exhibition does not aim to illustrate the Bradshaw paintings, but to think with them. These living pigments are a specific metabolism, located in a specific cultural context, but also a nexus of uncertainties which evade that context. What they mean cannot be disentangled from what they are: the way in which they interweave signification and materiality is another mental model for looking at how contemporary art operates with these binaries. Both organism, dependent on its own ecology, and scale-less abstraction, living pigments test the resilience and efficacy of the instruments we use to appraise the work and worth of art. Consider Lascaux, where the prehistoric paintings were contaminated by microorganisms carried in the breath of visitors. The cave was sealed and a painstaking replica, modelled with hundreds of tonnes of concrete, was created nearby. (This, without wishing to suggest a parallel, was a mental model for Baudrillard’s investigation of the simulacrum, of replications that consume the very matter of what they replicate.) Now Lascaux II is jeopardized, because of new generations of bacteria brought to the replica cave by new generations of visitors, encrusting copies that begin to deteriorate – which means that these copies are no longer an utilitarian ersatz, but in some way partake in the logic of heritage, of safeguarding the place ‘where we come from’.
The Bradshaws, at the other side of the spectrum, function as their own museum, re-engendering themselves under inauspicious climactic conditions. And they do so precisely through contamination, which is an eminently productive force here, through the very fact that they have been infested by bacteria, probably present in the original pigment with which they were made. With its own instruments and in conversation with the participating artists, the exhibition attempts to think through this reversal and others like it.

The Bradshaws, at the other side of the spectrum, function as their own museum, re-engendering themselves under inauspicious climactic conditions. And they do so precisely through contamination, which is an eminently productive force here, through the fact that they have been infested by bacteria, probably present in the original pigment with which they were made. With its own instruments and in conversation with the participating artists, the exhibition attempts to think through this reversal and others like it.

Instead of demarcated thematic fields, there are a few central ideas that are shared between different works, that perhaps function as subjects and predicates in the exhibition’s sentences. The show attempts to build a long, complex phrase, enunciated on many voices: a stage for questions and answers, strongly lit and slightly more obscure corners.

We’re showing larger and smaller works, but I would not divide the structure of the show between dramatis personae and a chorus. Scale plays a marginal role in the project, which is more about dialogic juxtapositions, about a sense of interlocution between the works and the absent pretext of the exhibition. I think that what Tom Nicholson’s expansive ‘Cartoons of Joseph Selleny’ and Miklos Onucsan’s comparatively modest ‘Unfinished Measurements’ have to say to each other bypasses hierarchical organization. To give another example, the space of investigation opened by Jonas Staal’s comparative study of Nosso Lar and Brasilia, the phantasmatic political space created in his juxtaposition of Modernist and Spiritist city models, communicates with Jerome Blumberg’s investigation of a Dogon astronomical observatory, a geological formation that has allowed them to make observations that have only recently become available to ‘our’ science.

The exhibition does not aim to diagnose the state of contemporary art; its notion of the contemporary is both very simple (right now) and very old (40 000 years ago). If there is, in the project, an attempt to fix a certain image of the present moment, and the ways in which the present imagines its past and future, then this is done from the perspective of allegory. The word is often used and infrequently defined in artistic commentary. In the words of Antwerp’s own Paul de Man, allegory “persists in performing what it has shown to be impossible to do”, and on a very basic level that impossibility is the distance between Extra City and the Kimberley mountain range in North-Western Australia. More interestingly perhaps, the question of allegory can be reformulated as one of stimulating insufficiency, of overcome deficit: what is that we cannot say, that we cannot address directly, but that we could still approach via allegorical intercession or approximation? Which ‘other places’ and ‘other actors’, invisible as they exist at the other side of a fracture in the contemporary, could be invoked and made almost palpable by energy of the allegorical act?