Agatha Gothe-Snape

In 2015, Monash University unveiled an unusually epic and amorphous public artwork by Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Scheme Was a Blueprint for Future Development Programs.

A large line drawing for Caulfield’s Campus Green, the work borrows its compositional logic from an unlikely fusion of sports-field markings and psychometric diagrams for self-analysis. A series of evocative words rally and radiate, addressing the university as a place of intense intellectual and emotional development. The work’svast horizontal plane playfully suggests a series of practical applications, from physical workouts to tutorial exercises and general counselling.^[1] At its crux, however, Blueprint considers the meeting point between public art’s functional agenda and the worlds of those who make and encounter it: the intersection of macro and micro, social and personal, bureaucracy and emotion, process and product.^[2]

The ‘preliminary’ form of Blueprint is typical of Gothe-Snape’s work, which often encompasses scores and instructions, with the work being contingent on interaction. Likewise, other established features of her practice play a structuring role, among them site specificity, language, drawing and attention to an emotional register. For Blueprint, these methods were filtered through a collaborative development process with landscape architects TCL, user stakeholder groups and the university’s administration. Gothe-Snape’s experience of navigating this process is distilled in the final work, which inserts itself into the campus as a giant symbol (in ‘Monash blue’ camouflage) of how cognitive and cultural capital meet the conditions of a contemporary labour economy that values flexible productivity and affective outputs.

The seven offset prints of the same title were made as the commission was nearing completion. A collaboration with designer Simon Browne, these unique works sit alongside other collateral more widely disseminated as part of the project, including a corporate promotional video and a print-on-demand user guide. Each poster, comprising found and self-generated text, represents a precept or ‘truth statement’ for the commission. Unlike the free-floating words in the line drawing, sentences such as ‘Exclusion is often unconscious’ and ‘Forget about your intention and focus on your behaviour and resulting impact’ offer a closer insight into Gothe-Snape’s psychology during the making process.

Like the line drawing when viewed from adjacent buildings, the posters offer an aerial view onto a flat language field and, as such, tacitly read as blueprints for the public work. In some ways, their compositions invoke the strict geometry of an architectural plan, although the classic colour scheme of white on blue has been inverted, and the word compositions are lively – disruptive even – each imbued with a sense of rhythmic movement and emotive energy. The letters disperse across the surface like bodies, writhing and dancing, marching in formation while simultaneously disorganising the grid underfoot. Indeed, the posters clearly channel Gothe-Snape’s longstanding interest in ‘how language enters the body’ through scores and notation, writing as drawing, and speech translated into gesture.^[3] But more pointedly, they open an inner monologue to public view. As documents of her working process for the commission, digested and recomposed, the prints articulate a ‘fault line’ – one that often exists but is rarely so reflexively expressed within the frame of a work – ‘between the institution’s agenda and the artist’s subjectivity’.^[4]

Anneke Jaspers is Senior Curator, Collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.

^{Photo: Zan Wimberley}