The 105 year old building that houses The Offering is innocuous enough; a stranger might pass without a second thought. Yet it hasn’t always been this way, the old church and hall were once a destination for congregations and community groups. The Offering evokes this diverse history of use one more time, revealing traces of the building’s past as a site for worship and community gathering. Yet Rowlands does not shy away from the building’s recent decline, or its final fate, even as he offers up a form of temporary redemption by way of art installation. The project’s title registers the ambivalence many of us feel when a historic building is condemned – the old church is to be sacrificed, offered up in the name of progress, but Rowlands allows the building to show what it still has to offer as a site for exploring themes of memory and history, revealing the formal and aesthetic potential contained within the building itself.

The challenge is to evoke the rich history of the building and signal its fate within the context of artistic practice. A church and a community hall; such spaces are easily over-determined in their meaning. There’s a temptation to make a series of predictable gestures which might symbolise the decline of community, the absence of the spiritual in contemporary life.  Yet what is immediately notable is how Rowlands avoids these easy moves. Intervening in this space is as much a question of what not to do. Inside, the artist’s presence is clear, upon entering one can notice a series of cuts made into the structure of the building, into its walls, the ceiling, and upon the stage. What is also obvious is that the building is in a state of abandonment. There are no floors, merely dirt and the remains of a set of wooden stumps, some erect, some fallen over. Amidst the dirt and stumps lie random objects, junk mostly in the form of empty bottles, a car battery, old wires and tape. Grass and weeds have invaded over time and died on entry.

It is confronting to see a church in this state, one is reminded of Freud’s observation that ‘dirt is matter in the wrong place’.  One can find precursors, perhaps Dubuffet’s 1940’s efforts to rehabilitate the status of dirt for art, but Rowlands refuses any simple choice between the base and the spiritual. Instead he stages a constantly shifting relation between them. Dirt is our constant companion; we try and raise ourselves above it but ultimately come down again. The Offering reminds us of such efforts, playing with basic materials but also with the symbolism of the church – which has always had an ambivalent relation towards matter

Generally if artists stage installations with dirt or other abject matter, they occur within the sanitised spaces of the gallery, aesthetic heaps ready for our consumption.  Rowlands has chosen to leave much of the building in the state of disarray in which he encountered it. This sets up a tension between the space functioning as a sort of giant found object, and Rowlands’ more overt actions within it. Two different sorts of entropy occur, the ‘natural’ loss of order that results from neglect, the accumulation of rubbish and weeds, and the artificial and more aesthetic form of entropy staged by the artist through his numerous cuts, where aspects of the walls and ceiling are peeled away to form sensuous shapes. We oscillate between the ‘base materialism’ of the floor, whose refuse and dirt resist the pleasure of the gaze, and the splices and shapes more readily identifiable as the ‘art’ part.

Many elements of Rowlands’ project work with a notion of a minimal difference, between presence and absence, between human creativity and the natural patterns of entropy, between the spiritual and the profane. Take the front room of the building, the oldest part that housed the church proper. At first glance it has all the signs of dereliction and decay; no floor, litter, frayed carpet peeling walls, and graffiti, but when we look again we can see signs of the artist’s presence.  There is a large diagonal cut beginning on the southern wall and extending across the stage floor. The material from the wall and floor has been carefully peeled away and laid across the ground in front of the stage forming a curved shape. This shape remains attached to the building but it gains new status as sculptural form. We separate it out from the other objects that recede into the background and begin to notice how it curves one way then another, the way it catches the light. The building is falling apart, yet we know that this object, while it mimics the process of collapse, is not simply another sign of decay. The same applies with the gaps in the floor and the wall where the wood has been peeled from. Nature does not work in this way, and we recognise the signs of human intervention. We might look upon the gap as contiguous with the sculptural form spread across the floor, or we might regard it as a sort of aesthetic void, projecting existential concerns (we are in a church after all) onto it. More practically, we might note the different materials that have gone into the building’s construction, noting that the church is a combination of original material and later processes of layering and cladding. From here one might imagine the different groups that occupied the building at these different stages of construction. The point is that Rowlands’ intervention marks a point of minimal difference, where we project a different set of concerns – artistic, social, and philosophical – upon these elements that are immanent to the building.

The large room at the back of the building has also been subjected to these cutting and peeling processes, but there is almost a formal inversion at work where the roof and walls have had a strip peeled back rather than the floor and wall. Those hunting for symbolism might identify such cuts in a former community hall as representing the fraying of the social fabric, but what is equally significant is how the artist, creates an effect in the back room that functions as an inverted mirror of the front, allowing us to think of the building in different ways at the level of its form.

Other aspects of The Offering are more concerned with the historical signs of the building as church.  Moving around the space one encounters various iterations of the cross, present, suggested, distorted, even imagined, yet never quite expected. The front room has a single piece of plaster peeled away and left hanging, high up above the stage. The plaster isn’t even in the shape of a cross yet it would be hard to think otherwise. Occupying a visually and spiritually significant location, the plaster droops and hangs, evoking the crucifixion. It still has nails attached to it, in case our imaginations needed further prodding. Yet it’s not a cross, it’s just a part of the wall. Rowland’s has simply created the opportunity for us to project onto it. Where we go from there depends on our disposition, we might read this as signifying the spirituality immanent in all things, or we might take the drooping plaster as a sign of the decline of the traditional church, the withering of patriarchal authority, and so on.

A similar process occurs in the large room that housed the community hall, where Rowlands has cut the cross bar out from a cupboard and placed the cut and reformed wood in a smaller room at the rear of the building. Looking at the cupboard now the cross shape is striking, it’s hard now to see the cupboard without this cross. Was it always there, hidden in the doors, or did it only appear once the artist made his cuts? Such questions can lead one into a sort of analytical overdrive. Looking around the building one soon finds cross-shapes everywhere, in the material of doors and walls, in the bars guarding the windows from intruders, in the patterns of linoleum. At certain times of the day the light enters the building and casts a shadow across one of Rowlands’ unfurled shapes on the floor at a crosswise angle. We know that the building is past its prime, parts of it are downright ugly, and that it’s condemned, yet in a curious way Rowlands manages to create a semiotic richness that properly inhabits spiritual places, where everything has significance, a ritual function, and a further level of meaning. Even in this abandoned place old oppositions haunt us. The material that Rowlands has cut out and peeled back have coiled serpentine forms, suggesting that one cannot have the cross without the snake being too far off.

This suggestive mutability occurs elsewhere in The Offering. In a small space that divides the front and back rooms, the artist has made a cut in the carpet to reveal the existence of a baptism bath that lies beneath. The contrast is striking, the frayed mission brown carpet against the cool, almost pristine tiles and steps of the bath. We don’t see the bath as a whole, nor can we touch it, we only get a hint of it through peering through the narrow slit the artist has made. Given that so much of the surrounding space is neglected, moribund, even dysfunctional, the discovery of the bath seems a minor wonder in its wholeness and perhaps it is right that we aren’t granted full access to it. Rowlands has coiled the strip of carpet and flooring at one end of the bath evoking the symbolic transformation it once enabled. The unbaptised would enter from one end, be immersed, and emerge in an altered state. This process is given a secular, if aesthetic twist as we stand at one end and witness the transformation of dull, generic material into something different at the other end of the bath – a spiral form that seems to curl back on itself, hinting perhaps that processes of change are never complete.

By contrast a smaller room to the side feels more melancholic. This space still contains evidence of habitation; there are decorations on the wall and indications that a child might have once been here. Bits of falling plaster lie on the floor and a light bulb hangs morosely. The light no longer works but the artist has increased the size of a hole around the bulb so as to let in filtered light. There is a single cut into the floor and the linoleum and wood strip has been coiled so that it lies uneasily on the ground. The impression created is one of restlessness, and here one almost welcomes the ultimate fate of this space.

While the act of cutting into walls and floors, peeling and stripping back the building’s basic materials, and refusing to alter the obvious signs of decay within this old church and hall could be seen as exacerbating the process of decline, I think that it can be read otherwise, as an attempt to reanimate the site.  The sculptural forms created are aesthetically rich, and the use of materials derived from the essence of the building offer a tribute of some kind by making us newly aware of the building’s form as well as its various historical and social functions. The display of the building as it is now, decayed and condemned, if initially confrontational, actually allows us to register the traces of the communities that once inhabited it. If Rowlands’ various forms of staged ‘collapse’ dispose us towards thinking aesthetically, we can also look at the space though different eyes, seeing, say, the lone community noticeboard with a single dart stuck in it as something worthy of attention, noticing perhaps how the light falls upon it, or upon other neglected objects lying around the space. Ironically perhaps within the space of a church, The Offering is a decidedly anti-transcendental project, it doesn’t pretend the building is anything other than it is, but in doing so also offers us hints of what it has been and reveals more than simply a dilapidated structure in the way of development.    An offering, a necessary sacrifice perhaps, but the building still has something to offer, this is the complex ambivalence created by the artist within this space.

Simon Cooper

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Simon Cooper teaches in Communications and Writing at Monash University. He is the author of Technoculture & Critical Theory: in the service of the Machine? (Routledge) , and is an editor of Arena Journal.