I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t seen Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions before entering, pen in hand, knowing that I was to write.

Context seems important. I am Anglo-Celtic. I live in Brunswick. I am currently reading Monkey Grip and dipping into The Art of Laziness. This is important, because as I get off the train, that’s the world my brain is in. It shapes the way I see everything, something I cease to have control over after making the choice to read what I’m reading. I lay awake from 2.40-6am this morning. I am tired, but calm and relaxed—content in being.

It feels overly self-centered starting this way, but writing as myself, it seems important to be clear on who this self currently is. I am biased by my choices and the choices that have been made for me. Everyone is.

I won’t submit any of the above, I’m sure. I will edit it out as unnecessary. Flabby. But for now, it is like showing the ‘working out’ in maths. It is necessary to where I will go. It will remain a thread, even after it has been cut. Like the knotted threads that preface experience, culture, place, an artwork, the following notes are about unknotting, ‘working out’.

Andy Butler. Canberra. Cuts to sky, Lake Burley Griffin, hills framed by government house, the National Library, the hard lines of architecture. Playing, being, confronting, in institutional spaces. The idea that something new is possible, that creating, collaboration and movement can shape and change what is.

Library archive (literal). The library/archive of the body (metaphor). The mind. Play. Situating. History playing out on multiple planes. ‘Hope and optimism a river in a time of upheaval.’ Henry Otley Beyer Collection at the National Library of Australia. 'Please don’t die of modesty!’… ‘After all, we’re in America.’ American colonial period (early twentieth century). Hollywood films on Asia and/or set in Southeast Asia. The absurdity of these narratives. All narratives? Narrative as creation. The absurd, tight weave of reality. Necessarily and inescapably constructed.

Complexity/structure, impossible to unravel. Creatively confronted by Butler.

Collection of Hollywood films set in or about Asia. Collection held by the National Library. National Library in Canberra. Encountered by Andy Butler, Filipino-Australian. The weaving of these things, these bizarre loose threads/loose facts speaks/reveals truth. Hope in a reweaving.

The radical act of copying. The self taking in hand the threads of the past.

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Andy Butler’s work Living truthfully in invented circumstances (2024) re-presents ‘what is’. Butler reveals by taking something to its logical conclusion. The ‘what is’ of Henry Otley Beyer’s archive is messy, problematic: the bind that is this time and place (?).

When I get stuck, writing about a specific artwork helps. It’s something I can do. But this is all about a specific artwork, so why am I stuck? How do I unstick myself when talking about an artwork that sticks me. 

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I’m sitting in front of the three screens of Living Truthfully again. This time not coming from a Helen-Garner-thesis-gummed-whimsical-commute-head, but a head already pre-consumed with Butler’s work.

Andy Butler to the archive: ‘I will take my rightful place on the stage and I will be myself. The thing I need most and want most is to be myself. I will work on it. I will raise my voice. I will be heard.’

Bodies. Breath. Vocalising. ‘Cut!’ The absurdity of it all. But the absurd is what pre-exists. ‘And cut!’

The books, the institutions, the archives. So racist. But revealing. They show how we got to where we are? Threads, that even when destroyed, their impact remains? To lay out the threads, see them in a hand. Not in a vacuum. In Australia, in Canberra, in the National Library. In Andy Butler’s hand. Held out, still in hand, at ACCA. 

How to articulate what Butler has articulated so well without words?

‘We were so young, maybe we were cruel, but you can’t use that to justify murder.’

This artwork appears as absurd as the Henry Otley Beyer Collection, in the National Library, in Canberra, in Australia. An absurdity that mirrors the films’ constructed reality that also reflects the attitudes of the time that they were made. Simultaneous truths, both rendering the other fallible, shaping the other. But through an act. The voice. The awkwardness. The...

Andy Butler reveals a knot. A tight bind. Absurdity. In writing about it, I feel as if I’m trying to undo the knot. Tease it apart. But the beauty, the hope. The holding out. ‘I will respond how I feel. Awkwardly, vulgarly, but respond.’ How to respond to this response?

But also fun. Funny. Hopeful. I feel like this has been lost here in my writing. How to talk about something that the work already does so perfectly? Any discussion/musing feels like a spiralling away from the real contained within the work.

Andy, I love this work.