Remote control: Simon Denny’s ‘Mine’ at MONA

Simon Denny: Mine, exhibition installation view, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, 2019; image courtesy MONA, Hobart; photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

‘Mine’, Simon Denny’s current exhibition project at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, attempts to represent the mostly unseen, planetary-scale processes of extraction – the plundering, accumulation, enclosure and colonial expropriation of natural resources which are fundamental to the interests of modern capitalism. In our increasingly decentred and dematerialised world, it is difficult to comprehend the scale and specificity of these processes, let alone grasp the ways in which they are naturalised and licensed to cut through patterns of human cooperation and social activity. Compared to our little lives and devices, the seemingly disparate networks of extraction are so immensely huge and their combined impact so vast and abstract, that they resist easy representation. The unrelenting dynamic of these anthropogenic processes have led us to the climatic mess we are currently in. Yet glimmering in the corner of Denny’s ‘Mine’ is the faint insistence that such complex systems-thinking now empowers us to begin reckoning with the devastation caused through this voracious process of extracting value from the natural world.

Denny’s research practice has involved interacting with the new breed of global business entrepreneurs, or people engaged in critical work investigating how these new technologies interface with our lives and affect our relations. Typically, he adopts the rhetoric and aesthetics offered up by these subjects and institutions, as a kind of ambivalent performance, appropriating the innovations of disciplines outside of art and espoused by these new tech industries. While Denny has deployed familiar tactics of immersion in ‘Mine’ – activating, implicating and putting people in different relationships to the material he is working with – his framing of the project in the media and in person signals a more definitive position than he had previously presented. This more straightforward enactment, however, is haunted by ghosts of his earlier techno-libertarian ‘fanboy’ days. It is as if the contradictions engendered by his previous indifference remain unresolved – despite the clear politicisation of content and an obvious change in the artist’s attitude.

Indeed, if Denny’s dystopian Disneyland holds up a mirror to a violently destructive industry in order to reflect the depressing commercial and sociopolitical realities of our time, the mirror also excludes or deflects. In both entertaining and implicating his audience to manifest certain behaviours, Denny manages to divert the critical attention away from his strategy of ‘remote control’ – meaning his authority to situate people in a scripted relation to spatial power. This strategy emphasises the prescribed patterns of action and invisible layers of interactivity which, deep within MONA’s ‘Mine’, are effectively putting us to work. The additional augmented-reality layer (a virtual double space) creates an eerie experience of art where the line between entertainment and exploitation blurs to a point of alarm.

Oscar Capezio, Hobart

This is an edited excerpt from an essay to appear in a forthcoming edition of Art Monthly Australasia; ‘Simon Denny: Mine’ is currently on view at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art until 13 April 2020.