Cassandra Tytler

A white woman, dead by the lake. Her body fetishised, in the same way it was and has been from 15th century paintings onwards to the most recent Scandi-noirs on Netflix. Here, ‘nature’ is constructed as ‘white’. As pure, as manicured, and beautiful. Just as long as you don’t get dirty. When dirt is introduced, it is the stuff of otherness. The non-white, the non-human, the expendable. Just like the Earth’s body, and the crime being committed towards it.

One Peppercorn (if demanded) is a site-specific art activation at Ron Stone Park, Menora, Western Australia.

The outcome involved participants walking together while listening to an audio soundscape designed by Cassandra Tytler and featuring interview material of performer and CPPP Indigenous advisor, Trevor Ryan. Participants listened to the soundscape through synchronized headphones, while following Tytler, who led them across the chosen site, Ron Stone Park. At certain points participants encountered video works that were placed within the park.

Honorable Mention - Mexico Independent Film Fest

Shortlisted for the Footscray Art Prize (37 out of 700)

Oops! was exhibited as a three-screen installation and also exists as a single-screen work

Read Adrian Martin’s catalogue essay here:

Agitated Faces, Open Window, Disordered Furniture

by Adrian Martin

Imagine a family scene: the wife is just about to grab a bronze sculpture and throw it at her daughter; the father is opening the window to call for help. At this moment a stranger enters. The process is interrupted. What appears in its place is the situation on which the stranger’s eyes now fall: agitated faces, open window, disordered furniture.

Walter Benjamin wrote this passage in 1934, as part of his lecture “The Artist as Producer”, to explain the principle of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre. In fact, there is no specific scene exactly like this in any of Brecht’s plays; Benjamin intended his description as an allegory or figure of a new kind of art.

But the scene now exists; Benjamin imagined it, described it and evoked it vividly for us. It’s a script. A script that Cassandra Tytler shoots not once but three times, in successive variations, for her work Oops! – a piece that is designed both for single screen or (as in this presentation) multiple screen versions. In either format, Tytler takes Benjamin directly at this word, not just for the scenario but also for the method that this model scene is designed to embody: “the interruption of sequences”.

Interruption is a figure of montage. Benjamin envisaged one prime moment of cutting in, interrupting a scene via the sudden appearance of a stranger. It is this moment that throws the naturalness, the dramatic flow of the scene out of kilter – freezing it, as it were, and showing it in all its disquieting weirdness. “There are eyes”, Benjamin adds wryly, “before which the more usual scenes of present-day existence do not look very different”. Meaning: the most banal situations of our everyday life are full of underlying, incipient violence, hatred, horror. Here, too, Tytler has taken the pulse of Benjamin’s account and sped it up, made it her own.

Oops! multiplies the horrors of normal life as glimpsed by “the stranger” (a person whom we never need know anything about: the fact that they interrupt is all that matters, their only function). The settings are a family dinner, a communal barbecue, a round of games among friends. The points and levels of disturbance just keep getting darker and deeper: generational conflict, maternal resentment, racial prejudice, sexual stereotyping, male-buddy humiliation, female-buddy hurtful whispers, anti-vegitarianism, slut-shaming, cruel laughter.

Three faces of a suburban, Aussie Hell; enclosed spaces where mean-mindedness can trigger violence. Are domestic curtains meant to facilitate people looking out, or stop people looking in? An aesthetic of the grotesque is just a frame away: close-up mouths grinning, chomping, laughing. The issue of taste, in all senses, starts to infiltrate everywhere: the taste of food, how it is cooked, table manners; and cultural taste, who’s deemed in-the-know and who isn’t on very specific subjects (Bradman’s cricket record is “common” knowledge, while Birth of a Nation is not). And all this efficiently, economically dramatised in just under 10 minutes.

For Tytler, montage is an immense tool: not just a single cutting-in, but also intensive cutting-up, rearranging, repeating, comparing. For starters, the three stories are unfolded together, in simultaneous juxtaposition. And Oops! keeps leaping ahead to what are (on a first viewing) the shocking gestures yet to come: a raised fist, a broken glass held out threateningly, an arm being twisted, a hand being forced toward scalding heat. The usual syntax internal to a single scene – like people casting looks at each other – starts to knit together across the three stories, underlining the profound similarities in ideologically and culturally bound (bad) behaviour. Every gesture, even the throw of a dice or a slaking of salad, the clinking of beer bottles or the sizzling of a grill, becomes a sign of aggression. The sound design (by Bonnie Knight) bursts with abrasive thuds, agitates with sheets of pulsation, spooks with ghostly echoes and shudders with low tremors.

For two decades, Cassandra Tytler has traced a unique path. Her work often takes short, highly condensed audiovisual forms. She grabs elements of generic stories – and expertly reproduces their best and most vivid effects, like the tense build-up across the whole arc of Oops! – but doesn’t get locked into one story, one world, one illusion. The three-screen set-up guarantees this splitting of any unity. There’s a comic (as well as Brechtian) aspect in the way she and her actors play with character stereotypes and dead, cliché-laden chatter.

An earlier work, I Still Call It Home, creates its aura of the uncanny via a different bag of tricks. This one edges closer to Gothic horror: hideous welts on the skin, mysterious shadows in the corner of walls, unbound screams (more great sound work here). A performance-art monologue (“Hack, hack, hack”) collides with echoes of David Lynch – but this is once again suburban Australia, not Twin Peaks, so the interplay of guilt, haunting, identity and denial takes us straight back to local, national issues of racial dispossession and slaughtered sovereignty.

It is another montage of multiple, quoted, enacted texts, proceeding by a kind of free but perfectly logical, unconscious association. “I want the truth”/“You can’t handle the truth!” is voiced by a passing parade of extras, like in an audition. The host of a beauty commercial dispenses advice about how to handle troublesome (non-white) skin. As well, there’s a strained pedagogic tableau on the “materiality of ideology” – but the young students (all two of them, both female like their teacher) seem not too comfortable with what they are hearing. In fact, everything in I Still Call it Home is about not feeling at home in one’s own body, one’s own space, one’s own place as a mother or a daughter, an expert or a client, an authority or a novice, a reciter of text or an embodiment of psychodrama.

“But it is at the end, not the beginning, of the experiment”, wrote Benjamin, “that the situation appears – a situation that, in this or that form, is always ours”. In these two works, Cassandra Tytler, the interruptive stranger, ceaselessly opens to the door to our haunted homes.

© Adrian Martin

Read Dr. Ashley Crawford’s text here:

The Horror of the Banal

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, asked a terrifying question: just how can unutterable cruelty possibly be unutterably banal?

Eichmann was the Nazi officer responsible for coordinating the transportation of millions of Jews, Gypsies, the infirm and others to various concentration camps. But Arendt concluded that Eichmann was in fact an utterly bland, bureaucrat, who, as she wrote, was “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.”

On a far more humble, indeed, suburban scale, Cassandra Tytler seems to conclude something similar when she depicts a late-teenage thug taunting a young vegetarian over a backyard barbeque. The thug isn’t really doing anything unusual by suburban Australian standards. Indeed, he, and his actions, are “terrifyingly normal.”

It is in moments like these that we hope for an Oops! moment. No one captured an ‘Oops! moment’ better than Sergio Leone in his 1964 Western classic, A Fistful of Dollars in which the ultimate Stranger – played by Clint Eastwood – inadvertently plays witness to a particularly nasty ‘domestic’ incident in a Frontier town. While he doesn’t take any immediate physical action, his very presence carries immense weight. For The Stranger has become The Witness.

Cassandra Tytler’s Oops! (2020) plays upon not dissimilar themes. Like the cruel perpetrators of Leone’s Frontier town, her protagonists, with their not-so-subtle racial and sexist behaviour, do not expect to be seen. In fact they seem almost oblivious to their obnoxious behavioural patterns until they are revealed by the presence of a Witness, a Stranger unexpected in their midst. To exacerbate this sense of disclosure, Tytler employs a pseudo-documentary schemata, fractured across multiple screens in order to make the viewer a decidedly uncomfortable Witness. For how often has the Witness also been the perpetrator, guilty of exactly what Tytler makes them confront?

“The look of the stranger renews the look of the viewer, shocking them into seeing a scene of impending violence anew, from the perspective of an interloper who sits outside the ideological context of the narrative,” writes Tytler. Impending domestic violence, but also the casual violence of Australian day-to-day cruelties toward the disabled, the ‘other’ race, the ‘other’ sex.

When Arendt concluded that Eichmann was “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal,” one could conclude something similar about those Tytler portrays in Oops!

Tytler, in Oops! plays the role of both Stranger and Witness, undeniably handing us our casual and thoughtless violence in a multi-screen panorama of our everyday lives. It is not a pretty sight.

 Dr Ashley Crawford

Winner of The Noel Counihan Commemorative Award, 2019

I Still Call It Home is a genre implosion of melodramatic horror and Brechtian didacticism. It takes place inside a haunted house, and a haunted society … we have a dark history and it’s bubbling up on our skin. In the words of Tom Cruise, characters scream “I Want the Truth!” but as the teacher tells us, “truth” is ideologically malleable. “There is something in the house” and that house is Australia. Language can grant us liberty when a past wrong is admitted, but language can also confine and restrict us. I Still Call It Home wrestles with these contradictions in its free-wheeling exploration of the policing of bodies through language and denial.

Excerpt taken from catalogue essay by Adrian Martin:

I Still Call It Home, creates its aura of the uncanny via a different bag of tricks. This one edges closer to Gothic horror: hideous welts on the skin, mysterious shadows in the corner of walls, unbound screams (more great sound work here). A performance-art monologue (“Hack, hack, hack”) collides with echoes of David Lynch – but this is once again suburban Australia, not Twin Peaks, so the interplay of guilt, haunting, identity and denial takes us straight back to local, national issues of racial dispossession and slaughtered sovereignty.

It is another montage of multiple, quoted, enacted texts, proceeding by a kind of free but perfectly logical, unconscious association. “I want the truth”/“You can’t handle the truth!” is voiced by a passing parade of extras, like in an audition. The host of a beauty commercial dispenses advice about how to handle troublesome (non-white) skin. As well, there’s a strained pedagogic tableau on the “materiality of ideology” – but the young students (all two of them, both female like their teacher) seem not too comfortable with what they are hearing. In fact, everything in I Still Call it Home is about not feeling at home in one’s own body, one’s own space, one’s own place as a mother or a daughter, an expert or a client, an authority or a novice, a reciter of text or an embodiment of psychodrama.

© Adrian Martin, November 2020

CREDITS:

Writer, Director and Producer Cassandra Tytler

Mother Harlene Hercules

Daughter Isabelle Bennett

Teacher Kelly Neilsen

Students Rachel Edmonds & Verity Lilley

Speakers Paula Armstrong, Georgia Coutts, Neelam Choudhary, Kathryn Davis, Claudine Dearn, Lynette Griffiths, Laura Jaeger, Domi Lizardo, Clare Regan

Camera Robert Harding

Gaffers Jane Jiang & Samantha Kwan

1st Assistant Director Georgia Coutts

Production Designer Cassandra Tytler

Set Dresser and Production assistant Georgia Coutts

On Set Sound Recordist Georgia Coutts, Robert Harding and Liam Power

Costumes Marina Thomson

Make-Up Irene Grammatikopoulos & Bronwyn Morrison

Editor and Colour Gradist Lucy McCallum

Sound Design, Dialogue Editing, ADR and Music Composition Gus Franklin

Thanks Philip Brophy, Georga Coutts, Zena Dubray, RMIT and Swinburne Universities

Special Thanks Julien Devin

Our relationship with screen culture has dramatically changed. Much of our daily interaction with others, our community and culture is mediated through screens. Increasingly, the way we relate to other bodies is via technological devices. These interactions and representations frame our world-view, informing our self-perception and social constructions.

The Internet has become a space where we can claim and narrate our screen bodies. This virtual space has the potential to offer resistance to normative representations of the body, creating bodies outside the hegemonic logic and disrupting the shared social ideal reflected around us. Sadly however, it can also further reinforce binary and simplistic readings of what the body “should” look like. These body ideals are repeated and strengthened through self-policing, as well as shaming those that have “failed” to meet the current standards, placing blame on the individual for their perceived deficiencies. Just read the comments sections!

Indisposed teases out notions of the body presented for public consumption. At once avowing and disavowing; revealing and hiding; constructing and deconstructing; our body reanimation is tinged with contradictions. Through performance, Cassandra Tytler enacts a character wrestling with what her body means to her and to others through her own representation of it televisually. She uses performativity, humour and pathos as tools to draw out ideas of self-representation, body hatred, body perfection, and how screen personas are an articulation of who we are and atonement for what we are not.

Edited by Morgana Mountfort-Davies

I’m Ugly, 2016; HD Video loop, 6 minutes, 16:9, Sound

(Camera: Robert Harding; Sound: Jake Moore)

Hey Guys, 2016; HD Video loop, 13 minutes, 16:9, Sound

(Music: Adam Selzer, Charmed Life; Honey Larochelle, Hijack, Aabo Remix, From The Free Music Archive, NC)

Monkey Suit, 2016; HD Video loop, 8’25” minutes, 16:9, Sound

(Camera: Julien Devin, Music: The Pixies, Gigantic; Sonic Youth, Kissability; The Plasmatics, Monkey Suit)

There’s Something, 2016; HD Video loop, 8 minutes, 16:9, Sound

(Sound: Jake Moore)

It’s Me, 2016; HD Video loop, 6 minutes, 16:9, Sound

(Costume: Marina Thomson; Sound: Jake Moore)

Squash, 2016; HD Video loop, 8’46”, 16:9, Sound

(Music: Gus Franklin)

Wobble, 2016; HD Video loop, 3’26”, 16:9, Sound

(Music: Gus Franklin)

Review by Philip Brophy, published in RealTime Arts here

I’m Sorry positions the viewer inside a mock domestic setting with two windows on either side of them. The sound of footsteps can be heard circling the space. Suddenly a figure starts knocking at one window. They keep saying “I’m sorry”, knocking as if they want to be let in. They walk around the space (footsteps circle the viewer) to the next window and knock while apologizing. As time goes on the apologies become more and more aggressive and the knocking more violent.

There is a dark undercurrent to this piece that explores the monstrousness in machismo culture that plays out and has its victims within the domestic space. The viewer is in the position of being ‘domestified’ and under attack. This is both a darker exploration of gender play and a theatre of performance. I myself perform as the man at the window in order to highlight that this person is wearing the “mask of masculinity”; a performative guise that exists, not through an essentialist idea of what it is to be a man, but a dangerous reification pushed upon us within the Australian hegemony. It should be noted that while I’m Sorry is about domestic abuse, that the viewers inside the space are of all genders. Everyone is a victim.

The elastic spring, the tired sag, and the face we just can’t shake. We are trapped inside ourselves and outside each other. In Lunar Swells, Cassandra Tytler performs through a latex mask caste from her own face in order to visually explore the social identity mask; the face we “put on” and struggle to live through. Haunting and beautiful, restrictive to the point of asphyxiation, Lunar Swells enacts the struggle of presenting our face to the world.

Screening at Melbourne Central Art Loop, Lonsdale St Entrance from Nov 5th, 2016. Curated by MARS Gallery, Melbourne.

Also screening in public spaces as part of Carne Neuva, Argentina from October 2016-January 2017.

In contemporary times the self can be morphed, copied, coded and re-presented. Does this mean that our sense of identity comes down to the reflected image alone? Are bodies lumbering, useless vessels, that represent nothing but blood and guts? Is our identity formed only by our online presence; our likes, our dislikes, our favourites? Have we become the passwords we choose and the questions used to identify the “real” us behind the computer screen? We ask ourselves, not only what next, but what came before, and who am I? Fiona battles herself and she who has become her. 

Applause is a video performance piece that explores the menace of group power dynamics, the ridiculousness of drunkenness, and the strangeness that exists between the two. Tytler, herself the performer, pushes her body to the limits of alcohol consumption. She weaves an inebriated dance amongst the bottle waving men in her video. She performs both a dance of the id - stumbling, falling, laughing and never halting gulp after gulp of alcohol, and also the passive receptacle of peer and sexual pressure, wanting to please. While arch in nature, this performance piece presents a situation that is both pernicious and celebratory.

Messed Up Pop Song is focused on the fine line between spectatorship and imitation, exploring how we watch people on-screen and identify with them - as a fan, in lust, in camaraderie. The film questions the narcissism inherent in watching: How do we see ourselves? How do we wish we saw ourselves and what are we attracted to? In our engagement with the character’s projected self-image, we watch their confused attempt to be something else, as we pay witness to their on-screen failure.

Soundtrack by Philip Brophy. Read his description of the process here

Documentation of a Video Installation, Exhibited at Metro Arts, Brisbane, Australia

Plat du jour is about the accruements of glamour and decoration, and a humorously dry celebration of this. It is pop, trash and home-made.  It is about dressing up and ‘playing’ at beauty.  Like Andy Warhol’s celebration of the aesthetic of surface, this piece explores a scene where all beauty is ‘man-made’.

The climax at the end of this short piece, (or the ‘money shot’ – call it what you will) in all its sweet, dripping, stickiness, is perfection on a plate.  It’s the “I love you”, the chase sequence, or the falling in a hail of bullets at the end of the movies we love.

We live in a world besieged and besotted by image. Everyone, it seems, wants their fifteen minutes and plenty of people will do whatever it takes to get a piece of the celebrity cake. And I Cried is a film about wishing to be a movie star. Being a star is about shining bright, a brilliant flash of light against a velvety black night sky. And I Cried is an exploration, a celebration, a lamentation, of our obsession with the star and the image.