Tina Stefanou’s Motet Fail at West Space appealed to me from the title alone, as lately I’ve been buying up a fair bit of early European polyphonic music cheaply on vinyl. Developed during the late middle-ages and early Renaissance, the motet is a sacred musical piece with more than one textual or lyrical component. While plainsong was a religious piece with a single voice (a Gregorian chant, for example), a motet was polyphonic, meaning multiple chants were laid over the top of each other, producing harmonies, counterpoints, and complex textual relations between the two or more texts, psalms, or liturgies being sung.

The reference to the motet drew me into Stefanou’s exhibition (and its eponymous work) through the metaphorical fecundity it offers. Here is something quite historically specific that expands outwards to include a consideration of the voice and vocality, and then beyond that to the idea of multiplicity—both within monophonics (multiple voices singing the same song) and polyphony (multiple voices singing different songs). Even more explicitly, the ethical implications of “the voice” are hard to avoid in contemporary political and philosophical life. We find ourselves asking each other: who am I as a listener, and who are you as a speaker? Are we one or many, mono or poly, a discrete identity or a loose alliance of microbial life? Furthermore, how do categories as vague and powerful as nationality, identity, and ethnicity play into this question of the voice?

Once my thoughts have hooked into these ideas, it seems impossible to rein them back in. I want to pretend this doesn’t matter, but what if the work doesn’t live up to my expectations? What if I get so caught up in the abstract, conceptual, and perhaps Byzantine chains of reference sparked by this title that the work pales in comparison? Philosophically, I know it is kind of impossible to see the work “in itself”: there is always a framing. But I also want to acknowledge that my enthusiasm for the motet, for example, preceded the work and in many ways is likely to drown it out. I will say, though, that I was drawn in by the ideas. But is this intentional? Have I been art-nerd sniped? Is Stefanou preaching to the choir, putting out ideas that will appeal to a certain kind of art viewer? And, importantly, does the work deal with the polyphonic voice in more than the title alone?

Stefanou’s work Motet Fail is a large, low installation. From wall to wall across most of West Space’s gallery floor, a dark red institutional carpet is laid with professional edging. A low-lying woodgrain Laminex bench, about forty centimetres high, hugs the perimeter of the room and forms two enclosed areas within this carpeted space, separated by a central channel filled with yellow sand. Votive candles are placed into this sand and lit by gallery staff when you arrive. Segments of the bench can be removed to allow people to walk into the carpeted areas, which otherwise seem almost fenced off. Running along the inside of the bench, phrases and words inside square brackets are etched or perhaps laser-cut, examples of which include “(crowd cheer),” “(frog chorus),” “(engine choke),” and “(rooster crow).” Laying on the carpet is one of a pair of molded cement-like discs—this one a light terracotta colour—while its off-white counterpart is placed outside this area on the floorboards. Both objects are imprinted with long triangular shapes, which radiate evenly outwards from a central text: “(breath held)” and “(warming),” respectively. Nearby on the floor and gallery counter are four roughly-hewn stone blocks about twenty-five centimetres along each edge. They could be granite—with two a mottled grey and two a deep black, echoing the formal logic of the discs. Inset into the objects’ surfaces are small glassy spheres that look like kako mati—the Greek blue and white apotropaic charms used to ward off the evil eye—turning the blocks into strangely off-kilter dice.

I try to avoid artists’ talks when reviewing a show: I can never quite separate the performance of the speaking with the content of the speech. Nevertheless, I timed it wrong and stumbled into Stefanou’s talk, which involved an audience of about twenty people sitting on or standing around the work. Stefanou spoke about broad political issues that concerned her such as her life in Wattle Glen and the soundscape of ecological change, the protests in the United States related to ICE (this was in mid-February, before Trump launched a war on Iran), her husband who lives in Philadelphia, and the different emotional registers of various art-world institutions. She described the differences between ACCA (the site of her most recent show) and West Space, and her feeling of being outside these institutions while also participating in them. The backgammon board, according to Stefanou, was the inspiration for Motet Fail, and as I sat down she talked about the game from the point of view of a vague ethnic stereotype: backgammon has ancient origins in Persia, and in western European history the game is often negatively associated with non-Christian peoples around the Mediterranean Sea. This is mostly, I would guess, because the game was popular in the Muslim world and also features a strong gambling component via a special dice called a doubling cube. The promotional material for the exhibition shows a backgammon board being handled by some demons in Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), from the panel depicting hell and torment. I’m also thinking of all the times I walked up Sydney Road late at night in the 1990s and saw older Mediterranean guys playing backgammon through the windows of storefronts or private clubs. Backgammon’s gameplay was also influential, in that no amount of strategic play can interrupt the luck of the dice—with Stefanou likening this to art practice in relation to the institutions we create to support such practices. She also spoke broadly about the collective power of imagination to change the world and the systems that we humans have built. This imagination is not the Sesame Street variety, but the ability to imagine new systems, be they legal, institutional, social, or broadly relational.

Whenever I think of the word relational I throw up in my mouth a little, but I don’t think Stefanou is concerned with the early-2000s becoming-formal of human relations called “relational aesthetics.” Looking up the artist’s work online before seeing the show revealed a preoccupation with singing and humming, on rural life and people, with non-Anglo working/middle-class culture, with horses and tractors, with family and community. Motet Fail is billed as a collaboration between Stefanou, set-designer Romanie Harper, and sculptor Aldo Bilotta, and the floor sheet has a contribution from her brother Kosta Stefanou. It seems more like the “it takes a village” kind of relational, not the “let’s have dinner with some artist-friends and call it art” kind. Other works attest to this. For example, the film There is a Dead Rabbit Under the Greek Family Unit (2022) directly involved the artist’s extended family. But I’m not entirely convinced that this village-relationality is something that really can be seen in Motet Fail without the framing of the talk or the text.

In framing her work, Stefanou describes it as concerned with “voice in the expanded field.” This practice is an extension of her training as a vocalist (as a child, presumably). The candles in Motet Fail are intended to represent this background: apparently one of the lessons the artist undertook was to sing in front of a lit candle and not let the flame move. At times, such as the artist’s website, this singing is referred to as an “embodied practice.” While I’ve read this phrase a million times, I’m not entirely sure it’s meaningful once I try and think of it in detail. Does it mean something humans do, humans who have/are bodies? The phrase only makes sense if you accept mind-body dualism, which I personally do not.

The candles look like the type you might light in a church. In the exhibition’s floor sheet, which is almost like a hymn-sheet, there is a Fluxus-like list titled ‘The Singing Lesson: Actions for Phono-Chronophobia.’ There are a total of thirty suggestions for things that you (as a viewer or whatever it is we are when we encounter artworks) can do, perform, think about, and so on while at the exhibition or afterwards. For example, “15. Yawn,” “17. Stare at the carpet,” or “23. Imagine a foe and tap your temple three times.” In addition to these suggestions there is a description of a literary backgammon game written by the artist’s brother. On a separate sheet is an essay written for the show that seems—in the tradition of International Art English—to be written to conceal as much as communicate. For some reason I think of all these extra parts framing the work as supplemental, but I find that without them the work is quite inward-looking and tightly controlled.

Standing by and within the work, for example, it doesn’t really feel like anything about singing or the voice. I guess that’s the beauty of proposing an idea like “voice in the expanded field”: an artist can put forward such an idea (which, not coincidentally I presume, includes two art-history buzzwords in “expanded” and “field”), and then it is up to us to connect the dots. Rather, the work in its material form conjures up feelings of institutional spaces for waiting, antechambers, and conversation pits: religious and symbolically overloaded spaces. Stefanou mentioned these kinds of spaces in her floor talk, but she linked them to airports and what she called “brutal places of bureaucracy,” shielded from reality by their transitory purpose. This is motet fail though, not Brian Eno’s Music for Airports fail. Perhaps I am being conditioned by first encountering the work through Stefanou’s talk, where we all sat and listened to an inspirational speaker in very much a didactic scenario, but I see the whole setup as, if not spiritual in aesthetics, then at least sacred. The lighting of candles for each soul who enters, the sitting down and listening, the suggested activities and postures as a form of controlled ritual. The reference to the motet. There is an earnestness to this work, and it seems like we are being encouraged to engage in our own polyphonic chorus, like Fluxus in a church.

However, this is motet fail, not just motet. Stefanou described various “failures” in her talk: failure to be a particular person within the art establishment, to feel at home, to feel like being part of the “right discourse,” whatever that might mean. What Motet Fail could be about then is backgammon as a kind of game theory for how to make it in the art world, where we are all making strategic moves for limited resources in spite of the overwhelming factor of luck. The thing is, we are all doing this in a symbolically overloaded space, where speaking from the right place and (crucially) at the right time is often a key to success. But there’s no point being part of the in-crowd or “right discourse” unless someone suggests that a) it is possible to win; and b) there is something worth winning. I wonder if the word “fail” is also a way to pre-emptively defend against the ambiguity of an exhibition’s reception?

In terms of a critical voice, I’m almost at a loss of what to say here (that is, within the frame of my word count and your patience as a reader). Do I go off on a tangent about “expanded cinema”—another of the artist’s concerns—and what that might mean, or do I consider the difference (if any) between a vocalist and a singer? Should I continue theorising about the game of backgammon? Or do I ramble on about my interest in late-medieval polyphony? There is one point about voice and polyphony I do want to talk about, though, related to the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. (Apologies to those of you traumatised over the years by the art, architectural, and literary theory perpetrated under Derrida’s name: I’ll try to be polite about it.)

One of the threads in Derrida’s work is the opposition of voice and speech in western metaphysics. In Derrida’s view, this stems from Plato, who wrote down the works of Socrates because the latter famously didn’t write anything himself. For Plato, writing becomes a dangerous mutation of speech, and the voice can be valued more highly than writing because listeners feel like it’s closer to the truth of the speaker, somehow closer to their mind and body. In the late 1960s, Derrida set himself the task of investigating this binary opposition, which had found its way into a broad range of western philosophical reflection on writing and language.

This talk of embodiedness in reference to Stefanou’s practice makes me wonder if there is a similar force at play in Motet Fail. Derrida’s argument is a little like polyphony as a philosophical concept. In perhaps a basic example, Derrida argues against the idea that a text (written or otherwise) expresses a single voice: the author is always complex and contradictory, like all humans. There is no point at which our inner voice is identical with whatever it is to be an “I.” When we write and speak we have just decided to use a particular word at a particular time. Why, then, should we assume (as we often do when reading a text or looking at an artwork) that there is some unified self at the other end? Going further, can we even assume the presence of an author, or is this the same as assuming there is a deity somehow behind everything? Derrida’s work in general is a call for an essential heterogeneity at the heart of all classificatory schema, of all attempts to rigorously define something. Importantly, this heterogeneity was a stylistic choice for him as well, often playing with different typographic techniques, presentations, and literary voices in his work to subvert or divert the tendency for a reader to attribute a homogenous monological author to his texts: homogeneity is something that can be resisted at the level of the presentation of the text. In terms of material presentation, I’m not entirely sure that Motet Fail reads as polyphonic, even though its framing obviously references polyphony. If I were to make it an essay topic (trigger warning), it might look like this: Does Stefanou’s work implicitly reenforce the hierarchical valuation of speech over writing, via the emphasis on the unexamined (but overloaded) concept of the embodied voice?

There’s another reference echoing in my brain, a particular passing remark by Australian artist and writer Ian Burn. In his 1989 essay ‘The Art Museum, More or Less,’ Burn wrote, “With one of the largest Greek communities, where are the examples of, say, early Greek modernism in our (Australian) museums?” Burn was considering national identity as a community created by multiplicity and difference—thinking of nationality as a kind of polyphony as well. Stefanou’s sometime self-description as a Greek-Australian seems to fit nicely here. It’s not all the time, but occasionally when I was researching her work this identity seemed important, and the kako mati on the four dice hint at this importance. I could also make a link to the work of Melbourne artist Constanze Zikos, whose exploration of Greek-Australian identity through the symbolic and material form of Laminex has a direct relation to Motet Fail’s bench.

Regarding “expanded cinema” (which to me can mean literally anything from a sequence of images to the broad concept of montage as the constellation of ideas or images side-by-side), there is one reference that also sticks out to me: Motet Fail could be seen as a symbolically-loaded arena for staging actions of some kind. It could be the game of backgammon, or whatever Fluxus or vocal poetics you like to do in the gallery. But it could also be a set for a film, and this connection—as well as the opulent material-presentation of the work—makes me think of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), an epic, extravagant, and ultimately self-indulgent film that features many overloaded symbolic spaces and cryptic actions being performed within them. I haven’t thought about Barney’s work for literally decades, but its highly idiosyncratic symbolism features a lot of awkward ritual-esque movement in opulent sets. If anyone does decide to perform the activities listed on the floor sheet in the gallery, perhaps the connection to an overly-coded film set would be plainer.

In wanting to say all of these things, I am still not sure if I am talking about Stefanou’s work Motet Fail. In many ways it feels like the artist has put down some breadcrumbs or game pieces as part of a game of backgammon, and I am just picking them up and either sending them home or putting them on the centre, hoping perhaps to gammon her and somehow … win the game? If I could make a move on this board myself, perhaps I would say that there is an imbalance between the abstraction of all these ideas and references and the way the work itself is kind of the opposite of abstract. The backgammon board as an inspiration becomes, in the work, a large backgammon board in the room. The candles for the voice, which is an interesting and complex idea, are represented by literal candles. The backgammon dice become stone dice. The words describing sounds become words literally carved on the Laminex bench. There is quite a dense abstraction and layering at the level of the references made by the work, compared to the almost mute or opaque abstraction at the work’s material level, and to me there is a disconnect between the sleek and controlled work and the complex and multi-layered ideas. I am left wondering, as I sneak away from the obligatory artist’s-talk performance (at a polite moment of course), that perhaps my misgivings and caution are just communication from one art nerd to another. Polyphony is strange old-fashioned music to some, catnip to others. I checked out the record shop under the gallery on my way out to clear my head.