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Driving down the A-44 autovia from Madrid to Granada, the wide sky and open plains of La Mancha give way to olive-lined hills, and then massive granite outcrops on the approach to Andalusia, or al-Andalus as it is known in Arabic. Though touching on these views a different kind of journey is mapped by 'Ungrammatical Landscape', a recent installation in Granada of petit points and murals by Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin. Its curious borrowed title, after Ian Burn, hints at how the work turns the genre of landscape against itself to plot geographies of displacement. Jubelin's multilayered narrative was woven through four floors of the Centro José Guerrero and called forth memory and contingency. In tracking the discontinuous bilingual conversation that Jubelin's work makes with other artists, the viewer finds herself shadowing these contingencies across old and new worlds, beginning in Granada, shifting to New York and Marfa, Texas and then out to the far periphery before finally returning back to Spain. 
 
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Nothing is more piecemeal than the small stitched flecks of colour which constitute a single petit point. A fragmented form of weaving informs Jubelin's entire working process, as she assembles, bit by bit, her tiny nets out of various tenuous connections. The thread and cotton grid pulls together the unlikely combination of Guerrero and Burn whose work has no more in common than that of thousands of other modernist exiles drawn to New York in the 50s and 60s. Along the way Jubelin channels Judd's various interlocutors across four decades and manages to temporarily hold the fields of abstract expressionism and minimalism in equilibrium.

Yet there is a profound ambivalence about tangling with minimalism for artists like Jubelin and Ferreira. A fascination for its powerful aesthetic of cool detachment sits awkwardly with practices based on an ethics of engagement. Such unease is not new, though it is now more common than it was in the 1970s when Ian Burn with fellow Art & Language vigilante, Karl Beveridge began interrogating the politics of minimalism by asking 'Don Judd is it possible to talk?' in reaction to the imperial language of that almost sacrosanct figure.  In fact 'Ungrammatical Landscape' takes its name from one of Burn's Xerox works of 1968. He had photocopied a kitsch mountain scene, doubled in reflection to form a diamond, to make a series of estranged minimalist objects. One of these readymade landscapes recently cropped up in four panels of Imants Tillers's 'Diaspora' series of 1992, as both a momento mori and a souvenir patched into a vast landscape about displacement. By chance it was on the shores of that very Swiss mountain lake that José Guerrero spent his first years in exile, before arriving in New York.

For all her borrowings, the Granada installation is probably one of the most intensely autobiographic of Jubelin's work. She writes in an introduction to the connotations of it 'marking the accumulation of time which I have taken to understand ... to begin to unravel living in this context ... to grapple with the ethics of my own displacement.' Isabel Carlos, the Portuguese curator who directed the 2004 Sydney Biennale, observed that the work's title denotes a way of speaking without the rules of grammar. Like a foreigner searching for some common ground, it also resonates with the desire to negotiate (if not reconcile) differences and to hold out for the possibility of conversation across the fragmented landscape of what is left of modernism.
 
 
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the Winter 2007 issue of Art & Australia