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Over ten consecutive nights during November 2005, pairs of two-colour posters - 1000 in all - were pasted around the Melbourne city centre. Featuring the recognisable image of escaped convict William Buckley - high forehead and mutton-chop beard - the posters 'advertised' the famous meeting of 6 July 1835 between Buckley, who had lived with the Wathaurang people in the Geelong region for three decades, and settlers at the Indented Head camp site established by John Batman. This action and its subsequent distillation into gallery form the following year exemplify key tropes, gestures and conundrums running through Tom Nicholson's practice over the past decade ...

The work is at least partially structured around apparently contradictory impulses towards appearance and disappearance. It appears only momentarily, beginning to disappear at the very moment of inception, leaving us to question just how crucial the visibility of an action may or may not be to its reverberations through a time, a space, a culture. In this the work both re-dramatises and problematises the fate of the historical action that it takes as its subject matter - in this case an encounter both within and across cultures. It functions as a form of memorial, but one that acts to prompt reflection via a fleeting encounter - that acts as a supplement referring us back (or onwards) in a questioning manner to its subject rather than serve as interminably displaced focal point for an inevitably ossified form of public memory. It looks at relations between the private and the public, the individual and the collective. And in the slightly strange, ever so unsettling, even deliberately awkward form of the work it manifests and concentrates a tension, a fault line of sorts, which is a prompt that brings the reverberations of the past clattering into the present. In this instance we might note the manner in which a form, the bill poster, normally used to create gatherings for future events is here used to promote a past event, as if seeking to retrospectively reconstitute its public.

This may seem a lot to claim for a relatively straightforward action of producing and pasting a poster in public space. However all Nicholson's work is characterised by exactly this concentration of complex paradigms and relationships within direct and highly engaging action-based undertakings. The reverberation of encounters across cultures, political and national boundaries and across time; the dynamic of appearance and disappearance, or of memory and forgetting; the relationships of gesture and materiality, of action, image and document, of transience and permanence, of visibility and invisibility; the energy of rejuvenation; and the imbrications of the individual within the collective all manifest again and again in work that traverses public actions and performances, moving image, photography, banners, flags, drawings, text, scores and artist multiples including books ...

Nicholson never works with or presents material documents, manifestations or traces of actions that infer a fully analogical or 1:1 relationship between action and document. This is not unusual within the aesthetic field of the post-action document so prevalent in contemporary practice generally. However, an artist's overt manipulation (selection, editing, re-composing etc) of the 'raw data' of post-action documentation brings into play issues of authenticity and representational ethics tirelessly rehearsed through the ages of mechanical and post-mechanical reproduction. This is particularly the case when the action has a communal character and clear social and/or political purpose outside of its function as basis for, or simply as, a work of art.

The relation of action to document - the status of both as 'work' - also sits at the core of Nicholson's various banner marches, probably the most well known of his action works. These ongoing 'Marches for another season' works were initiated in 2003 and have taken place in Melbourne (Seven days (action), 2003, over seven consecutive days), Kellerberrin, Western Australia (22.06.1911/30.10.2004, 2004, two marches on one day at dawn and dusk) and in Sydney (Marches for a May Day, Sydney, 2005, two marches at dawn on consecutive days leading up to May Day). With each of these actions, a group of friends, family members, artists, local community members and other volunteers come together to assemble large unwieldy banners featuring drawings of generic, mask-like faces which they then carry along a route predetermined by Nicholson. The marches are quiet affairs, taking place in the liminal moments between night and day and appearing in the video documentation as serious processions somehow honouring the figures being borne along. However, the generic form of the action and of the images being carried combine to resist any sense of reverence for an individual. The uniformity within the banners and the actions also tends to unsettle any easy identification of the works as paeans to historical proclamations of collective identity. The works stir up associations to public demonstrations of belief and collective force, primarily in relation to the marches of labour and other leftist movements - a socialist proclamation of the rights of the collective - but veering to evoke also military pageants, religious processions and a multitude of other occasions where individuals cluster beneath the banners and images they choose to parade their allegiance to through the streets (or, of course, are chosen for them).

The banner marches share a fundamental ambiguity, an unclear sense of purpose as actions. There is no clear connection between the banner portraits and the individuals gathered to bear them along the road. Viewed from the position of non-participant as spectacle, the marches can appear as somewhat puzzling rehearsals of failed public declaration. They take place at times when there is barely a public assembled as witness. They occasion the gathering of individuals to labour over the bearing of images around which no specific meaning can attach. And so they might be construed then as reflexive actions, as actions whose key purpose is primarily to explore in process the experience of collectively bearing images through place - of constituting a group, a collective, a public through this simple act. There is no redemptive purpose to the act of the marches. They simply (yet not so simply) probe the experience and meaning of collective participation ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.