Penetrating the impenetrable Pine Gap

REVIEW by KIERAN FINNANE

It was the strangest opening any of us had ever been to: the vernissage – a private viewing – of Georgie Mattingley’s exhibition Project Pine Gap. The entire staff of the so-called Joint Defence Facility had been invited and not a single one turned up. And of the local VIPs invited, just two took up the opportunity, Mayor Asta Hill, and myself (the first time in my life to have been so classified). With our respective partners, that made for an audience of four.

Was it a coincidence, we wondered, that the Pine Gap ball had been scheduled for that night?

Mattingley took the no-shows in her stride. She knew her invitation had been widely seen inside 'the base’, as it is commonly referred to. That was an achievement in itself.

I've written multiple articles as well as a book about Pine Gap and I'm not sure any of my communications ever went past the media office of the Department of Defence, even if I addressed them elsewhere.

Till now there has only ever been one 'insider' account of the base, David Rosenberg's 2011 memoir, thoroughly vetted and partially redacted before clearance by the NSA, but to a degree revealing nonetheless.

Activists have penetrated the base's outer perimeter on multiple occasions and famously, one pair in 2005, the inner perimeter. They even managed to take, and smuggle out, a photograph on top of one of the base's buildings. The Alice Springs News published it.

From inside the outer perimeter in late 2014, the photographic artist Kristian Laemmle-Ruff managed to take what has become an iconic image of the base, widely reproduced including as the cover of my book.

But Mattingley's show goes inside, pursuing her interest in little seen spaces, such as hospitals and prisons and various attempts to humanise them, the subject of previous art projects.

The base, as we know, is protected by scarce political scrutiny and harsh security legislation in both the US and Australia. The highly technological nature of its activities and its isolated, heavily patrolled location, only add to its aura of impenetrability. Yet, it is staffed by humans, some 800 of them, and they live in our community.

The first prong then of Mattingley's ingenious approach has been to find humans who would respond to her seemingly anodyne request to describe art work hanging inside the base. This has extended to descriptions of its recreational facilities, such as the pool and the canteen, and even to an account of a poem, typed up and stuck on a wall.

On the basis of these verbal descriptions – quite remarkable in their detail – she has recreated the works and depicted the settings, a step towards making visible what is supposed to be unseen. She invites viewers to participate in this essentially forbidden act by following her careful instructions in a paint by numbers video.

Taking it further, she uses the descriptions to interrogate AI chatbots about the base, recording her questions and their answers. The results, processed by her own creative filter in the video works, are hilarious and intriguing.

The chatbots meet direct questions about the base with a wall of refusal, even though the questions are essentially of the same anodyne nature. This is despite all of the factual information that is in the public domain about the base – academic research by the likes of Professors Des Ball and Richard Tanter, leaks by Edward Snowden made accessible to the Australian public by journalist Peter Cronau, then with the ABC, the work of other journalists and authors, the US Congressional record, the questions pursued, less fruitfully, in the Australian parliament.

All of this work allows us to know that the activities carried out by US and Australian personnel at Pine Gap, linked as the base is to the Five Eyes system of global surveillance, are directly involved in US and allies' military actions around the world, the most deeply concerning in the present moment being Israel's annihilation of Gaza and its people, made possible by the supply of American bombs and intelligence.

The AI tools would know all this but clearly they are doing their corporate masters' bidding, who in turn are doing the bidding of the US and Australian defence establishments: they are censoring themselves in servile acts of anticipatory compliance.

Trying a different tack, Mattingley gives the AI creative tasks. Now the responses are more on point. One task is to create the formula for a scent inspired by the base, and a campaign to promote it (the artist then collaborated with her mother, Diane Mattingley, a professional perfumer, to actually make and package the scent as part of the show).

Another task is to write a poem, relevant to the base, inspired by the poem stuck on a wall there, which AI deduces is 'In Flanders' fields' written in 1915 by poet, soldier and surgeon John McCrae.

AI's completion of both tasks is revealingly pertinent to the nature of the base's surveillance and military activities.

Mattingley is an artist, not an activist. But this does not mean that she claims some kind of apolitical space for art. What we see in this show goes straight to the stories we tell ourselves, for instance through the art on our walls: the way we seek to reassure ourselves of our humanity and our connection to the Earth, while we look the other way when it comes to our contribution to utterly inhumane and criminal acts and environmental destruction at an ever more egregious scale.

Mattingley is an audacious thinker with a distinct aesthetic that allows her to clad this 'iron fist' subject in a velvet glove. It's an unsettling, disarming strategy.

Project Pine Gap shows at Watch This Space on Gap Road until 15 November.

Note in the interest of transparency: Kieran Finnane is credited by Georgie Mattingley as creative mentor on the project. This took the form of a number of detailed discussions between them as the project developed.

Kieran Finnane co-founded the Alice Springs News with Erwin Chlanda in 1994 and was a senior writer with the paper for many years. She is the author of Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, national security and dissent, published by the University of Queensland Press in 2020.