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The Reflective Time Traveller

This review was published on The Wireless for Radio New Zealand in 2014.  You can read it here.

Note: this link is unavailable following a server crash at The Wireless. I can make the full text available on request.

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Comprehending Complexity

Networks large and small make up so much of our world, from biology to the stock market. Theoretical physicist Shaun Hendy says the true nature of complex systems such as these can only be understood through how they act collectively, rather than by looking at each small part making up the whole. Hendy’s most recent research into complexity has been around innovation, and his book with Sir Paul Callaghan, Get Off the Grass, attempts to get at the root of what is holding New Zealand back when it comes to innovation by examining our economy’s reliance on agriculture.

order, structure, pattern is a sculptural expression of Hendy’s research by Wellington artist Gabby O’Connor. Installed at Toi Poneke, the sculpture is instantly recognisable by those familiar with O’Connor’s work, as it mirrors the faceted shapes forming her notable icebergs. The facets of order, structure, pattern are negative space, however, defined by a complex lacing of rope between long extension cables. The resulting nets are stretched floor-to-ceiling through Toi Poneke’s L-shaped gallery in three distorted rectangular panels. The first panel is largely blue, a colour O’Connor was avoiding for this project until a supply shortage forced her hand. This panel feels rather abrupt before the rest—red, pink, orange and yellow—dominate most of the gallery. The plugs where the extension cables meet are satisfyingly distributed throughout the nets, and act as a subtle reminder of the inspiration for the work.

What is particularly striking about order, structure, pattern is the way its form connects to Hendy’s explanation of understanding complex systems. The work is made up of lines, connecting hundreds of pathways along thousands of metres of rope and cable. Each length of rope is made up of hundreds more smaller intertwined strands. These lines do not connect any discrete, and attempting to discern meaning from individual lines is futile, for their meaning is reliant on their relation to the system as a whole. The work compels the viewer, but it also pushes them away, requiring them to view the structure from afar.

You can hear Gabby O’Connor and Shaun Hendy talk about their collaboration at Toi Poneke on Saturday 14 September, 1 pm.

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Cathryn Monro's Passage

Passage, Cathryn Monro, 1998-2013

Cathryn Monro’s installation Passage hangs in the window space of the gallery on Te Ahumairangi. Lines totalling 3.5km are strung with transparent beads, hanging from floor to ceiling throughout the space. The strands are aligned in a regimented grid, bisected by two straight channels empty of beads. Hanging still, the gridded strands form patterns to the eye as the viewer passes by them. Untouched, the strands are ordered and static. The patterns bring to mind Jim Allen’s Space Plane, a hanging installation with a similar grid format, which I was required to babysit when it was part of the Points of Contact exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery in 2011. As someone with a propensity for structure and order, I am finding great satisfaction in detangling the strands back into their regular grid after the artwork has been interacted with. At the Adam, this was relatively rare, as my primary task was to make sure no one touched it in the first place. In the case of Passage, however, the tangled strands remaining at the end of the day betray that the ordered beauty of the still work is secondary to its purpose as an experiential installation; a temporary pause before it is brought to life by our interaction with it.

The name Passage refers to the act of passage through the work, rather than the static passages that it physically defines. The artwork charts out space, its form consisting of the empty spaces defined by the beads as well as the strands of beads themselves. I have watched as visitors who enter the work may try to walk along the empty spaces, avoiding contact with the artwork, accustomed to the harshly whispered ‘don’t touch!’ of art galleries and museums. (Disclaimer: I have never harshly whispered ‘don’t touch!’ to a visitor.)Passage, however, invites you to interact with it: the empty strips running through are narrower than shoulder-width. Even if you try to sneak through you’re likely to set the strands into motion. And once a shoulder bumps a string of beads, a transformation occurs. The movement is infectious. The previously tentative visitor becomes more adventurous, even running through the window space with outstretched arms.

Getting in touch with Passage. Photo by Cathryn Monro.

I have found that many people feel they need permission to enter the work. As a facilitator for the users of the ground floor, I am faced with the dilemma of encouraging them to interact without explaining or directing their experience. As so much of the work’s essence is defined by individual agency, I agree with Cathryn’s request that no one interferes with a visitor’s expression of same. I think people’s reluctance derives from Passage’s location within a literal glass display case rather than its original installation in a contemporary art gallery setting, where it interrupted the transition between two spaces. This question of display adds an interesting layer, however, when one considers the performative element of the work.

Once inside Passage your environment is transformed. The thousands of beads catch and refract light around you, dancing into life as they are activated through contact. They invite you to stray from the path and make your own passages through the work, telling your own story and sculpting uniquely with the movement of your body. On display in a glass case, your movements are visible from all sides. When you enter the work you become a part of it, activating it and completing it. Are you now on display as part of the work? Your interaction with it is now theatrical, transforming it from static sculpture to performance piece.

This is not quite true though. The experience of being inside the work is very personal; intimate, almost. Our tentative visitor from earlier, maybe at the library to do some research or popping in on her lunch break, has forgotten where she is. She doesn’t notice she’s on display at all, and forgets that moments ago she was on the outside looking in. Transparent curtains obscure what’s out there. Stepping from the gallery into the network of beads is fully immersive, introspective, experiential. Passage makes the visitor conscious of space, conscious of their movement within space, and as a result of that offers an exploration of the self. The exact limits of your physical body collide with the strands of beads. Your conscious self determines these collisions. Do you venture out of the empty passages? Do you walk, run, spin, twirl, or sit down?

Walking and examining. Photo by Mark Beatty.

My favourite visitors to observe inside Passage are, of course, children. They have none of the reservations that adults do around letting themselves go. They see Passage as a world of infinite possibilities. Babies love the tactile sensory experience, sitting and crawling around the window space. I can’t describe little ones toddling through the beads as anything less than adorable, although sometimes we need to appoint older siblings as guardians to prevent them from toddling headlong into the glass itself. And babies using the strands to hoist themselves up to standing have only caused a few torrents of beads to pour down and scatter across the floor. (Luckily Cathryn is very understanding about this.)

The imaginations of older children go wild. We’ve heard it compared to rain, the ocean, seaweed, strands of pearls, and swishing piu piu. When Cashmere Ave School came to visit during Matariki, we thought that the light refracting through the beads sparkled like stars, so we chose to move through the artwork while we sang ‘Tirama Tirama Ngā Whetu’ (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star).

Working in the library with Passage leads to magical moments every day, with young and old, in pushchairs and wheelchairs. I’ve been asked by groups visiting from around the world to take photos of them in the work. I’ve also, reluctantly, had to hurry visitors who are on tours of the library out of the work so they have time to see everything else! Some sharp-eyed people spot the few multi-coloured beads that snuck into the mix when the work was assembled. I’ve challenged people to find them all, but so far no one has found them faster than the Minister of Women’s Affairs Hon Jo Goodhew and her office.

Regular columns and rows of silent, motionless strands have no life until individual experience breathes life into them. Displayed alongside Tirohia Mai / Look At Us Now, Passage speaks to the paths that women have carved for themselves throughout New Zealand’s history. It challenges you to step away from the beaten track, to explore the passage you wish to take, no matter what that is. Run through the beads, tangle yourself in them, lie beneath them; explore, experiment and do as you please.

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Beautiful Creatures and Fantastic Fantasies

Bitches ain't shit and they ain't sayin' nothing / A hundred motherfuckers can't tell me nothing  

Probably not the words you expect to hear booming through the normally quiet, white and serene galleries of the Adam. Nicki Minaj makes her debut appearance at the Adam Art Gallery in the form of artist Jacqueline Fraser’s large-scale installation THE MAKING OF THE CIAO MANHATTAN TAPES 2013, and sets the tone for the transformative Beautiful Creatures exhibition. (Side note: did nobody tell her it’s bad form to rhyme a word with itself?) 

Beautiful Creatures is an exhibition of youth, fantasy, and desire. Works from Australian photographer Bill Henson’s Untitled 1998/1999/2000 series transform the top floor of the gallery into a dark, moody and mysterious setting. Henson’s portraits of lithe adolescents, unaware or unaffected by the camera’s presence, shoulders and limbs dappled by cool light as they emerge from a deep, pervasive blackness, clearly resemble the work of master painter Caravaggio. It is incredibly rewarding to feel that two artists’ practices, five hundred years apart, can speak to each other unironically.  

Henson’s photographs alternate between vulnerable bare youths and empty locations, both on the verge, in a space in between. Neither day nor night, both intensely dark and luminously light, they tell the timeless tale of adolescence; of confident actions underneath overarching uncertainty, and of meaningless discontent. 

She evokes similar themes, but Jacqueline Fraser defines her time and place much more assertively. This is hip hop culture, here and now. A series of plastic-wrapped small collages in large frames depict women in provocative poses alongside rappers and similar imagery. The Nicki Minaj issuing through the gallery comes from the centre of Fraser’s immersive 3D installation around the corner, which sees the Lower Chartwell gallery space filled with hung collages, designer furniture and projected material. The collages spill over the edges of their square canvas mounts, showing beautiful men and women, adorned with real wigs and cheap polyester veils. The work is gaudy and in your face, speaking to the sexualisation of popular culture and its conjunction with the luxurious alongside the lurid and the lewd. 

The third artwork found in Beautiful Creatures is Jack Smith’s 1962-3 film Flaming Creatures, playing in the Kirk Gallery. Although running long, the whirling tableaux of male, female, and gender-ambiguous figures in parodic Orientalist costume is the perfect accompaniment to Henson and Fraser’s works, and offers a mid-20th century precedent for their practice.  

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It's The Little Things: Saskia Leek at the Dowse

Desk Collection is a retrospective of Saskia Leek’s paintings currently at the Dowse in Lower Hutt. The name comes from the fact that every painting included in the exhibition could have been made at a desk; they average A4 in size. The paintings are intimate in subject as well as scale. Leek’s early paintings recall her teenage years, populated with small figures dotted across a painterly ground. They combine seemingly unrelated symbols and snippets of text that encapsulate the roving, unsure imaginations of teenage girls. This is a deliberate: in an interview she explains “The way I make work is a little idiosyncratic, in that I don’t really know what I am doing before I start.” The unconscious nature of these paintings endears them as more open and authentic, if sometimes a little naïve.

The later paintings in this exhibition show a distilled focus that Leek’s earlier works lack. Pastel yellows, blues and pinks assert themselves as the dominant palette, giving muted form to the landscapes and buildings which make up the subject matter before disappearing into abstraction. The strongest paintings here combine delicate muted backgrounds with linear detail, in one case juxtaposing an industrial structure against the pastel. Saskia Leek has also experimented with the frames of some of these later paintings, extending the rough, unfinished strokes on the borders of the paintings out across the white wooden frame. The Cubist tendencies in these later paintings evoke the amateur or the school project, bringing naïve art into the ‘high art’ setting of the art museum.

While this exhibition is centred around the smallness of Leek’s paintings, it could perhaps have benefited from a less spacious system of display. The paintings are so widely spaced across at least four or five rooms that they lose connection to one another. Against a white wall the pale palette becomes even more washed out. While within each single painting this tells of intimacy and vulnerability, the combined effect causes the entire exhibition to lack visual impact. Such a generous commitment of space for a contemporary New Zealand artist is very welcome, however. Leek’s exhibition is fresh, and forces the viewer to turn their attention to the small — reminding us in the process that small does not always equal minor.

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This essay was commissioned by Enjoy Public Art Gallery for their PDF Publishing series. Click the title to open the file.

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21st Century Collecting: Showing Little and Saying Nothing

21st Century Collecting claims to “[raise] provocative questions about the nature of contemporary art practice and the challenges facing those who are its custodians.” Unfortunately the Adam Art Gallery has fallen victim to its own ‘art-speak’, as the exhibition fails to propose any sufficient answers to these undoubtedly relevant questions, and instead draws attention to the inadequate way in which many of the works included have been displayed. 

  A significant portion of the artworks included have been seen either at the Adam in the past several years, or around campus as part of the Victoria University Art Collection. The entirely new and not previously exhibited acquisitions are relegated to the lower floors of the gallery, out of sight and out of reach for many new visitors who have either no time or courage to explore the gallery’s full depths.  Presumably some of these works will be hung permanently on campus in future, but for the purposes of this exhibition, the flipside of what may have been a well-intentioned case of “saving the best for last” means the visitor is greeted with what appears to be a hurriedly recycled mish-mash of old material. 

   The window gallery shows Window Cleaning, a work by Billy Apple featuring cleaning materials which were used to clean the gallery window before the exhibition opened. They are accompanied by the text: The inside dirt is separated from the outside dirt by 6mm. This installation is the re-staging of Window Cleaning 27 March 2009, shown at the Adam and itself a re-staging of Window Cleaning 5 June 1971, which Billy Apple carried out in New York.  

  The Congreve Foyer is populated by another Billy Apple, and a “Billy Apple”; the first, Billy Apple’s From The VUW Art Collection, is usually found in the University’s Art History department. The painting itself being relatively small, it looks somewhat out of place on the long wall of the gallery on which it hangs, the entire wall having been painted the requisite red that the artist stipulates.  

  The second work, With All Kinds of Delays, is by Daniel Malone, who changed his name by deed poll to Billy Apple in 1996. Malone’s preference for this work to be attributed to ‘Billy Apple’ is prevented by the real Billy Apple’s trademark. The work itself consists of a glass brick cast from the shattered remains left when Malone threw a clay brick through the front window of the gallery in July 2009, immediately after Window Cleaning 27 March 2009. The glass brick is displayed now on a pedestal, next to a television on the ground playing video documentation of the original 2009 act. The choice of display is awkward, discouraging viewers from watching the full recording, however it is an improvement from when Malone’s brick was last shown, without accompanying video, in the Peripheral Relations exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery from July to October last year. However, visitors will no doubt be surprised to see the brick again so soon. 

  Occupying the Upper Chartwell space is another familiar series from last year: John Lake’s The Campus. What made for a lively documentation of campus politics in its first form, shown on many screens with overlapping audio tracks, is here condensed and silenced. This strikes me as a lacklustre effort in capturing the work’s essence. Copies of Student, a revived 1930s student newspaper, make up an integral part of the work, but are dumped unceremoniously around a corner and it isn’t immediately obvious what they are there for. 

  Downstairs, the darkened Kirk Gallery shows films from Philip Dadson’s Polar Projects series. Recorded during the artist’s 2003 trip to Antarctica, these audiovisual works are powerful visions of an alien landscape, and the Kirk Gallery affords them the space and attention they deserve.  

  Dedicating a theatre-like space to video art is ideal, but is impractical, and it brings us back to these questions the exhibition is raising. So far, the video components of the art on the main floor of the gallery have been poorly represented, and descending into the stairwell between the lower two floors shows another lackluster display of video works which deserve more. Over an hour’s worth of Campbell Patterson’s video art is represented here, again without accommodation for the visitor wishing to afford them more than a cursory glance. These videos are at times unnerving and cringe-inducing, as the artist repeatedly dips his tongue into a pile of dust on the floor, or passes a chewed piece of paper from his mouth into a companion’s, staring emotionless from the screen the entire time. Patterson’s performances are real, unstaged and unapologetic, often repeating actions with his own body to the extent of absurdity. 

  Also frustratingly represented is Louise Menzies’ Letters to Students of the Radiant Life. Originally consisting of a video performance, lecture and collected ephemera from the archive of the bizarre School of Radiant Living, this work has been presented here as a series of framed documents. The publication which came out of Menzies’ 2010 work, Radiant Living, is trapped in a vitrine and cannot be read. The accompanying poster, a still from the video component of the original work, is not displayed. Very little information about either the School or the original artwork can be derived from this exhibition choice. 

  By the time I reached the Lower Chartwell gallery space, filled with the gallery’s newest acquisitions and where I had hoped to spend some time with new and exciting art, I was going to be late for my appointment. Large-scale photographs and paintings by Jae Hoon Lee and Elizabeth Thomson, among others, are visually enticing, but they are also the easiest to display. It isn’t clear what “provocative questions about the nature of contemporary practice” these works raise, and they don’t offer the same challenges of preservation and display that performance and video art does. A lack of accompanying documentation and a minimal public programme are not promising signs for finding the answers to exactly how these works fit in the exhibition, nor for finding satisfying answers to the questions of how to best document and re-stage challenging formats of contemporary art. At best, 21st Century Collecting offers a select introduction to some New Zealand contemporary art practice, but should certainly not be taken as representative and makes no significant contribution of its own. 

  The edited article is available on the Salient website here.

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Canvas on Campus column

Canvas on Campus: Muttnik, Sriwhana Spong

Muttnik is a 3 minute, 38 second video installed in the Kirk foyer. This work was originally installed at Anna Miles Gallery in Auckland, alongside batik cloths hung to form a shrine, but here stands alone, accompanied only by The Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’.

The video shows footage of a series of sculptures made from everyday items, assembled in a suburban backyard landscape. We see a tower of apples, cigarettes, bottles arranged in tribute to traditional Balinese shrines. The lo-fi depiction of Spong’s ephemeral sculptures evokes a sense of nostalgia.

Spong constructs this nostalgia in an attempt to navigate her uncertain links to her own Balinese heritage. The title, Muttnik, references the stray mutt dogs sent into space in Russia’s Sputnik programme, and captures Sriwhana’s personal inquiry into the unknown.

Sriwhana Spong is one of New Zealand’s leading multimedia artists and is a finalist for this year’s Walters Prize.

Canvas on Campus: The Collection

Over the past three weeks you will have noticed this Canvas on Campus column gracing your visual arts page. Todd Atticus and I will be taking turns to decode a series of works from Victoria University’s significant collection of New Zealand art.

A little about the collection: it began in 1948 with a modest purchase by the Staff Club, and has since grown to over 300 works. The majority of these are hung around campus for staff and students to appreciate, ranging from small drawings framed in the library to Neil Dawson’s formidable steel sculpture hanging above the Hunter Courtyard.

The Adam Art Gallery administers the collection alongside the regular schedule of exhibitions, and will be exhibiting some recent acquisitions next year. Fun fact: the big wall immediately to your right as you enter the gallery was designed with Colin McCahon’s Gate III in mind. You can now find this painting presiding over the foyer in Rutherford House.

Canvas on Campus: Flying Steps, Neil Dawson

Suspended high above the Hunter Courtyard, Neil Dawson’s Flying Steps is a conceptual realisation of the University’s values. The sculpture depicts a spiral staircase, with each successive step becoming further apart until the uppermost few break away from the central column. It tells of higher learning, raised literally in the air, and suggests that as our study and research advances we aspire to bridge the gaps between the steps that are already there.

Dawson is undoubtedly most famous in Wellington for Ferns, the globe hung above Civic Square. Flying Steps makes innovative use of steel in a similar vein, creating the illusion of delicate forms filled in with cloud and sunlight. From some angles the sculpture appears abstract, its true form emerging as you move beneath it and look up.

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Review: The Commons Project

In Our Name:  The Commons Project

Campbell Kneale and Alan Courtis

James Smith Carpark

Thursday 3 February

  Organised by the Adam Art Gallery, staged in a parking building at rush hour on a weekday and with no recognisable music to be heard, the second performance in the Commons Project series challenged both the attendees seeking art and those expecting a performance by celebrated local noise musician Campbell Kneale. The event was the second in the Adam’s series of four musical performances aimed at reclaiming common spaces and fostering creativity in a public space. Curator Laura Preston describes the Commons Project as challenging people’s expectations of what defines art and music and where it should be seen or performed.

  It was like a reality TV challenge that asked the participant to make music with only the item provided: a carpark. Who better to take on this challenge than Campbell Kneale? With projects ranging from the ambient noise of Birchville Cat Motel to the slow and doomy Black Boned Angel, if anyone could tease music out of the roaring of traffic and the squealing of tires, it would be Kneale. ‘Buckling Metal Snowflakes’, from the Birchville EP Chi Vampires, comes to mind; the track heavily samples the unaltered squeals of electric trains straining down the Hutt Valley line.

  By 6.10pm, an assortment of twenty-somethings in plaid and numerous bicycles were in attendance. People became restless as two guys knelt on some cardboard at the centre of the spiralling exit ramp in the James Smith carpark and fiddled with a stereo. The machine would whirr into life occasionally and eject a CDR; at the same time, the crowd would tense up as though the performance was beginning. To those familiar with Kneale’s aesthetic, the mechanical sounds were similar to those found in his previous works. But nothing happened. The men drew childish patterns on the CDRs and distributed them amongst us. Where was the performance?

  Interviewed in the Dominion Post before the date, Kneale revealed he had not planned what he was going to do in the carpark and that he was “interested in how much music the venue will actually play for itself.” If I’d read this before I went to the show I might have spent less time waiting for Kneale and collaborator Alan Courtis to actually perform some music. I could have also saved some retrospective embarrassment after saying to my friend “Wouldn’t it be funny if this was all there was. A cuzzy recording a carpark.”

  Turns out that a cuzzy recording a carpark was really all there was to it. We left rather downcast, and got kebabs. But rather than creating sound within a common environment, as the Commons Project blurb suggested, Kneale was drawing sound from the environment and giving it to us to take someplace else.  As well as collaborating with each other, the artists collaborated with the environment itself, building a relationship between sound and site as the project intended. It was not really a performance, but those lucky enough to receive one of the CDs recorded on site are able to hear the sounds of the venue isolated from the environment. It brings the common space of the carpark into our own personal space, and the result is astoundingly beautiful. I’m not sure why I ever doubted Campbell Kneale’s musical genius, and even though the event itself was more of a non-event, the 26 minute track of growling engines and the occasional skateboard clatter is totally worth it.