Pinned fabric pieces and slides

Amy Howden-Chapman: I used to think the only lonely place was on the moon
Newcall
3 June - 20 June, 2009

Amy Howden-Chapman is well known as half of the Wellington based performance group Raised By Wolves. Here at Newcall where she has performed on an earlier occasion, she presents a number of items: a carousel of sequenced slides projected on one wall; another projector on the floor, lightless with the carousel rotating while covered with rumpled plastic; a narrow catalogue of four brief, but beautifully constructed, essays from different authors; and eight fabric paintings made of triangles of striped cotton, pinned in angular configurations on the walls. The latter dominate the room.

Howden-Chapman’s slide projection however catches your eye first. It shows the lush green vegetation of the Amazon rain forest, blurrily photographed from the river. One salient lengthy sequence shows a large tree falling and crashing through the dense undergrowth. There are no signs of millers.

The Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) once argued that if something is not perceived it does not exist. If a tree falls in an isolated forest it not only does not make a sound if there is no one around to hear it, but it doesn’t exist either. If it does exist, the reason is because God watches over the forest too, and He perceives it.

These two carousels seem to comment on Berkeley - as do the fabric constellations which look like kites or geometric birds in the sky. They seem to represent a spiritual dimension, an all pervading omnipresent power. There is also something slightly Native American about the motifs.

To construct these forms the various striped cotton triangles, diamonds and skinny parallelograms have been cut from bedspreads or tablecloths made up of stitched coloured bands, and as such are related to quilts such as those made by Amish and other religious communities in America. The pulsing bands in these sections when pinned up are mostly aligned horizontally, occasionally diagonally, and very rarely vertically.

When contrasting striped tones are alternated and not too harsh, the chroma glows softly and is reminiscent of sections of paintings like Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. However Howden-Chapman in her positioning of these linked (but never overlapping) snipped triangles is not precious about finish. The borders are left as cut, a little ragged with some loose threads not tidied up. Some of her geometric configurations look improvised on the spot, and others seem carefully preplanned. With these very portable works, the larger combinations tend to be symmetrical; smaller ones not.

In an included essay she herself has written, Howden-Chapman looks on grunge as “an attempt to protect the ability to feel in amongst a deluge of manipulation” and in a discussion about overhype, says this:

Back in the nineties…people were ‘Friends of The Earth and conservationists. People were still chaining themselves to trees, and hugging without irony. The same impulses are still being played out now with a new language… attempts by governments to implement the ‘greening’ of the economy’ has come with ‘green washing’ the environmentalist values for profit. Cars that are just slightly more fuel efficient than regular cars are being advertised as having the ability ‘to protect your family and the earth.

I think her idealism is reflected in the fabric wall paintings, art which Laura Preston in her essay compares to Tomma Abts’ practice – as being ‘uncertain documents’ that come from ‘an intuitive approach’. These works though, being of fabric, are closer to the art of seventies feminist 'craft' painters like Joyce Kozloff or Miriam Schapiro, and don’t seem so time–based in process as Abts. They are not like say, Dorothea Rockburne, where the procedures in thinking are laid out in detectable stages. They may be improvised to a degree, but unlike Abts the processes are not embedded in the final visual statement.

This exhibition works as an intriguing cohesive statement rather than as a collection of honed individual parts. With three excellent essays and one inflammatory interview in the catalogue (Anna Sanderson and Genevieve Michaels are included) it is a classy well articulated presentation about craft, changing taste, cynicism and eco-politics.

Not remotely feral

Various Artists …Continued
Raised by Wolves performance
(Windows) Auckland University Clocktower
Monday 2 March, 6 pm

It was good to see Raised by Wolves do a work in Auckland, as I had missed a much earlier Newcall gig. This time they presented work in the beautiful neo-Gothic Clocktower of Auckland University.

Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey presented a well-researched lecture on the history of that particular building, built in 1921-26. They also spoke about the university itself, especially as seen from the tower windows. Immaculately polished in their delivery, indeed like university lecturers, they told anecdotes on how the edifice was perceived, and how the university (and also the wider Auckland community) has subsequently changed over the years.

Their very accessible lecture lasted about twenty-five minutes and then was deliberately disrupted by noisy visitors with a ghetto-blaster coming up the stairs. The end was formalised by the scrolling up of blinds at the top of the building to reveal children’s drawings on transparent sheets, an image of a geodesic dome and – in true primary school teacher fashion - a scattering of gold stars. (Remember this is the generation of ‘Don’t Misbehave!’, and ‘Mostly Harmless.’)

As it is typical of performance artists of this vintage, no irony was intended. And here I have a gripe. I appreciate its professional finesse and energy, but find it too earnest and ‘goody-two-shoes’. What I think of as ‘Sunday School Teacher Art’. Conceptually dull as an idea for an artwork, and drearily wholesome and worthy in tone. And with more than a whiff of privilege. Take a look at Raised By Wolves' webpage here... ‘they have five university degrees between them.’ Says it all.

Out the Window

Various Artists: Raised by Wolves, Richard Maloy, Sam Rountree Williams, Holly Willson, John Ward Knox, Annie Bradley
Window
Curated by Holly Willson and Sam Rountree Williams
Design work by Nell May
11 February – 6 March 2009

This is one of those shows that is all about context, about the art ‘frame’ or what is outside it – rather than what is within, though that can’t be ignored either.

This time there is nothing actually inside the Window window in the library foyer. Works are located at various spots around the university, or in Annie Bradley’s case, online. Some are easy to find. Others aren’t (despite the terrifically designed info sheets by Nell May that have maps), and after several attempts I gave up searching. This writing is about what I found.

So how important is this issue of context? What happens when you rip art out of the white cube (my violent metaphor is deliberate) and plonk it down in the so called real world. This show examines that. It is a theme Sam Rountree Williams has long been preoccupied with.

Personally I think the significance of context is exaggerated. This is because ultimately the declaration that something is art can never release it from an art context. If defined as such, that frame is always there and will never dissolve. Whatever the physical environs a work is put in, saying it is ‘art’ or knowing it is such, helps shut out many distractions that might intrude. The only thing that really makes that process difficult is putting it close to other art works. It is like putting two different cake mixtures, based on two different recipes, together in the same baking pan. Something very peculiar happens when they mingle.

That is the logic behind Sam Rountree Wiliams’ placement of one of his three oil paintings below an early Richard Killeen cutout in the library foyer. The two works play off each other but in my view both suffer. (If I was Killeen I’d be annoyed he put his work so close). It’s like pouring a can of Pepsi into a tin of baked beans and expecting the resulting concoction to taste good.

With his two other placements Rountree Williams uses other university buildings, those of business schools, and again plays off against the university collection in one building, making a comment perhaps on the prestige of acquisition. Does the work’s meaning change when it pretends to be included in an important collection? Well maybe not its meaning, but certainly its value. (In the northern hemisphere collectors often have to prove the pedigree of their collection before a dealer will sell to them.)

What about the business schools? Is this artist slyly trying to interest future corporate CEOs in his practice while they are in his age group and still studying? And what of the actual architecture of the buildings? His small painting displayed in the brick Old Choral Hall looks quite different from what it would look if hung in the same space as his other work – in the new Owen G. Glenn Building, a huge modernist glass tower.

Richard Maloy has his videos of private performances positioned in varied spaces within the library building. You really have to move extensively around the different floors to see them. His three recorded actions of building up accumulations of clay over his ear, nose and hand, and torso and arm, attempt to create bodily extensions or corporeal substitutes, and seem in this context to be a comment on the library as a repository of knowledge, an adding to of the mind’s resources, an extension of accumulated mental faculties.

Annie Bradley’s online spread page takes a lot of scrolling to explore properly. It is a meandering Photoshop–style collage, with various snaps of pedagogical spaces, like the School of Medicine, with long bland corridors and pokey lecture theatres. Interspersed throughout are configurations of stacked, unravelling files that become floating snowflakes or tumbling sheaves; sliding toppling reams of information. Most dominant is a geometric frieze of folded, interwoven ribbonlike lines that doubles as a complex maze of alternating pathways and corridors for the student.

Bradley’s sprawling field makes her compressed and layered forms take on the structures of microscopic plants and crystalline minerals, mixing them into the interior images of architecture. In her vision of knowledge accumulation and dissemination, culture and nature blend and become interchangeable.

There is more to come in this exhibition. A performance by the Wellington group Raised By Wolves will be presented at the Clocktower on 2 March.