Dane Mitchell. Barricades
Starkwhite, Auckland.
November 13 – December 9 2007
Images of protestors standing behind barricades and hurling rocks or Molotov cocktails at government forces are monotonously common in our newspapers and television screens. Dane Mitchell is so fascinated by them he has collected over three hundred such photographs. A large part of his current installation at Starkwhite consists of pencil drawings of barricades based on the newspaper clippings he has collected over the last two years - part of a proposed but uncompleted project researched for a venue at Sao Paulo university. The images come from a wide range of confrontations between police and demonstrators in a number of countries at different periods.
Mitchell is intrigued by the engineering of these obstacles, their spontaneous and makeshift nature, and patterns of the different varieties. Some of the drawings are words placed over traced maps of Paris, and refer to the fifties group of radical Marxists, the Situationists. The maps also allude to the boulevard layout of Paris, designed by Baron Haussmann under instructions from Napoleon III. The narrow streets were replaced by wide roads so that it was impossible for dissidents to erect barricades to block troop movement.
Mitchell’s installation mixes drawing with sculpture and some sound so that everything interpenetrates. Rectangular sections of the front wall by the K’ Rd entrance have been cut out and converted into riot shields. The remaining holes look like gun pits and you peer through them when you enter the gallery. Close to the entrance gap is a shovel with its blade embedded high in the wall and a red flag hanging from its handle. The project references the recent police raids on Tuhoe, and police suspicion of nationally co-ordinated, armed insurrection.
With the last two or so shows he has had at Starkwhite, Mitchell demonstrated what a fine producer of elegant drawings he can be. These are a little like Sam Durant in theme and method, but show a big interest in shape and considered placement on the page. And they look elegant framed and lined up on the wall.
Still there was a time – only five years ago - when Mitchell was the bane of Auckland curators and directors, when his conceptual investigations into museum and gallery systems and politics made him serious enemies, and when his presentation was clumsier than what it is now. Has his work become too stylish and marketable? There seems to be less risk in his aestheticized, recent projects.
There is also the question of rhetoric about revolution on white dealer gallery walls. Mitchell has to be careful he is not over-commodifying these images of anti-government resistance; they could become like ‘Che’ coffee beans, cultivating a superficial ‘revolutionary’ ambience for a young, easily impressed, artworld audience.
And what do the drawings say about their potential purchasers? They seem to extol an assumed political position, with a sneaky pinch of anthropological voyeurism thrown in. Maybe this is what Dane the Bane intends? That these works are like Trojan Horses. Decoys that ask hard questions about his own practice and his art collecting audience.
(Images courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite.)
10 comments:
I'm assuming that the vanila flavoured revolution-as-interior-design is entirely intentional. If it is not deliberate Dane Mitchell is a lot less smart than I though he was.
Well, he might argue that neutrality in a gallery is impossible anyway, so one might as well accept 'vanilla' as given.
Sorry I thought you were talking about the wall colour, but you mean it to be much broader than that, don't you? You mean 'revolution' as consumerable entertainment, and that doesn't really depend on wall colour -though considering the dealer venue's name, perhaps it does?
no, I wasnt thinking hue, but flavor. revolution made demure, denatured.
Cooking the raw perhaps?
have you got any images of the drawings? how faithful to the originating documentary images are they? did I understand you correctly that the drawings are based on images from media sources?
Well they are very formally composed mono-coloured pencil drawings, flat in space with the emphasis on carefully positioned shape surrounded by lots of white paper. Based on newspaper photos. Nice looking work.
This show seems to fit with APW's line in 'The Pencilcase Painters' where he said "the actual New Zealanders have been erased – neutron-bombed – from the landscape", though in this case it looks like they've been bottled.
It is clever to gouge out the gallery walls to look like shields and convey wittily how we're all in it together, but it doesn't seem to be adding any heart or muscle to the reality, it is rather passive.
Well it is 'art' isn't it and so it is artificial - whether in a gallery-space or outside it. The artist has been stimulated by media images and the history of various conflicts. Short of organising a genuinely tumultuous riot inside Starkwhite, what else can Mitchell do?
Well, yes, no riot, but.. I was genuine in seeing a connection to what Andrew was saying in The Pencilcase Painters: and if you can talk about an absence of people in one context of art, why not this one, I thought.
However, I see now he was talking not about absence of people (and I was vaguely thinking organic shapes) in artworks, but the absence of people in the current milieu of how New Zealand is being visually or otherwise marketed (he said it was more or less being marketed as a "LOTR"-land, where New Zealanders were 'irrelevant to the task of selling of the country').
I didn't originally have any response to the Dane Mitchell's bottle ground installation (over the internet) and I was mainly mystified in art terms, so I gave out a bit of poke to see what happened. Sorry.
Now I have warmed to it and think its got some sophistication, humour and spark.
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