The International Arts Festival: Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery
24 February - 25 April 2009

Anthony McCall is a British artist living in New York who in the early seventies, made a series of systems-based performances involving grids of small fires on open fields - set alight at dusk in strictly planned (‘scored’) sequences and time schedules. He was interested in the optical qualities of light and smoke and their spatial relationship to a viewer who might move around or through them.

Most of the works he made at that time involved light, often involving spaces such as dusty studios where beams of sunlight could be manipulated through incisions in paper placed over windows. Another particularly unusual project was a film made using hand-made animation, where a projected dot metamorphosed into a curved line which then grew into a self-joining complete circle. It was not so much the image on the screen that was interesting as the horizontal line/cone formed in space between screen and projector that the viewer could bodily interact with and which required smoky or dusty air to take shape. In clean air, the sculpture was disastrously invisible.

In the eighties and nineties McCall withdrew from gallery activity and worked as a catalogue and magazine designer. However in the early part of this millennium his work was rediscovered by some key curators and placed in highly visible, international shows. This prodded him into adapting his sculptural ideas for digital technology, and doing things that were impossible with reel to reel projectors - such as making vertical light cones. He also did some technological research and discovered ‘haze machines’. These can fill a room with a foggy ‘chalk dust’ mist that makes traversing light visible.

With digital know-how McCall’s more recent projects therefore have become more complicated. Sometimes they have three evolving linear elements side by side, such as a straight line and two turning parabolic wave forms that are like U’s. At one point in the cycle they join up to become a complete circle, before sliding apart and becoming independently turning, slowly writhing, components once more.

When you visit the current survey Christina Barton has put together for the Adam, you realise that the online documentation of McCall’s sculptural work often looks slick, as if digitally tidied up and possibly a little bland. The actual experience though is far better, for there are accidental components that bring an unanticipated richness. These include swirling highly ‘expressive’ eddies of fog that cling to the cordlike edges of each projected cross-section, and ‘white’ lines on the black planes of plinths that are not white at all but pastel yellow, pink and green.

From the titles that McCall gives his cones of light, he seems to regard the sculpture as a simile for the standing human presence. He sees himself as a humanist–structuralist, an odd hybrid of opposites, yet the work is sufficiently exciting in its own right. It doesn’t need clumsy conceptual overlayering - that makes him look like a Gormley wannabe. It works best trope free.

In an essay about McCall that Luke Smythe contributes to the Adam’s poster/catalogue he points out a number of writers like George Baker and Branden Joseph who think that McCall’s films of the 1970s continue the interests and “phenomenological concerns of minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture…(displacing) the emphasis of sculptural spectatorship away from the internal dynamics of the artwork itself, toward the moment-to-moment perceptual dynamics of the temporally-extended encounter between sculpture and viewer.”

This is an interesting issue. If one looks at examples of minimalist geometric sculpture of the mid-sixties, such as Robert Morris’s arrangements of square slabs or L-forms through which his audience moved, the gallery experience seems very different as a bodily sensation from what McCall offers. Most obvious is the fact that the minimalist work is made of painted plywood that the human form can move around and between, but not into – unlike a single cone made of light on dust that can be walked through.

So the question is, is standing within McCall’s conical shell of gradually moving blinding light, comparable to standing between identical wooden modules in different stationary positions that have solid planes? I don’t think so. Yet for sure, both are immersive and both have temporal-perceptual aspects – but one is overwhelming optical and ‘head’, whilst the other is more bodily in a far more general proprioceptive sense. It seems very odd to compare them.

This is an unusually immersive show, though the presence of drawings on some walls also ensures an overtly analytic component where the viewer has to mentally link moving images with stationary marks. McCall’s light sculptures surprise also because there seem to be plentiful allusions to earlier films like Len Lye’s Tusalava and Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy.

The five vertical cones are smallish, on plinths, and so are called 'maquettes'. They are not cathedral-like as in some installations (like in the image above) but they give you a good idea of the principles at work. The highlight is a long horizontal projection in the Kirk Gallery, You and I, Horizontal (2005), which though claustrophobic on a humid day (the air conditioning has to be turned off) is extraordinarily mesmerising. It has formal drama mixed with tantalisingly slow movement.

As with Viola and Cardiff at The New Dowse and City Gallery, this McCall show is an essential visit.

On Adam's walls

Wall Works
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
8 September – 4 October 2009

The notion of drawing or painting directly onto the gallery wall has been with us for at least forty years now, probably becoming most well known with the practice of Sol Lewitt. For this method, Tina Barton has picked an unusual group of artists to work on the Adam Art Gallery walls, eight individuals some of which you and I would be unlikely to predict: David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison, Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, and Jeena Shin.

For the first half of the show the gallery was opened so that the visiting public could observe the artists constructing their artworks. If you click on the link here you can examine nineteen slides showing samples of the processes involved. (Put your cursor on one image and lefthand click halfway down the righthand edge to change it).

Barton has come up with a terrifically inventive eight-unit combination. The big surprises are Cauchi to install graffiti in the two toilets, Paterson to screen a DVD loop in the dark walled, rubber-floored ‘dungeon’, and Harrison to paint on a large moveable wall by the entrance. Inspired choices.

David Cauchi’s contribution is a revelation – far funnier and classier than what you’d pick up from his blogsite. His use of the orange and green planar surfaces of the Ladies and Gents on which to place withering (often appropriated) comments on idealism, art world participants, liberal democracy and our meaningless lives in general make him a sort of Aztec-obsessed Keith Haring–meets-Emil Cioran, and are so entertaining (though he’s serious in his unrelenting scorn of anything and everything, not trying to get laughs) that his incessant but earnest quips could turn you into a compulsive dunny loiterer.

Reuben Paterson’s black and white film on a pearlescent glittery screen celebrates a queer politic in its furtive, bunkerlike space and bombarding central-state imagery. The flashing, pulsing sequences of kaleidoscopic patterns expand and contract, spin and tilt; hurling you through the screen at unexpected speeds - via different jarring scales - to explore delicate geometric snowflakes and dotty asymmetrical Brownian motion. It is difficult to leave the space because you keep discovering new shapes and tumbling axial alignments you had never previously noticed.

The tunnelling physicality of Paterson’s project has similarities with Kim Pieters’ towering and shimmering wall paintings of cascading pale blue and creamy dribbles on the staircase. These gorgeous surfaces evoke the Sublime and force your eye to rush to the ceiling and its corners, seeking out strategically positioned, negatively-shaped drip-free zones that allow planar respite.

Similarly vertical linear qualities, but much finer and graphic – not overtly painted - are also apparent in Julia Morison’s multi-panelled Myriorama mural that descends down the wall under the Adam’s infamous Athfield-designed floor/ceiling slot. Her columns of 106 portable and reusable panels, each with a gently mottled background overlayed with one of thirty-two repeatable permutations of entangled or parallel lines, drop down or traverse three linked walls, and play off against two thick black parallel bands that bisect the high planes.

Simon Morris and Jeena Shin use only one wall each. With Morris’ looping grid of pale yellow ochre lines you can see where the tone and saturation levels vary, and how – using templates not pencil – the artist has gradually built up the horizontal structure. You can also see how in the first half he has added extra lines, doubling back in reverse to create a denser complexity. The occasional ball within the transparent trajectories indicates where the tips of adjacent lines have overlapped, providing clues to where certain sections of pathway have shared common routes.

Jeena Shin’s large mural features tumbling tangram-like forms of overlapping rectangles and triangles in glossy grey on a matt white plane. The occasional fine ridge shows traces of her process as she modifies the angular geometric rhythms and descending negative gaps. The evanescent forms are getting larger for this artist, becoming more robust, more strident and less delicate.

Michael Harrison’s work on a movable rectangular wall is a comparatively simple composition that shows a small red cat suspended within the larger negative silhouette of an open-mouthed Alsatian where the curved arabesqued contours of the feline tail and canine jaws play off amusingly against each other. It is fascinating to see Harrison deal with this uncharacteristic scale and successfully resolve any formal or technical problems.

Patrick Lundberg’s project involves thinking about the site specific peculiarities of the wall fittings and architectural fittings around the top of the stairs, using a repertoire of generic pencil lines (repeatable with tracing paper) similar to those used by Sol Lewitt. You have to look closely to see them and how Lundberg refers to various wall edges, ceiling planes, bookcase corners, light fittings and banisters.

This show looks excellent now, but I saw it last weekend at the time of the Adam’s Tenth Anniversary Party. For that event Barton had commissioned temporary structures designed and built by second year students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design to be placed inside or next to the installations by the eight artists I’ve just discussed. The result was a political, aesthetic and conceptual disaster, making many of the artists furious that their projects were interfered with at a time when many out-of–town visitors had come to see the show. It was sad to see such curatorial blundering - though thankfully, only short-term.

The big Apple: New Zealand's conceptual pioneer in 70s New York

Billy Apple: New York 1969 – 1973
Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
Curated by Christina Barton
28 March - 17 May 2009

Held in Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery, Tina Barton's unusual survey examined Billy Apple’s New York years: between his leaving of London for the States and the period leading up to the first of his two New Zealand tours in the mid-seventies. It looked closely at the preoccupations of his practice and the various activities of his non-profit Apple gallery, fitting in between the period discussed in Barton’s earlier The Expatriates show and the works discussed in Wystan Curnow’s now online (Auckland Art Gallery Quarterly) article on Apple’s 1975 tour.

It also partially overlapped with the 1974 Serpentine exhibition From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple 1960 - 1974 - if any of you are lucky enough to own that catalogue.

This Adam exhibition finished last Saturday, and was an understated warm up to new two exhibitions curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Zoe Gray about to open at Witte de With in Rotterdam. As one would expect from either Apple or Barton, the Wellington show was meticulously presented. Wall labels were kept to an absolute minimum, there were no distracting catalogue numbers beside the work, and the free photocopied pamphlet that listed works by name, indicated their positions via three maps. As the floor levels and stairwells at the Adam are quite complicated, you had to be on your toes to figure out the identity of the pieces.

What came through in Barton’s selection (from Apple’s extraordinarily extensive archives) was how the seemingly disparate transitive verbs that formed a basis for various art actions (like clearing, collecting, vacuuming or scrubbing) ended up being closely connected. The physical movements and byproducts from cleaning a room’s floor, or sweeping the roof of an apartment, suddenly acquired similarities to wiping a living human body. Terms like ‘gaseous discharge’ when applied to neon tubes became applicable as names for ‘residues’ for a nominated human body that was an artwork too.

These things regularly found parallels. Sometimes sustained, sometimes not. On one occasion a cotton bud or toilet tissue might be kept as art (by virtue of presenting a secretion from a larger and previous artwork such as Apple’s body, in another a soiled cloth from wiping windows would be thrown out in the rubbish; although they too could be an artwork’s byproduct – in terms of animated action, but not in bodily substance.

In the 2005 Expatriates catalogue Barton investigated the implications of Barrie Bates’ name change, and the consistency of his long interest in marketing and commerce. This recent show however was more about the other side of the coin - social relations and the body of the individual within those. There were some tensions that Barton might perhaps discuss in the planned publication, like the role of Apple in group activities when he (and only he) is a living art object. Though communal in context, his actions took on a different meaning from those of non-artworks like his then wife Jacki Apple, or friends like Jerry Vis or Geoff Hendricks.

Even for those reasonably familiar with Apple’s early work there were many unexpected surprises. One was a gorgeous 1968 film of flickering flames within differently coloured tubes of neon, exploring various linear configurations and close ups – with a soundtrack by Nam June Paik. Another was a project which showed Apple’s interest in going beyond his own personality, to do uncharacteristic things as instructed by an astrologer - like buying lottery tickets.

One of the highlights related to this was a video of his visit to a fortune teller who read his cards. In the unfolding discussion after her procedural analysis, we see Apple become confused and distressed because it is unclear whom the reading with its specific details pertains to – Billy Apple (b. 1962) or Barrie Bates (b.1935). He doesn’t like being filmed and asks for the camera to be turned off.

This very focussed assortment of elegant black and white photos, videos, film, coloured slides, used tissue collections and inventories of glowing neon tubes effectively documented Apple’s (the artist and the gallery) projects, making an exceptionally rivetting show, a display far too good (and significant) to be exposed to Wellington audiences only. One can only hope an Auckland venue like Te Tuhi, ARTSPACE, or AAG will slot it into their programme, and that the up and coming Witte de With shows will also return to Aotearoa to tour – just as the Stedelijk A Question of Faith McCahon exhibition did in 2003.