Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers adds to the continuing discussion of the Triennial

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Various Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon was launched a few weeks ago with a suite of gallery openings, artists’ talks and panel discussions. Curator Natasha Conland’s umbrella theme of risk and adventure engages with a diversity of current art practices. As other Eyecontact reviews already give summary impressions of the whole Triennial, this piece focuses on a group of artists and the talks they gave during the opening weekend.

What characterizes Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is the multiplicity of interpretations that can be made of its themes of risk and adventure. Where other triennial or biennial events might develop a rigid curatorial concept, Conland offers a more porous conceptual framework. The twenty-eight artists selected investigate various dynamics of risk-taking, from explicitly looking at our current financial recession to examining the physicality of risky activity or simply exploring various material conditions.

The multifarious nature this Triennial might exasperate those who would like an explicit pairing of artist and curatorial concept. In some instances, such as Martin Boyce’s fantastic sculptural pieces at St Paul St, ideas of risk taking and adventure do not seem appropriate or useful as a means of engaging with the artworks on show. I found that the curatorial premise was most effective where it articulated relationships between different art practices.

During the opening weekend I was particularly fascinated by the relationship between Alicia Frankovich’s sculptures and the films of Mike Parr. Frankovich’s series of sculptural pieces at the New Gallery investigates the form of the human body in relation to everyday materials. In the centre of her space hang two Martini bottles attached to a pump circulating a red coloured liquid. Clearly a reference to body fluid, this booze-bottle water feature humorously hints at the presence of alcohol in our systems. Like her memorable performances at ARTSPACE last year, Frankovich creates potentially risky bodily engagements and reveals that they are not without ethical implications.

At her artist’s talk I was intrigued to hear Frankovich speak of her sculptures as performances. Works such as Lover, a human form vaguely traced in neon tubing hanging from a coat hanger, or Piston, a round ball suspended precariously from the ceiling, do not immediately speak of performative concerns. But the lightness of their construction does suggest an agile physical quality. At her talk we were also reminded that Frankovich was once a competitive gymnast. Indeed, her engagement with the effects of gravity has an athletic flair—these works could topple over at anytime.

Where Frankovich’s ARTSPACE performances were powerfully simple and coherent, these Triennial pieces function more like a series of drawings, experiments that explore the space between sculpture and performance.

Performative parameters were also discussed at Mike Parr’s artist talk. Parr spoke about his significant career as an Australian conceptual and performance artist as he discussed his early works on show at the George Fraser Gallery. This talk even tended toward performance in itself. At one point the artist read out a list of actions for possible works that he’d written in the 1970s. Directives such as ‘Hold your breath under water for as long as possible,’ or ‘Drip blood from your finger onto the lens of a camera...until the lens is filled with blood’ varied from the torturous to the mundane. As Parr finished reading each page of directives he let these papers drop one by one on the ground. Whether this was intentional or not I couldn’t help but associate these discarded pages with the artist’s video One Hundred Breaths being projected in the next room. In this video Parr sucks pieces of paper onto his face until he runs out of air and needs to take a breath. What gives this slightly ferocious work its poignant overtones is that each piece of paper bears a self-portrait of the artist. Parr is elevating his own image with all the air in his body, creating a tangible link between self-image and physical reality.

Alongside Parr and Frankovich, the body’s movements are also explored in Tino Sehgal’s work Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things. Known for his ‘constructed situations’ — choreographed movements or exchanges involving one or many people — Sehgal does not allow any documentation to be made of his work, nor does he use the term ‘performance’ to describe it. At St Paul St a man dressed in casual jeans and a jacket made a very purposeful wriggling movement along the concrete floor of the gallery. His unusual sliding actions had the precision and attentiveness of a professional dancer — someone who is acutely aware of their body.

Derived from Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham videos, Sehgal’s piece has been reenacted in galleries across the globe. Anna Macrae is the New Zealand dancer who facilitated Sehgal’s piece. At a panel discussion on the opening weekend she spoke about the process of developing this work in New Zealand. Macrae, who is currently living in Berlin, happened to be coming back home during the period of the Triennial. Seeking to avoid any unnecessary travel, Sehgal and Conland arranged for her to ‘learn’ the choreography in Berlin and teach it to six professional dancers based in New Zealand, who would in turn reenact it at St Paul St.

Macrae’s remarks at the panel discussion revealed that the scope of Sehgal’s work goes beyond what occurs in the gallery, beyond a single person moving across a concrete floor. It is a constructed situation comprised of a series of incidental actions and connections—small movements across space and time.

Although this Triennial’s themes of risk and adventure may seem tenuously linked to the artworks on show, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon does offer a myriad of smaller, intriguing relationships between different art practices. It presents constellations of artists whose share subjects and modes of investigation across gallery spaces. It is a show that requires an attentive approach to viewing—something that is well worth the time.

The images above ascend from Mike Parr's video One Hundred Breaths, shown at his artist's talk at the George Fraser opening.
Then there is Parr's Facts About The Room (1970), and three details from Alicia Frankovich's presentation in The New Gallery.

4th Auckland Triennial -1

Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: (Looking at the themes - Part One) Bodies at Risk
Mike Parr, Alicia Frankovich, Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Laresa Kosloff, Richard Bell
28 artists in various Auckland venues.
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial curated by Natasha Conland has been with us for over a couple of weeks now, so what does one make of it? It has a great poetic and metaphorically loaded title, a superb hardcover catalogue with three excellent essays, and a new large downtown venue, but what of the art? Is it memorable? Does it provide examples that stick in the mind like say – to look at the earlier exhibitions – Ashley Bickerton and Roni Horn did in Bright Paradise, or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and William Kentridge in Public / Private, or Willie Doherty and Issac Julian in Turbulence?

The show is less overtly finger-waggy than Turbulence, but you still sense Conland is very much a schoolmarm – only more circumspect. She has a lighter touch than Victoria Lynn, allowing more whimsy and humour to mix with her didacticism. (Comparing the two titles shows that.) Yet for my money, that side of her intelligence, her appreciation of wit and irony, came out much more in Mystic Truths, a much smaller, non-Triennial show than say Earth Matters, a Triennial warm-up. Nevertheless Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is impressively focused. It doesn’t feel sprawling or scattered in its content. There are about five themes that reveal themselves (often several overlapping) in all of the works, but which may not be at first obvious. They are Bodies at Risk; The Journey; The Imagination; The Economy; and Dialogue.

Therefore I want to take a look at the Triennial in a manner that ignores the placing of the twenty-eight artists within the separate venues and elaborate on these five overarching themes instead. I want to briefly provide some interpretive possibilities, putting five or six artists in each category, and then looking at each in turn.

The first theme is 'Bodies at Risk’. Although the theme of risk is discussed constantly throughout the essays and catalogue entries, it is more global economic vulnerability (Conland’s essay), or explorative navigational risk (Doryun Chong’s text), or linked to the artist’s body (Leonhard Emmerling’s discussion) – not that of the viewer. While artists like Mike Parr and Alex Monteith have made films or performances where the viewer empathises with the artist’s or film-maker’s body in pain or in danger, there is no sense of implied audience peril anywhere in this exhibition. None of the sculpture for example is menacing in its ambience in the way that sculpture, like say the kinetic works of Len Lye or Peter Roche, can be.

With Parr’s work at George Fraser the outside windowed gallery is the site of a very early (1970) text work where he describes in a hundred vinyl-cut sentences attached to the wall, the properties of a room, its space and what is seen through the windows. At his artist’s talk this work was linked to a film of his 'Hundred Breaths' (Breathless) performance of sucking self-portrait prints to his face one by one till on each occasion, his oxygen runs out. The room becomes a trope for his interiority, his ruminating self enclosed within his body as he looks out its windows. This in turn is paralleled in one of the films he shows in the darkened inner gallery, where he is rolling a recording movie camera up and over a hill. The camera lens swishing through blurs of long grass could be Parr’s decapitated head.

Alicia Frankovich’s AAG installation shows a hospital ‘drip’ made out of two end-to-end Martini bottles pouring orange liquid into a small swimming pool, to be then repumped up and recycled. The fluid could be a cocktail of blood, urine, sweat and tears, and seems to be alluding to artists recycling earlier art. In a corner is a Duchampian rack holding orange shopping bags from the Pergomon Museum in Berlin, on one wall is a neon that seems to allude to very early Richard Serra, and a ball suspended in a ‘testicular’ harness refers to her own history and mindset. With the rack of shopping bags entitled Woman, and a pinned up skirt displayed with a found drawing of graphite traces, Frankovich has with her installation and bodily absence created one of the more witty and visually compelling works in the Triennial.

Inanimate objects representing the human body are explored further with Robert Hood driving his Cortina from Christchurch up to Auckland earlier this year where it was taken to a shredder and ‘atomised’. The remnants are laid out on the gallery floor like a large bed. A real time audio recording of the trip is provided alongside Hood’s appropriated (and inserted) self-portrait version of Yves Klein’s famous ‘leap into the void’ photograph. In such a grouping, driver and vehicle symbolically merge.

With Martin Boyce we have the large gallery at St. Paul St blindingly illuminated by a weblike structure of white fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. A black construction of broken wooden chair parts hangs like a Calder mobile, but seems to also reference (perhaps be a substitute for) Bruce Nauman’s turning wax dog corpses and decapitated white male heads. On a remote wall is a black, wire-mesh cubist/tribal mask watching in silence.

Aboriginal activist Richard Bell may smile sweetly during his videoed games of free association, but his critique of white Australia, with its youthful blonde representatives attired in gold laméd bikinied splendour, is excoriating. He is of course, deeply body conscious – as they are too of him, though he is fully dressed. With his dangerous charm he coaxes out a series of racist jokes for our delectation. If in the normally dismal Shed 6 we stay and listen, we become complicit – especially if we laugh: as Bell himself does. If we walk away, we (physically, hopefully not mentally) desert the artwork.

Fellow Australian Laresa Kosloff films bodies in action, airborne as a clowning trapeze act, or climbing over public sculptures in a park as bored children, or groups of adults exercising. Like Mike Parr’s rolling camera, Kosloff also films as if the camera were a moving figure – in her case while ascending and descending in a lift, looking out through a tall building’s windows. Her subject matter is contemporary for the looping footage we see at ARTSPACE is recent, yet the super 8 black and white film makes it look much older. You wonder if these people are still alive now, but of course probably they are, very much so.

It is difficult, naturally, to separate the human body from the activity of travel. ‘The Journey’ - and the Triennial's title - will be the subject of Part Two.

Jennifer French’s documentary photographs and DVD stills are of works by Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Richard Bell and Laresa Kosloff.

Planar modification

A Plane For Behavers (discussion continued)
Alicia Frankovich
ARTSPACE
16 May – 27 June 2009

We have here three public indoor performances, and another private outdoor event at Kitchener Place, documented on video. The four connect a bit like the installation placed in the main ARTSPACE gallery, its four monitors on chairs positioned to make up a square, a square plane suspended by its corners with remnants from the first work hanging above.

Frankovich is a gymnast preoccupied with linear vectors. She thinks in terms of vertical drops or lifts, horizontal conveyancing and diagonally angular ascents or descents. Her body is a point in motion co-ordinating with other point/bodies. Dot becomes line which transmutes into plane.

Such elements take on poetic metaphor. Plane becomes aircraft guided by pilots who are accountable for their actions above ground. Notions of responsibility are embedded in space. Dimensions within the aether acquire social properties.

Using limited means Frankovich has created a surprisingly layered presentation. Each of the three ARTSPACE rooms elaborates on different vector combinations: horizontal movement with no people is presented in the long space off to the far left with a stationary ‘dumb waiter’ shuttle that has a moving cable; in the big square gallery we see vertical/horizontal movement involving one person hoisting or many people carrying the artist; and horizontal motion (live but not videoed) and diagonal movement (videoed but not live) are enacted in the smallest room by pilots as agents for all three vectors.

There is also a fourth performance created several times a week where people sit in the four chairs in the main gallery for an hour, clutching the functioning monitors to their chests and resting the weight on their knees. They are here carrying not the artist but the moving image of the artist being carried. Their presence in the gallery makes viewing those screens more disquieting and confrontational, involving an unanticipated social dimension. The visitor remains a passive observer with some difficulty.

This artist is a shrewd manipulator of different logics. The video documentation, gallery sculpture (living or otherwise) and even undocumented works (not in the building, but on the website) are tightly meshed together so their relationships seem inevitable. A superbly planned and executed exhibition.

Dissolving distinctions

Alicia Frankovich: A plane for behavers
ARTSPACE
May 2, 3-4 pm

Let me start with an account of a work experienced many years ago. In August 1981, while watching an international performance festival (called ANZART) I saw a work by Marina and Ulay Abramovic called ‘Witnessing.’ It featured the two artists in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre in Christchurch, a huge room, with one of them standing in a corner and the other in another corner diagonally opposite. Both wore immaculately tailored ‘karate’ suits, and looked like gymnasts.

The work was an endurance piece. The man would raise his arm and point directly at the woman, holding his arm horizontally for as long as he could bear it. Then let it fall. Then repeat. At a certain point they would swap around and the woman would take over the pointing. The work was at least six hours long. It was about love. It was also about art making, the work itself as obsession.

That work has similarities with yesterday’s performance at ARTSPACE. Have a read of ARTSPACE's text about the event and throw it away. I think the art was really about cruelty and sadomasochism. With performer being victim and ‘behaver’. It’s very clever…and mean.

The piece consisted of two ‘work horses’ – one performer in a harness like the famous work by Maurizio Cattelan of a life-size horse suspended high in the air; the other like an animal working in a field, lifting the droopy inert figure up on a pulley by yanking on a long rope. So in this work, the limp dead weight in the air was the Artist, and the poor sucker doing the physical work was the Director of the institution.

Thus every four minutes, Bugden would hoist the Artist (a taller, bigger person) up towards the ceiling, struggle to the door, open it and let some people leave and outside visitors in – clinging to the rope so the artist didn’t fall. Then she would carefully lower her, the two would pause, catch their breath, drink a little water, and then in a couple of minutes repeat the action.

Bugden did not find the activity easy. It required genuine exertion and an hour of such rope pulling and weight lowering would have been really tough. As on any other day, focussing on the service she normally provides for any artist, helping her in her art production.

However the project was also about the audience and their complicity in her suffering. They stood and watched and could have offered to help. They allowed her to exhaust herself because after all, she was the Director, and she acquiesced to the Artist’s wishes that she participate in the work. No one forced her. In fact the work was a clear collaboration. And in that relationship who was active and who was passive became confused. It became paradoxically reversed. The seemingly inert artist became the driver. The director became the directed.

Rebus

Alicia Frankovich: Counter/action
Starkwhite, Auckland
1 February - 1 March 2008

Frankovich’s show is a suite of (mostly) framed photographs and an inverted screened map of the world, positioned around another photo - on its side - leaning against some metal trestles. The show seems a sort of rebus: a combination of Simon Denny meets John Baldessari. It could be a spoof on those artists.

The ‘floor sculpture’ features a photo - in a damaged folder - of a thin metalic Armani purse with a cord handle. Close to it, draped over the trestles on one corner, is what seems to be a section of basketball-hoop netting. One of the photos is a bunch of ripening tomatoes and a rope ladder into which has been jammed a piece of woven plastic, and around the corner is an image of a foot sticking out of a top floor window of an old brick barn.

What does this all add up to as a statement? It seems to examine suspension, the effects of gravity on certain substances, and how weight behaves when spread out through soft versus inflexible materials. Formally, the angle of projection for the foot relates to the trestles and the highlight of the room, the pink map.

The screened map shows - using zigzaggy lines reminiscent of eye movement diagrams – the routes between Christchurch and Auckland and the UK, Central Europe and Japan. As discrete items the map and the ‘rope ladder’ photograph make a fine pair – linked by diagonal trajectories.

The inverted map in particular, is an intriguing image that works well with the accompanying twitchy, fine, black line. It implies the trips to Europe and Asia are a process involving natural laws, as inevitable as a tomato falling off a stalk and landing on the ground.