Maloy, Patterson, Steyerl

Richard Maloy: Raw Attempts / Campbell Patterson: floorshow / Hito Steyerl: After the Crash
ARTSPACE
12 December 2009 - 27 February 2010

ARTSPACE’s director, Emma Bugden, has organised a trio of related exhibitions for 2009’s last slot, presentations that explore processes of continual change and transmutation. Each of the three artists has a project that is engaging in isolation, and the shows can thus be approached separately, but the challenge for the visitor is to also figure out how the three interact collectively. Do they link up? If so, how?

Firstly, looking at the three solo components, the most dramatic is Richard Maloy’s use of the big square ARTSPACE gallery. Maloy is known for his series of photos and videos where he either applied chunks of gooey butter to his head and face, using his physiognomy as an armature, or lumps of sticky wet clay to his torso and arms - to be smoothed over and incorporated as an extension of his body.

For ARTSPACE Maloy starts by treating the ceiling of the gallery the way he used to treat his body, but with cardboard not clay. It functions as a armature/support, not a surface on which to rest or lean things but a plane to which they can be attached, that supports all their weight. Working at night or in daylight hours when the gallery is shut, he uses a staple gun with which he can fasten opened out and dismembered cardboard boxes, later painted orange.

His first experiment was a huge continually spiralling wall, a thin wonky shell designed like a massive orange peeling – held up by the roof. If you look at the long sequence of online photos here you will see where he has tested other structures too, letting some fall down by overloading or else deliberately pulling them down – only to try hanging up something new. Each time, fastening forms to the ceiling and working his way down by adding to each suspended sheet with sticky tape, or else using the floor to reconfigure the fragile walls when collapsed, to see what shapes can hold up their own weight when folded or buckled around.

Campbell Patterson has used the long narrow gallery to display initially six, now five, projections on the walls. He films his body as he carries out various tasks that often set out the spatial limitations of each site. The dozen or so actions you see him perform include using no hands but soaping his head by rubbing it into a mound of aerosol foam sprayed on the floor, pulling a camera attached to string towards his face by chewing up and ingesting the string, turning another camera with another piece of string as he moves around a small bathroom with a shower going that soaks his clothing, crawling along a tiled floor by dragging the tripod and filming camera behind him, licking up swept dirt or soap powder from piles on the floor, mashing up bananas with his stockinged feet, squeezing through a ventilation shute, and lying on the floor with a pointed stone under his belly.

Of the three Patterson show I’ve seen in Auckland so far, this presentation is the most successful, due to the restricted focus of his material and its self-deprecating humour – despite its knowing art historical references to sixties performance art.

These two Auckland artists specialise in working within specially devised rules, difficult restrictions put in place to shape the form of their projects – vaguely related to the early (pre-performance) poems of Mike Parr and Vito Acconci in the sixties and seventies, or European Oulipo writers like Georges Perec, or Raymond Queneau.

In After the Crash, Hito Steyerl’s film, when placed in this ARTSPACE context, presents dismantled airplanes in an aircraft junkyard in the Californian desert as a metaphor for a morgue with human bodies, with their recyclable parts as tropes for human organs. Though critiquing capitalism and its recent collapse it also marvels as how such an ethos survives, how even discarded waste can be swiftly turned into substantial profit - through being made into exploding film props. The mutilated skeletal aircraft parts however radiate poignancy, part of an ongoing process that parallels those of Patterson and Maloy in terms of inventiveness.

Though Steyerl’s film is quite different to the projects of Patterson and Maloy, and about documented process, not improvised or procedural events, as Bugden puts it ‘the planes take on an oddly human subjectivity.’ The inclusion of this German-based artist is important because of that, as an inverse foil to some of the machinelike, relentlessly unwavering and obsessive aspects of the two highly energetic Aucklanders. A thoughtfully clever package.

OK a KO

OK (Hany Armanious, The Estate of L. Budd, Julian Dashper, Richard Frater, Patrick Lundberg, Campbell Patterson)
Curated by Sarah Hopkinson
Michael Lett
27 May - 4 July 2009

The six works from six artists that make up this exhibition - assembled by Sarah Hopkinson - all tend to be understated visually (lots of white), but with plenty going on conceptually. The theme seems to be a vague examination of essences and how we codify phenomena such as ‘identity’.

The voices quoted in the work from The Estate of L. Budd set the stage. Written on a painted wallpaper sheet with a dilapidated hifi speaker sitting on some battered scales on the floor, the quotes deny their own corporeal origins, and initial sense too. Signifier and signified get swapped around, entity and idea, subject and object get reversed so that part of the scrawled text reads: …by the objective reality of an idea I understand the entity or being of the thing represented by the idea, in so far as this entity is in the idea…

Meaning turns to sludge, certainties disappear. Entities transmute into ideas, expand and spread.

OK’s other artworks parallel this slippery amorphousness. Richard Frater has a video of walls made of sugar cubes slowly dissolving in a tank of agitated water, Campbell Patterson has a low square landscape of small undulating hillocks made of Persil washing powder, so that the smell dominates the room far beyond its source. The perfumed soap particles seem to be spreading out into K’ Rd.

The theme continues. Hany Armanious has a portrait made of cut locks of hair spread thinly on a page so we can see a face. Some parts of a visage also hover above it. It’s spreading like Persil aroma. There is an uncertainty factor built in here, for how much is coincidence, how much calculation?

A very unusual Julian Dashper work features a cluster of half inflated balloons pinned by their mouths to the wall, with the artist’s photograph glued on one. As their air gradually seeps out, there is a sense of isolated selves living their transient existences - their lives ebb away and their bodies shrivel. Dashper’s artist’s breath, referencing Piero Manzoni’s balloons, mixes with Patterson’s soap molecules to be then carried in the draughts circulating within the gallery.

Even a gallery wall cannot claim permanence or stasis. Patrick Lundberg’s portable section of plaster gib shows how a precise archaeological excavation might reveal a history of wall paint application. He exposes myths of wall insusceptibility to change; he showcases their illusory solidity. Like soap powder that moves to a far corner as olfactory particles, or the tumbling snipped hairs of a portrait, or dissolving sugar bricks, or breath from a balloon, or entities that once represented ideas (but now reversed) - layers get scraped away and discarded as dust, to be picked up and redeposited by passing zephyrs.

This is fascinating show shouldn’t be missed.

Body Artist

Campbell Patterson: Ambient 3
Newcall
6 May - 23 May 2009

This Newcall show is a variation of the exhibition Campbell Patterson had at Michael Lett’s last year. Lots of moving image, some paintings, and unlike Lett , a couple of sculptures.

Patterson is known for his videos. Despite his goofy bushy-tailed enthusiasm and overt - yet charming- narcissism his recorded performances (private activities involving only himself) wear thin after a while.

Climbing around the fittings of a hotel bathroom whilst clinging to the walls and not touching the floor; chewing up several pottles of fried chips, never swallowing the mush and then calming placing the accumulated chomped up sludge into a paper bag; clambering up over a sedan and a station-wagon parked head to tail, slithering like a snake over their roofs and bonnets and wearing only undies so as not to scratch the paint: these activities only initially amuse as a sort of domestic gymnastics. They are similar in many ways to the works of Steve Carr but without the obvious gags. Patterson tries for giggles whilst avoiding overt humour.

As his Lett exhibition showed,Patterson is a gifted painter.There is a beautifully made grey work in this exhibition that is very unusual. Within a dominant pattern he has incorporated the leaf and flower motifs of a brand of toilet paper alongside curving lines of tablets. Nearby on a wall two such referenced toilet rolls prop up a large Perspex sheet. On this other work are positioned in two rows of thirty stamped loyalty cards – all used up with twelve freshly made fruit juices drunk for each.

Such a panel tells a bodily focused narrative, 360 drinks imbibed and (as implied with the toilet paper) partially expelled. It tells a story more succinctly than any video could. It seems Patterson works better away from filmed documentation of actions.

It is no surprise then that his artist’s statement at Newcall, a sheet of writing describing its own production processes and created while he was taking a shower, is the best item in the show. This artist has a real instinct for language and keeping it fresh. He knows how to adapt, shape and effectively pace his written thoughts, thoroughly keep track of all his various senses, and incorporate precise detail.

Few artists have that ability. (Tahi Moore does - but he is more about processes of interiority). Perhaps Patterson will develop this writing talent further. The next show will tell.

Reactions as videos and painting

Campbell Patterson: Work and Exercise
Michael Lett
10 September – 4 October 2008

This show pairs the videos and paintings by Campbell Patterson in an odd hybrid of darkened installation with white walls. Most of the moving image material is in a black polythene-lined space (the main gallery) and front entrance, while the four paintings are in the wee nook round the corner leading into Lett’s office.

Putting it simply, the videos are tedious oneliners, but the paintings are good. The filmed treatment of the jokes doesn't engage like say those of Steve Carr, which though also silly, have a slickness that intrigues via the work's meticulous construction. Many of Patterson's videoed wise-cracks are about process art, where the camera is set up and left running to record whatever might occur.

A good many of these quips seem focussed on Australian artist Mike Parr’s filmed performances in particular: Parr’s Holding my Breath for as long as I Can (1973) is transmuted into Patterson’s Holding My Mother for as Long as I Can. Parr’s lighting fires in his mouth with matches is turned into Patterson setting toilet paper on fire in a lav. Even the black plastic lined room seems a reference to Parr’s Black Box theatre made for the first Sydney Biennale in the late seventies.

Patterson’s Compilation paintings at first glance seem to be made of children’s transfers but in fact the images are painted. The categories and assorted jostled positionings make them intriguing. Many of the rendered clothes, animals, household objects, vehicles, toys and body parts are upside down or sideways, so the square works seem capable of being hung any way up. In other words you have four options. Some images contain blended doublings where detailed parts are repeated within an image, creating an amusing sort of 'double-vision'.

Compared to the flippant videos you could spend a lot of time with the paintings. They have a Killeenlike interest in categorization and how connections can be produced between randomly placed images. They might even have started as a send-up of Richard Killeen but they have gone off somewhere else. They are sweeter, more intimate and domestic, more literal in the sort of mental narrative they encourage. Jokey, but yet worthy of serious attention.

(Thank you Michael Lett for the images).