Three films

Annie Bradley, Cellulite Rose, Susie Thomas: Lending Looks To Other People
The Film Archive
17 October - 21 November 2009

I like the crazy ambiguities of this title. Is it about misspelt 'books', lending supportive glances, or the activity of borrowing or sharing? This confusion is not just me being a bit thick. It’s deliberate. It’s a little tricky figuring out who does what in this show. Even the writer of the accompanying text, Matthew Crookes, is not very sure for example, of what Cellulite Rose is going to contribute. He never really finds out.

What turns out to be her work, was I initially thought, a second part of Annie Bradley’s. And a soundtrack I imagined was Cellulite Rose’s, ends up being made by Susie Thomas. Yet in a perverse way all this scrambled muddle makes sense, for the show’s theme - if there is one – seems to be about slippery identity (Rose), false decoys (Thomas), and the reliably stable self (Bradley).

Rose, with her two tiny screens propped up in the centre of the floor, has a young woman (the artist?) addressing the camera about the nature of the self, causality and identity – pondering some of the issues an empiricist philosopher like David Hume raised three hundred years ago - and attacking viewer assumptions about any fixed essence behind her corporeal presence, and inanimate objects like light switches.

Bradley’s film, on the end wall, is about the attempted transmission of knowledge from a patient teacher to a pupil trying to learn to whistle, but who is getting nowhere. He can’t get the mechanics of manipulating his lips and cheeks correctly. The funny thing is that the coach, though long suffering, is no musical virtuoso. Technically she is quite clumsy. However she is also a rock of dependability, constantly encouraging and supportive.

Susie Thomas’s film seems to be a satire about claustrophobic reflexivity, a joke about art that obsesses over its own production processes as content. It is a long scrolling text about copyright and legal stipulations, with her own name appropriately inserted. Designed I think to make you irritated and groan, it has a sound track that in contrast is quite gorgeous, espousing the natural world outside the gallery through the recorded clicks and whirrs of what sounds to me like a flock of starlings.

Their chirruping voices sound electronic, even metallic, but they bring to mind the world of non-art, unless you are thinking of John Cage and his use of 'given' ambient sound. This densely textured birdsong seems to be the real point of Thomas’ project, and the moving legalese a droll excuse for some accompanying visual material needed to pull an audience. The film is the bait to which you will ‘lend a look’, but the solid work – the ‘art’ part which you are initially not aware of (and for which you need the headphones) - is the avian soundtrack.

This is a clever, subtle little show that these three artists have organised. Worth viewing on your way into ARTSPACE.

Motorway paradise

Cellulite Rose: Island Resort
Room (295 Karangahape Rd)
14 May - 30 May 2009

Artists collective Room, formerly Room 103, have moved. They are now firmly ensconced in the middle of Auckland’s ‘Art mile’, positioned very close to MIC, and opposite ARTSPACE and Ivan Anthony. It’s an inspired location, and the exhibiting space has a very different ambience from the old downtown venue in Achilles House. Much less office-like, it has a concrete floor, no carpet, and a clean rectangular shape with no nooks and crannies.

Cellulite Rose’s show is a great start, based on a landscaping oddity just around the corner and easily visible from the Newton Road overpass, facing East. I look at this peculiarity almost every day when I walk to K’ Rd to check out the shows. In the gallery she (I’m assuming a female gender here) has installed a large projected DVD loop on one wall, and two much smaller LCDs on the opposite one. The above three images are stills.

The DVDs show the artist (another assumption) taking advantage of a landscaped pond and incorporated line of trees in the middle of the Northwestern motorway. The A shaped form is tucked into the southern edge between Upper Queen St and Newton Rd – near Ian McKinnon Drive.

The artist has decided to use the newly discovered ACC amenity as an island resort, to put up a hammock between a couple of cabbage trees and use a lilo to shoo away the ducks and splash around in the sun - amidst the noise and fumes. I imagine she (and recreational equipment) got dropped off by friends who also took the photos. It would be too dangerous to go there by foot.

So, as art, is this interesting? Obviously it is an entertaining prank, a bit of light-hearted exhibitionism, but it also raises questions about big cities and how little the general public know about planning decisions that affect their daily interaction in the civic space.
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This ‘resort’ seems to be some sort of stormwater outflow that has been cosmeticised to help beautify the motorway. As such it is a good idea, but one which because it has been successful, has also been invisible. Hundreds of cars drive past it every day, with not one driver ever realising it is there. Just an occasional haven for aquatic birds and nosey-parker artists.

(Thank you to the artist and Nick Spratt for the images.)